Posts by Destroy All Monsters
5565 posts • joined Tuesday 3rd June 2008 16:11 GMT
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I think trolls do need a good kicking, perhaps then they would stop trolling others.
Re: Here We Go Again
Yes we got that...? Mais encore?
> Penguins have been clamoring that this locks them out because of the GNU and other licences that require them to be "open" which secure boot is not.
NOPE. Do you hear "penguins clamoring"? Are we in Antarctica? No.
What happens is that the bootloader has to be signed [by someone who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard]. Apparently this is MANDATORY on ARM machines for some reason.
This as far as I can see has nothing to do with GNU licensing.
It has to do with someone [who?] going to the keyholder guy [who owns the private key the public counterpart of which is on the motherboard] with a compiled version of GRUB2, then asking nicely whether he would like to sign this binary thank you very much and can we come back once the next bugfix release is due.
Now the keyholder guy may want to get paid or the outfit which manages the certificate chain involved might. Apparently in this case the latter is Verisign and someone [who?] will come up with the cash.
I suspect this addy should be accompanied by a "Blue Men" flash
....but I have NoScript turned on.
"It works who cares"
The paper raises interesting legitimate questions.
So does it really work, or is the understanding of what a "memristor" is different between the theoreticians and experimentalists (or between inside HP and outside HP) or is this a Cold Fusion device? Is suppose in the end, the Real Stuff won't be a "passive device"...
We read:
"In With regard to equation (34), the dynamical state equation (31b) would thus violate Landauer’s
principle as there is no restriction with respect to the minimum amount of energy which is needed to attain to an internal, physical state change. Following equation (31b), one would be able to change the state of a system – and that means in our case a real physical modification – at any time by merely feeding some electric current through the system, independent of the energy or work which can be actually supplied to the system in course of time. However, internal states of a system can only be altered if some minimum amount of generalized thermodynamic work is involved in, and that holds for both macroscopic and nanoscopic systems. Reasoning thoroughly about all of this, the dynamical state equation (31b) for our hypothetical memristor violates thus the fundamental requirements of the thermodynamics of information processing by itself. Maybe, approaches like the state equations (31a) and (31b) might be maintained if an extra side condition for the considered system is specified, namely the minimum electric power input to the device which is necessary to arrive continuously at internal, physical state changes, but we have reasonable doubts with regard to this. Physically, one might be confronted with capacitive or inductive effects, but it is beyond the scope of the present work to discuss such thinkable systems."
Posted in Yale finds second diamond planet
Obligatory XKCD planets image: http://xkcd.com/1071/
I should really be doing my boring webapp...
Cisco Livery Astroturf!
So we still don't know whether Huawei has links to the {Party|Red Army|Other PRC Power Center}, but know that Cisco is very likely indeed to have links to {Congress|Senate|Military|FTC|Other US Power Center}.
Oy!
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: Slow
> The speed of light does seem rather slow, cosmically speaking.
It has exactly the value it needs: 1
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Oh the huge manatee!
> Labs are boring some people have a life.
Translation: Too dumb to learn. Will watch Lindsay's arse instead.
> Either way, speculation is all we have at this point
Yes, you are on Youtube.
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: we have yet to understand light
Why are so many cranks emerging in this thread, seemingly from before the french revolution considering their state of knowledge of contemporary physics and Lorentz boost operators?
Has someone opened a Portal by testing FTL devices again??
IGOR!!!!
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
The VERY short answer... photons don't need to know, they just try it all
1) Check out Feynman's books on QED (there is one for the lay public and one called "Feynman Path Integrals" or something). The idea:
You "just" need to add the complex amplitudes (at the target) of EVERY POSSIBLE PATH that a photon might take from source to the target. Square the value, which gives you a classical probability density function. A photon will be detected according to this PDF.
Everything (shortest path through spacetime, diffraction, refraction, Heisenberg uncertainty, interference, the works) can be explained by this simple principle - use EVERY POSSIBLE PATH (also the fractal ones - especially the fractal ones, though Feynman didn't know about that adjective, I think - and even the ones going faster-than-light, to the edge of the universe and back) AND SUM OVER THEM. For every photon. There are exponentially more paths in case you have more particles. Tremendous computational capability in this universe, wouldn't you think (but sadly NP-hard problems stay unsolvable even so)
2) In classical mechanics, you have the "Lagrangian formalism" which gives you the path an object takes through (flat) spacetime by requiring that INTEGRATION OVER TIME OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KINETIC ENERGY AND POTENTIAL ENERGY SHALL YIELD AN EXTREMUM. Simple as that. And it works bombers. Time disappears and the classical trajectories are simple solutions of a minimization procedure. Great stuff! (not so great that it would allow you do NP-hard problems efficiently though)
What does it all mean? Nobody knows.
Holy stuff!
Clearly, the apes in 2001 didn't know about "slide to unlock".
Bad money drives out the good, etc.
Note to "regulators":
You can only "regulate" what you can actually SEE.
And even then, "regulation" is generally abysmal, counterproductive, uneconomical, unethical and probably transforming the "seen" into the "unseen".
Posted in Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare
Re: Sound and Fury
The Internet is full of 'tards, no surprise here.
Re: Apache change commented out
> How do you misuse something that is not a standard as yet?
If it's ready for implementation, it's standardized enough.
But I still don't see why he went all postal on this.
I don't see where the problems are either. IMHO, the "cookie" debacle is just political grandstanding that muddies the issues. "Do not track" means that you are telling a reputable service to throw away data ASAP (i.e. once the session closes or a small timeout has been reached) and to not communicate said data to 3rd party services while held. What could be simpler?
If you are connecting to a disreputable service, DNT will do bugger all, but then you still have "private browsing".
THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN PIANO INDUSTRY
By William Braid White. The American Mercury, February 1933, pp. 210-213 (some selective quoting)
"During the last century the piano has obtained a position of almost complete dominance over the art of music. That is because it combines two properties that are not to be found in the same combination in any other instrument. On the one hand, its player can instantly and directly control the loudness of the tones he evokes, while on the other the keyboard which he manipulates gives him command over the entire range of sounds used in music, through seven octaves and a minor third, from the lowest A at 27.5 vibrations a second to the highest C at 4186. He commands every harmony within the scope of his ten fingers; and if he be sufficiently skilful he can even expand this scope by combining rapid skips over the keyboard with a judicious use of the pedal. Many musical instruments, in fact, nearly all, endow their players with the first of these powers. Some, like the organ, give him the second. But only the piano gives both, immediately and directly. Moreover, the piano is the easiest to play of all the more important instruments. It is this combination of powers within a comparatively small physical size that has brought it to the front of the musical art. But today that position is seriously threatened....
With some external refinements, cheap uprights soon began to appear also in the cities. With their appearance came the instalment system of purchase, already known to buyers of the cheaper lines of furniture. Considering that the retail price of a fairly good upright was in those days about 1250 and that $15 a week was a good salary for a clerical worker, it is easy to see how the instalment system became a necessity. Very quickly the cheap upright became the money maker of the industry. The number of manufacturers increased year by year, until at the end of the century some 300 were listed. Many of them were turning out what were unkindly called thump-boxes, that is to say, large, cheaply constructed uprights, poor in tone and poorer in mechanism. Why they were bought at all is still something of a mystery. For the American middle class was no more musical then than it is now, and the number of persons who could play the piano was proportionately no larger than it is today. Yet everybody wanted an upright, and 250,000 were sold each year from 1900 to 1910....
Cheap upright player-pianos soon came on the market, with the playing mechanisms built in. Within a few years after 1905 they were leading all other kinds of piano in output, and had become in their turn the big money makers. The apex of their popularity came during the war-time boom of 1916-19. Almost immediately thereafter this received, suddenly and unexpectedly, a fatal wound, by the emergence of public radio broadcasting. For twenty years, under the feet of thousands of wholly unmusical men, women and hildren, up and down the land, the player-piano had been emitting terrible caricatures of piano music. But there was no longer need for it when better music, in every style, could be had from a radio set.
The number of pianos made and sold annually in the United States has been declining steadily for six years, nor has the process yet been checked. The effect of this decline has been two-fold. In the first place, it has revealed clearly what has always been realized by a few, namely, that the American people were never really musical, but bought pianos during many years only because their possession was a sign of social respectability. The position which the instalment-bought piano once occupied in this respect has now been assumed by the automobile."
Re: Developer's perspective
Nothing surpasses Skeletor!
Or better yet...
"Emmanuel Goldstein in a Box."
Re: Russia
> Implying that the USA or Russia have a "free market"
> Implying that the end result of capitalism is Saudi Arabia
> Implying that "Science" is pure and unadulterated and a grounding force. Lyssenko or Nazi doctors may want to chat with you.
> Implying that anyone even knows who Paul Broun is or that people are bothered by the crud they elect.
Really now.
Someone once said with a bit too much flourish:
"Capitalism demands the best of every man — his rationality — and rewards him accordingly. It leaves every man free to choose the work he likes, to specialize in it, to trade his product for the products of others, and to go as far on the road of achievement as his ability and ambition will carry him. His success depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value. When men are free to trade, with reason and reality as their only arbiter, when no man may use physical force to extort the consent of another, it is the best product and the best judgment that win in every field of human endeavor, and raise the standard of living—and of thought—ever higher for all those who take part in mankind’s productive activity. ....
In this complex pattern of human co-operation, two key figures act as the twin-motors of progress, the integrators of the entire system, the transmission belts that carry the achievements of the best minds to every level of society: the intellectual and the businessman. ....
It is on this fundamental division of labor and of responsibility that the intellectual has defaulted. His twin brother, the businessman, has done a superlative job and has brought men to an unprecedented material prosperity. But the intellectual has sold him out, has betrayed their common source, has failed in his own job and has brought men to spiritual bankruptcy. The businessman has raised men’s standard of living—but the intellectual has dropped men’s standard of thought to the level of an impotent savage."
Posted in Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare
Re: So how about...
> Making an education offensive.
Why do you want to have offensive education?
> Make it affordable for people to study engineering.
I don't think that the price tag of engineering curricula or the current skill set is much of a problem.
It's just that stuff from <whatever far eastern company> can - at the present time - be had at a better price than if it was produced locally. Which of course is A-OK, because that means you don't need to shell out $$$ for your kit and can invest it in something else.
It is of course true that this only happens because the US can print up money at will [or else promise tax revenues from the future] for continued infinite imports. This is not A-OK. Take that away and prices might very well balance at some time.
Btw, an economic system does not allow you to "make it affordable" just like that. That's like demanding that the solution to your differential equation should have a certain shape. It doesn't work like that. Something has to give.
Re: Public vs Private
There is also the problem of "dark matter" - losses undetected that went into the heat sink (a USB stick in the trash being carried off for incineration) - losses undetected that went into someone's toolset (a USB stick falling victim to dumpster diving).
"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."
If Rumsfeld is to be remember for anything except asshattery, this should be it.
Re: bah
It's also a nice illustration of what is called the economic calculation problem in a socialistic outfit. You don't know how much anyone would pay for your service. You don't know what service to provide. You don't know how much to invest where. You don't know your pay levels. You can, however, demand more money from the taxpayer by wailing enough.
In a rational economic actor, what would happen is that there would be an evaluation of whether to invest in business re-engineering for more data protection [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place] or whether to incur the risk of being fined by ICO if case SHTF [which means shifting resources away from what people pay for in the first place]. Assign a price to each eventuality. Take the cheapest.
You want standards? There are truckloads. Who is going to implement them? How many years will it take? How many contractors do you need? Take them from EDS? PwC? Repeat every year or every two years? Train existing personnel for two weeks ... need more personnel etc. etc. etc.
The economic calculations are NOT trivial.
Re: Public vs. Private
> Actually, when you think about it
Well, it's worse with the public outfit. They also have a contract (it's "the law" and stuff) that is imposed (did you sign something? no) on you and you have no particular choice about handing over your data
> And we all know that companies are taking the data for explicit commercial gain, rather than (for example) trying to make people better.
Do you really think that what you say makes any sense at all?
Re: Public vs Private
> Unlikely.
Why?
Posted in Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare
Re: If ever they were found out...
So the Chinese are crazy prepared, is that it?
Posted in Reds in the Routers is routine, not rare
Re: Some of us build our own routers ...
> using off-the-shelf parts
Sourced from China. Not that I take this latest US moral panic seriously.
Upcoming: Wahabbis and Salafists in our oil, ZOMG! After this message...
I draw you a Mohammed!!
> Just adapt to people whose values are different from your own.
I have no intention to adapt to people whose value is being professionally offended in the name of $DEITY and who go out of their way to tell me about it in no uncertain terms. I would rather use a daisy cutter on them.
Re: Upgrade Edition
Clearly, you are a Cylon.
Posted in Gavel fails to fall for Apple 1
Re: Too right, typical Apple
I remember the 16 bit machines...
Amiga 2000, 1987 (Motorola 68000 @ 7.14 MHz, 512 KiB): USD 1'500
Mac II, 1987 (Motorola 68020 @ 15 MHz, 1 MiB): USD 3'769
Good times, good times... somebody had an acoustic coupler ....
Bad taste in decoration?!
Shouldn't there be a stencil of Ayn Rand's likeness on the capsule instead of the flag of some failed state?
Re: im going to rush out and get it on release day
No, you just yum update
Re: We can only hope
> The physics such as they are seem sound
END OF LINE
STEM again?
> close the gender gap in the STEM
This is actually done by more females taking up STEM subjects, not by warbling from LEO.
Odds are not good...
You don't quite understand how central banking works.
Posted in Gavel fails to fall for Apple 1
Yep
Like the Necronomicon, it's damn ancient. Unlike the Necronomicon, it doesn't reveal forbidden knowledge.
Now, was Jobs in the same league as Abdul al Hazred? Some rumors say yes...
Re: limits are made to be broken...
Of course, of course. But that means a whole new production and engineering chain, so might well take several decades. Unlike what politicians believe, you cannot just fart whole new approaches out of nothing.
I still remember my amazement at this from February 1993 in Communications of the ACM. 4 KW for 250 MHz. My dad was laughing at me and thought I was a retard for believing the power uptake numbers:
"The CPU module contains one microprocessor chip, its external cache, and an interface to the bus. A storage module contains two 32-megabyte (MB) interleaved banks of dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The I/O channels that are connected to one or two DECstation 5000 workstations, which provide disk and network I/O as well as a high-performance debugging environment. Most of the logic, with the exception of the CPU chip, is emitter-coupled logic (ECL), which we selected for its high speed and predictable electrical characteristics. Modules plug into a 14-slot card cage. The card cage and power supplies are housed in a 0.5- by 1.1-meter (m) cabinet. A fully loaded cabinet dissipates approximately 4,000 watts, and is cooled by forced air. Figures 1 and 2 are photographs of the system and the modules.
....
We designed the bus to provide high bandwidth, which is suitable for a multiprocessor system, and to offer minimal latency. As the CPU cycle time becomes very small, 5 nanoseconds (ns) [250 MHz] for the DECchip 21064, the main memory latency becomes an important component of system performance. The ADU bus can supply 320MB of user data, but still is able to satisfy a cache read miss in just 200ns."
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: Limits.
> I'll cling on to hope, thanks.
Do not hope to do impossible things. Hope to do feasible things. Anything else is religion in a terribly bad way.
This is the Slow Zone. Better accept it.
Do they hang around the coffee vending machine most of the day?
Posted in Is lightspeed really a limit?
Re: Limits.
A shadow does not "travel" in any sense a reasonable intelligence would accept. Neither does an equation, an idea or a train of thought.
Also, humans limited forever, no-go theorems, N is not NP, Gödel, the age of failed dreams (when we still watched the original Star Trek)
Re: I guess
That's why there is some kind of celebration around that time...
As H.P. Lovecraft wrote....
"I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember."
"I blame you for the moonlit sky and the dream that died with the eagles' flight."
> Do you actually know *anything* about the recent and current US space programme?
1) Glorious proclamations on a scale akin to "unbreakable" healthcare promises. Moon tomorrow, Mars soon etc.
2) Let the elections pass.
3) ????
4) Become aware of decatrillion [actually hectatrillion] debt hole, economy in the crapper, central bank thinks it's the Weimar Republic all over again, encroaching fascialism, several ongoing "Wars On Stuff/Terra", sliding transformation into Banana Republic, only with nukes and better uniforms. Space program of the non-military kind? Uh... yeah? Maybe? Let's build a few more aircraft carriers and nukesubs instead.
The cat is out of the bag.
Re: "a test for human empathy"
Just scan their braaiiinnnns. I want all politicians to get a mandatory scan here!
Interestingly, in the PKD novel, the replicants are the psychopaths - they don't connect (even among themselves IIRC) and don't understand anything about peoples' motiviations. Consequently they are just out to fuck up peoples' lives. Deckhard is confused at first but rejoins the mainstream after his new expensive goat his thrown off a building by Rachael. There was even a discussion about whether he should shoot the girl immediately or after bedding her first. Definitely not PC.
Re: Not far enough....
Excellent. I have a proposal to set up a lobby to make that idea mandatory across the board. After all, what CAN be done, SHOULD be done. It will also help save children.
Obligatory
"Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a liberal, Mr. Deckard?"
Re: sucked into the event horizon?
But that's wrong. Any lightray projected outwards from your eye excepts the ones going "straight up" will intersect the event horizon at some point. I.e. everything will be black except for a single point. Similarly, if you are at 3M radius, the event horizon will look like a flat infinite expanse.
Fun's here: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Tour/Tour.html#BHVIEW I'm sure there are others.
10/10 would troll with!
Re: something meandering and brown
"They hated machines being used by unscrupulous businessmen to put them out of work. They were actually pretty forward thinking and progressive...."
Yeah, that's the problem with "progressivism" in one pithy sentence, thank you very much.
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