Posts by John Savard

Spectrum

Her contribution in this area was probably first brought to general notice by an article in the September 1984 IEEE Spectrum written by The Codebreakers author David Kahn.

Revenge for 1895

I take it the headline was meant to picture this as Earth taking its revenge for the Martian attack, with heat rays, on Britain in the late nineteenth century as chronicled by one Herbert George Wells. Or at least to note with irony that instead of the Martians sending walking tripods with heat rays to us, we're the ones sending robots with heat rays to them.

But our intellects are neither cool nor unsympathetic, and we are confident there is no intelligent life on Mars against which we could stumble into war.

Oh, Dear.

The world didn't end 5,200 years ago. We're still here, aren't we? So why would anyone be worried?

Passive Drinking

Having followed the link, I see that "passive drinking" was merely misnamed. It's not about people getting cirrhosis of the liver from inhaling alcohol fumes from other people drinking - that would indeed be junk science. It's about people injured by drunk drivers and so on. That is a real enough problem.

The Company They Keep

Very shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, those nice people in the U.S. who picket the funerals of American soldiers who died in Afghanistan and Iraq told us that he was burning in Hell, since he did not give God the glory for his achievements, and he encouraged sin.

Now more respectable people are jumping on the bandwagon.

Even if their points are valid, to most of us, Steve Jobs is important for what he has done for us, and his faults are between him and those affected by them. That may be selfish of us, of course.

Solutions

Obviously, if the world gets its act together, people will want to have meat in their diet, and that pretty much kills any hope of controlling greenhouse gases from agriculture. Unless we get to the point of being able to produce it by tissue culture of a sort - which was the subject of a recent news item.

But read The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan - or watch Romance by Catherine Breillat. Men want a woman in their arms - women want a baby to hold.

So if unmarried men commit the crimes and start the wars, for the men to get what they want, the women have to get what they want, and we're doomed. A massive expansion of nuclear power, and using some of it to do geoengineering, seems to be our only choice. Not that improving agriculture in the Third World, as suggested, isn't a good idea that can be part of an all-out strategy.

Endangering Life

The limit in Canada is still 0.08, but when the police stop people, at first over 0.05, but now with any detectable alcohol, they still impose penalties such as a 24 hour license suspension.

So, while the criminal limit of impaired driving has not been reduced more, from a level at which a driver is not an accident waiting to happen, but his reflexes are simply a bit off, so that a near-accident caused by other factors would become more serious, provincial driving regulations have gone beyond that.

Thus, 0.2 or 0.24 or thereabouts is simply garden-variety drunk driving, where the driver is an accident waiting to happen. That should result in significantly worse penalties than merely impaired drivers, but somehow getting tougher on drivers that are just barely impaired (if they really are impaired) is more important than having harsher penalties for those who really do put others at significant risk.

Polynesia

Hawaii is in Polynesia, although it isn't in the South Pacific. Or, at least, Hawaiians are Polynesians - Hawaii, like Easter Island, isn't really in the archipelago.

But Polynesia isn't part of Asia, even if one would think of Japan or Indonesia as part of Asia.

Like the Babel Fish

If science says that the Universe shouldn't exist, but it does, that's a dead giveaway that God has been rigging the game. But if He is supposed to depend on faith...

Doomed Anyways

Just because a giant solar flare won't send us back into the Dark Ages doesn't mean we're not doomed. Between the effects of globalization, which have led to an economy in which only the top 1% of the people matter, and global warming - we're doomed well enough without having the Mayan calendar to time it.

No More Vectors

Today's microprocessors have vector instruction sets such as MMX, AltiVec, and SSE, which involve dividing a wide chunk of memory into several numbers. This derives from such computers as the AN/FSQ-32 and the Lincoln Laboratory TX-2.

The other kind of vector instruction, where a vector might consist of a large number of double-precision numbers - 64 of them, instead of 2 - but instead of being fetched all at once, is processed one number to a clock in a dense pipeline sequence - is the one used in computers like the Cray I.

Back around 1994, you could buy a board with the Fujitsu MB92831 on it - it was a single-chip co-processor with vector registers and vector instructions like those of a Cray, used in machines like the Mieko CS2.

Why we don't have things like that now, but even better, is well-known, so they say: the extreme cost advantages of commodity hardware, and the huge gap between memory bandwidth and computing speed, which reduces the benefits from vector instructions. But I still wonder, and suspect that classic vector instructions would benefit commodity micros for prosaic tasks like computer games.

Importance

The question, of course, is: how important is it that the U.S, have greater manned space capabilities than Russia? The U.S. is still a technological leader, but it is possible that manned space activity of the sort which involved the Shuttle and the ISS is not particularly important to the well-being of U.S. citizens, to U.S. national prestige, or U.S. national security.

Building a colony on the Moon, landing a man on Mars - now, that would be something. But without the reasons that existed in the Cold War, it's not clear if the expense can be accepted.

The Legitimate Intent

Of course, though, this wouldn't stop people from running Linux software with the help of applications such as andLinux. But you would still have to buy a copy of Windows.

What it would do is lock out boot sector viruses - which, of course, would be a good thing, because it would also lock out low-level anti-virus products.

Basically, this is indeed a disaster. But something like it would be a good idea. The right way to achieve this would be for the user to have to go into the BIOS screen, and digitally sign his Windows CD, or his Linux CD, or his antivirus product CD, from there to allow it to be installed - so that viruses, not being explicitly authorized by the user for booting from, would have no chance of invading.

Eliminate viruses not by locking the user out of the machine, but by giving the user more control over the machine!

Another way to do this: let the user go into the BIOS screen and add new keys - so that it would come with Microsoft's public key, but you could add one from your Linux supplier. (Or you could make a public/private key pair yourself and encrypt the kernel you compiled...)

So there is a way to make this work and avoid it ending OS competition.

Cellphone

He deliberately included a radio receiving device in the decorated toilet, which gave reasonable cause under present circumstances for authorities to suspect the possibility of a remotely controlled explosive. Therefore, charging him with a bomb hoax, nut just littering, was appropriate, and he should have been convicted, as far as I can tell from the article.

Free speech and protest are rights - but deliberately creating more work for the police is not a right.

Crown Copyright

Aren't Ordinance Survey maps in Britain protected by Crown Copyright?

It would be different if this were actually depriving people of the ability to do something with these maps they were legally entitled to do.

Adobe Doesn't Have to Die

This doesn't have to kill Adobe. After all, the Flash player plug-in is given away by Adobe free of charge. The thing that Adobe sells, and makes money from, is the authoring software.

So, if it becomes possible for HTML 5 to permit content to be displayed in a manner comparable to that of Flash, the Adobe software can presumably be modified to save content in that form. Of course they will lose the advantage that fewer people have the Silverlight player installed than the Flash player - but Flash became dominant because of Adobe's superiority in the whole technological field.

Perhaps The Only Hope

Maybe some groups could make two versions of their singles. One with compression to send to the radio stations to play on the air, and one without for people at home to listen to and enjoy the full musical experience of the song.

Ideally, this would give them the best of both worlds - they wouldn't get buried by the louder competition on the air, but people who buy the record and take it home would find it sounds better than those of the bands that don't do this.

The Phrase in Question

I take it then the phrase to which the article was referring was "Like painting the Forth Bridge"? It takes some effort to dig that out of the context.

Obvious Helpful Measure

If, when I go to a web site, its IP address has changed since the last time I visited it, the browser should prompt me, and ask if I want to go to the old address or the new one.

After all, normally, browsers keep a browser history, and they go out and get the IP address from the URL before fetching the page with the IP address, so the information is there. Naturally, this is an extra pop-up when a page legitimately changes, but when people see the old page really isn't there, then they can proceed based on the change apparently being legitimate.

Appropriate

Well, if someone posted my credit card details on the Web, I'd want the police to be able to take them off again before anyone could see them. Even if the card would still have to be cancelled.

There are appropriate cases where there is no time to lose - the recent Wikileaks news item, where the lives of people heroically exposing human-rights violations have been put in danger give an example of that.

Why Do We Have Taxes?

If this article really had a valid point, we wouldn't need to have taxes in the first place. If people aren't willing to give their money to the government voluntarily, obviously they don't want to pay taxes, so we should just abolish them.

The thing is, though, that aside from being able to buy toys directly, money is also useful in competing with the next fellow to attract the best-looking birds. Thus, people can realize the need for certain government expenditures and activity - but only be willing to help pay for them if they can be sure that the next fellow will do his bit.

My Worst Nightmare

would be if Apple decided to replace the Macintosh with something based on iOS, subject to the restrictive policies of the App Store.

That would be the kind of "all-new Mac" that some indications point towards.

However, whatever I may think of some poor decisions Apple has made in the past, they're not that crazy.

Already Invented

The power source of the future he is looking for is called the "fuel cell". They used them on the Apollo moon missions. Electrical power at chemical fuel energy densities.

Admittedly, they're more suitable to luggables than pocketables... but if people can refuel cigarette lighters, then I suppose a hydrogen port on a cell phone is also possible.

Or that's it - it might not be great for global warming, but why not a cigarette lighter that supplies heat to run a tiny steam engine? Powering a little generator, naturally.

I Always Thought...

that they should have continued the joke by calling the Pope's special helicopter "The Flying Vatican".

Necessary Solution

Server-side Javascript is able to access items in one's browser cache? That seems like something that has extreme privacy implications, and which should be corrected forthwith.

Not Just a Demonstration

If they shut off the phone service simply to prevent a protest, to prevent a group from peacefully communicating its grievances, then I can understand the concern.

But the group calls itself "No Justice, no BART", and a previous protest disrupted service. So it wasn't just a protest they were acting to prevent: it was interference in the right of commuters to get to work on time or get home from work without unnecessary delays. This is the primary service which BART provides; being able to use one's phone on the train is not much use if you can't even get on the train, and it's a poor substitute if the train can't go anywhere.

Prior Art

While the patent may include broader claims, and have an illustrative example for a Windows PC, as far as I'm aware, Microsoft didn't have to license that patent to add the "sleep" feature to Windows. And that sounds like what it is describing.

Now, if there is some specific reason why the power-on self-test - something a lot of computers do - was not used by Microsoft for sleep mode, but Apple is using it, at least for that laptop, then they might even have a case. But I doubt it.

From Arthur C. Clarke...

Well, even if her tweet does sound a bit on the vapid side, I'd say it's essentially correct.

After all, Arthur C. Clarke himself commented about the movie that "MGM doesn't know it yet, but they are making the first 10 million dollar religious movie".

Just Fix It

Although in general an individual Mac is more secure than an individual Windows PC, if a vulnerability that lets an attacker to revert the network from Kerberos to DHX turns multiple Macs into a house of cards, that is very serious. The thing to do is to both fix that vulnerability, and provide a tool with which to remove DHX completely from a Mac.

It's not good enough for the Macintosh to have the potential to be a secure platform if even one flaw makes it less secure.

However irrational this fear may be, though, some people wonder if Apple might not move someday to a closed App Store model with the Macintosh similar to that for the iPhone and its relatives. That, not security, is the greatest threat to the success of the Macintosh at the moment.

One Almost Hopes So

Well, if Apple is buying up all the things needed to make portable computers with these form factors, one would almost hope they're a fad.

I think it's obvious that people do want a laptop computer to be as portable and convenient as possible, and with as long a battery life as possible. But it also has to have enough power to be useful.

Think of how powerful computers were that could get useful work done running Windows 3.1, and think of the hardware resources required to run today's versions of Windows. To my way of thinking, this is one obvious roadblock - and Apple, with its own OS, potentially had a way around that. Of course, even netbook computers are running Windows 7 today, and if this form factor becomes important enough to discourage bloat in future versions of Windows, we will all win.

Unchallengeable Monopoly

...of the buggy-whip market.

Mainframes have lasted longer than anyone might have expected. But now that the Nehalem-EX has RAS features, the handwriting is on the wall, and soon there will be no reason to process data on anything but an x86 chip any longer.

So the real manaical laughter is coming from Sunnyvale.

Hardware

Oh, dear me. The state which is the prime suspect in this is also the one on whose territory almost all our computers are manufactured.

Mind you, if they put chips on the motherboards with backdoors in them, they would eventually get caught without any plausible deniability (it's just over-enthusiastic teenaged hackers who swallowed our propaganda about the capitalist roaders and their running-dog lackeys) so maybe we're safe for now.

Maybe.

Unclear

I get the feeling this is supposed to be a new, clever algorithm that can run on existing hardware.

And in at least one sense, "unlimited detail" is possible. I remember playing a game from Lucasfilm on my Commodore 64 that converted from a coarse polygon map for a given object to an equivalent finer one as one got closer to it; they billed this as "fractal graphics".

And storage for the ultimate detail of the world was avoided, since much of it was algorithmically generated at random.

Proportional Spacing

Many daisywheel printers had proportional spacing, and IBM made some typewriters using the later 96-character golfball - the Model 50, 65, and 85 - that had proportional spacing as well. It is a little-known fact that the typestyles used for those golfballs actually existed on 88-character elements as well, for the Mag Card Selectric.

But in addition to conventional proportional spacing with 60 units to the inch, IBM did something with the 88-character element that no one ever bothered to try equalling with the daisywheel. The memorable Selectric Composer, switchable between 72, 84, and 96 units to the inch, which by using smaller units, and allowing different sizes of type with the same spacing pattern, closely approximated typesetting.

Characters varied from 3 to 9 units, but letters like M and W were squashed a bit, so if you compared the spacing to that on a Monotype caster, it would appear to be an 11 or 12 unit to the em system.

Surprising

I am amazed that the "local businessman"'s home and computers haven't been searched, and that he hasn't already been arrested - and, likely, held without bail.

Outrageous

It is absolutely outrageous and unacceptable that there isn't some way to push a button on a battery and totally reset the software, so that a user can quickly and easily fix such a thing without having to spend money to take it in to be fixed.

Of course, the idea of a battery having a little computer inside it is rather strange as well.

We've already seen, though, that many Macintosh models don't have an eject hole for their CD drives, so this kind of deficiency has been encountered before. A Mac may be much less subject to viruses than a PC, but the system's inflexibility sometimes deprives the user of recovery options.

Severe Penalties

He shouldn't just be charged with theft. Because airline passengers are forced to entrust their baggage to TSA personnel - and, for that matter, to airline baggage handling personnel - because of emergency anti-terrorism laws, these people are in a special position of trust.

So if they commit any thefts from passenger luggage, in addition to any theft charges, they should also face Federal felony charges with especially severe penalties - so that any theft, however small, could lead to life imprisonment.

Auxilliary Currency?

Couldn't the Greek central bank continue to deal in Euros, while a subordinate bank deals in Drachmas, with laws forcing landlords to accept Drachmas, and with people getting ration coupons to use Drachmas (otherwise non-convertible) to buy necessary imports like citrus fruits?

So people working in successful export businesses would be paid in Euros, and civil servants and anyone whose job has to be propped up with government subsidies would be paid in Drachmas. Given a non-convertible Drachma, no irresponsibility would be involved if the government printed as many of them as it liked.

True Enough

I know that Reuters' Science Daily site largely features news releases - and I do remember a few a year or two back that should not have been reported uncritically. Thus this is a potential problem, and I can believe the BBC might have it.

However, Reuters, at least, seems to have cleaned up its act, because I haven't encountered lately anything presenting speculative new theories as newly discovered fact there - so they have someone sifting through those press releases who knows what he's doing now.

The One True Energy Source

Solar power is good, a bit more realistic than wind power.

But really, if we want as much energy as we can pay for, when we want it, then aside from fossil fuels, there's just one choice. Nuclear.

Not renewable, but we have enough for hundreds of years, provided we don't waste the U-238 - that is, we breed and reprocess.

Indeed

One memento my father had of his wartime service with the Canadian merchant marine was a textbook on arithmetic - fractions, decimals, and even how to extract square roots. It was classified "restricted". Presumably, it might aid the enemy to know exactly what facts of basic arithmetic our troops were required to know... but, of course, the book contained nothing secret of itself.