Posts by Ru 1818 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jun 2007
"These web applications, mostly built using open-source technologies like Hadoop and Lucene, have turned the idea of an operating system on its head."
No. No they haven't. New languages, new platforms, new runtimes, new communication protocols, etc etc... same old client-server architectures with some fancy new software. Where's the paradigm shift?
Seriously, 15 billion? Has Ballmer gone completely off the rails? If they'd invested that much cash in sorting out, say, their mobile operating system, they'd be in a vastly better situation than if they'd hung an enormous web 2.0 albatross around their neck.
Of all the possible things to do with 15 billion, this has to rank right up there with the worst. Why is he still at the helm?
"Its actually a little bit of both. Traditional business has a cost called 'delivery'. Typically when you order something, you pay the seller, and they pay for the delivery using a 'logistics company'. This has traditionally not happened for online electronically delivered (logistics=telco) content - the content sellers have had it really good delivering more and more with little increase in cost to themselves."
Google (and whoever else) *does not connect to the internet for free*. They pay for their bandwidth, and the ISPs they buy connectivity will in turn pay for their own connectivity from other companies, or have reciprocal peering agreements where they're effectively paying for someone else's bandwidth by providing their own in return. Mobile end users also pay for connectivity. Everyone already pays!
The telcos want to keep all the customers they're apparently undercharging, and they want to keep making a profit by getting successful companies to make up the shortfall. Why on earth should anyone else have to prop up this sort of flawed business model? They've painted themselves into a corner, unwilling to raise prices before any of their competitors because they will lose customers in droves. They're all equally stupid and guilty, and a nice healthy kick in the share price will do them a world of good.
This is more about stealing an existing, working design for building new kinds of robot rather than trying to design something new from scratch without the benefits of a few million years of testing.
Complaining that because we understand the underlying mathematics behind something we have no need to ever study the phenomenon ever again is obtuse at best.
Just for fun, try replacing 'Eric Butler' in Keith's post with the name of you 'favourite' UK tabloid.
Now, if you can take a break from your self righteous, 'ignorance is bliss' tirade (pausing, perhaps, to read up on logical fallacies) remember that any operating system that allows a user to trivially put a computer's wireless interfaces into promiscuous mode has been able to do this sort of thing for *years*
Mr Butler has done nothing new; he's merely packaged up and presented a succinct demonstration of a flaw that shouldn't exist on any website. Google were very slow in fixing gmail, and even they provided a purely HTTPS interface years ago to prevent this very problem!
Clearly, letting the industry sort itself out in its own good time has been an utter failure. They've been utterly irresponsible, orders of magnitude worse than a little skiddie application and some publicity.
Lasers aren't much good at ranges of a light second or more because they're diffraction limited, unless you can work out how to make hard xray lasers.
Chuck rocks at something a light second away? You'd better be pretty patient. Missiles carrying one-shot railguns and lasers and fragmentation warheads are the most sensible things to use, not plain old chemically driven bullets.
"because you won't have a liquid in a vacume[sic]. It will become a gas."
Eventually, a body of liquid will evaporate in a vacuum, but not instantaneously. You can see the same effect simply by exposing volatile liquids to normal atmospheric pressure and seeing that they don't all instantaneously and exposively vapourise.
A fluid that exhibits low vapour pressure and high surface tension could potentially form stable droplets, I guess, but they'd be a wee bit smaller than the average pipette nozzle. I guess its not beyond the realms of possibility that heat loss via evaporation would freeze some fluids in a vacuum and leave them to sublime instead, but my physics is pretty rusty nowadays.
You could certainly get enough liquid together long enough to demonstrate that pipettes would not work.
One desktop manager, sure. You should submit your proposal to the chief software architects of the supreme linux steering committee, who will direct the thousands of software developers working on various projects to concentrate on one.
I'm sure that with sufficient coercion, say the threat of excommunication and banning them from linux use or development or having their funding cut, all the developers will jump into line.
Whilst you're there, you should ask about unifying all those different distributions. Such a waste to have so many! All that duplicated effort! Why, if everyone just concentrated on the One True Linux, surely it would be the OS to end all OSes, or something?
"it would be more effective to construct a more powerful laser on the ground."
Oh, absolutely: but bear in mind that you might want to zap sattelites that don't fly over your particular motherland, and so having ground-based laser facilities would be useless. Having the facility to deploy a sat-blinder anywhere in the world could, eg, ensure that no-one else has orbital surveillance capabilities in a foreign combat theatre.
Used to have motorail services in this country a few years back. All got stopped as part of the larger 'lets get rid of rail because the road freight lobby is so strong'. I doubt they will ever come back for the same reason. Seems like the future is heading towards bus, bike and truck for most people and things as the cost of car ownership and use will rise ever higher.
> "I've spent many years in the software industry and even if they chose the highest bidder in the most expensive country, I still wouldn't trust it, because I know that testing is the area that corners are cut. Why do you think every software EULA explicitly denies all liability for injury or loss (life, money etc)."
You don't generally get to do that in safety critical systems. If you're making fire alarms, life support systems, avionics or (eventually) car autopilots, if you aren't prepared to stand by the quality of your product, you will either a) be ignored by companies who aren't willing to take the blame for your shitty components killing hundreds of people or b) be unable to sell it in the first place without breaking a whole bunch of laws.
A partially automated car network whereby major roads were embedded with guidance and traffic management systems is a much more likely occurrence than VWs pie-in-the-sky dream. Common places to find long, boring journeys and long traffic jams, the benefits of autopiloted cars could be most easily seen with the least investment of effort and in a much more controlled environment with no blind corners or sudden turnings.
Road users could be encouraged to fit autopilots in return for reduced tolls or taxes, or other benefits like dedicated autopilot lanes, etc.
Making a totally general purpose car navigation system is probably an AI-hard problem in any 'legacy' road network that has built on a couple of thousand years worth of farm tracks to produce massively suboptimal routes. I'd be far happier trusting a robot to drive on a multilane trunk road than a twisty back lane, for example.
And this doesn't even begin to consider how loath many people would be to give up car ownership. Still, it got plenty of press attention so I guess it did its job.
The Reg had something to say on this matter a few months back... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/
It isn't worth making consumer goods anywhere but China, really. But they're not the only products in the world.
"I do sometimes wonder whether the information they supply to joe public is as dangerous to us all"
And rightly so. May I be so bold as to suggest that widely read publications (such as the Reg) are also being thoughtless (at best!) when they give additional publicity to these amateur spies. What is needed is some sort of central bureau through which all published information (such as news articles or blog posts) must pass. Only articles which have been deemed to be free of this sort of sensitive information would be allowed to be published. This means there's no danger of anyone even inadvertently broadcasting information that they might not have known was top secret!
Or, you know, if a handful of amateurs with fairly simple astronomical equipment can see what this spacecraft is doing, then you can be absolutely and totally guaranteed that any national government that cared about such things could afford to employ a few people with high quality equipment full time to do much more thorough sky surveys without even the hassle of needing any foreign intelligence operations.
If even we know about it, and it were intended to be totally secret, then our governments have screwed up to such a massive degree that they probably aren't doing a very good job of protecting anything.
> Or maybe it was that he was a Swede who didn't accept Big Bang and was an electrical engineer to boot.
Question for you: how do you tell a sudden, intuitive leap of brilliance explaining deep mysteries of the cosmos from a wild guess based on flimsy evidence?
Did his theories make any predictions that could be verified by observation or experiment? I imagine that didn't happen, either because he was wrong or because it remains too difficult to verify any of his claims. This isn't politically motivated climate study you know; academics couldn't manage a proper conspiracy to save their lives. Lets not have a "They laughed at Columbus" moment here. No-one really cares about his nationality or non-mainstream cosmology enough to try and bury the truth of his work, even assuming it *is* true in the first place!
Incidentally, if you have a peek at A Brief History of Time, you may note that Stephen Hawking has conceived a model of the universe which doesn't have a beginning or end of time. Don't see many people trying to hide his research due to that little bit of unorthodoxy, do you.
Proving P != NP does not prove that sentience is somehow noncomputable. The two issues are totally distinct.
The existence of a form of reasoning that is fundamentally more powerful than mathematics and logic, as you suggest human intuition is, has consequences every bit as far reaching as if it were proven that P = NP. Fast, specialised heuristics do not a godlike intelligence make.
Savants (Idiot or otherwise) can be hugely mathematically gifted but they do not operate at some high level of reasoning, or they would be able to do arbitrarily complex calculations in constant time (instead of time increasing in proportion with, say, the size of the numbers involved).
> Not only that, there was quite the speculation that it would happen instantaneously - no matter the distance (thereby circumventing light speed restrictions on data transfer).
You can't send useful information faster than the speed of light. Reality doesn't appear to work like that. Perhaps you're thinking of quantum superdense coding which allows you to significantly increase the bandwidth available from more mundane communication channels, but you still can't send a message any faster than the speed of light.
The two halves of the electron pair (or indeed any other quantum bit carrying medium) must be *together* when entangled, so you have to send one half of the pair away with the person you're communicating with.
They can then perform some operation on it, and send it back to you. The trick is that the quantum state can hold more bits of quantum information than it can of classic information, thus increasing the bandwidth of the channel. Furthermore, interception of the bit in transit gives no useful information at all, because both halves of the state are required for useful decoding.
You're still having to send 2 bits out and 2 bits back for a total of, say, 4 bits of useful information exchange, but compared to one-time pads and the like, superdense coding is much higher bandwidth (which would only send 2 bits of useful information in this case).
> What happened to all of this?
Was never possible. General relativity puts serious limits on the number of awesome sci-fi toys and tools that can exist in reality.
Stopping quantum decoherence and related issues is why we don't have commercial quantum computers and communication lines... its pretty tricky stuff. Easier than fusion though, I reckon, so maybe its only 20 years off? :o)
> TL; DR
GBT physics class. No FTL communications for you, ever.
Offhand, I can't think of two books I've read in the not too distant past, Diamond Age and The Algebraist, which already suggested this topic taken to the next level with motile devices. Smart dust and distributed sensor networks themselves aren't new ideas either.
Quite frankly, if you're not already using TEMPEST rated approaches to security your systems, why on earth should potential future eavesdropping systems bother you when proven and available systems today could steal anything you might have?
I suspect that no-one else took such measures before because the people who benefit most from the appalling libel laws in the UK are either the ones making the laws, or the ones who fund the political parties making the laws.
I'd like to think this will kick the ponderous bulk of Her Maj's legal system in to sorting itself out, but I won't hold my breath.
If someone breaks into your house, they will be prosecuted already. There are laws covering that sort of thing all over the world. What you're advocating is a new set of laws to protect companies whose shoddy designs aren't fit for purpose, and people who knowingly use defective security systems (hello, DOD) and expect compensation for their own stupidity.
If you use a known-insecure system to protect your property, your insurers will laugh at any claims you might try to make (but I had a sign saying 'no burglars'! they shouldn't have tried to get in!) and quite justifiably so.
ATM manufacturers are clearly avoiding security best practises... or even security *minimum* practises and have done so for such a long period of time that this sort of publicity is the only way that is ever going to shake them out of their complacency.
> And the burglar's 'defense' is, "It's all yor fault for having such crappy door locks." you'll be okay with that, will you?
Your insurer is likely to have some thoughts on that, and will probably tell you where to go when you tell them that a few hundred grand's worth of stuff went missing from your straw hut.
Sure, he did the crime, etc etc, but he's being extradited because the price tag put on the cleanup operation is so hight. Given that the sysadmins in charge of the systems he broke into were manifestly incompetent (or their management was wilfully ignorant) that cost should be borne by them, one way or another, rather than trying to hang it all on a handy scapegoat. McKinnon should serve a sentence in the UK appropriate to his breaches of the computer misuse act, etc.
To continue the increasingly contrived example above, maybe you could try claiming on insurance the cost of rebuilding your house in a more secure fashion, or perhaps asking that much in damages from the burglar. Do let us know how well that works out for you.
Where's the roadmap for putting iOS onto the sorts of PDAs you might find in stock and order tracking systems in supermarkets, warehouses, couriers, restaurants, whatever? There isn't one? MS seem to have a pretty hefty market share there. How about on cash machines, checkouts, kiosks? Oh, looks like MS have that sewn up too.
They're selling into much more diverse markets, but quite why they'd need anything other than a new WinCE (for ARM platforms, maybe with phone specific extensions) and a new WinXP Embedded (for x86 platforms) is slightly beyond me.
Quite why Ballmer is still there is similarly beyond me.
The porn is just a side-show. They were selling booze without a license, that's probably enough to convict them. Selling food without a license isn't going to help either. Copyright violation and distributing porn to minors is almost entirely irrelevant after that; enough with the outrage and 'won't someone think about the people who are thinking about the children?' hysteria.
Funny, I don't recall ever seeing an unlimited data plan from any provider. Was this some short lived 'lets make unlimited actually mean unlimited' notion that I'd somehow missed?
Telcos have always just hidden the limits behind 'fair use', which tended to be pretty limited. Maybe now we'll actually get some meaningful and upfront information about how much bandwidth you really get.
The key thing is that a large proportion of the heat generated in an internal combustion engine is going to be lost via its exhaust. A car engine might only need to shift ~20kw of heat via its cooling systems. It is possible to have an open cycle laser, but a device that chucks out very hot, very toxic clouds of gas is commonly known as a 'chemical weapon' and would be frowned upon.
Next, vehicle design takes advantage of forward movement through air to provide a fair bit of cooling. Static or slow-moving laser emplacements don't have this luxury. Try running an engine hard on a stationary vehicle and see what happens.
Engines can also run quite warm and are generally made of quite robust components, whereas lasers like to run cool to prevent degradation of the beam or damage to delicate optical bits.
There are probably other issues regarding energy densities making it harder to cool smaller components generating the same amount of heat energy before they toast themselves, but I don't know enough about the workings of a chemical laser to comment on that. I shall leave it as an exercise to the reader ;-)
"Surely, classy birds with active and fullfiling social lives are out living their fulfilling social lives rather than spending time chatting up strangers on an on-line dating site?"
I said nothing about the virtues or disadvantages of online dating, as it happens; only about seeking partners in bars. Me, I've always found having some interesting hobbies has always been the way to meet people, but that clearly doesn't work for everyone.
I see you feel that anything related to computers and the internet leaves those associated in the depths of a socially and emotionally crippled nerd ghetto; stop to consider the fact that those sorts of people are also unlikely to find a partner online (at least not one who'll hang around long after meeting face to face). The popularity and profitability of online dating sites implies a reasonable quantity of socially well adjusted users, fifty percent of whom seem to be quite happy avoiding individuals like yourself.
Is there a situation in which someone another than a marketing or sales drone, astroturfing or otherwise, would use the word 'proactive' in connection with a product?
Perhaps you should leverage your synergies towards a vocabulary used by real people to further your marketing campaign.
"I inhaled it on all occasions as did all neighbours and there were no bad health effects."
Funny thing about chronic toxicity and exposure to carcinogens... just because you don't drop down dead on the spot, doesn't mean that the chemicals were harmless or that you were unaffected.
> To geeks who think this is a cool 'gadget'
You know, I think the "guys on the ground" who are getting "machinegunned" by the "taliban" might think this is a "cool" "gadget" "too". You should pay a visit to a hospital where a few of them have ended up, and tell em how selfish they're being.
But thank you for your patronage, dragging us poor old nerds out of our ivory towers. Gosh, we'd never understand what the real world was like without folks like you. You should tell more folks that war is bad, mmkay, and I'm sure it'll be stopped right away!
What's that you say chief? Cutting off a major market for your products? Failing to do your job to increase shareholder value?
It will happen, either through greed and a blase attitude to any consequences, or because the people actually running the companies involved are obliged to do so. With any luck they'll just shift deliberately crippled products to China rather than harming the security of the rest of us.
Small, bright point sources of light do a lousy job of 'jamming' CCTVs and the like. It'll work if you strap a car headlight to your hat, perhaps... nothing else is going to be really powerful enough to dazzle the camera.
During daylight hours, an IR-cut filter applied to the camera would defeat any sort of IR-camo-makeup attempt, though perhaps it might work against night-vision type cameras (though I doubt it very much).
"The Titanic was unsinkable, too."
It was never proven to be so, was it? Turns out that marketing has almost nothing to do with physics or mathematics. Who knew?
Compare QKD with traditional public key systems whose security limits have been well established. New techniques for calculating prime factors or solving the discrete logarithm problem will render PK systems noticably less secure, and quantum computing could conceivably blow them out of the water entirely. Not so with quantum cryptography.
Don't mistake being trite with being profound.
Perhaps not. But I wonder if it has been recorded that these individuals failed a CRB check. That's the sort of information that follows people around, especially with the ever increasing enthusiasm for background checks and databases. I wonder if the CRB can offer any guarantees to these people that it hasn't affected their future employability.
"No point dissing the US or OZ las[sic] leaders of the world, they both learned from their parent the UK"
Not an uncommon excuse for ignorance, incompetence or corruption anywhere in the former empire/commonwealth, really. It woz them imperialist royalist warmongering brits what made us do all this.
If Her Maj told your all to collectively boil your heads, would you do that too?
Sure, projectile interception *can* be done using currently available defense guns like the phalanx, but its a very complex task indeed compared to painting an incoming projectile or aircraft with a beam of light.
Should this device do the job, its targetting hardware (of the mechanical pointy type, computerised calculation type and radar tracking type) would conceivably be an order of magnitude simpler. Interception rates should rise significantly.
That's the major selling point here... not dropping dud shells onto the surroundings is a minor bonus in comparison.
Warp drives couldn't possibly be propelling spacecraft at sublight speeds, because their journeys were objectively too fast.
Now, if you're talking about a warp drive based on the Alcubierre metric, then you might have a point. But that would be theoretical physics, and not part of a fictional TV series.
It generally isn't found without some concerted effort to find it. Not everyone does this, for a whole variety of reasons. This seems to be a study more about sexuality rather than physiology... the fact that (as Dr Whipple pointer out) they ignored lesbians and bisexual women in their study just lends more credence to the idea that the study was poorly thought out.
Though one conclusion, "Women may argue that having a G-spot is due to diet or exercise, but in fact it is virtually impossible to find real traits" is probably quite reasonable, the rest is very dubious indeed.
The correct method would probably involve twins with a common sexual partner... or perhaps triplets, with one sister acting as a 'control group'. I shall be contacting my local university forthwith.
> 1. A good EMP device could cripple the forces that wear them, if one was to be developed.
A good EMP device would be a serious hazard for *everything*. And if by 'cripple the forces' you mean 'level the playing field' you're quite correct... they're still worn by soldiers, after all.
> 2. A good shot could detonate the fuel cells, killing all in the vicinity of the poor soul that got it.
Watch less James Bond. Worst case here is that a hydrogen cell could cook off wich would be hazardous but these things can and will be engineered to not go up like grenades when dented. Well protected cells, or cells using less volatile fuel will merely be fire hazards when breached.
You may also find that soldiers don't stand shoulder to shoulder in any sort of combat situation any more. The 19th century called and asked for their tactics back.
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