HN user

Agent101

49 karma
Posts3
Comments37
View on HN

I'm a bit leery of teleoperated machinery, rather than physical people. Not saying it can't be done, but adds in a few more things that can go wrong. And while outsourcing coding can incur extra delays if something went wrong with the link/power supply, I don't want a robot with a drill in my mouth.

So what would I need to go to a teleoperated dentist.

-Reliable direct satellite link?

-Own power supply in the clinic in case of black outs.

-Similarly reliable supplies in the operators place, or sufficient numbers of people that could take over the operation if the something went wrong with them.

Also any surgeons/dentists in the house? How important is reaction time. Would latency be an issue?

The above site has <meta http-equiv="Objective" content="Hash Exploit"> in as well.

Poder is power in Latin as well. Cibernetico might be a latin translation of Cybernetic.... I'm expecting a Latin moto as per usual on these things. Still can't get the hash, tried a number of different capitalisations.

So 128 bits? I'd guess they wouldn't use md5 (or any of the md family), which according to wiki leaves haval/ripemd/tiger. I'd go for ripemd-128 (on what the wiki says) although you would expect them to use a NSA blessed algorithm.

Is there a market for long time scale shorts on EFTs? I know long term oil futures go for 7-8 years generally.

I wouldn't place bets except on the time scale of 20-40 years and even then I'm not sure it is worth it in terms of likely pay off and time taken to research.

I thought about mapping. Wouldn't you get into trouble if the section of memory still had to be readable during the time it is used by the kernel if you unmapped it? Or can you modify a read-write map to a read-only map? I'm just getting into windows internals.

Heh, I didn't know there were fellow people interested in keykos type stuff here. I'm fairly new to that and more interested in the 3rd thing you can do to reduce cost of ownership, having an adaptive computer background.

If you submit a link to caja here let me know and I'll upvote it. The cap-like stuff that the Marks were working on for delegating authority to web apps was also interesting. It does reduce the amount of maintenance the user has to do, they still have to pay for the web apps though, so depending upon the income of the user and cost of the service it might not reduce the total cost by much.

There are three ways to tackle the human costs of computing.

1) Make the things humans have to do easier. UI/UX

2) Reduce the number of things humans have to do. While all modern hardware can calculate the same things (are universal) they have different security models which can affect how much maintenance the user has to do. Take capability based security, an old idea implemented in hardware in the IBM AS 400. Languages (E, Joe-E) based on it are currently being touted as a way to reduce the risk of malware infection, even if malware does get on the system it can't do much because the language VMs operate under a principle of least privilege.

If we are changing the Arch for performance (e.g. fleet) and can't make use of the performance with standard software we may want to change it in this way as well, to take advantage of the system.

To give a concrete example of how computer architectures can be changed for the better. If windows had capability based security at the low level it could pass bits of memory to the user land process by sharing a capability that gave it write access. Then the user land process could populate it, once it had finished and the kernel wanted to read it, they could revoke the the writeable permission. This would prevent this sort of attack

http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1331025

See this for an intro to the philosophy

http://www.erights.org/talks/virus-safe/index.html

3) Make the computer do the work for the human. Yes this is mainly an AI problem, but it also an architecture problem. If you want the system to manage things like your graphics card drivers for you, you have to make some decisions about the hardware. Which programs are allowed to try and manage the graphics card drivers, how can the user communicate what she wants in terms of graphics card drivers in a way that the computer will find unambiguous.

So yep, UI and UX, is important but it is only one possibly angle of attack, and not the one I'm interested in. Because people are doing fine work on it, while the others languish a bit.

Have a browse through the table of contents of the International Journal and you might get the same impression as me.

http://www.oldcitypublishing.com/IJUC/IJUC.html

Basically it is too unconventional (chemical), faddy and not focussed on producing something usable by the average geek.

That sort of stuff is still interesting (for computing in odd situations) but is not what I am looking for. I suppose I wondering why there isn't the computer equivalent of a space elevator. That is something most people know about that can't be done with current tech but is physically plausible (but might still might be too hard to do). Something that might spark the equivalent of the spaceward foundation, but for computers.

The fleet architecture represents a different face of unconventional computing. One that geeks can get behind. However it concentrates on speed of processing. Looking at the costs of computing, increasing computational power per watt or flops is useful but does not address the dominant cost of owning and running a computer. The dominant costs, I think, are the costs of learning the system, administering them and programming them. This is not addressed by either of the above threads of research.

I have my own odd-ball ideas. Which I'm excited about. I just wanted to gauge opinion of HN type people.

The first thing I would try is a bit hacky but might work. I'd take a copy of the data structures you are analysing when looking for malware and then copy it back to the original place just before you call the normal windows function.

It would minimise the amount of time the malware had to get the data in.

What you really need is to move the data into kernel space somehow. That would need a tweak to windows though.

The difficulty for the attacker comes in creating the initial attacker and faker threads. Possibly AV can hook the creation of threads and examine new threads for this potential behaviour (this might kill heavily threaded apps though). Then the virus make would have to attack two separate threads.

I've just created a google group to discuss implementing this and other game changing techs. Because if you are going to start from scratch with computers again, you want to correct the some other problems we have with current systems (e.g. security architectures)

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/fca-t

Spread the word (I was kinda waiting until I had some more content before I publicised, but this seemed like a good opportunity).

There is nothing stopping you using tagged tuples in haskell. I don't think it is done so much because type signatures are very useful and cross:: (Num b)=>(a,b, b) -> (a, b, b) -> (a, b, b) is more wordy than cross :: (Point p) => p -> p -> p.

You can use newtypes but then you lose the genericness.

Lambda Calculus 17 years ago

I find lambda calculus needed when you get into some of the subjects that functional programming languages are a gateway to. It definitely helps when trying to read the Coq manual.

I think the problem with building generalized intelligence is that it needs to built on a general platform, like the x86 architecture in flexibility but designed to be self-maintaining and self-upgradeable to the highest degree possible.

This means you kind of have to start from scratch as it is not backwards compatible (the idea of a superuser is baked into most archs), which is an enormous amount of effort.

I'm thinking about trying to start a "reboot computing" campaign to get people to think about how we could improve computing if we didn't have backward compatibility to worry about (different security archs, self-maintenance etc).

A leap may come when we can reduce the cost of development by off-loading more of the work on to computers. However that is not just around the corner. And nothing to do with web development.

It is a headline in papers and online news sites. It is not only my attention that it is consuming. And attention is valuable right? There is only a finite amount of it to go around for good causes etc.

If everyone was doing their best to help the living, I would have no issue with it.

I can see that on the scale on individuals? But governments? They make a habit of going against what the previous incumbents did or said, just so they look like they are doing something different.

As such I don't see how this apology will make one jot of difference to the UK governments future actions (it already has openly gay MPs, I can't see them backing legislation that criminalizes their sexual preference).

The difference between semi-conductors and solar/battery tech is that you are already working at the molecular level with solar panels/batteries and have to change materials to get different results, this is complex as we don't have analytical models of this sort of thing.

With semi-conductors things materials don't need to be changed so much. We are still working with doped silicon (although we do need to make variations with SOI), we are just shrinking something we understand well.

I'm not suggesting that the same friends use both of them, I'm suggesting that the youth will partition their social lives like they already do.

You have your friends and you have your family. You want your granny to be able to see the pictures your mum took, but you don't want your mum to know you are friends with bobby that she disapproves of.

I think the average person will find it easier to socialise on two different sites or possibly have two different facebook identities, rather than altering the settings so that they can make sure that relatives can't see pictures of them looking silly or doing things that they wouldn't approve of.