Under the gun, Smith and Boyle went into an office and, in one hour, emerged with the basic plans for the CCD, the sensor still used in digital photography today. A CCD works like this: Light hits a tiny grid of photosensitive silicon cells, each which build a charge proportional to the intensity of the light hitting it. This charge can be measured precisely and we can know exactly how bright that portion should be. Add filters, and color can be discerned too.
Author Archives: mea
Judge Kills AT&T’s Attempt to Slow Google Fiber in Louisville
A Federal Judge has shot down an AT&T lawsuit against the city of Louisville, one of several company bids to slow down Google Fiber’s arrival to the region. AT&T sued the city back in February of last year after Louisville streamlined its utility pole attachment rules to speed up the arrival of competing broadband services to the city. Incumbent ISPs have long abused the absurdly bureaucratic pole attachment process to slow competitors, and Louisville’s “one touch make ready” reforms streamlined the process significantly.
Source: Judge Kills AT&T’s Attempt to Slow Google Fiber in Louisville
A Solution of the P versus NP Problem
Berg and Ulfberg and Amano and Maruoka have used CNF-DNF-approximators to prove exponential lower bounds for the monotone network complexity of the clique function and of Andreev’s function. We show that these approximators can be used to prove the same lower bound for their non-monotone network complexity. This implies P not equal NP.
Source: [1708.03486] A Solution of the P versus NP Problem
More background at: The P-versus-NP page
This page collects links around papers that try to settle the “P versus NP” question (in either way). Here are some links that explain/discuss this question:
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A clear formulation of the “P versus NP” question by Stephen Cook.
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Device That Revolutionized Timekeeping Receives an IEEE Milestone
Physicist James Clerk Maxwell was perhaps the first to recognize that atoms could be used to keep time. In 1879 he wrote to electricity pioneer William Thomson, suggesting that the “period of vibration of a piece of quartz crystal” would be a better absolute standard of time than the mean solar second (based on the Earth’s rotation) but would still depend “essentially on one particular piece of matter” and therefore would be “liable to accidents.” Maxwell theorized that atoms would work even better as a natural standard of time. Thomson wrote in the second edition of the Elements of Natural Philosophy, published in 1879, that hydrogen atoms, sodium atoms, and others were “absolutely alike in every physical property” and “probably remain the same so long as the particle itself exists.”
Source: Device That Revolutionized Timekeeping Receives an IEEE Milestone – IEEE – The Institute
The Digital Divide Isn’t Microsoft’s First Priority
But in urban areas all around the world where Microsoft wants to do business, the white spaces will be very useful for “smart city” devices and applications—remember, that’s Microsoft’s big idea. And if the US is already widely using those white spaces, the rest of the world will follow along—both in terms of policy and in terms of providing additional marketplaces for the white spaces ecosystem of manufacturers to sell into.
Source: The Digital Divide Isn’t Microsoft’s First Priority | WIRED
A pirating service for academic journal articles could bring down the whole establishment
That’s as it should be, advocates of open research say. They argue, among other things, that a substantial portion of the research that publishers attempt to lock behind paywalls was funded with grants paid for by taxpayers, and that the public should therefore have unfettered access to it.
Source: A pirating service for academic journal articles could bring down the whole establishment — Quartz
3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million to Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008
Writer Andrew Jerell Jones also points out how Comcast-owned NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC can rarely be bothered to reveal their parent company’s lobbying on this subject, or in fact cover net neutrality in their news reporting much at all. Even purportedly “progressive” MSNBC has been frequently criticized for rarely talking about the subject.
Source: 3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million to Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008 | DSLReports, ISP Information
Renewable energy is becoming so cheap the US will meet Paris commitments even if Trump withdraws
Globally, the price of solar panels has fallen 50% between 2016 and 2017, they write. And in countries with favorable wind conditions, the costs associated with wind power “can be as low as one-half to one-third that of coal- or natural gas-fired power plants.” Innovations in wind-turbine design are allowing for ever-longer wind blades; that boost in efficiency will also increase power output from the wind sector, according to Morgan Stanley.
Giving perspective on systemd’s “usernames that start with digit get root privileges”-bug
So in order to trigger this behaviour, someone with root-level privileges needs to edit a Unit file and enter a “invalid username”, in this case one that starts with a digit.
But you need root level privileges to edit the file in the first place and to reload systemd to make use of that Unit file.
Source: Giving perspective on systemd’s “usernames that start with digit get root privileges”-bug
It’s an obvious bug (at least on RHEL/CentOS 7), since a valid username does not get accepted by systemd so it triggers unexpected behaviour by launching services as root.
However, it isn’t as bad as it sounds and does not grant any username with a digit immediate root access.
More than 40 ISPs Across the Country Tell Chairman Pai to Not Repeal Network Neutrality and Maintain Title II Enforcement
The 2015 Order famously outlined clear net neutrality rules. But those rules only passed muster because the Order also explicitly classified broadband service as a “common carrier” service, regulated by Title II of the Communications Act, rather than an “information service” regulated by Title I of the same Act. And that classification has several corollary effects, because Title II isn’t just about net neutrality. It is also meant to curtail the anti-competitive conduct from incumbent monopolists like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. In essence, as common carriers, they are not able to use their power to control the Internet experience, and they are not able to directly harm their competitors in the broadband market.
Google Fiber’s deployment ran into snags in Austin, Texas when those poles were owned by AT&T, because the surest way to prevent competition is to just physically prevent their entry into your market. If a company the size of Google could be stifled without the law supporting them, what hope does a smaller ISP have in entering into a market where the incumbent broadband provider owns the poles that are a necessary component to deploying the network? The FCC Chairman’s plan fundamentally ignores this problem and offers no clear solution to competitors. An incumbent broadband provider that owns a lot of the poles is going to have no federal legal obligation to share that access at fair market rates if broadband is no longer a common carrier service.