...
"In the 1984 film Red Dawn, a band of high school guerrilla fighters hears two code phrases (each repeated twice) broadcast over the radio as they hide out in the wilderness. The phrases are: The chair is against the wall and John has a long mustache (the latter of which was actually used as a code-signal by the French Resistance during World War II)."
"Is there life on Titan? Probably not. It's cold down there! 94 Kelvin is the same as -179 Celsius, or -290 Fahrenheit. And yet . . . life is persistent. It's been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we'll be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that's where we'll find it."
I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7.0
on
What's New In FreeBSD 7.0
·
· Score: 4, Informative
flash (ssds) uses less power than harddisks. you don't need to spin flash memories while you are not reading them, or move other mechanical parts while reading.
see e.g. http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3732
"Power efficiency. SanDisk SSDs have minimal power requirements, with savings rated at over 50 percent compared with a hard disk drive -- 0.9 watts during active operation versus 1.9 watts7."
that's very interesting. And I'm very curious about these pamphlets. Would it be too much if I asked you to take a picture of one or two, and post them somewhere? (flickr?) I'd like to have a look if possible... Cheers!
1) Open formats aren't compatible with DRM. You have to understand that irrespective of your opinion about DRM, the BBC has to use it to protect the rights, royalties, etc of the artists and programmes it redistributes. BBC programmes aren't free, they're available to people who have a TV licence which - as it's mandatory - should be anyone with a television set. It just seems like they're free because you (presumably) have a TV licence so aren't restricted in any other way from watching and recording their programmes.
The DRM that BBC wants to adopt ends up being a proprietary (in this case Microsoft's) Digital Restriction Management.
But the best way to manage restriction access (in order to be fair to the rights/royalties of the artists,producers and shareholders) is to use well-proven and studied mechanisms such as simple login+password to access the BBC OGG content. In this case, BBC licencees would be able to access the OGG content from any operating system (GNU/Linux, *BSD, Plan9, etc etc), while still protecting the content from anyone not paying the TV license. Gee, a paranoid BBC should just put a random watermark (or even a random plaintext tag) associating the downloaded OGG stream with the login, and if this OGG shows up on P2P networks, or other public place on the Internet, BBC can easily track down the offender and lock down his/her BBC iPlayer account (much like the guy who distributed digital pictures of the latest Harry Potter book and ended up having its digital camera serial-number found). If you say that any motivated-enough offender can remove the tag, I say that any motivated-enough offender can also remove any proprietary DRM. So, better stick to non-proprietary methods that are simpler and cost less to the legitimate user.
There's lots of well-proven non-proprietary open methods like these for doing these restrictions, there is NO need to use instead an undisclosed proprietary everybody-knows-it-wont-work nobody-but-microsoft-knows-how-it-works i-will-have-to-buy-ms-windows Microsoft-only WMV+DRM.
2) It doesn't matter that DRM can be cracked. Copy-protection routines on games and applications are routinely cracked and removed, but that doesn't stop publishers continuing to use them. Why? Because these publishers have to at least try and protect their interests to appease their shareholders, etc. The big problem with this argument is technically speaking the general licence-fee paying public should be entitled to watch the iPlayer programmes without DRM, on any platform. However, since it can't be guaranteed that they are licence payers (people from places outside of the UK could just as easily download and use it) how else are they supposed to protect their interests other than through DRM?
The Microsoft's proprietary DRM does not work as a method to restrict access to payees only, because it requires both the encrypted content AND the key to be available during playblack in your local computer, so anyone (even viewers not paying the licence) can access the supposedly 'protected' content.
The practical non-proprietary way to restrict access to TV-licence-payees-only is to use simple login+password. MS-DRM, sadly, only makes it much more difficult for the legitimate BBC-licencees to COPY the program for personal use, time-shifting and backup, a widely accepted fair-use practice during the VHS years: because the tools available to the normal user do not know how the MS-DRM content is encoded or they do not allow the legitimate user to do the copying the way he/she wants. This artificial MS-DRM proprietary restriction is annoying to the legitimate user, ends up costing more to the user and the society (everybody has to buy windows, there's no competition to improve media formats because everybody must use MS-formats only, etc), and it does not make it more difficult for the organized pirate organization to copy, because they can build these tools, like the DVD-DRM fiasco any many others show.
1) See the BBC content without having to buy MS Windows (or any other OS for that matter). BBC therefore should make its contents available using open formats such as OGG, openly available to free operating systems such as GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg) 2) Record a BBC program for personal use, as BBC viewers have been doing since the invention of VHS recorders. Therefore, no DRM should be used, since it doesn't restrict the bad guys (just see DVD's DRM fate) and it just cripples legitimate viewers rights of doing personal copies.
== == Having to buy MS Windows to watch BBC is the same == as having to buy air to breathe. ==
1) The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such
amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original
pictures. The rover was taking the picture from the bottom up, so also the material
wasn't in the lowest part of the terrain.
2) In the original JPL's pictures, you can see the same 'watery' material all way up to
the border of the crater: it's distinctly darker. In the panorama, it's interesting to note that it doesn't go all the way down to the bottom of the crater, where you can see a brighter dust covering
everything.
Does this darkness means humidity? I fail to see streaming water, maybe flat thin ice
sheets from a humid surface but this seems to be explicitely discarded when the author
says that "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the
surface, there would be rubble or sand or something." (btw, sand on this steep cliff?)
A very thin dark powdery sand looks more likely, but someone needs to go there and poke
it to be sure. Any ideas about this? I'm unable to find the original paper to have a
look at it.
Can anyone explain how they came up with the bluish hue in the composite picture, since
the original pictures do not seem to have any filter information? (the 25th character
in their names is 0 instead of some specific filter frequency)
One big problem in not releasing the source code is that they actually are not making our computer experience better: their drivers have bugs, and we will be locked to whatever features and bugs THEY want to make available to us -- so, basically we become hostages of their will, they can do whatever they want, because whithout THEIR driver, your nvidia card isn't worth its weight.
In the future, when new versions and extensions of OpenGL are released, we won't have any guarantee that they will properly update the drivers. So, you'll probably won't be able to use their proprietary drivers in 5 years for new applications (shining new wobbling effects), because these apps will need new extensions, but the driver for your specific nvidia card is arbitrarily not supported anymore by them (they want to force you to throw the old one away). Too bad for you.
On the other side, if we have access to the source code (or at least the hardware specification), we don't even need nvidia's help: we can do the updates/bug-squatting ourselves, much better than a small team at nvidia. This is something that these companies don't get: the whole world is willing to write their drivers for free and maintain them to the end of times, but they refuse the consumer this right (or maybe they get, they just want you to throw away your old card and buy a new one). We don't want a huge amount of work from them, quite the contrary! It's *way* cheaper for them to release an open-source driver: it costs nada/zero, we can build one with the bare bones of a reasonable hardware specification, a little pdf file -- how much does it cost to post a pdf file on the Internet?
There's no RMS ideology in that, only the absolute minimum someone would expect in terms of support for something you bought. Nowadays, the choice is clear: go Intel X3000/X3500, which supports open source and you can be sure will always be up-to-date. Ignore nvidia and ati, until at least one day (I hope so) nouveau arrives.
People tend to assign intelligence (and therefore intention and conscience) to anything that is too complex for them to predict the behavior. See early humans: they believed in a different god behind every 'unexplainable' complex thing like sun, weather, diseases, birth and death. It is a natural human trait: if it is to complex to grasp, then it is intelligent or derived from intelligence. Since it's probably correct to say that there will always be something unexplained in the universe, there will always be space for an intelligent entity like a god to live in.
-- W3C CSS Validator Results for http://www.slashdot.org/ Sorry! We found the following errors URI : http://images.slashdot.org/base.css?T_2_5_0_138 16 h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 Invalid number : text-shadow Property text-shadow doesn't exist : #000 0 0 0 176 Invalid number : min-width Property min-width doesn't exist : 0 178 Combinator ~ between selectors is not allowed in this profile or version 345 div.storylinks ul li.comments Invalid number : text-shadow Property text-shadow doesn't exist : #000 0 0 0 638 div.storylinks ul li.bin Invalid number : text-shadow Property text-shadow doesn't exist : #000 0 0 0 659 a.ac-source Invalid number : background-color darkgray is not a color value : darkgray 668 #ac-select-widget Invalid number : background-color lightgray is not a color value : lightgray 674 #ac-select-widget input Invalid number : border lightgray is not a color value : 2px solid lightgray 688 #ac-choices.yui-ac-content Invalid number : border darkgray is not a color value : 1px solid darkgray URI : http://images.slashdot.org/slashdot.css?T_2_5_0_13 8 15 a#newuser Invalid number : text-shadow Property text-shadow doesn't exist : #000 0 0 0
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"...So on top of worrying about global warming, it seems we should also worry about the physics that govern the orbit of Earth around the sun. Too bad we don't have a way of keeping the Earth in the same orbit/on the same axis of rotation."
A link to the paper: Korycansky, D. G.; Laughlin, Gregory; Adams, Fred C. Astronomical engineering: a strategy for modifying planetary orbits. Astrophys.Space Sci. 275 (2001) 349-366 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102126 Abstract: "The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of engineering such a migration over a long time period. The basic mechanism uses gravitational assists to (in effect) transfer orbital energy from Jupiter to the Earth, and thereby enlarges the orbital radius of Earth. This transfer is accomplished by a suitable intermediate body, either a Kuiper Belt object or a main belt asteroid. The object first encounters Earth during an inward pass on its initial highly elliptical orbit of large (~ 300 AU) semimajor axis. The encounter transfers energy from the object to the Earth in standard gravity-assist fashion by passing close to the leading limb of the planet. The resulting outbound trajectory of the object must cross the orbit of Jupiter; with proper timing, the outbound object encounters Jupiter and picks up the energy it lost to Earth. With small corrections to the trajectory, or additional planetary encounters (e.g., with Saturn), the object can repeat this process over many encounters. To maintain its present flux of solar energy, the Earth must experience roughly one encounter every 6000 years (for an object mass of 1E22 g). We develop the details of this scheme and discuss its ramifications."
The Windows Registry is basically a file system optimized for handling small files. Each such file is equivalent to a few-bytes entry (the name-value pair) in a config (.ini) file. It is a 20-year-old '80s ad-hoc abstraction devised for the original Windows for DOS to replace the config (.ini) files. (that's why Microsoft recommends at most 2048 bytes in each registry entry.)
At that time, storing one config entry per file directly on FAT-FS was an unjustifiable waste of FAT16 entries -- there was a maximum number of 65536 cluster entries in FAT16, which would be rapidly exhausted into configuration entries since each file requires at least one FAT cluster -- and waste of disk space of (at the time) expensive disks -- because each cluster was at least 512 bytes, and in 2GB disks it was around 32KB (so each name-value pair would require at *least* 32KB!).
And storing entry files inside.ini files is also not the best solution, since setting up individual attributes such as ACLs, or management of the entries, becomes a nightmare, is not fast for parsing or granular enough for quick edition.
Therefore, building a file system (REG-FS?) optimized for storing such name-value entries was crucial. Too bad it was an ad-hoc solution, but it's somewhat justifiable if you think that at the time Microsoft wasn't so big and therefore probably didn't do enough research in new file systems (or operating systems:).
Today, the registry should simply be wiped off from Windows. The original requirements do not hold anymore. Wasting an extra 100MB for storing name-value entries directly on NTFS or FAT32 is not too bad nowadays. Indeed, NTFS is somewhat optimized for accessing small files together with ACLs (see MFT). And accessing them using the cosy file API is priceless. [It would be an interesting project to write a replacement registry api which would just map directly to some NTFS folder.]
Justifying the registry in terms of aggregating 'user' and 'system' configuration in different files is not sustainable. This is equivalent of having eg. two different NTFS directory hierarchies 'user' and 'system', containing each the respective name-value entries as small files. Copying, creating and managing the registry this way would be so much easier. No more that bloated registry API or unimportable.REG files. Registries could be shared by just mounting a SMB share. Very easy to manage centrally. NTFS is able to report file access events just as in registry events.
However, there are even better solutions that that to store configuration files. The best solution nowadays (both for Windows and for Linux) is ReiserFS 4 (http://www.namesys.com/). It was specially developed for this purpose.
From their abstract: " Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create them fast? No problem."
A note on NTFS: "Inside the Windows NT File System" the book is written by Helen Custer, NTFS is architected by Tom Miller with contributions by Gary Kimura, Brian Andrew, and David Goebel, Microsoft Press, 1994, an easy to read little book, they fundamentally disagree with me on adding serialization of I/O not requested by the application programmer, and I note that the performance penalty they pay for their decision is high, especially compared with ext2fs. Their FS design is perhaps optimal for floppies and other hardware eject media beyond OS control. A less serialized higher performance log structured architecture is described in [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. That said, Microsoft is to be commended for recognizing the importance of attempting to optimize for small files, and leading the OS designer ef
WHUXGA an abbreviation for Wide Hex[adecatuple] Ultra Extended Graphics Array, is a display standard that can support a resolution up to 7680 x 4800 pixels, assuming a 16:10 aspect ratio. The name comes from the fact that it has sixteen (hexadecatuple) times as many pixels as an WUXGA display. As of 2005, one would need 12 such displays to render certain single-shot digital pictures, for instance a 14836 x 20072 pixels image created by a Betterlight Super 10K-2.
Slashdot Mirror
Vista demands so much hardware that it certainly contributes to global warming.
The chair is against the wall.
But ...
BUT ...
John has a SHORT moustache.
thanks for presenting me to this wikipedia's article on number stations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
... "In the 1984 film Red Dawn, a band of high school guerrilla fighters hears two code phrases (each repeated twice) broadcast over the radio as they hide out in the wilderness. The phrases are: The chair is against the wall and John has a long mustache (the latter of which was actually used as a code-signal by the French Resistance during World War II)."
Anyone recommend an online Mandarin turorial?
...researchers supported by Michigan State University and the Office of the Chinese Language Council International have a game for you. http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/05/1744252You might like to have a look at "Slow Life", by Michael Swanwick.
http://www.analogsf.com/Hugos/slowlife.shtml
It's a nice sci-fi novelette (that won the Hugo in 2003) about life in the deep seas of Titan.
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/Hugo2003.htm
http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/Hugo2003.html#nvt
"Is there life on Titan? Probably not. It's cold down there! 94 Kelvin is the same as -179 Celsius, or -290 Fahrenheit. And yet . . . life is persistent. It's been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we'll be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that's where we'll find it."
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html#FS
maybe that's what you're looking for? http://www.eagleonemedia.com/comic_book_cd-roms.htm
flash (ssds) uses less power than harddisks. you don't need to spin flash memories while you are not reading them, or move other mechanical parts while reading. see e.g. http://www.sandisk.com/Corporate/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressRelease.aspx?ID=3732 "Power efficiency. SanDisk SSDs have minimal power requirements, with savings rated at over 50 percent compared with a hard disk drive -- 0.9 watts during active operation versus 1.9 watts7."
since low power seems to be the main feature, I wonder why they are using a HDD instead of a flash memory.
that's very interesting.
And I'm very curious about these pamphlets. Would it be too much if I asked you to take a picture of one or two, and post them somewhere? (flickr?) I'd like to have a look if possible...
Cheers!
The DRM that BBC wants to adopt ends up being a proprietary (in this case Microsoft's) Digital Restriction Management.
But the best way to manage restriction access (in order to be fair to the rights/royalties of the artists,producers and shareholders) is to use well-proven and studied mechanisms such as simple login+password to access the BBC OGG content. In this case, BBC licencees would be able to access the OGG content from any operating system (GNU/Linux, *BSD, Plan9, etc etc), while still protecting the content from anyone not paying the TV license. Gee, a paranoid BBC should just put a random watermark (or even a random plaintext tag) associating the downloaded OGG stream with the login, and if this OGG shows up on P2P networks, or other public place on the Internet, BBC can easily track down the offender and lock down his/her BBC iPlayer account (much like the guy who distributed digital pictures of the latest Harry Potter book and ended up having its digital camera serial-number found). If you say that any motivated-enough offender can remove the tag, I say that any motivated-enough offender can also remove any proprietary DRM. So, better stick to non-proprietary methods that are simpler and cost less to the legitimate user.
There's lots of well-proven non-proprietary open methods like these for doing these restrictions, there is NO need to use instead an undisclosed proprietary everybody-knows-it-wont-work nobody-but-microsoft-knows-how-it-works i-will-have-to-buy-ms-windows Microsoft-only WMV+DRM.
The Microsoft's proprietary DRM does not work as a method to restrict access to payees only, because it requires both the encrypted content AND the key to be available during playblack in your local computer, so anyone (even viewers not paying the licence) can access the supposedly 'protected' content.
The practical non-proprietary way to restrict access to TV-licence-payees-only is to use simple login+password. MS-DRM, sadly, only makes it much more difficult for the legitimate BBC-licencees to COPY the program for personal use, time-shifting and backup, a widely accepted fair-use practice during the VHS years: because the tools available to the normal user do not know how the MS-DRM content is encoded or they do not allow the legitimate user to do the copying the way he/she wants. This artificial MS-DRM proprietary restriction is annoying to the legitimate user, ends up costing more to the user and the society (everybody has to buy windows, there's no competition to improve media formats because everybody must use MS-formats only, etc), and it does not make it more difficult for the organized pirate organization to copy, because they can build these tools, like the DVD-DRM fiasco any many others show.
Any BBC viewer should have the right to:
1) See the BBC content without having to buy MS Windows (or any other OS for that matter). BBC therefore should make its contents available using open formats such as OGG, openly available to free operating systems such as GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg)
2) Record a BBC program for personal use, as BBC viewers have been doing since the invention of VHS recorders. Therefore, no DRM should be used, since it doesn't restrict the bad guys (just see DVD's DRM fate) and it just cripples legitimate viewers rights of doing personal copies.
==
== Having to buy MS Windows to watch BBC is the same
== as having to buy air to breathe.
==
BBC, wake up!!!
"The acquisition is slated to enhance Google's application portfolio,"
... hope they do not become another Jotspot and vanish into thin air.
It seems that the colored composite picture shown in newscientist's article was derived from these two original left-right pictures from Opportunity's navigation cameras on day 285. There are many more similar pictures around day 285, with these flat paths around the flat stones. In the 'Burns Cliff' Color Panorama (high res), the newscientist's image is just a fraction of the cliff: it's in its very center, where you can see a V and the steepness of where it is located.
1) The surface just seems a bit too steep to me to accumulate any liquid water in such amounts for a pond, since it's facing up the border of the crater in the original pictures. The rover was taking the picture from the bottom up, so also the material wasn't in the lowest part of the terrain.
2) In the original JPL's pictures, you can see the same 'watery' material all way up to the border of the crater: it's distinctly darker. In the panorama, it's interesting to note that it doesn't go all the way down to the bottom of the crater, where you can see a brighter dust covering everything.
Does this darkness means humidity? I fail to see streaming water, maybe flat thin ice sheets from a humid surface but this seems to be explicitely discarded when the author says that "If they were ice or some other material, they'd show wear and tear over the surface, there would be rubble or sand or something." (btw, sand on this steep cliff?) A very thin dark powdery sand looks more likely, but someone needs to go there and poke it to be sure. Any ideas about this? I'm unable to find the original paper to have a look at it.
Can anyone explain how they came up with the bluish hue in the composite picture, since the original pictures do not seem to have any filter information? (the 25th character in their names is 0 instead of some specific filter frequency)
One big problem in not releasing the source code is that they actually are not making our computer experience better: their drivers have bugs, and we will be locked to whatever features and bugs THEY want to make available to us -- so, basically we become hostages of their will, they can do whatever they want, because whithout THEIR driver, your nvidia card isn't worth its weight.
In the future, when new versions and extensions of OpenGL are released, we won't have any guarantee that they will properly update the drivers. So, you'll probably won't be able to use their proprietary drivers in 5 years for new applications (shining new wobbling effects), because these apps will need new extensions, but the driver for your specific nvidia card is arbitrarily not supported anymore by them (they want to force you to throw the old one away). Too bad for you.
On the other side, if we have access to the source code (or at least the hardware specification), we don't even need nvidia's help: we can do the updates/bug-squatting ourselves, much better than a small team at nvidia. This is something that these companies don't get: the whole world is willing to write their drivers for free and maintain them to the end of times, but they refuse the consumer this right (or maybe they get, they just want you to throw away your old card and buy a new one). We don't want a huge amount of work from them, quite the contrary! It's *way* cheaper for them to release an open-source driver: it costs nada/zero, we can build one with the bare bones of a reasonable hardware specification, a little pdf file -- how much does it cost to post a pdf file on the Internet?
There's no RMS ideology in that, only the absolute minimum someone would expect in terms of support for something you bought. Nowadays, the choice is clear: go Intel X3000/X3500, which supports open source and you can be sure will always be up-to-date. Ignore nvidia and ati, until at least one day (I hope so) nouveau arrives.
As someone else noted, you are looking for PSA systems. AllocPSA is a nice GPL PSA project.
o up_id=165183&ssid=57157
allocPSA: http://www.allocpsa.org/
screenshots: http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gr
GNU Enterprise is another: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/
http://www.gnuenterprise.org/packages/
People tend to assign intelligence (and therefore intention and conscience) to anything that is too complex for them to predict the behavior. See early humans: they believed in a different god behind every 'unexplainable' complex thing like sun, weather, diseases, birth and death. It is a natural human trait: if it is to complex to grasp, then it is intelligent or derived from intelligence. Since it's probably correct to say that there will always be something unexplained in the universe, there will always be space for an intelligent entity like a god to live in.
Clippy Goes Undercover
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJCv8ru3L98
Clippy Gets Clipped
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB03aRifPLU
Clippy faces facts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMShkAZR1-Q&NR
Trying slashdot.org on article's link http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS10/
.yui-ac-content Invalid number : border darkgray is not a color value : 1px solid darkgray3 8
3 8 .details .details .details .details ...etc
18 December 2006 - Fuji CSS Validator released (more) http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
--
W3C CSS Validator Results for http://www.slashdot.org/
Sorry! We found the following errors
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26 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts div#links div.block div#links-sections-title and
26 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts div.block div.title and
26 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts div#links div.block div#links-sections-title and
26 Same colors for color and background-color in two contexts div#links div.block div.title and
"...So on top of worrying about global warming, it seems we should also worry about the physics that govern the orbit of Earth around the sun. Too bad we don't have a way of keeping the Earth in the same orbit/on the same axis of rotation."
/ earth_move_010207.html
Yes, we have! And it's very interesting indeed!
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth
A link to the paper: Korycansky, D. G.; Laughlin, Gregory; Adams, Fred C. Astronomical engineering: a strategy for modifying planetary orbits. Astrophys.Space Sci. 275 (2001) 349-366
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102126
Abstract:
"The Sun's gradual brightening will seriously compromise the Earth's biosphere within ~ 1E9 years. If Earth's orbit migrates outward, however, the biosphere could remain intact over the entire main-sequence lifetime of the Sun. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of engineering such a migration over a long time period. The basic mechanism uses gravitational assists to (in effect) transfer orbital energy from Jupiter to the Earth, and thereby enlarges the orbital radius of Earth. This transfer is accomplished by a suitable intermediate body, either a Kuiper Belt object or a main belt asteroid. The object first encounters Earth during an inward pass on its initial highly elliptical orbit of large (~ 300 AU) semimajor axis. The encounter transfers energy from the object to the Earth in standard gravity-assist fashion by passing close to the leading limb of the planet. The resulting outbound trajectory of the object must cross the orbit of Jupiter; with proper timing, the outbound object encounters Jupiter and picks up the energy it lost to Earth. With small corrections to the trajectory, or additional planetary encounters (e.g., with Saturn), the object can repeat this process over many encounters. To maintain its present flux of solar energy, the Earth must experience roughly one encounter every 6000 years (for an object mass of 1E22 g). We develop the details of this scheme and discuss its ramifications."
ReiserFS 4 can be used as a configuration database. And better, you can edit it with vi. Look here: http://www.namesys.com/v4/v4.html#aggr_files
The Windows Registry is basically a file system optimized for handling small files. Each such file is equivalent to a few-bytes entry (the name-value pair) in a config (.ini) file. It is a 20-year-old '80s ad-hoc abstraction devised for the original Windows for DOS to replace the config (.ini) files. (that's why Microsoft recommends at most 2048 bytes in each registry entry.)
.ini files is also not the best solution, since setting up individual attributes such as ACLs, or management of the entries, becomes a nightmare, is not fast for parsing or granular enough for quick edition.
:).
.REG files. Registries could be shared by just mounting a SMB share. Very easy to manage centrally. NTFS is able to report file access events just as in registry events.
At that time, storing one config entry per file directly on FAT-FS was an unjustifiable waste of FAT16 entries -- there was a maximum number of 65536 cluster entries in FAT16, which would be rapidly exhausted into configuration entries since each file requires at least one FAT cluster -- and waste of disk space of (at the time) expensive disks -- because each cluster was at least 512 bytes, and in 2GB disks it was around 32KB (so each name-value pair would require at *least* 32KB!).
And storing entry files inside
Therefore, building a file system (REG-FS?) optimized for storing such name-value entries was crucial. Too bad it was an ad-hoc solution, but it's somewhat justifiable if you think that at the time Microsoft wasn't so big and therefore probably didn't do enough research in new file systems (or operating systems
Today, the registry should simply be wiped off from Windows. The original requirements do not hold anymore. Wasting an extra 100MB for storing name-value entries directly on NTFS or FAT32 is not too bad nowadays. Indeed, NTFS is somewhat optimized for accessing small files together with ACLs (see MFT). And accessing them using the cosy file API is priceless. [It would be an interesting project to write a replacement registry api which would just map directly to some NTFS folder.]
Justifying the registry in terms of aggregating 'user' and 'system' configuration in different files is not sustainable. This is equivalent of having eg. two different NTFS directory hierarchies 'user' and 'system', containing each the respective name-value entries as small files. Copying, creating and managing the registry this way would be so much easier. No more that bloated registry API or unimportable
However, there are even better solutions that that to store configuration files.
The best solution nowadays (both for Windows and for Linux) is ReiserFS 4 (http://www.namesys.com/). It was specially developed for this purpose.
From their abstract: " Reiser4 uses dancing trees, which obsolete the balanced tree algorithms used in databases (see farther down). This makes Reiser4 more space efficient than other filesystems because we squish small files together rather than wasting space due to block alignment like they do. It also means that Reiser4 scales better than any other filesystem. Do you want a million files in a directory, and want to create them fast? No problem."
A note on NTFS: "Inside the Windows NT File System" the book is written by Helen Custer, NTFS is architected by Tom Miller with contributions by Gary Kimura, Brian Andrew, and David Goebel, Microsoft Press, 1994, an easy to read little book, they fundamentally disagree with me on adding serialization of I/O not requested by the application programmer, and I note that the performance penalty they pay for their decision is high, especially compared with ext2fs. Their FS design is perhaps optimal for floppies and other hardware eject media beyond OS control. A less serialized higher performance log structured architecture is described in [Rosenblum and Ousterhout]. That said, Microsoft is to be commended for recognizing the importance of attempting to optimize for small files, and leading the OS designer ef
For instance, see this one in Peru:
2 69&spn=0.155239,0.240704&t=k&hl=en
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=-16.341133,-71.965
Just wait a few more years for WHUXGA...
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUXGA
WHUXGA 7680×4800 16:10 37M
WHUXGA an abbreviation for Wide Hex[adecatuple] Ultra Extended Graphics Array, is a display standard that can support a resolution up to 7680 x 4800 pixels, assuming a 16:10 aspect ratio. The name comes from the fact that it has sixteen (hexadecatuple) times as many pixels as an WUXGA display. As of 2005, one would need 12 such displays to render certain single-shot digital pictures, for instance a 14836 x 20072 pixels image created by a Betterlight Super 10K-2.
Edmundo Halleio, Astronomiae Cometicae Synopsis, Autore Edmundo Halleio apud Oxonienses. Geometriae Professore Saviliano, & Reg. Soc. S., Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775), Volume 24, 01 Jan 1753, Pages 1882 - 1899n re=article&issn=0260-7085&volume=24&spage=1882
n re=article&issn=0080-4614&volume=323&issue=1572&sp age=349
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?ge
Wonderful.
A nice discussion can be found here:
D. W. Hughes, P. H. Fowler, Bernard Lovell, D. Lynden-Bell, P. J. Message, J. E. Wilkinson, The History of Halley's Comet [and Discussion], Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and Physical Sciences (1934-1990), Volume 323, Issue 1572, 30 Sep 1987, Pages 349 - 367
http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/openurl.asp?ge