There was a TNG episode ("The Pegasus", I think), where the Federation did develop a phased cloak that could make your ship go through stuff (the Enterprise used it to fly through a large asteroid), but the development and use of cloaking devices is banned under the Treaty of Algeron (the treaty that ended the second Romulan War).
Um, yes, I know, that's exactly what I was talking about.
So now the Founders are this huge threat. They threaten the entire Alpha Quadrant. The Federation thinks it very well could lose this war. You mean to tell me that they will let a piece of paper they signed with the Romulans keep them from deploying the phased cloaking device? I don't believe that for a second.
And, even if they are more worried about the treaty than about survival, they would just call up the Romulans and say "Hey, under the circumstances, will you let us break the treaty for a while?" What will the Romulans say, "No, we think it would be fun to have the Founders overrun the whole quadrant; go ahead and lose the war."
Even if the phased cloaking device is dangerously unstable, you could make unmanned ships piloted by a Daystrom computer and send them to wreak havoc among the Founders' forces. Even if half the ships wound up being destroyed by cloak malfunctions, the other half would be able to do some serious damage.
A show based in the early days of the Federation could work.
The biggest problem facing the writers in Star Trek is that the technology can do so many different things. If the characters are in trouble, why not just beam them out? If a friend is fighting an enemy and you can't get a clear shot at the enemy, why not just stun them both? If the Federation had a cloaking device that not only made things invisible but could actually make things slide through solid matter, wouldn't they have done something with it when fighting a major war?
The current answer is just to handwave with silly made-up words: "We can't use the transporter right now because there is a cluster of verteron particles in the area." (At one time there was a "Particle of the week" web site, updated whenever Voyager introduced a new particle, which was about every week.)
A series set in the early days of the Federation would let them put more limits on the tech. They might go as long as a month before introducing a new particle to us.
If I were somehow put in charge of Star Trek, I know what series I would make. We know that when a civilization invents warp drive, the Prime Directive ends and they are invited into the Federation. We know that sometimes the Federation sends in a covert team to make sure things go smoothly--remember the episode where Riker was undercover and that alien chick was blackmailing him for sex? So, the series I would make is about a covert team that goes from planet to planet, helping smooth the way as each planet makes the final leap and joins the Federation. Because they are covert they can't just run around with phasers, communicators, and other gadgets, and they can't just beam out whenever they feel like it. Ideally it would have a story arc like Babylon 5 had, where it would take multiple episodes to resolve all threads in the plot and get the planet introduced to the Federation; over a 7 year run we might see 10 planets helped in this fashion. I wanted to call this "Star Trek: First Contact" but they used that title for a movie.
Anyway, setting the show in the wild-and-wooly early days of the Federation might work out well. But I still don't expect them to take any actual risks with the new show. It will be more of the same, but just a little bit different.
Hmmm, let's extrapolate from the past: white male starship captain, older starship captain, black starship captain, woman starship captain... I figure the next one up will be an older, woman black starship captain. Probably not bald, but we can't be sure.
If this is as sturdy as they say, with the head locked at power-off and all, then this drive should be about as durable as a Jaz drive. Probably more durable.
You could afford to buy a kit to mount this drive in a pull-out drawer ($30 or so) and still be way ahead on GB per dollar.
The most practical energy storage system in use right now is pumped storage hydroelectric.
This is used with a hydroelectric generator plant. When demand is low, it will use excess power to pump water uphill into a reservoir; then, during peak demand times, it uses water from the reservoir to generate electricity. Here's a
link
to one in Oklahoma.
Can anyone explain the key advantage to this new system?
I really want to read more details about this. But I'm pretty sure that the key advantage is the lack of resistance.
Superconducting wires don't just have less resistance to current flow, they have no resistance at all. A superconducting cable will not have any losses due to resistance. (This means that when you run current through the superconducting cable, the cable won't heat up, so the cable won't be boiling off your liquid nitrogen.) I guess the reduced losses make up for the power needed to keep the cables as cool as liquid nitrogen.
My main worry is whether depending on liquid nitrogen for cooling will make this system more prone to failure. I'm sure they are not replacing all the copper, at least right away!
They wouldn't take risks with this if they were just breaking even. I'm sure that the new cables can carry more electricity than the ones they replace, not just the same amount; and the reduced losses might mean the same power plants can provide more useable power than previously.
A requirement of the Dumb Buddy movie is that it be offensive, generally via obligatory toilet jokes and gross-out scenes.
Then I guess neither Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure nor Wayne's World were Dumb Buddy movies? Both were really funny without any toilet humor or gross-out scenes.
Yes, the interface is ASCII, but it's still around
Good news for you: there is now a very pretty GUI version of Nethack called
GnomeHack.
If you love Nethack, you will want this!
This has been
folded
into the
official Nethack
distribution, so it no longer exists as a separate project.
If you use RPMs, do a Google search for "GnomeHack" and you will find lots of sites that have them. If you are a Debian user, you can get this with apt-get.
Re:Wall St. hype hurts tech sector employees.
on
Turbolinux Layoffs
·
· Score: 2
I'm more inclined to believe that capital was diverted from viable productive sectors of the economy to unfit companies who basically squandered it.
The great thing about a free market, though, is that the unfit companies cannot squander forever. They run out of money, crash, and burn.
One of the big problems with the economy in Japan is that the big companies have so much influence with the government there; they are not inclined to let market forces punish poor performance, so they do things to prop up poor companies so they can continue to operate poorly.
The "creative destruction" in a free market allows poor companies to fail, and better ones to replace them. It can be painful to watch, and the people often cry out for the government to "do something" but that is always a mistake.
You always see headlines like "lots of workers laid off" but you never see headlines like "new companies hiring lots of laid-off workers".
Connectivity can be lost and restored. Data lost on a fiber network cannot.
But they aren't planning to store anything long-term on it! It's only intended for very short-term data, such as which computer is working on what part of a large job, or the results of one piece of the job that finished running.
They only will have 10GB for the whole ring; that wouldn't be much for all of Canada if people try to store MP3 files on it!
And anyway, if you are going to make a peer-to-peer, massively parallel computer, you need to make the system robust. Forget the backhoe; suppose a power failure takes out an entire town's worth of computers all at once?
P.S. It would be serious overkill, but I keep picturing this being used to release Linux kernel 2.6! 10:00, it ships; 10:01, every computer in Canada has a copy...
They aren't doing this in an attempt to re-invent the hard disk. This is about peer-to-peer, massively parallel computation.
SETI@home
works in client-server fashion: your desktop computer asks the main server for a chunk of data, then chews on the data and talks to the server again. This is massively parallel computation, but it isn't peer-to-peer, it's client/server.
When you put data on this fiber ring, within a very short time all the computers on the ring have seen the data. So if you want a bunch of computers to cooperate on a job, this would be a great way for them to update each other on what they are doing. If you did it right, you would have massively parallel distributed processing: all the computers in Canada tied into a single InterComputer. And just as
Napster
can spread popular songs around where a single FTP server would be hammered, an InterComputer potentially could handle truly large computations that any single computer (or even
Beowulf
cluster) couldn't.
Multicast data packets aren't new; that's why they said it takes only a few changes to try out their ideas. Multicast packets are currently designed to die fairly quickly so they can't clog a network up too much; these guys want the packets to go all the way around the ring.
P.S. That joke about the backhoe chopping the fiber was only a little bit funny, and then only the first time. When a backhoe hits a cable today, half of Canada does not lose Internet service! It isn't a trivial ring; it has some redundancy redundancy.
Debian GNU/BSD is unlikely. Although the BSD license gives Debian every right to fork the codebase and GPL it
Um, I never said anything about a fork with a different license.
Debian is a kernel with a whole bunch of extra stuff. The extra stuff includes shells, utilites such as ls and cp, compilers, debuggers, etc. that were written by the GNU project; a
GNU environment.
Richard Stallman
insists
that any distro that has a GNU environment should have "GNU/" in the name, and the Debian folks have chosen to do this. So, if a BSD distribution has GNU tools as well as the BSD kernel, if Debian were ever to ship a Debian based on it, I believe they would call it "Debian GNU/BSD".
If the BSD folks have their own BSD environment, and they don't use GNU shells and debuggers and compilers and such, then this obviously doesn't apply.
I can't speak for the Debian project, so I don't know whether they would try to change the license on the kernel or not. I never meant to imply that they would.
If I ran serious big servers, I would look at BSD. But the servers I run are not heavily loaded, so the advantages of BSD don't make any difference to me.
Since the potential payoff is very limited for me, I'm not much interested in learning my way around the BSD world. I'm spending my time learning my way around the Debian world, and I love it. The only possible way you would get me to run BSD would be if BSD were more like Debian.
Debian isn't particularly hard to get up and running, and once it's up it is so easy to administer. Did someone find a security hole in BIND this week? Fine; with a single command you can get and install the fixed version. In fact, with a single command you can get all the latest stuff. (The command is "apt-get upgrade" and you can specify which mirror it should get the stuff from; I use the University of New Mexico, for example. You can choose from "stable", "testing", and "unstable"; for servers you would probably only use "stable".)
The Debian project not only has the "Debian GNU/Linux" distro, they also have "Debian GNU/HURD". I can't think of any reason why the BSD folks couldn't make their own "Debian GNU/BSD" distro, and if they did, I would be willing to run servers with that. Why not? The vast majority of your day-to-day work is with system utilities, most of which come from the GNU project. If I were running BSD, I could still have my tcsh, the arguments to ls wouldn't be any different, and so on. How often do you really care which kernel you are running?
But maybe the BSD folks don't want to do things the Debian way. (For example, I believe the/etc directory in a Debian GNU/Linux system looks very different from/etc in a BSD system. The BSD folks probably like it just the way it is.) They still have a chance at winning me over: they just need to code up a BSD version of apt-get. (This implies Debian-style packages... does BSD even have packages?)
"They're making it as easy to buy music as it is to steal it." -- Jay Samit, in the article
Jay Samit seems to get it.
Microsoft doesn't have to invent an uncrackable scheme; they just have to invent one that makes it a bit more difficult and annoying to steal, while at the same time they make it as easy as possible to just pay for the song. I'm all in favor of this. (I want this to work on Linux too, so I don't really want Microsoft to control it. But the idea itself isn't evil.)
But it won't work while the record companies try to charge too much money for the songs. $4 each? That's one-fourth the cost of a CD!
Whenever I consider copy-protection issues, I always remember the example Borland set in the mid-80's. At a time when other companies were charging high prices and using copy protection, Borland charged low prices and didn't use copy protection, and sold a ton of products. The lesson is clear: if you charge a fair price, most people will pay you instead of ripping you off.
So if Microsoft or anyone else can make a system as easy-to-use as Napster, which makes payment so easy it's automatic; and if this system is then loaded with music the average person thinks is fairly priced... it will be a gold mine.
But what makes a fair price?
Serving up music via the Net should reduce costs for everyone. No need to pay for warehouse space to store piles of CDs. No need to pay a CD manufacturer; no defective CDs to throw away. No guessing wrong what the people want, and having to destroy thousands of CDs no one would buy. No retail markup. The band makes the music, the web page sells it, the consumer listens. Not a middle-man in sight, which (as Scott McCloud says) is great news as long as you aren't one of the middle-men.
When costs fall, prices always fall too. If they can make money now selling a CD for $15, they ought to be able to make money charging a heck of a lot less just for a copy of the bits.
Well, here is the kicker: the record companies seem to want to lock the prices in where they are now, despite costs that will be lower to them. In other words, they want their profit margin to go up, a lot. And they seem to think that just by using the right copy-protection technology, they will be able to do it. It won't work.
In the future, the cost of music will fall. It's going to happen. The record companies can get on board and make money, or they can try to use copy-protection to prop up prices and go broke.
I recently bought a 30 GB IBM DeskStar [...] and, sure, it's quiet. But it's not silent.
Yes, it's never going to be silent. IBM may claim it's the quietest drive around, but I'll bet the
Quantum lct15
is actually the
quietest.
I built one computer using an lct10 (the predecessor of the lct15) and then put the drive in a
SilentDrive
acoustical jacket. That computer uses a K6-III with an extra-quiet cooling fan, and an extra-quiet power supply fan, and a video card with no cooling fan at all. It is pretty darn close to a silent computer.
P.S. While searching for the URL that goes with SilentDrive, I stumbled across a pretty good
page
about really quiet PCs.
What a brilliant idea; too bad it doesn't have anything to do with what I want. I don't want Citrix; I do want Linux. I do want decent 3D graphics, a nice sound card, the ability to plug in a scanner, the ability to plug in a joystick... in short, I want what I said I want: a very quiet PC.
By the way, have you ever heard of a thing called an X Terminal? That's another thin client that doesn't do what I want, and they first appeared long before Citrix.
I build my own computers. I make them as quiet as possible.
I haven't tried this yet, but I want to make a silent computer with no hard disk at all -- it would boot from a network card.
With a 100Mbps full-duplex Ethernet connection, a decent network switch, and a server with a fast hard disk tucked away into a clost, I believe that a completely diskless workstation would be nice and fast. 100Mbps is about 10MBps, which is exactly the speed of a fast narrow SCSI bus; not that bad. Just put in 256MB of RAM so the system doesn't need to swap. (Last time I checked, you could get 256MB of RAM for well under $200!)
I'm typing this message on a computer I built, and by far the noisiest part of it is the CPU fan. (Anyone know of a really quiet Socket A cooling fan?) That's why I would love to buy one of those Transmeta Crusoe server-edition CPUs. With a big heat sink I wouldn't need a cooling fan.
I have hopes that IBM or HP will make one of their "legacy-free" managed PCs like this. Then all I would need to do is just buy one.
I have fond memories of typing on the Atari 520ST we used to have. No cooling fans, no hard drive... unless the floppy disk was whirring quietly, that thing was silent. Oh yes it was nice.
Forget the split keyboard; further down on that same page they describe a new screw head and screwdriver design. One screwdriver for multiple screw sizes, less likely to mangle screw heads... looks like a winner to me.
Most people agree that flat keyboards are not very ergonomic. Taking a flat keyboard, splitting it in two, and rotating the pieces 90 degrees doesn't change the fact that it is a flat keyboard.
When I want to explain ergo keyboards to people, I ask them to hold their hands out in front of them at chest height. Go ahead and do it. Now look at your hands: your hand will be in a straight line with your arm, and your hands will be slightly angled. It isn't natural or really comfortable to bend your wrists at the precise angle needed to line up your fingers in a flat row for a normal flat keyboard.
Now look at a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. The angling of the keys allows your hands to be in more of a straight line with your arms. The bulge in the middle more closely matches the slight angle you want to hold your hands at. It helps.
The Microsoft Natural Keyboard is nowhere near as extreme as other ergo keyboards I have seen, but in my experience it makes a big difference. Once I strained my neck muscles, and typing on a flat keyboard became very painful if I did it for more than an hour or so. Since I was programming for 10 hours a day I had a problem. I tried the Microsoft Natural Keyboard and I was able to type on it all day, even with the strained muscles. I very much doubt that this new keyboard would have helped me.
P.S. Of course I could be wrong. If you naturally hold your hands out angled and rotated in such a way that your fingers are in a flat row, congratulations! You are perfectly evolved for non-ergo keyboards!
0. It's in RealPlayer format. When you go to watch it, the trailer is in this tiny window surrounded by junk. Click on "CLICK TO ENLARGE VIDEO" and it doesn't actually enlarge the video, but it does get rid of the extra junk; then you can use the zoom command to enlarge the video. (Why did they think the extra junk was a good idea? Why make it harder to see it zoomed?)
1. Looks nice. Seamless effects, has that "big-budget" look. As long as they don't mangle the story, this could be great.
2. I didn't know, but it's a trilogy! Three movies, each to be released at Christmas a year apart. The Fellowship of the Ring 2001, The Two Towers 2002, The Return of the King 2003. Enough screen time to do the story right? Maybe... I hope so!
I thought people believed that open source was better than commerical software.
What do you mean by "better"? I, for one, have never claimed that open source is a magical ingredient that magically makes everything better.
The open source process has the potential to produce very bug-free code. It gives an extremely large group of software developers (more or less the whole world) a chance to contribute, which can lead to innovative new features. (Did you know that the 2.4 Linux kernel directly supports speech synthesizers? Blind folks can now debug kernel code if they want to!)
I agree that the slashdot headline is strange. When I hear about proposed new MP3 technology, my first thought isn't "but what about LAME?" What the heck, this is slashdot. "End of the world coming in one month! What will happen to the 2.5 kernel?"
But your flame about "This just shows where the real innovation comes from" is just dumb. Take a good look at what is going on with Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis will produce better quality in fewer bits than MP3, and it will do it with one hand tied behind its back (i.e. with lawyers checking at every step to make sure no patents are infringed). The Vorbis spec has more room for growth than the MP3 spec, too... future versions of Vorbis will include wavelet compression, for example.
When I was there, the HR department at Microsoft was definitely not anti-black. If you imagine the stereotypical "politically correct" attitude of a liberal university, that's the vibe I got out of the HR department.
Microsoft likes to really grill job applicants. Applicants get interviewed by multiple people, many of whom are just ordinary developers such as I was. The HR department gave us a little seminar on how to conduct ourselves when grilling applicants; there were many subjects we were not to ask about or discuss, and race was one of them.
(Another was "Do you have kids?" While this might be intended as a friendly question, we were told this could be used as a lever to sue Microsoft and us personally if the applicant was not hired, reasoning goes like this: they asked if I have kids and I said yes, therefore they assumed I would not be available to work really long hours, therefore they didn't hire me, therefore I was discriminated against because I have kids. I'm pretty sure that actually happened at least once for them to be so nervous about it...)
Microsoft's recruiting literature is loaded with pictures of happy Microsoft employees, and about half of the people in the pictures are minorites, some of them black. While I was there, I worked with people from India and Pakistan, Asians, white folks, black folks, females, a few queer folks I knew about, and a few pagans I knew about. I didn't see as many black folks as the recruiting brochures might imply, but on the other hand I saw a higher percentage of black folks than I generally see walking around in shopping malls nearby.
It is inevitable that with so many people working for it, Microsoft has to have someone racist somewhere in the chain. But to claim institutionalized racism at Microsoft and ask for $5 billion? I don't see it.
BTW, Is it only me that thinks that they targeted their chips at the mobile market as an afterthought "Oops guys, we can't get this to run fast enough. What to do?" "Hmm.. we'll call it a mobile chip."
Not sure if you are joking, so I'm answering seriously. It's clear to me they had the mobile market in mind all along; their design is tiny and dissipates a very small amount of heat, and they have a feature for dynamically changing the clock rate. Existing "mobile" chips have a feature for idling the CPU to save power, but Transmeta can actually slow the clock rate down. More on this, plus cool infrared photos of heat dissipation,
here.
I would seriously love to have a desktop computer with two or four Crusoe chips in it. I dream of having a computer running Linux quickly yet as quiet as the Atari 520 ST we used to have. (The Atari had no cooling fans, and no hard disk; if the floppy disks were idle, it was silent.) If a single 600 MHz Crusoe runs about as fast as a Celeron/300, two of them ought to be plenty for reading my mail and such. And it should be possible to cool them with just heat sinks.
I think the last word on this is
what Robert Bruce Thompson said
on his web site: this cannot possibly succeed, not for a moment, unless it is mandatory. Literally no rational person would buy one of the copy-control drives if a non-copy-control drive is available.
I suppose it is possible that the people behind this are confident they will get the law changed, but I think it is more likely that they are sitting in an ivory tower somewhere and talking only to each other, not letting the real world intrude on their thoughts.
Think about it: since non-copy-controlled drives are not supposed to work at all with copy-controlled drives, each Zip disk, floppy, or backup tape will also need to be copy-controlled, or else not work. You will need new drives for all of the above, too. In other words, for this proposal to go forwards, everyone will have to scrap all their storage devices and buy complete new ones.
And why would people do it? Suppose the copy-prevention goes wrong; you just lost all the data on that drive. It's a catastrophic failure mode. And you cannot swap out the drive without getting authorization from an external authority? You would also need to get authorization before using each and every Zip disk, backup tape, etc. I hope the copy-prevention guys are buying lots of net bandwidth and lots of fast servers; they will need them. And they will pay for all this how? By passing costs on to anyone who buys in to the scheme?
IBM couldn't even sell MicroChannel and that isn't a tenth as odious as this; it's dead before arrival. Unless it's mandatory.
There is no way, even in principle, to get kind of protection they're looking for. The data has to be descrambled on the local machine, decompressed and sent off to the video and audio subsystems.
You think too small. The media guys already want to make digital monitors have builtin encryption! They noticed that it doesn't matter how good CSS is if a nice clean digital signal is being sent from the computer to the monitor; someone could tap it, so it needs to be encrypted. It's also easy to imagine digital speakers that take an encrypted bitstream.
It's all nonsense anyway. Even if no one cracked the encryption in the usual way, you could always take apart the digital monitor and digital speakers. There has to be some point at which there is a decrypted signal to record! (E.g. in the speakers, you could tap in to the amplifier stage.)
The cyberpunk solution: we must all get implants that decrypt video and sound. This does have its good side: when your boss walks in and finds you playing Quake VI, all she will see and hear is static.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, yes, I know, that's exactly what I was talking about.
So now the Founders are this huge threat. They threaten the entire Alpha Quadrant. The Federation thinks it very well could lose this war. You mean to tell me that they will let a piece of paper they signed with the Romulans keep them from deploying the phased cloaking device? I don't believe that for a second.
And, even if they are more worried about the treaty than about survival, they would just call up the Romulans and say "Hey, under the circumstances, will you let us break the treaty for a while?" What will the Romulans say, "No, we think it would be fun to have the Founders overrun the whole quadrant; go ahead and lose the war."
Even if the phased cloaking device is dangerously unstable, you could make unmanned ships piloted by a Daystrom computer and send them to wreak havoc among the Founders' forces. Even if half the ships wound up being destroyed by cloak malfunctions, the other half would be able to do some serious damage.
steveha
The biggest problem facing the writers in Star Trek is that the technology can do so many different things. If the characters are in trouble, why not just beam them out? If a friend is fighting an enemy and you can't get a clear shot at the enemy, why not just stun them both? If the Federation had a cloaking device that not only made things invisible but could actually make things slide through solid matter, wouldn't they have done something with it when fighting a major war?
The current answer is just to handwave with silly made-up words: "We can't use the transporter right now because there is a cluster of verteron particles in the area." (At one time there was a "Particle of the week" web site, updated whenever Voyager introduced a new particle, which was about every week.)
A series set in the early days of the Federation would let them put more limits on the tech. They might go as long as a month before introducing a new particle to us.
If I were somehow put in charge of Star Trek, I know what series I would make. We know that when a civilization invents warp drive, the Prime Directive ends and they are invited into the Federation. We know that sometimes the Federation sends in a covert team to make sure things go smoothly--remember the episode where Riker was undercover and that alien chick was blackmailing him for sex? So, the series I would make is about a covert team that goes from planet to planet, helping smooth the way as each planet makes the final leap and joins the Federation. Because they are covert they can't just run around with phasers, communicators, and other gadgets, and they can't just beam out whenever they feel like it. Ideally it would have a story arc like Babylon 5 had, where it would take multiple episodes to resolve all threads in the plot and get the planet introduced to the Federation; over a 7 year run we might see 10 planets helped in this fashion. I wanted to call this "Star Trek: First Contact" but they used that title for a movie.
Anyway, setting the show in the wild-and-wooly early days of the Federation might work out well. But I still don't expect them to take any actual risks with the new show. It will be more of the same, but just a little bit different.
Hmmm, let's extrapolate from the past: white male starship captain, older starship captain, black starship captain, woman starship captain... I figure the next one up will be an older, woman black starship captain. Probably not bald, but we can't be sure.
steveha
This new drive: 15GB, $90
If this is as sturdy as they say, with the head locked at power-off and all, then this drive should be about as durable as a Jaz drive. Probably more durable.
You could afford to buy a kit to mount this drive in a pull-out drawer ($30 or so) and still be way ahead on GB per dollar.
steveha
The most practical energy storage system in use right now is pumped storage hydroelectric.
This is used with a hydroelectric generator plant. When demand is low, it will use excess power to pump water uphill into a reservoir; then, during peak demand times, it uses water from the reservoir to generate electricity. Here's a link to one in Oklahoma.
steveha
I really want to read more details about this. But I'm pretty sure that the key advantage is the lack of resistance.
Superconducting wires don't just have less resistance to current flow, they have no resistance at all. A superconducting cable will not have any losses due to resistance. (This means that when you run current through the superconducting cable, the cable won't heat up, so the cable won't be boiling off your liquid nitrogen.) I guess the reduced losses make up for the power needed to keep the cables as cool as liquid nitrogen.
My main worry is whether depending on liquid nitrogen for cooling will make this system more prone to failure. I'm sure they are not replacing all the copper, at least right away!
They wouldn't take risks with this if they were just breaking even. I'm sure that the new cables can carry more electricity than the ones they replace, not just the same amount; and the reduced losses might mean the same power plants can provide more useable power than previously.
steveha
Then I guess neither Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure nor Wayne's World were Dumb Buddy movies? Both were really funny without any toilet humor or gross-out scenes.
steveha
Good news for you: there is now a very pretty GUI version of Nethack called GnomeHack. If you love Nethack, you will want this!
This has been folded into the official Nethack distribution, so it no longer exists as a separate project.
If you use RPMs, do a Google search for "GnomeHack" and you will find lots of sites that have them. If you are a Debian user, you can get this with apt-get.
Here's a review of GnomeHack.
steveha
The great thing about a free market, though, is that the unfit companies cannot squander forever. They run out of money, crash, and burn.
One of the big problems with the economy in Japan is that the big companies have so much influence with the government there; they are not inclined to let market forces punish poor performance, so they do things to prop up poor companies so they can continue to operate poorly.
The "creative destruction" in a free market allows poor companies to fail, and better ones to replace them. It can be painful to watch, and the people often cry out for the government to "do something" but that is always a mistake.
You always see headlines like "lots of workers laid off" but you never see headlines like "new companies hiring lots of laid-off workers".
steveha
But they aren't planning to store anything long-term on it! It's only intended for very short-term data, such as which computer is working on what part of a large job, or the results of one piece of the job that finished running.
They only will have 10GB for the whole ring; that wouldn't be much for all of Canada if people try to store MP3 files on it!
And anyway, if you are going to make a peer-to-peer, massively parallel computer, you need to make the system robust. Forget the backhoe; suppose a power failure takes out an entire town's worth of computers all at once?
P.S. It would be serious overkill, but I keep picturing this being used to release Linux kernel 2.6! 10:00, it ships; 10:01, every computer in Canada has a copy...
steveha
SETI@home works in client-server fashion: your desktop computer asks the main server for a chunk of data, then chews on the data and talks to the server again. This is massively parallel computation, but it isn't peer-to-peer, it's client/server.
When you put data on this fiber ring, within a very short time all the computers on the ring have seen the data. So if you want a bunch of computers to cooperate on a job, this would be a great way for them to update each other on what they are doing. If you did it right, you would have massively parallel distributed processing: all the computers in Canada tied into a single InterComputer. And just as Napster can spread popular songs around where a single FTP server would be hammered, an InterComputer potentially could handle truly large computations that any single computer (or even Beowulf cluster) couldn't.
Multicast data packets aren't new; that's why they said it takes only a few changes to try out their ideas. Multicast packets are currently designed to die fairly quickly so they can't clog a network up too much; these guys want the packets to go all the way around the ring.
P.S. That joke about the backhoe chopping the fiber was only a little bit funny, and then only the first time. When a backhoe hits a cable today, half of Canada does not lose Internet service! It isn't a trivial ring; it has some redundancy redundancy.
steveha
Um, I never said anything about a fork with a different license.
Debian is a kernel with a whole bunch of extra stuff. The extra stuff includes shells, utilites such as ls and cp, compilers, debuggers, etc. that were written by the GNU project; a GNU environment. Richard Stallman insists that any distro that has a GNU environment should have "GNU/" in the name, and the Debian folks have chosen to do this. So, if a BSD distribution has GNU tools as well as the BSD kernel, if Debian were ever to ship a Debian based on it, I believe they would call it "Debian GNU/BSD".
If the BSD folks have their own BSD environment, and they don't use GNU shells and debuggers and compilers and such, then this obviously doesn't apply.
I can't speak for the Debian project, so I don't know whether they would try to change the license on the kernel or not. I never meant to imply that they would.
steveha
Since the potential payoff is very limited for me, I'm not much interested in learning my way around the BSD world. I'm spending my time learning my way around the Debian world, and I love it. The only possible way you would get me to run BSD would be if BSD were more like Debian.
Debian isn't particularly hard to get up and running, and once it's up it is so easy to administer. Did someone find a security hole in BIND this week? Fine; with a single command you can get and install the fixed version. In fact, with a single command you can get all the latest stuff. (The command is "apt-get upgrade" and you can specify which mirror it should get the stuff from; I use the University of New Mexico, for example. You can choose from "stable", "testing", and "unstable"; for servers you would probably only use "stable".)
The Debian project not only has the "Debian GNU/Linux" distro, they also have "Debian GNU/HURD". I can't think of any reason why the BSD folks couldn't make their own "Debian GNU/BSD" distro, and if they did, I would be willing to run servers with that. Why not? The vast majority of your day-to-day work is with system utilities, most of which come from the GNU project. If I were running BSD, I could still have my tcsh, the arguments to ls wouldn't be any different, and so on. How often do you really care which kernel you are running?
But maybe the BSD folks don't want to do things the Debian way. (For example, I believe the /etc directory in a Debian GNU/Linux system looks very different from /etc in a BSD system. The BSD folks probably like it just the way it is.) They still have a chance at winning me over: they just need to code up a BSD version of apt-get. (This implies Debian-style packages... does BSD even have packages?)
steveha
Jay Samit seems to get it.
Microsoft doesn't have to invent an uncrackable scheme; they just have to invent one that makes it a bit more difficult and annoying to steal, while at the same time they make it as easy as possible to just pay for the song. I'm all in favor of this. (I want this to work on Linux too, so I don't really want Microsoft to control it. But the idea itself isn't evil.)
But it won't work while the record companies try to charge too much money for the songs. $4 each? That's one-fourth the cost of a CD!
Whenever I consider copy-protection issues, I always remember the example Borland set in the mid-80's. At a time when other companies were charging high prices and using copy protection, Borland charged low prices and didn't use copy protection, and sold a ton of products. The lesson is clear: if you charge a fair price, most people will pay you instead of ripping you off.
So if Microsoft or anyone else can make a system as easy-to-use as Napster, which makes payment so easy it's automatic; and if this system is then loaded with music the average person thinks is fairly priced... it will be a gold mine.
But what makes a fair price?
Serving up music via the Net should reduce costs for everyone. No need to pay for warehouse space to store piles of CDs. No need to pay a CD manufacturer; no defective CDs to throw away. No guessing wrong what the people want, and having to destroy thousands of CDs no one would buy. No retail markup. The band makes the music, the web page sells it, the consumer listens. Not a middle-man in sight, which (as Scott McCloud says) is great news as long as you aren't one of the middle-men.
When costs fall, prices always fall too. If they can make money now selling a CD for $15, they ought to be able to make money charging a heck of a lot less just for a copy of the bits.
Well, here is the kicker: the record companies seem to want to lock the prices in where they are now, despite costs that will be lower to them. In other words, they want their profit margin to go up, a lot. And they seem to think that just by using the right copy-protection technology, they will be able to do it. It won't work.
In the future, the cost of music will fall. It's going to happen. The record companies can get on board and make money, or they can try to use copy-protection to prop up prices and go broke.
steveha
I haven't tried it, but it seems that with OpenGL and Wine you can play Half-Life already!
http://lhl.linuxgames.com/howto.shtml
Yes, it's never going to be silent. IBM may claim it's the quietest drive around, but I'll bet the Quantum lct15 is actually the quietest.
I built one computer using an lct10 (the predecessor of the lct15) and then put the drive in a SilentDrive acoustical jacket. That computer uses a K6-III with an extra-quiet cooling fan, and an extra-quiet power supply fan, and a video card with no cooling fan at all. It is pretty darn close to a silent computer.
P.S. While searching for the URL that goes with SilentDrive, I stumbled across a pretty good page about really quiet PCs.
steveha
What a brilliant idea; too bad it doesn't have anything to do with what I want. I don't want Citrix; I do want Linux. I do want decent 3D graphics, a nice sound card, the ability to plug in a scanner, the ability to plug in a joystick... in short, I want what I said I want: a very quiet PC.
By the way, have you ever heard of a thing called an X Terminal? That's another thin client that doesn't do what I want, and they first appeared long before Citrix.
steveha
I haven't tried this yet, but I want to make a silent computer with no hard disk at all -- it would boot from a network card.
With a 100Mbps full-duplex Ethernet connection, a decent network switch, and a server with a fast hard disk tucked away into a clost, I believe that a completely diskless workstation would be nice and fast. 100Mbps is about 10MBps, which is exactly the speed of a fast narrow SCSI bus; not that bad. Just put in 256MB of RAM so the system doesn't need to swap. (Last time I checked, you could get 256MB of RAM for well under $200!)
I'm typing this message on a computer I built, and by far the noisiest part of it is the CPU fan. (Anyone know of a really quiet Socket A cooling fan?) That's why I would love to buy one of those Transmeta Crusoe server-edition CPUs. With a big heat sink I wouldn't need a cooling fan.
I have hopes that IBM or HP will make one of their "legacy-free" managed PCs like this. Then all I would need to do is just buy one.
I have fond memories of typing on the Atari 520ST we used to have. No cooling fans, no hard drive... unless the floppy disk was whirring quietly, that thing was silent. Oh yes it was nice.
steveha
steveha
When I want to explain ergo keyboards to people, I ask them to hold their hands out in front of them at chest height. Go ahead and do it. Now look at your hands: your hand will be in a straight line with your arm, and your hands will be slightly angled. It isn't natural or really comfortable to bend your wrists at the precise angle needed to line up your fingers in a flat row for a normal flat keyboard.
Now look at a Microsoft Natural Keyboard. The angling of the keys allows your hands to be in more of a straight line with your arms. The bulge in the middle more closely matches the slight angle you want to hold your hands at. It helps.
The Microsoft Natural Keyboard is nowhere near as extreme as other ergo keyboards I have seen, but in my experience it makes a big difference. Once I strained my neck muscles, and typing on a flat keyboard became very painful if I did it for more than an hour or so. Since I was programming for 10 hours a day I had a problem. I tried the Microsoft Natural Keyboard and I was able to type on it all day, even with the strained muscles. I very much doubt that this new keyboard would have helped me.
P.S. Of course I could be wrong. If you naturally hold your hands out angled and rotated in such a way that your fingers are in a flat row, congratulations! You are perfectly evolved for non-ergo keyboards!
steveha
1. Looks nice. Seamless effects, has that "big-budget" look. As long as they don't mangle the story, this could be great.
2. I didn't know, but it's a trilogy! Three movies, each to be released at Christmas a year apart. The Fellowship of the Ring 2001, The Two Towers 2002, The Return of the King 2003. Enough screen time to do the story right? Maybe... I hope so!
3. There is a review of this trailer on Ain't It Cool News.
4. It made me want to pull the books out and read them again!
steveha
What do you mean by "better"? I, for one, have never claimed that open source is a magical ingredient that magically makes everything better.
The open source process has the potential to produce very bug-free code. It gives an extremely large group of software developers (more or less the whole world) a chance to contribute, which can lead to innovative new features. (Did you know that the 2.4 Linux kernel directly supports speech synthesizers? Blind folks can now debug kernel code if they want to!)
I agree that the slashdot headline is strange. When I hear about proposed new MP3 technology, my first thought isn't "but what about LAME?" What the heck, this is slashdot. "End of the world coming in one month! What will happen to the 2.5 kernel?"
But your flame about "This just shows where the real innovation comes from" is just dumb. Take a good look at what is going on with Ogg Vorbis. Vorbis will produce better quality in fewer bits than MP3, and it will do it with one hand tied behind its back (i.e. with lawyers checking at every step to make sure no patents are infringed). The Vorbis spec has more room for growth than the MP3 spec, too... future versions of Vorbis will include wavelet compression, for example.
steveha
Microsoft likes to really grill job applicants. Applicants get interviewed by multiple people, many of whom are just ordinary developers such as I was. The HR department gave us a little seminar on how to conduct ourselves when grilling applicants; there were many subjects we were not to ask about or discuss, and race was one of them.
(Another was "Do you have kids?" While this might be intended as a friendly question, we were told this could be used as a lever to sue Microsoft and us personally if the applicant was not hired, reasoning goes like this: they asked if I have kids and I said yes, therefore they assumed I would not be available to work really long hours, therefore they didn't hire me, therefore I was discriminated against because I have kids. I'm pretty sure that actually happened at least once for them to be so nervous about it...)
Microsoft's recruiting literature is loaded with pictures of happy Microsoft employees, and about half of the people in the pictures are minorites, some of them black. While I was there, I worked with people from India and Pakistan, Asians, white folks, black folks, females, a few queer folks I knew about, and a few pagans I knew about. I didn't see as many black folks as the recruiting brochures might imply, but on the other hand I saw a higher percentage of black folks than I generally see walking around in shopping malls nearby.
It is inevitable that with so many people working for it, Microsoft has to have someone racist somewhere in the chain. But to claim institutionalized racism at Microsoft and ask for $5 billion? I don't see it.
steveha
Not sure if you are joking, so I'm answering seriously. It's clear to me they had the mobile market in mind all along; their design is tiny and dissipates a very small amount of heat, and they have a feature for dynamically changing the clock rate. Existing "mobile" chips have a feature for idling the CPU to save power, but Transmeta can actually slow the clock rate down. More on this, plus cool infrared photos of heat dissipation, here.
I would seriously love to have a desktop computer with two or four Crusoe chips in it. I dream of having a computer running Linux quickly yet as quiet as the Atari 520 ST we used to have. (The Atari had no cooling fans, and no hard disk; if the floppy disks were idle, it was silent.) If a single 600 MHz Crusoe runs about as fast as a Celeron/300, two of them ought to be plenty for reading my mail and such. And it should be possible to cool them with just heat sinks.
steveha
I suppose it is possible that the people behind this are confident they will get the law changed, but I think it is more likely that they are sitting in an ivory tower somewhere and talking only to each other, not letting the real world intrude on their thoughts.
Think about it: since non-copy-controlled drives are not supposed to work at all with copy-controlled drives, each Zip disk, floppy, or backup tape will also need to be copy-controlled, or else not work. You will need new drives for all of the above, too. In other words, for this proposal to go forwards, everyone will have to scrap all their storage devices and buy complete new ones.
And why would people do it? Suppose the copy-prevention goes wrong; you just lost all the data on that drive. It's a catastrophic failure mode. And you cannot swap out the drive without getting authorization from an external authority? You would also need to get authorization before using each and every Zip disk, backup tape, etc. I hope the copy-prevention guys are buying lots of net bandwidth and lots of fast servers; they will need them. And they will pay for all this how? By passing costs on to anyone who buys in to the scheme?
IBM couldn't even sell MicroChannel and that isn't a tenth as odious as this; it's dead before arrival. Unless it's mandatory.
steveha
You think too small. The media guys already want to make digital monitors have builtin encryption! They noticed that it doesn't matter how good CSS is if a nice clean digital signal is being sent from the computer to the monitor; someone could tap it, so it needs to be encrypted. It's also easy to imagine digital speakers that take an encrypted bitstream.
It's all nonsense anyway. Even if no one cracked the encryption in the usual way, you could always take apart the digital monitor and digital speakers. There has to be some point at which there is a decrypted signal to record! (E.g. in the speakers, you could tap in to the amplifier stage.)
The cyberpunk solution: we must all get implants that decrypt video and sound. This does have its good side: when your boss walks in and finds you playing Quake VI, all she will see and hear is static.
steveh