I'm just confused by this. My initial gut reaction is that Negroponte wants to completely scrap what came before, and put his own stamp on the project. But that makes no sense, because it was his project, and his stamp was on it already.
They will be able to sell this new device for under $100, this time for sure. Okay, I'll agree that using standard DVD player screens might help. But why two screens then? Isn't the screen the most power-hungry part of the device? The OLPC screen has special power-management features; won't standard screens burn more power? And won't having two screens double the power?
The article spoke of "dual touch screens". At first I thought this meant "multi-touch screens" but now I think it just means both screens will be touch screens. Even so, how do you make a standard DVD player screen into a touch screen?
And once again. Why two screens? Yes, it looks more like a book. Big deal. This dual-screen design has a hinge! It's got to be easier and cheaper to make a slab tablet device, with maybe a hinged cover (note that a cover has no electrical connections and need not break a waterproof seal).
So, no keyboard; just an onscreen virtual keyboard. I'm guessing no onboard camera, since none was mentioned and they are being aggressive about price. Not one word about openness of software stack... Negroponte just doesn't care anymore, I guess.
The OLPC project hasn't just jumped the shark. They went out and found a new shark and they are jumping over it now.
What I'm just waiting for is a bootable Linux CD that includes ClamAV ready-to-run.
Once a root kit has its tentacles through your system, you can't trust your system. So it just makes sense to boot a trusted system before running a malware scan.
I know enough that I could boot an Ubuntu CD, make sure clamav is installed, update it to the latest virus definitions, mount each disk volume, and then run clamav by hand. But more people could use it if this was easier.
Originally I was thinking of a CD you boot just for virus scanning. But I already carry around an Ubuntu CD to use as a utility disk (you can boot it as a RAM tester, or you can boot to a desktop to help repair a non-booting computer). And if it finds any malware you will want to fire up a web browser and read about how to clean your system. So now I think the very best thing would be for the standard Ubuntu live CD desktop to have a "scan computer for viruses" icon. Ideally it should have some kind of attractive GUI interface, but I'd settle for a scrolling text display as long as it does everything automatically.
Ideally this would also have a way to download a signed program, verify the signature, and run the program; then people could write programs that automatically clean malware off a computer.
I already give away Ubuntu CDs to friends who use Windows, and I tell them how to use them to test their RAM. It would be so cool if they could also use it to check their computers for malware. (Who knows, they might get tired of cleaning malware off their computers and try running Ubuntu someday.)
Is there any way to suggest this as a "summer of code" project or something?
This reminded me of blade servers. I wondered why they didn't just order a bunch of blades with RAM and CPU only.
I read the article, and they are planning to have special CPU chips fabbed: CPUs tailored specifically to the needs of climate modeling. I guess this will provide the lowest possible operational cost--the least electrical consumption and heat dissipation possible to solve their problem.
Quote from John Shalf:
We have something that automatically tunes the software after we make a hardware change, then we benchmark it, measure how much power it takes, then we change the hardware again. We keep on iterating to come up with the optimal hardware and software solution for power.
Given how many nodes they need, optimizing for lowest operational cost probably makes sense. But calling it an "iPod Supercomputer" is pretty egregious, even by the standards of pop tech journalism.
It seems like it would be bog simple (disclaimer: I am not much of a programmer... salt at the ready) to remap unlinking of a file to relinking it to a trash directory, something like $HOME/.Trash (there's per-volume trashes too, but I always forget where those live. Probably on the volume):P Then, and this is the important part: 1, when free space is requested, files in the trash are not shown in the quota and 2, when a file operation requires disk space, instead of failing it, we unlink some files for real based on some sort of reasonable algorithm.
Hear, hear. I second this.
You know why I want this so much? Because I used to have this. When I ran Windows 98 with Norton Utilities I had a feature called the "Norton Protected Recycle Bin". It had the following properties:
0) When a file was deleted by any means it would go into the NPRB. If you copied file "foo" onto file "bar", the old "bar" would go into the NPRB. If you went into a DOS shell and ran the "del" command, the files you deleted would go into NPRB.
1) The original name, original location, timestamp of the file at the time of deletion, and time of deletion were all saved and were visible in the list of deleted files.
2) You could specify a do-not-save list, both by filespec (example: do not save "*.tmp", "*.bak", etc.) and by location (example: do not save any files in C:\Windows\Temp, etc.) And sensible defaults were provided (all my examples here were set by default, plus more).
3) Your deleted files would age out. It would automatically purge files that were deleted more than 14 days ago (by default; of course you could change it). I liked to keep mine set for 3 days auto-purge; I pretty much always un-deleted something seconds after deleting it, so the longer period didn't help much. And disks were small in those days...
I don't think it would ever empty the NPRB automatically just because you were out of disk space. But it was trivial to right-click on the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop and choose "Empty Norton Protected Recycle Bin".
To do the above properly in Linux, the file system should have a way to specify whether a given file should be saved or simply deleted. The Ext2 file system has an attribute you can set on a file requesting that it be saved instead of deleted; read the man page for chattr(1) and look for the 'u' attribute. (Then read the "Bugs" section at the end, where it says that the undelete feature has never actually been implemented.)
The file system should handle the deletion or saving of files, and then user-space utilities should be able to get a list of saved files, undelete a saved file, empty the saved files, etc. Of course users should only be able to delete their own files, so ownership and permissions need to be checked too.
With this feature, and today's huge hard disks, a Linux desktop would be great for ordinary users.
P.S. If you have Vista, and you get Norton Utilities, is there still a Protected Recycle Bin feature? Or is that one of the things that Vista loses? For that matter, can you still do this in XP?
I was hopeful when I first saw the news stories about Thermal Depolymerization. This is not complete vapor; there is in fact an operational plant. Given where oil prices are now, we should be reading about TDP plants opening all over the place.
We aren't reading about TDP plants opening all over the place.
So what happened? I can't figure it out. There were allegations that the TDP plant was emitting bad odors, but none recently, and I think they have figured out how to make the plants trap the worst odors. Given the profits they could be making right now, I can't believe that the odors problem would stop them even if they did not have a solution (just put the plants in really remote areas).
My best guess is that they are profitable enough to keep running the plant, but not so profitable that it's tempting to build more plants. Given oil's current price, that is somewhat surprising... maybe the big investors are expecting oil prices to drop again in future?
Oh man this would be sweet for first person shooters. Want to spend the entire level running? Better be in shape.
Next we need to add heavy custom controllers: the "rocket launcher" accessory should be made of real metal (or cheap plastic with lead weights built in). For rocket ammo, they will sell little "ammo packs" that each weigh almost as much as the rocket launcher.
Of course, some people will not play fair.
"He's using the wall-shelf hack!" (putting the ammo on a shelf instead of carrying it)
P.S. For a while I was looking for a good first-person tank combat game. Then I realized that your typical first-person shooter game is effectively a tank game. You are armored like a tank, and you can often carry a rocket launcher plus 99 rounds of ammo, plus some kind of heavy machine gun, plus railgun, particle beam, sack full of grenades, etc. etc.
Which is one reason why I like CounterStrike so much. One rifle, one handgun, a couple grenades, and you are fully loaded. You can still run full-tilt all over the map without ever getting tired or even out of breath, but what the heck.
Some of the ideas in the article are just silly. I would never, ever accept a free umbrella that whispers ads to me; especially if my free hat was whispering different ads. The alert for incoming rain is sort of cool, but not at the price of whispered ads.
What I really want is a PDA that aggregates everything. The PDA can alert me to incoming rain; I can use it to pay for things; I can use it to check my mail; and of course I can use it as a PDA. A screen and a stylus is the form factor I really want, not an umbrella with a flashing red light.
Your own PDA is a great way to pay for things. It can be much more secure than the current system, where anyone who copies down your credit card number can use it. And I'd sooner trust my own PDA that I carry around to be secure, rather than punching in a passcode to a computer system not under my control. (Google search for "ATM skimmer"; thieves have figured out how to hack an ATM to copy the information from your ATM card, and a hidden camera records your passcode. Then they 0wn your ATM account.)
I read a short story where police wore eye-protecting goggles that had an "enhanced reality" heads-up display. A computer picked out possible weapons and made glowing spots that superimposed over what the cop was seeing; the computer could zoom and give a sort of telescopic vision. I imagine that will happen someday. Even sooner than that, I expect police to start carrying guns that log when they are fired (timestamp, and maybe even GPS coordinates).
If you want a silly take on ubiquitous computing, read some Ron Goulart stories, which include things like a camera that argues with the user: "I don't want to take a picture of that, it's boring, point me at a good looking girl or something."
I once worked at a manufacturing company, and one of the products they made was called the 5100. They needed to replace it, and there was a big debate over whether to make a software package that could run on a standard laptop, or to make another standalone device (the 5200). In the end they decided to make the standalone 5200. One of my coworkers, we'll just call him B, was strongly in favor of doing the standalone 5200; he was guy who would do the software development for the 5200, it was his baby.
Well, I brought my laptop to work (it was a TRS-80 Model 102 if you care). In the text editor, I made a banner that spelled out "5200" in asterisks or something. I went into the lab, and pushed B's 5200 prototype to the back of his work area, and set up my laptop in its spot, turned on and showing the "5200" banner. Then I went and found B and innocently asked if he would show me the 5200 prototype. Actually, I think he was amused by the gag as well.
Right after I was hired there, another of my co-workers tried to convince me that they had this really cool super-ELIZA program that was actually intelligent. He sat me down in front of a dumb terminal to try it out. I figured right away, correctly, that they had just set up two terminals and that somewhere else in the building, some human was impersonating ELIZA, so I tried to ask questions that would be easy for a computer to answer but hard for a human ("What's the square root of 12345?"). If only he'd had the foresight to keep a scientific calculator close at hand.
Neither of these were on April 1. Why limit this sort of fun to one day per year?
Or better yet, provide a proper buffet style subscription. Sort of like the playsforsure plan, pay a reasonable monthly fee and listen to anything and everything, with the tracks expiring when the person stops paying.
This sounds like Rhapsody. (You can try Rhapsody out for free, by the way.)
Having access doesn't necessarily mean that a person isn't going to value it enough to buy it. Plus opt-in anonymous stat collection ought to be able to do a better job of figuring out what people actually like than a bunch of execs in suits.
I agree with both of these points. When I find music I love on Rhapsody, that music goes on my "buy that CD" list. And the top lists are great; if you pull up some band, you can see at a glance what the most popular songs are. Sometimes when I don't know the name of a song, but I know the band, I can find the song just by checking the most popular songs list.
Rhapsody is an all-you-can-eat music service. I have Rhapsody and I love it.
Rhapsody costs $12-$15 a month (depending on your options), and you can listen to the music as long as you keep paying the monthly fee. If Apple can actually talk the big labels into granting unlimited lifetime downloads of music, that you can keep, for $20... I'll be stunned. That's a huge value there. Even at $80 that's a huge value.
I could see the labels going for a $20-per-iPod tax, maybe. I can't see them going for a special model that costs $20 extra. You just know that anyone who buys the $20 extra model is going to actually use the service. Maybe the statistics show that currently the average customer buys $20 worth of songs, but this all-you-can-eat plan slices away any future chance of that dollar amount going up. We're talking about an industry that is pricing CDs at $20... can Apple really get them to do this?
P.S. If you have never tried an all-you-can-eat music service, I suggest you try the two-week free trial for Rhapsody. You will probably see the appeal. It's easy and fun to find new music. Sometimes I don't make up my mind whether I like something until I play it all the way through a few times; it's nice to be able to do that.
I agree that Python is a good language to know. It's my favorite language.
I won't claim it's perfect, but IMHO it comes closest of any language I have tried to just letting me code up my thoughts. In any language, there is a certain amount of stuff you need to do to satisfy the syntax of the language; for example, in most languages you cannot do anything with a variable without declaring it first. Fans of Python sometimes claim that Python code looks like pseudocode, but with the extra advantage that it actually works.
Python has object-oriented features, functional programming features, and good-enough performance. It would be an ideal language for introducing a beginner to programming. When you do something that makes no sense, like trying to add an integer and a string, Python will catch it (Python is strongly typed) and Python will raise an exception. Some languages will magically convert types for you, but this can lead to subtle bugs.
Note that Google has standardized on four languages, and Python is one. (The list: Java, C++, Python, Javascript) Google has hired several important people from the Python community, including Guido van Rossum who created Python and still serves as Benevolent Dictator for Life.
I'm happy because my current job lets me do most of my work in Python, and we are doing cool stuff.
In Southeast Asia, there are legends of supernatural monster women whose heads can detach from their bodies. During the day they seem like normal women, but at night, their heads can detach (with heart, lungs, and guts coming along with the head, and the rest of the body left behind). These heads then fly around looking for victims.
My favorite part: after they feed, their guts are a bit swollen, so once they get back to their lair they soak their guts in vinegar to shrink them down, so they will fit back into the body.
In different countries this legendary monster has different names. In Thailand, this is a "krasue" (pronounced something like "gra-suer"). In Malaysia it is "penanggalan".
Fair enough: it's not just designers, it's also (or even mostly) the designers' clients.
I have no quarrel with most of your points.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Super-wide may not be best, but super-skinny with lots of wasted space around it isn't great either.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.
My habit is to leave browsers maximized, and use lots of tabs, toggling between the tabs as I go. I really don't want to fuss with resizing windows and tiling them for ultimate effect.
I also hate web pages that decide for me to open the link in a new window. If I want a new window, I'll open one. Thus, most of my browsing is done with the middle-button click to open in a new tab, and I get windows with very heterogeneous tabs. The prefect resizing and tiling for one tab will be wrong for another tab.
Doing a 200% zoom would sort out everything and should look good.
I use a 110 dots per inch monitor. I hate, hate, hate all web pages that were laid out with WYSIWYG design tools, with fonts set to 7 pixels tall and columns also specified as a certain number of pixels wide.
I don't have eagle eyes and I don't like to sit close to my screen. So I have my personal CSS forcing fonts to a minimum size... which makes some pages ugly, and other pages unreadable (depends on how much the page designer hard-coded with pixel sizes). I'm also using the ImageZoom extension to scale up images... which means the scaled images cover up lots of text on many web pages, and fancy graphical navigation buttons often don't match up with their clickable regions.
And I have a 16:10 ratio monitor... which means that often I will read a web site and there will be a narrow strip of text in the center, and tons of wasted space to either side, again because some web designer hard-coded things with pixel counts.
I used to wish that web designers would make sites that can adapt to unusual screen sizes. Well, the WYSIWYG tools aren't going away, so now I just want to zoom my pages.
I suggest that what we really need is a second Patent Office. The first one can go on granting patents as usual. The second one's mission will be to invalidate and throw out as many patents as it can. Patent examiners in the second one will be paid bonuses according to how many patents they manage to invalidate.
I'm kidding... but only partly. The more I think about this, the more I like it.
Python is already a very smooth language, but there are a few corners where it could be better. The Python guys are taking this chance to smooth out the wrinkles.
For example, Python 2.x has both range() and xrange(), and the only difference is that range() actually builds a list and xrange() doesn't (it returns an iterable object that can be expanded into a list if you like, or just used in a for loop or whatever). There is no real need to have both range() and xrange(), so Python 3.x will simply have range() and it will return an iterator. More generally, all the Python features that return a list in 2.x will now return an iterator, and the special variants that return iterators will vanish.
There are many other changes but that one is representative. There is nothing here as dramatic as the changes from Perl 5 to Perl 6. Also, there is a nifty automated tool to help migrate Python 2.6 programs to Python 3.0 programs. There is no huge controversy here, sensational headlines notwithstanding.
I predict that the Python community will embrace Python 3.x when it's available. Python 2.x won't vanish instantly, but people will want to migrate to the new Python, and certainly schools using Python to teach will want to start using Python 3.0 immediately.
Well, I prefer to buy music in a lossless format, so I buy most of it as a CD (and then immediately rip to FLAC with Grip or Sound Juicer).
I heartily recommend Magnatune. They let you download the entire album in medium-quality MP3, listen to it as much as you want, and then if you buy it you can download a WAV file, FLAC, high-quality MP3 or high-quality Ogg Vorbis. (Or more than one of those formats.)
I found several albums from Magnatune that I really love.
Also, I'm listening to a lot of music on Rhapsody right now. I actually don't mind DRM for a music "rental" situation; I object to DRM on tracks that I buy. Rhapsody is a great way to listen to a whole bunch of music at once, and they also have old Bill Cosby comedy albums, holiday albums, and other special things that I might like to listen to once in a while but I don't really have an urgent desire to buy. Rhapsody doesn't have lossless, so I'm not likely to buy much music from them, but it's a great way to find albums to buy on CD. It is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows. (Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to try to sell it to you. I get a free Rhapsody account as a job benefit, but if I didn't, I would definitely be willing to pay $13 a month to get access to millions of songs.)
Back in the days when a copy of WordStar or Microsoft Multiplan cost hundreds of dollars and came on copy-protected floppy disks, Borland International came out with a line of software that was different. Turbo Pascal, Sidekick, and other products came on non-copy-protected disks and cost $50 or $100.
If you believe in the claims of the DRM advocates in our big media organizations, you probably figure that Borland must have lost money horribly. Actually, they didn't; their strategy of selling without copy protection at a fair price was very successful.
The lesson I take away from that is that most people, if you offer them a fair deal, will take the fair deal rather than steal from you. I don't remember anyone ever saying "Borland deserves to have this stuff ripped off."
If you offer me music without DRM at a fair price, I will pay the price and get the music legally. I think most music fans will do the same. (Especially if they believe that their money will mostly go to the band instead of to the record label.)
P.S. The flip side of the coin is that DRM doesn't actually work. There's this thing called the "Internet", see, and if anyone anywhere in the world manages to once break the DRM, then everyone who wants to download the DRM-free version can do so. Thus DRM just hurts the actual paying customers, who then might well feel entitled to steal the next product instead of buying it.
As I understand it, even with this so-called pharming technique, the bad guys still cannot correctly spoof an "https:" page... at least not without compromising the private key used to secure the SSL connection, or compromising the private key of the certificate signing authority.
When I explain to people how to use the Web, I always tell them to look for the security indicators before doing anything involving money.
P.S. I wouldn't be surprised if the bad guys here added Javascript code to their fake bank site, to rewrite the address bar of the web browser to show the "https:". This is why I prefer to do all my online banking with Javascript disabled; thank you, NoScript.
I read through the whole article, and was just bemused. According to the article, MapReduce isn't as good as a real database at doing the sorts of things real databases do well. Um, okay, I guess, but MapReduce can do quite a lot of other things that they seem to have missed.
Also, I had a major WTF moment when I read this:
Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.
Empirical evidence to date suggests that MapReduce scales insanely well. Exhibit A: Google, which uses MapReduce running on literally thousands of servers at a time to chew through literally hundreds of terabytes of data. (Google uses MapReduce to index the entire World Wide Web!)
This in turn suggests that the authors of TFA are firmly ensconced in the ivory tower.
They complained that brute-force is slower than indexed searches. Well, nothing about MapReduce rules out the use of indexes; and for common problems, Google can add indexes as desired. (Google uses MapReduce to build their index to the Web in the first place.) And because Google adds servers by the rackful, they have quite a lot of CPU power just waiting to be used. Brute force might not be slower if you split it across thousands of servers!
Likewise, they complain that one can't use standard database report-generating tools with MapReduce; but if the Reduce tasks insert their results into a standard database, one could then use any standard report-generating tools.
MapReduce lets Google folks do crazy one-off jobs like ask every single server they own to check through their system logs for a particular error, and if it's found, return a bunch of config files and log files. Even if you had some sort of distributed database that could run on thousands of machines, any of which might die at any moment, and if you planned ahead and set the machines to copy their system logs into the database, I don't see how a database would be better for that task. That's just a single task I just invented as an example; there are many others, and MapReduce can do them all.
And one of the coolest things about MapReduce is how well it copes with failure. Inevitably some servers will respond very slowly, or will die and not respond; the MapReduce scheduler detects this and sends the Map tasks out to other servers so the job still finishes quickly. And Google keeps statistics on how often a computer is slow. At a lecture, I heard a Google guy explain how there was a BIOS bug that made one server in 50 disable some cache memory, thus greatly slowing down server performance; the MapReduce statistics helped them notice they had a problem, and isolate which computers had the problem.
MapReduce lets you run arbitrary jobs across thousands of machines at once, and all the authors of the article seem to be able to see is that it's not as database-oriented as a real database.
I'm hoping that technology will keep driving down the cost of making a movie.
The cheaper it is to make a movie, the easier it is to get the movie made, and made properly.
Say some young hotshot has a great idea for this weird, quirky movie. If it costs a lot of money, the studio will start pushing the guy around. No, don't cast that guy as the lead, cast one of our proven stars. No, take out that sarcastic sub-plot; it might offend someone. The more money is at stake, the less risk they will allow, and the more they will want to push it into the tried-and-true just-another-Hollywood-movie mold.
So, I'm hoping that cheaper movies might turn out to be better movies, because the original artistic vision of the creator will be allowed to be realized.
Of course there is a problem on the opposite extreme: since no one could say "no" to George Lucas, he went ahead and made Star Wars Episode I and the other prequels. I wish someone could have said "No, that submarine-through-the-core sequence is stupid, strip it out. No, the pod race sequence is just too long. No, Jar Jar is too annoying."
At least if movies are cheaper, there will be more of them. Hopefully more movies will result in more great movies.
In Earthweb prediction markets have a major role in the plot. Prediction markets are used to harness the wisdom of the crowds over the whole planet; this is what the title references. The book also speculates on some of the problems that might happen with prediction markets, such as people who just try to figure out an expert's prediction and just bet the same as that expert. (This expert-following skews the results; the followers are not adding any more insight to the market, and they might be lending their support to someone who might be wrong.)
The book is really a bunch of cool future Information Age ideas, with just enough plot to stitch them together. The action sequences are as energetic and implausible as a Tomb Raider game. It's not Shakespeare but I enjoyed it.
P.S. The book also tells, as part of its backstory, about a bunch of inexpensive computing devices with networking built in being air-dropped over the poorest parts of the world, to give poor children some sort of an education. He wrote this years before OLPC.
Slashdot Mirror
The Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle program has worked for me. I wrote a long summary of it a while back, and I'll just link it:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=226411&cid=18343433
steveha
I'm just confused by this. My initial gut reaction is that Negroponte wants to completely scrap what came before, and put his own stamp on the project. But that makes no sense, because it was his project, and his stamp was on it already.
They will be able to sell this new device for under $100, this time for sure. Okay, I'll agree that using standard DVD player screens might help. But why two screens then? Isn't the screen the most power-hungry part of the device? The OLPC screen has special power-management features; won't standard screens burn more power? And won't having two screens double the power?
The article spoke of "dual touch screens". At first I thought this meant "multi-touch screens" but now I think it just means both screens will be touch screens. Even so, how do you make a standard DVD player screen into a touch screen?
And once again. Why two screens? Yes, it looks more like a book. Big deal. This dual-screen design has a hinge! It's got to be easier and cheaper to make a slab tablet device, with maybe a hinged cover (note that a cover has no electrical connections and need not break a waterproof seal).
So, no keyboard; just an onscreen virtual keyboard. I'm guessing no onboard camera, since none was mentioned and they are being aggressive about price. Not one word about openness of software stack... Negroponte just doesn't care anymore, I guess.
The OLPC project hasn't just jumped the shark. They went out and found a new shark and they are jumping over it now.
steveha
What I'm just waiting for is a bootable Linux CD that includes ClamAV ready-to-run.
Once a root kit has its tentacles through your system, you can't trust your system. So it just makes sense to boot a trusted system before running a malware scan.
I know enough that I could boot an Ubuntu CD, make sure clamav is installed, update it to the latest virus definitions, mount each disk volume, and then run clamav by hand. But more people could use it if this was easier.
Originally I was thinking of a CD you boot just for virus scanning. But I already carry around an Ubuntu CD to use as a utility disk (you can boot it as a RAM tester, or you can boot to a desktop to help repair a non-booting computer). And if it finds any malware you will want to fire up a web browser and read about how to clean your system. So now I think the very best thing would be for the standard Ubuntu live CD desktop to have a "scan computer for viruses" icon. Ideally it should have some kind of attractive GUI interface, but I'd settle for a scrolling text display as long as it does everything automatically.
Ideally this would also have a way to download a signed program, verify the signature, and run the program; then people could write programs that automatically clean malware off a computer.
I already give away Ubuntu CDs to friends who use Windows, and I tell them how to use them to test their RAM. It would be so cool if they could also use it to check their computers for malware. (Who knows, they might get tired of cleaning malware off their computers and try running Ubuntu someday.)
Is there any way to suggest this as a "summer of code" project or something?
steveha
I read the article, and they are planning to have special CPU chips fabbed: CPUs tailored specifically to the needs of climate modeling. I guess this will provide the lowest possible operational cost--the least electrical consumption and heat dissipation possible to solve their problem.
Quote from John Shalf:
Given how many nodes they need, optimizing for lowest operational cost probably makes sense. But calling it an "iPod Supercomputer" is pretty egregious, even by the standards of pop tech journalism.
steveha
Hear, hear. I second this.
You know why I want this so much? Because I used to have this. When I ran Windows 98 with Norton Utilities I had a feature called the "Norton Protected Recycle Bin". It had the following properties:
0) When a file was deleted by any means it would go into the NPRB. If you copied file "foo" onto file "bar", the old "bar" would go into the NPRB. If you went into a DOS shell and ran the "del" command, the files you deleted would go into NPRB.
1) The original name, original location, timestamp of the file at the time of deletion, and time of deletion were all saved and were visible in the list of deleted files.
2) You could specify a do-not-save list, both by filespec (example: do not save "*.tmp", "*.bak", etc.) and by location (example: do not save any files in C:\Windows\Temp, etc.) And sensible defaults were provided (all my examples here were set by default, plus more).
3) Your deleted files would age out. It would automatically purge files that were deleted more than 14 days ago (by default; of course you could change it). I liked to keep mine set for 3 days auto-purge; I pretty much always un-deleted something seconds after deleting it, so the longer period didn't help much. And disks were small in those days...
I don't think it would ever empty the NPRB automatically just because you were out of disk space. But it was trivial to right-click on the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop and choose "Empty Norton Protected Recycle Bin".
To do the above properly in Linux, the file system should have a way to specify whether a given file should be saved or simply deleted. The Ext2 file system has an attribute you can set on a file requesting that it be saved instead of deleted; read the man page for chattr(1) and look for the 'u' attribute. (Then read the "Bugs" section at the end, where it says that the undelete feature has never actually been implemented.)
The file system should handle the deletion or saving of files, and then user-space utilities should be able to get a list of saved files, undelete a saved file, empty the saved files, etc. Of course users should only be able to delete their own files, so ownership and permissions need to be checked too.
With this feature, and today's huge hard disks, a Linux desktop would be great for ordinary users.
P.S. If you have Vista, and you get Norton Utilities, is there still a Protected Recycle Bin feature? Or is that one of the things that Vista loses? For that matter, can you still do this in XP?
steveha
I was hopeful when I first saw the news stories about Thermal Depolymerization. This is not complete vapor; there is in fact an operational plant. Given where oil prices are now, we should be reading about TDP plants opening all over the place.
We aren't reading about TDP plants opening all over the place.
So what happened? I can't figure it out. There were allegations that the TDP plant was emitting bad odors, but none recently, and I think they have figured out how to make the plants trap the worst odors. Given the profits they could be making right now, I can't believe that the odors problem would stop them even if they did not have a solution (just put the plants in really remote areas).
My best guess is that they are profitable enough to keep running the plant, but not so profitable that it's tempting to build more plants. Given oil's current price, that is somewhat surprising... maybe the big investors are expecting oil prices to drop again in future?
steveha
Oh man this would be sweet for first person shooters. Want to spend the entire level running? Better be in shape.
Next we need to add heavy custom controllers: the "rocket launcher" accessory should be made of real metal (or cheap plastic with lead weights built in). For rocket ammo, they will sell little "ammo packs" that each weigh almost as much as the rocket launcher.
Of course, some people will not play fair.
"He's using the wall-shelf hack!" (putting the ammo on a shelf instead of carrying it)
P.S. For a while I was looking for a good first-person tank combat game. Then I realized that your typical first-person shooter game is effectively a tank game. You are armored like a tank, and you can often carry a rocket launcher plus 99 rounds of ammo, plus some kind of heavy machine gun, plus railgun, particle beam, sack full of grenades, etc. etc.
Which is one reason why I like CounterStrike so much. One rifle, one handgun, a couple grenades, and you are fully loaded. You can still run full-tilt all over the map without ever getting tired or even out of breath, but what the heck.
steveha
Some of the ideas in the article are just silly. I would never, ever accept a free umbrella that whispers ads to me; especially if my free hat was whispering different ads. The alert for incoming rain is sort of cool, but not at the price of whispered ads.
What I really want is a PDA that aggregates everything. The PDA can alert me to incoming rain; I can use it to pay for things; I can use it to check my mail; and of course I can use it as a PDA. A screen and a stylus is the form factor I really want, not an umbrella with a flashing red light.
Your own PDA is a great way to pay for things. It can be much more secure than the current system, where anyone who copies down your credit card number can use it. And I'd sooner trust my own PDA that I carry around to be secure, rather than punching in a passcode to a computer system not under my control. (Google search for "ATM skimmer"; thieves have figured out how to hack an ATM to copy the information from your ATM card, and a hidden camera records your passcode. Then they 0wn your ATM account.)
I read a short story where police wore eye-protecting goggles that had an "enhanced reality" heads-up display. A computer picked out possible weapons and made glowing spots that superimposed over what the cop was seeing; the computer could zoom and give a sort of telescopic vision. I imagine that will happen someday. Even sooner than that, I expect police to start carrying guns that log when they are fired (timestamp, and maybe even GPS coordinates).
If you want a silly take on ubiquitous computing, read some Ron Goulart stories, which include things like a camera that argues with the user: "I don't want to take a picture of that, it's boring, point me at a good looking girl or something."
steveha
I once worked at a manufacturing company, and one of the products they made was called the 5100. They needed to replace it, and there was a big debate over whether to make a software package that could run on a standard laptop, or to make another standalone device (the 5200). In the end they decided to make the standalone 5200. One of my coworkers, we'll just call him B, was strongly in favor of doing the standalone 5200; he was guy who would do the software development for the 5200, it was his baby.
Well, I brought my laptop to work (it was a TRS-80 Model 102 if you care). In the text editor, I made a banner that spelled out "5200" in asterisks or something. I went into the lab, and pushed B's 5200 prototype to the back of his work area, and set up my laptop in its spot, turned on and showing the "5200" banner. Then I went and found B and innocently asked if he would show me the 5200 prototype. Actually, I think he was amused by the gag as well.
Right after I was hired there, another of my co-workers tried to convince me that they had this really cool super-ELIZA program that was actually intelligent. He sat me down in front of a dumb terminal to try it out. I figured right away, correctly, that they had just set up two terminals and that somewhere else in the building, some human was impersonating ELIZA, so I tried to ask questions that would be easy for a computer to answer but hard for a human ("What's the square root of 12345?"). If only he'd had the foresight to keep a scientific calculator close at hand.
Neither of these were on April 1. Why limit this sort of fun to one day per year?
steveha
Or better yet, provide a proper buffet style subscription. Sort of like the playsforsure plan, pay a reasonable monthly fee and listen to anything and everything, with the tracks expiring when the person stops paying.
This sounds like Rhapsody. (You can try Rhapsody out for free, by the way.)
Having access doesn't necessarily mean that a person isn't going to value it enough to buy it. Plus opt-in anonymous stat collection ought to be able to do a better job of figuring out what people actually like than a bunch of execs in suits.
I agree with both of these points. When I find music I love on Rhapsody, that music goes on my "buy that CD" list. And the top lists are great; if you pull up some band, you can see at a glance what the most popular songs are. Sometimes when I don't know the name of a song, but I know the band, I can find the song just by checking the most popular songs list.
steveha
Rhapsody is an all-you-can-eat music service. I have Rhapsody and I love it.
Rhapsody costs $12-$15 a month (depending on your options), and you can listen to the music as long as you keep paying the monthly fee. If Apple can actually talk the big labels into granting unlimited lifetime downloads of music, that you can keep, for $20... I'll be stunned. That's a huge value there. Even at $80 that's a huge value.
I could see the labels going for a $20-per-iPod tax, maybe. I can't see them going for a special model that costs $20 extra. You just know that anyone who buys the $20 extra model is going to actually use the service. Maybe the statistics show that currently the average customer buys $20 worth of songs, but this all-you-can-eat plan slices away any future chance of that dollar amount going up. We're talking about an industry that is pricing CDs at $20... can Apple really get them to do this?
P.S. If you have never tried an all-you-can-eat music service, I suggest you try the two-week free trial for Rhapsody. You will probably see the appeal. It's easy and fun to find new music. Sometimes I don't make up my mind whether I like something until I play it all the way through a few times; it's nice to be able to do that.
http://learn.rhapsody.com/
Disclaimer: I don't work for Rhapsody but I do work for the company that owns it.
steveha
I agree that Python is a good language to know. It's my favorite language.
I won't claim it's perfect, but IMHO it comes closest of any language I have tried to just letting me code up my thoughts. In any language, there is a certain amount of stuff you need to do to satisfy the syntax of the language; for example, in most languages you cannot do anything with a variable without declaring it first. Fans of Python sometimes claim that Python code looks like pseudocode, but with the extra advantage that it actually works.
Python has object-oriented features, functional programming features, and good-enough performance. It would be an ideal language for introducing a beginner to programming. When you do something that makes no sense, like trying to add an integer and a string, Python will catch it (Python is strongly typed) and Python will raise an exception. Some languages will magically convert types for you, but this can lead to subtle bugs.
Note that Google has standardized on four languages, and Python is one. (The list: Java, C++, Python, Javascript) Google has hired several important people from the Python community, including Guido van Rossum who created Python and still serves as Benevolent Dictator for Life.
I'm happy because my current job lets me do most of my work in Python, and we are doing cool stuff.
steveha
In Southeast Asia, there are legends of supernatural monster women whose heads can detach from their bodies. During the day they seem like normal women, but at night, their heads can detach (with heart, lungs, and guts coming along with the head, and the rest of the body left behind). These heads then fly around looking for victims.
My favorite part: after they feed, their guts are a bit swollen, so once they get back to their lair they soak their guts in vinegar to shrink them down, so they will fit back into the body.
In different countries this legendary monster has different names. In Thailand, this is a "krasue" (pronounced something like "gra-suer"). In Malaysia it is "penanggalan".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penanggalan
steveha
Facebook reacted quickly when the news broke. I'm not sure why this is a story now.
http://secwatch.org/advisories/1020254/
steveha
Fair enough: it's not just designers, it's also (or even mostly) the designers' clients.
I have no quarrel with most of your points.
Highres monitors that wide aren't made for having a single window fill the whole workspace. Super-wide columns aren't readable anyway; human eyes prefer text in narrow columns that wrap quickly.
Super-wide may not be best, but super-skinny with lots of wasted space around it isn't great either.
Try tiling your web browser window next to other work windows, or email, or even 2 or 3 browser windows side-by-side. You'll be happier.
My habit is to leave browsers maximized, and use lots of tabs, toggling between the tabs as I go. I really don't want to fuss with resizing windows and tiling them for ultimate effect.
I also hate web pages that decide for me to open the link in a new window. If I want a new window, I'll open one. Thus, most of my browsing is done with the middle-button click to open in a new tab, and I get windows with very heterogeneous tabs. The prefect resizing and tiling for one tab will be wrong for another tab.
Doing a 200% zoom would sort out everything and should look good.
The reason I want FF3 is to get whole-page zoom.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/07/27/firefox-3-gets-full-page-zoom
I use a 110 dots per inch monitor. I hate, hate, hate all web pages that were laid out with WYSIWYG design tools, with fonts set to 7 pixels tall and columns also specified as a certain number of pixels wide.
I don't have eagle eyes and I don't like to sit close to my screen. So I have my personal CSS forcing fonts to a minimum size... which makes some pages ugly, and other pages unreadable (depends on how much the page designer hard-coded with pixel sizes). I'm also using the ImageZoom extension to scale up images... which means the scaled images cover up lots of text on many web pages, and fancy graphical navigation buttons often don't match up with their clickable regions.
And I have a 16:10 ratio monitor... which means that often I will read a web site and there will be a narrow strip of text in the center, and tons of wasted space to either side, again because some web designer hard-coded things with pixel counts.
I used to wish that web designers would make sites that can adapt to unusual screen sizes. Well, the WYSIWYG tools aren't going away, so now I just want to zoom my pages.
steveha
I suggest that what we really need is a second Patent Office. The first one can go on granting patents as usual. The second one's mission will be to invalidate and throw out as many patents as it can. Patent examiners in the second one will be paid bonuses according to how many patents they manage to invalidate.
I'm kidding... but only partly. The more I think about this, the more I like it.
steveha
Python is already a very smooth language, but there are a few corners where it could be better. The Python guys are taking this chance to smooth out the wrinkles.
For example, Python 2.x has both range() and xrange(), and the only difference is that range() actually builds a list and xrange() doesn't (it returns an iterable object that can be expanded into a list if you like, or just used in a for loop or whatever). There is no real need to have both range() and xrange(), so Python 3.x will simply have range() and it will return an iterator. More generally, all the Python features that return a list in 2.x will now return an iterator, and the special variants that return iterators will vanish.
There are many other changes but that one is representative. There is nothing here as dramatic as the changes from Perl 5 to Perl 6. Also, there is a nifty automated tool to help migrate Python 2.6 programs to Python 3.0 programs. There is no huge controversy here, sensational headlines notwithstanding.
I predict that the Python community will embrace Python 3.x when it's available. Python 2.x won't vanish instantly, but people will want to migrate to the new Python, and certainly schools using Python to teach will want to start using Python 3.0 immediately.
steveha
Well, I prefer to buy music in a lossless format, so I buy most of it as a CD (and then immediately rip to FLAC with Grip or Sound Juicer).
I heartily recommend Magnatune. They let you download the entire album in medium-quality MP3, listen to it as much as you want, and then if you buy it you can download a WAV file, FLAC, high-quality MP3 or high-quality Ogg Vorbis. (Or more than one of those formats.)
I found several albums from Magnatune that I really love.
Also, I'm listening to a lot of music on Rhapsody right now. I actually don't mind DRM for a music "rental" situation; I object to DRM on tracks that I buy. Rhapsody is a great way to listen to a whole bunch of music at once, and they also have old Bill Cosby comedy albums, holiday albums, and other special things that I might like to listen to once in a while but I don't really have an urgent desire to buy. Rhapsody doesn't have lossless, so I'm not likely to buy much music from them, but it's a great way to find albums to buy on CD. It is available for Linux and Mac as well as Windows. (Disclaimer: I work for the company that owns Rhapsody, but it's not my job to try to sell it to you. I get a free Rhapsody account as a job benefit, but if I didn't, I would definitely be willing to pay $13 a month to get access to millions of songs.)
steveha
Back in the days when a copy of WordStar or Microsoft Multiplan cost hundreds of dollars and came on copy-protected floppy disks, Borland International came out with a line of software that was different. Turbo Pascal, Sidekick, and other products came on non-copy-protected disks and cost $50 or $100.
If you believe in the claims of the DRM advocates in our big media organizations, you probably figure that Borland must have lost money horribly. Actually, they didn't; their strategy of selling without copy protection at a fair price was very successful.
The lesson I take away from that is that most people, if you offer them a fair deal, will take the fair deal rather than steal from you. I don't remember anyone ever saying "Borland deserves to have this stuff ripped off."
If you offer me music without DRM at a fair price, I will pay the price and get the music legally. I think most music fans will do the same. (Especially if they believe that their money will mostly go to the band instead of to the record label.)
P.S. The flip side of the coin is that DRM doesn't actually work. There's this thing called the "Internet", see, and if anyone anywhere in the world manages to once break the DRM, then everyone who wants to download the DRM-free version can do so. Thus DRM just hurts the actual paying customers, who then might well feel entitled to steal the next product instead of buying it.
steveha
As I understand it, even with this so-called pharming technique, the bad guys still cannot correctly spoof an "https:" page... at least not without compromising the private key used to secure the SSL connection, or compromising the private key of the certificate signing authority.
When I explain to people how to use the Web, I always tell them to look for the security indicators before doing anything involving money.
P.S. I wouldn't be surprised if the bad guys here added Javascript code to their fake bank site, to rewrite the address bar of the web browser to show the "https:". This is why I prefer to do all my online banking with Javascript disabled; thank you, NoScript.
steveha
I read through the whole article, and was just bemused. According to the article, MapReduce isn't as good as a real database at doing the sorts of things real databases do well. Um, okay, I guess, but MapReduce can do quite a lot of other things that they seem to have missed.
Also, I had a major WTF moment when I read this:
Given the experimental evaluations to date, we have serious doubts about how well MapReduce applications can scale.
Empirical evidence to date suggests that MapReduce scales insanely well. Exhibit A: Google, which uses MapReduce running on literally thousands of servers at a time to chew through literally hundreds of terabytes of data. (Google uses MapReduce to index the entire World Wide Web!)
This in turn suggests that the authors of TFA are firmly ensconced in the ivory tower.
They complained that brute-force is slower than indexed searches. Well, nothing about MapReduce rules out the use of indexes; and for common problems, Google can add indexes as desired. (Google uses MapReduce to build their index to the Web in the first place.) And because Google adds servers by the rackful, they have quite a lot of CPU power just waiting to be used. Brute force might not be slower if you split it across thousands of servers!
Likewise, they complain that one can't use standard database report-generating tools with MapReduce; but if the Reduce tasks insert their results into a standard database, one could then use any standard report-generating tools.
MapReduce lets Google folks do crazy one-off jobs like ask every single server they own to check through their system logs for a particular error, and if it's found, return a bunch of config files and log files. Even if you had some sort of distributed database that could run on thousands of machines, any of which might die at any moment, and if you planned ahead and set the machines to copy their system logs into the database, I don't see how a database would be better for that task. That's just a single task I just invented as an example; there are many others, and MapReduce can do them all.
And one of the coolest things about MapReduce is how well it copes with failure. Inevitably some servers will respond very slowly, or will die and not respond; the MapReduce scheduler detects this and sends the Map tasks out to other servers so the job still finishes quickly. And Google keeps statistics on how often a computer is slow. At a lecture, I heard a Google guy explain how there was a BIOS bug that made one server in 50 disable some cache memory, thus greatly slowing down server performance; the MapReduce statistics helped them notice they had a problem, and isolate which computers had the problem.
MapReduce lets you run arbitrary jobs across thousands of machines at once, and all the authors of the article seem to be able to see is that it's not as database-oriented as a real database.
steveha
I'm hoping that technology will keep driving down the cost of making a movie.
The cheaper it is to make a movie, the easier it is to get the movie made, and made properly.
Say some young hotshot has a great idea for this weird, quirky movie. If it costs a lot of money, the studio will start pushing the guy around. No, don't cast that guy as the lead, cast one of our proven stars. No, take out that sarcastic sub-plot; it might offend someone. The more money is at stake, the less risk they will allow, and the more they will want to push it into the tried-and-true just-another-Hollywood-movie mold.
So, I'm hoping that cheaper movies might turn out to be better movies, because the original artistic vision of the creator will be allowed to be realized.
Of course there is a problem on the opposite extreme: since no one could say "no" to George Lucas, he went ahead and made Star Wars Episode I and the other prequels. I wish someone could have said "No, that submarine-through-the-core sequence is stupid, strip it out. No, the pod race sequence is just too long. No, Jar Jar is too annoying."
At least if movies are cheaper, there will be more of them. Hopefully more movies will result in more great movies.
steveha
Earthweb is a novel by Marc Stiegler.
In Earthweb prediction markets have a major role in the plot. Prediction markets are used to harness the wisdom of the crowds over the whole planet; this is what the title references. The book also speculates on some of the problems that might happen with prediction markets, such as people who just try to figure out an expert's prediction and just bet the same as that expert. (This expert-following skews the results; the followers are not adding any more insight to the market, and they might be lending their support to someone who might be wrong.)
The book is really a bunch of cool future Information Age ideas, with just enough plot to stitch them together. The action sequences are as energetic and implausible as a Tomb Raider game. It's not Shakespeare but I enjoyed it.
P.S. The book also tells, as part of its backstory, about a bunch of inexpensive computing devices with networking built in being air-dropped over the poorest parts of the world, to give poor children some sort of an education. He wrote this years before OLPC.
steveha
I wonder if he got fired or got a raise?
Maybe he just got a commendation for original thinking.
steveha