I know ARM/PXA/XScale can run some intensive applications (Tomtom is my favorite Killer App) on my PDA. I also have an ARM in my (linux-enabled) router, so I know what it's capable of and some multi-core'ing would be nice (push data with samba and read with UPnP simultaneous).
I even have a Gamepark portable console with an ARM9 inside, that can play DivX and DOOM (!) full-screen at 320x200.
On the other hand, my PDA and my router run severely-stripped OS'es (busybox, for example) and the Gamepark can only run one task at a time (reboot, open next game).
I never said it was a poor CPU, I just said that most programs on it are built with highly optimized code.
Firefox it an excellent example of something that can be highly multi-threaded (simultaneously retrieve multiple pages/images, run Flash and Java applets, etc.
Unfortunately, it is also an absolute pig when it comes to memory consumption (around 500MB, a.t.m.) and some of the Flash applets kick my Core Duo into 75% CPU load (just a single applet).
There is also another problem: those cores need a complex architecture, if you want to stick over 4 cores on a single die.
The Quadcore is made of 2 DualCore CPU's that happen to share the same socket, like Pentium2's douls be run in DualCPU, by putting both of them on the same bus and toggling a single CPU bit. This will not scale nicely over 4 cores and will get worse as more cores are stuck on the same bus.
AMD took a -very long time- to build a native QuadCore CPU with an efficient crossbar architecture. (I don't know how long it took Sun to design the Niagara CPU).
I have one of those wonderful next-gen PowerPC CPU's in my Playstation3, but the programmer's design guidelines tend to scare most programmers.
Each sub-cpu is linked to the main CPU, so traffic from one sub-CPU to the next (sending that downloaded image to the Firefox rendering engine is painstakingly slow.
Also, I haven't seen reports of multi-core architectures slowing down individual cores.
Because the core is linked to its bus at a (usually) fixed multiplier, slowing down individual cores means managing bus and multiplier speeds for each Core individually, which will make the Interconnection architecture (Crossbar) more complex, and thus slower and more prone to bugs.
Yes, X86 is a dog that should be simply put to sleep.
Unfortunately, all other architectures (Itanium, Sun T2) are not built for mainstream use and thus are prohibitively expensive.
Transmeta has tried to build/sell a new CPU with a brand-new architecture, which could emulate X86 and 68K, but it failed miserably.
(It was even more power-efficient, but it was probably killed stone dead by Intel)
I really hope someone else will build a new Crusoe and, this time, succeed.
If they manage to make the interface (mostly) compatible with existing PCIe interfaces,
companies might even start building hardware for it
(otherwise, they would have to re-design their device, investing into something
that is unproven and might not even outlive the design process).
About the ARM core: Keep in mind, that programs written for ARM tend to be written in low-level languages, to squeeze that last bit of power out of that poor CPU. Sticking 16 cores on a CPU is not a guarantee for a faster CPU. Four cores is the most Windows can effectively manage (after 8 cores, the increase in power is marginal). I'm sure Linux can handle those cores more effectively, but Joe Average has no use for them. I don't think all my 3 Firefox windows, my Outlook and my Word/Excel need their own CPU to run effectively.
The Niagara CPU from Sun is a wonderful piece of multithreading technology. I'm sure Apache/Bind/Postfix/Oracle/JBoss will run at blazing speeds with all those simultaneous threads,
but it's only useful in servers that have over 25 transactions going a second. My website does not get that much traffic.
And about Unix/Linux: You might want to check out the history of UNIX. It wasn't meant to be big or reliable. It became popular because it was the cheapest O/S you could stick on your hardware. It was based on 3 rules:
"Being small and simple is more important than being complete and correct."
"You only have to solve 90% of the problem."
"Everything is a stream of bytes."
More quotes "UNIX Haters Handbook": Modern Unix1 is a catastrophe. It's the "Un-Operating System": unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial.... The original version of Unix sent outside of Bell Labs didn't come on distribution tapes: Dennis Ritchie hand-built each one with a note that said, "Here's your rk05, Love, Dennis." (The rk05 was an early removable 230 System Administration disk pack.) According to Andy Tannenbaum, "If Unix crapped on your rk05, you'd write to Dennis for another.")
About FILE Security
This is NOT RAID1, it is a "scheduled synchronisation" the bad
With this system, if Disk 1 crashes halfway the day, the data is from last night.
you lose everything that changed that day. the Good
If you accidentally delete a file, you can simply open Disk 1 and get your file.
(you may need to make a seperate 'share' for Disk 2)
I've been playing with this type of idea for a while now and I think I may have just the thing:
Buy a Linksys NSLU2 and a pair of USB drives of equal size.
why the NSLU2?
The NSLU2 has its own O/S and can be administered on a Web GUI, it's a breeze to set up.
It draws very little power.
The official firmware has everything you need, no hacking (or Linux skill / support) required.
why not?
The device has only 1 problem that I know of:
It can only push 5 MB/s (those are 5 MegaBYTEs, though)
Setting it up
Once the device is set up with one disk, hook up the second disk and look up the "Disk Backup" option in the interface.
Here, you can tell it to backup Disk 1 to Disk 2 at a given time of day (or, preferably, night).
I have even told my laptop to wake up early (6am), so my NSLU2 can automatically back up my documents
Both of these functions are part of the official firmware, no hacking required
Disaster recovery:
If the device burns out, you can buy a new one and configure it.
If you're desperate to get your data now, hook it up to a Linux machine or install a Windows ext2fs driver.
If Disk 1 burns out, swap out the disks and replace it.
If Disk 2 burns out, replace it and check the Web GUI.
I am in no way affiliated with Linksys.
My other NAS is a Asus WL-500g, which has been 'tweaked' and now feeds my PS3 (TwonkyVision), Pinnacle (Wizd) and various other Media Devices
A word on disks
If you're putting it a home situation, I recommend using a silent drive (LaCie or Seagate) as main drive and using a drive which automatically powers off (WD MyBook) as a secundary drive.
That way, you ears and power bill won't even notice the NAS is powered on!
Any systems that human beings in it is doomed to make mistakes, be it voluntary (spying) or involuntary (accidents). The only other option (SkyNet), isn't very appealing either, though.
Whilst I agree with your reasoning ( My TV remote is a pain to use by touch because of a a lack of real 'buttons'), I don't think we can solely blame the phone on the spelling on it.
Keep in mind that the iPhone is indeed targeted to a specific 'iGeneration' and a special iType of people (generally iArtists), who are well-known for non-conformance.
I think few people these days actually know of the (WASD) origins of 'pwn' and it has subsequently found its way into 'regular use'.
------------ (Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?)
Oddly enough, DRM was invented for -exactly- this purpose. Not to stop johnny from copying his music or to prevent people from publishing movies to the internet.
It is meant to prevent unauthorized personnel from reading documents they're not supposed to read
and to make sure they don't make any unauthorized copies (and take them home with them,
where they can be lost/stolen). The Dutch Military still has serious issues with USB sticks,
the data on them and the ways people manage to lose them,
even after countless security briefings, memos and technical restrictions. (OK, let's disable USB on all workstations, they never use them anyway, OOPS)
Well spoken.
If they left out all the copyrighted stuff there would be nothing left. My bad, IANAL and the distinction between copyrighted, licensed and completely free code is still a bit vague to me.
most have a support staff that are nothing more than trained monkeys Actually, I'm intimately familiar with the quality of code and support of a few vendors. I'll not delve deeper into this issue, because I still want to sleep tonight.
Internal knowledge, it seems, is unfakeable. This was actually a jab at the unbreakable/unfakeable Linux game going on between RedHat and Oracle. From what I have read, Unbreakable Linux is not as stable as the original (Red Hat/CentOS). RedHat does not know every package by heart, but they can be a useful resource in finding that one (clustering) setting that's not in the documentation. They are prepared to talk to you and help you fix a problem, which is more than I can say for a lot of companies. (others usually tell you to re-install and update a clean system, before considering helping you).
They were linked from the main product page Each time I needed an evaluation license, they changed that name/location of the request. Last time I checked, it was a Developers test subscription.
Redhat wins with their support and their cool Redhat network If you liked RHN, you should see Satellite Server in action. Aside from acting as a proxy to reduce traffic and exposure,
it allows you to roll out your own RPMs and configuration files to groups of computers. That way you can update apache and roll out httpd.conf to all your webservers with a minimum of effort.
In one way, GPL allows anyone to use the sources of any GPL O/S to 'build' a new O/S, as long as all copyrighted material is left out. This has allowed a few people to 're-release' the combination/dependency/compatibility work of a commercial GPL O/S
In another way, it has also allowed another company (a certain Database company comes to mind) to do exactly the same thing. All the original company can do (and did) is to tell the people that they have a deeper understanding of the O/S itself. Internal knowledge, it seems, is unfakeable.
Technically, Red Hat would prefer home-coders to use Fedora Core. That way the home coders have access to all the latest Linux Bling (Yippee!) and Red Hat has a large testing crowd,
to see how well all those Bling features work out in the 'real world'. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is, essentially, a (previous) version of Fedora Core that has proven itself to be rock-solid.
On the other hand (like the post above), CentOS allows people to have a good look at RHEL without having to request a temporary 'test licence' (Yes they are available on request, you just have to dig a little deeper to find them).
On the subject of Red Hat actually tolerating CentOS, I have spoken to some people of RH and they seem to get along
rather well with the CentOS people.
If you follow the original thread on the article's link, you'll see that Theo is mostly upset at someone making a statement that he finds stupid and flaming the poor guy into oblivion. On one hand, I have to agree with Theo that adding virtualization does not benefit the security of a machine. OpenBSD programmer's obsession with finding and fixing that last 10% of security holes gives them a jaded view of any piece of software that is not in OpenBSD.
Indeed, Xen might not be quite as bug-free as OpenBSD and it might not (currently) provide more security than is currently present in x86 hardware and O/S'es.
What he does not see, though, is that current Virtualization is merely in an infant state. CPU developers are still trying to find ways of segmenting Virtual Machines in better, more secure ways than are currently possible.
If OpenBSD van at least get its Virtualization act together and thing -WITH- the virtualization developers, they might be able to make a difference.
I know there are currently holes in Virtualization security. Blue Pill is living proof. The discussion going on about it, w.r.t. detection and prevention will eventually allow future generations virtualization to be more secure.
What Virtualization -does- allow you to do, is set up a fully featured Development-, Test- and Acceptance- server on the same piece of hardware. With a bit of trickery it even allows on-the-fly hybernation-type full backups and restores os a machine, without even stopping the machine itself. Like an Ignite tape on steroids.
I think the original question on the list was a reasonable one, if only for the wrong reasons. Virtualization allows for fully-controlled testing and forensic environments. Copying the full DomU currently running on the firewall and restoring it to a testing/development server gives you an environment to test a new firewall design or to examine a hacked machine in a sandbox environment, without the hacker's scripts/tools finding out about it, allowing for forensic examination. (Network Associates has been using virtualization to study virii for quite a while, now).
Microsoft is adding more and more features to have poeple use their (noisy) console for things it was never designed for. With this, they hope to sell the machine to more people that were still in doubt about buying a console. Maybe they will even make a few sales to people that simply want a TV tuner with a decent programme listing, like the way people bought PlayStation2's as a DVD player.
I'm perfectly happy with my Playstation as a Game Console and BD-ROM player. It's quiet and has all the outputs I need to make that perfect connection to my Home Cinema equipment. Yes, I have Linux on there so I can use it to watch 'downloaded' media content, but it's not the reason I bought it. (An XboX can't even do that without a PC with Windows Media Player 11 on a networking doing all the hard work.) With Linux, a PS3 can already use any linux-supported (HD)TV receiver, or any other (Linux supported) USB device.
Because of HDTV and ever-more-powerful processors, one machine will someday sit in the living room, recording your TV shows, string your music, doubling as Internet Appliance for browsing an e-mail. At the very least. If people will still have hard-wired phones, the machine will answer the phone for you. Home Automation will also be interesting (toggling lights when you're on vacation, climate control, remote alarm check-up/signaling, providing access to the networked webcam in the baby room). The possible privacy issues are just as endless.
Any machine successful enough gets the attention of 'the power that be' and will be used for things people will not like. Just as phone companies log your calls, ISP's keep track of all your sent and received e-mail and cars with LoJack are already monitored (Did I mention Cell Phone tracing?), every bit of information will be monitored, logged and, if you're unlucky, scanned and reported.
Everything automated can also be controlled. Just like TiVO's deleting shows at the broadcaster's command and digital music becoming suddenly unplayable , someone will always be annoyed at the endless possibilities and will want to keep the possibilities within limits.
What will -really- make the device sell is something I don't know yet. It's 'killer feature' maybe has not even been invented yet.
Did anyone look at the names of the people that built teh first American Atom Bomb?
Not exactly English names, eh?
They sound more like, wel..., German.
The US simply 'acquired' the German nuclear Physicists after WWII to build the first -working- Atom Bomb.
Wikipedia Nuclear Weapon:
The first nuclear weapons were created in the United States by an international team, including many displaced scientists from central Europe, which included Germany, with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada during World War II as part of the top-secret "Manhattan Project". While the first weapons were developed primarily out of fear that Nazi Germany would develop them first, they were eventually used against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Thanks!
I'm an incredible scatterbrain and I just found the html formatting tags at the bottom of the text box.
I thought I'd try making sense for a change;-)
It took about 6 edits/reviews, but I'm glad the effort was appreciated
I have to admit that I am not a Bluetooth Expert, but I do have a degree in Electrical Engineering.
With embedded devices (especially low-power ones, like bluetooth headsets),
the trick is in making the hardware comply with the protocol,
but the art is doing so with as little (electrical) effort as possible.
If he can design a chip that takes care of the entire Bluetooth side of things,
which consumes only a fraction of what a microcontroller does,
that chip design saves engeineers of embedded devices a lot of effort.
They are, however, expected to pay for the use of his design.
This form of outsourced development is what makes the patent-world tick.
Actually accomplishing the same, without infringeing on those patents, is one of the things makes the F/OSS world tick.
My guess is, that he probably came in contact with the early Bluetooth ideas and tinkered with those in his spare time in College.
This, of itself, means that the implementations he designed in college are owned by said college, which applied for a patent and got lucky
You are indeed correct, except for a few details:
(from Wikipedia:)
The Bluetooth specification was first developed in 1994 by Sven Mattisson and Jaap Haartsen, who were working for Ericsson Mobile Platforms in Lund, Sweden at the time[1]....
(the Bluetooth consortium) was established by Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Nokia, and later joined by many other companies as Associate or Adopter members
What's most surprising is, that one of the founding members has stop developing a while ago:
But, back to the story at hand:
Suominem had 4 patents on implementations of bluetooth protocols
People are still allowed to develop their own bluetooth hardware and software, but if they want to use existing systems, they'll have to pay the license fees for those patents.
(kinda like licensing the Quake Engine to make Half-life, before the engine went OSS)
Broadcomm bought a license, but Nokia did not.
(They probably decided they would code their own, then failed)
F.E.A.R. and FarCry are two games that managed to scare the pants off me.
The best part of F.E.A.R. is that it -makes- you confront your fears.
(darkness, heights, ghosts, death, the usual)
The bad part of F.E.A.R. is the way it simple -eats- memory.
It easily fills 1.5 GB of RAM
The best part of FarCry is the sheer scale of the levels.
You can walk back for 15 mins to pick up that one weapon you dropped.
The only bad part of FarCry is the lack of 'real' savegames / quicksaves.
It's truly annoying to spend 30 minutes trying to kill 16 people without dying,
and then faling off a bridge before you get to the save-point.
This was actually the exact system I was thinking of when I was reading this. ( feel free to patent this mechanism, as long as my name is mentioned anywhere in the patent;-)
A: Record vote on Electronic Machine. (This can be either a paper stub or a WORM card, be electrionic, magnetic or (low-power) RFID) The machine will dispense the vote medium and direct the voter to the next step
B: Verify vote. The voter will present the vote medium to a single, non-networked machine with no writeable storage. This machine will simply display (and pronounce) the vote on the vote medium
C: Cast Vote. The Vote Medium will be accepted by a Receiving Machine. It will perform a rudimentary check of the device (to check for bit-errorrs, etc) and keep an internal record of the received votes on WORM media in case of power failure. (E.G. EPROM) In case of power failure, the WORM media will still contain the received votes and the machine can continue accepting new votes without a re-count.
D: Tally votes. At the end of the voting session, the tally can be either displayed on a screen or written to a Digital Medium (providing a digital signature previously stored on the First Sector of the WORM media).
E: (optional) Recount votes. In case of a recount (or a malfunction) the received Vote Media can be recovered from the inside of the machine. (with a locking mechanism which only a Voting Supervisor can unlock) The Medium can then be re-counted by placing the Vote Medium in another Voting Machine or by manual rescanning. (scanning device connected directly to an electronic display).
This system retains Voter Anonymity by recording only the vote. Single Voting can me reassured by either A/ handing out the medium upon presenting a valid ID to receive the medium, or B/ by sending out Blank Medium by mail and having people precent ID to receive a replacement Vote Medium
(in case it gets lost in the mail)
Slashdot Mirror
I know ARM/PXA/XScale can run some intensive applications (Tomtom is my favorite Killer App) on my PDA. I also have an ARM in my (linux-enabled) router, so I know what it's capable of and some multi-core'ing would be nice (push data with samba and read with UPnP simultaneous). I even have a Gamepark portable console with an ARM9 inside, that can play DivX and DOOM (!) full-screen at 320x200. On the other hand, my PDA and my router run severely-stripped OS'es (busybox, for example) and the Gamepark can only run one task at a time (reboot, open next game). I never said it was a poor CPU, I just said that most programs on it are built with highly optimized code. Firefox it an excellent example of something that can be highly multi-threaded (simultaneously retrieve multiple pages/images, run Flash and Java applets, etc. Unfortunately, it is also an absolute pig when it comes to memory consumption (around 500MB, a.t.m.) and some of the Flash applets kick my Core Duo into 75% CPU load (just a single applet). There is also another problem: those cores need a complex architecture, if you want to stick over 4 cores on a single die. The Quadcore is made of 2 DualCore CPU's that happen to share the same socket, like Pentium2's douls be run in DualCPU, by putting both of them on the same bus and toggling a single CPU bit. This will not scale nicely over 4 cores and will get worse as more cores are stuck on the same bus. AMD took a -very long time- to build a native QuadCore CPU with an efficient crossbar architecture. (I don't know how long it took Sun to design the Niagara CPU). I have one of those wonderful next-gen PowerPC CPU's in my Playstation3, but the programmer's design guidelines tend to scare most programmers. Each sub-cpu is linked to the main CPU, so traffic from one sub-CPU to the next (sending that downloaded image to the Firefox rendering engine is painstakingly slow. Also, I haven't seen reports of multi-core architectures slowing down individual cores. Because the core is linked to its bus at a (usually) fixed multiplier, slowing down individual cores means managing bus and multiplier speeds for each Core individually, which will make the Interconnection architecture (Crossbar) more complex, and thus slower and more prone to bugs. Yes, X86 is a dog that should be simply put to sleep. Unfortunately, all other architectures (Itanium, Sun T2) are not built for mainstream use and thus are prohibitively expensive. Transmeta has tried to build/sell a new CPU with a brand-new architecture, which could emulate X86 and 68K, but it failed miserably. (It was even more power-efficient, but it was probably killed stone dead by Intel) I really hope someone else will build a new Crusoe and, this time, succeed. If they manage to make the interface (mostly) compatible with existing PCIe interfaces, companies might even start building hardware for it (otherwise, they would have to re-design their device, investing into something that is unproven and might not even outlive the design process).
About the ARM core:
...
Keep in mind, that programs written for ARM tend to be written in low-level languages, to squeeze that last bit of power out of that poor CPU.
Sticking 16 cores on a CPU is not a guarantee for a faster CPU. Four cores is the most Windows can effectively manage (after 8 cores, the increase in power is marginal).
I'm sure Linux can handle those cores more effectively, but Joe Average has no use for them.
I don't think all my 3 Firefox windows, my Outlook and my Word/Excel need their own CPU to run effectively.
The Niagara CPU from Sun is a wonderful piece of multithreading technology.
I'm sure Apache/Bind/Postfix/Oracle/JBoss will run at blazing speeds with all those simultaneous threads,
but it's only useful in servers that have over 25 transactions going a second.
My website does not get that much traffic.
And about Unix/Linux:
You might want to check out the history of UNIX.
It wasn't meant to be big or reliable.
It became popular because it was the cheapest O/S you could stick on your hardware.
It was based on 3 rules:
"Being small and simple is more important than being complete and correct."
"You only have to solve 90% of the problem."
"Everything is a stream of bytes."
More quotes "UNIX Haters Handbook":
Modern Unix1 is a catastrophe. It's the "Un-Operating System": unreliable, unintuitive, unforgiving, unhelpful, and underpowered. Little is more frustrating than trying to force Unix to do something useful and nontrivial.
The original version of Unix sent outside of Bell Labs didn't come on distribution tapes: Dennis Ritchie hand-built each one with a note that said, "Here's your rk05, Love, Dennis." (The rk05 was an early removable 230 System Administration disk pack.) According to Andy Tannenbaum, "If Unix crapped on your rk05, you'd write to Dennis for another.")
Those that have actually read all of the above and enjoyed it need to go to:
http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-download.html
(It's free, as in beer)
About FILE Security
This is NOT RAID1, it is a "scheduled synchronisation"
the bad
With this system, if Disk 1 crashes halfway the day, the data is from last night.
you lose everything that changed that day.
the Good
If you accidentally delete a file, you can simply open Disk 1 and get your file.
(you may need to make a seperate 'share' for Disk 2)
Sorry, no ugly
I've been playing with this type of idea for a while now and I think I may have just the thing:
Buy a Linksys NSLU2 and a pair of USB drives of equal size.
why the NSLU2?
The NSLU2 has its own O/S and can be administered on a Web GUI, it's a breeze to set up.
It draws very little power.
The official firmware has everything you need, no hacking (or Linux skill / support) required.
why not?
The device has only 1 problem that I know of:
It can only push 5 MB/s (those are 5 MegaBYTEs, though)
Setting it up
Once the device is set up with one disk, hook up the second disk and look up the "Disk Backup" option in the interface.
Here, you can tell it to backup Disk 1 to Disk 2 at a given time of day (or, preferably, night).
I have even told my laptop to wake up early (6am), so my NSLU2 can automatically back up my documents
Both of these functions are part of the official firmware, no hacking required
Disaster recovery:
If the device burns out, you can buy a new one and configure it.
If you're desperate to get your data now, hook it up to a Linux machine or install a Windows ext2fs driver.
If Disk 1 burns out, swap out the disks and replace it.
If Disk 2 burns out, replace it and check the Web GUI.
I am in no way affiliated with Linksys.
My other NAS is a Asus WL-500g, which has been 'tweaked' and now feeds my PS3 (TwonkyVision), Pinnacle (Wizd) and various other Media Devices
A word on disks
If you're putting it a home situation, I recommend using a silent drive (LaCie or Seagate) as main drive and using a drive which automatically powers off (WD MyBook) as a secundary drive.
That way, you ears and power bill won't even notice the NAS is powered on!
Any systems that human beings in it is doomed to make mistakes, be it voluntary (spying) or involuntary (accidents).
The only other option (SkyNet), isn't very appealing either, though.
Also keep in mind, that this (paper DRM) is, of course already reality:
Color Copiers are already 'prohibited from' copying paper money.
Just try it and see what happens.
Then, try to find an (exotic) currency it might not already know
Whilst I agree with your reasoning ( My TV remote is a pain to use by touch because of a a lack of real 'buttons'),
I don't think we can solely blame the phone on the spelling on it.
Keep in mind that the iPhone is indeed targeted to a specific 'iGeneration' and a special iType of people (generally iArtists), who are well-known for non-conformance.
I think few people these days actually know of the (WASD) origins of 'pwn' and it has subsequently found its way into 'regular use'.
------------
(Where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?)
Oddly enough, DRM was invented for -exactly- this purpose.
Not to stop johnny from copying his music or to prevent people from publishing movies to the internet.
It is meant to prevent unauthorized personnel from reading documents they're not supposed to read
and to make sure they don't make any unauthorized copies (and take them home with them,
where they can be lost/stolen).
The Dutch Military still has serious issues with USB sticks,
the data on them and the ways people manage to lose them,
even after countless security briefings, memos and technical restrictions.
(OK, let's disable USB on all workstations, they never use them anyway, OOPS)
Check. Intel Inside? Intel Research has developed the ultimate baby monitor for neurotic parents.
Working on it... Intestinal Exploder? Not hits as of yet... "rights management" for your medications? competing hospitals are choosing not to install viewers that would allow MD's to look at films that were taken at their competition
They're still working on DRM'ing the Doctors, but they'll get to the patients soon enough. Nursing outsourced to call centers? Telemedicine and Telehealth Links - Call Centers
and
Using Telephone Support to Manage Chronic Disease
Already a booming business, get your medical help by phone!
Why, I always get my regular mental check-up from Dr Sbaitso
I'm still waiting for that Star Wars 'droid to get me that mechanical hand, though.
I'll not delve deeper into this issue, because I still want to sleep tonight. Internal knowledge, it seems, is unfakeable. This was actually a jab at the unbreakable/unfakeable Linux game going on between RedHat and Oracle.
From what I have read, Unbreakable Linux is not as stable as the original (Red Hat/CentOS).
RedHat does not know every package by heart, but they can be a useful resource in finding that one (clustering) setting that's not in the documentation.
They are prepared to talk to you and help you fix a problem, which is more than I can say for a lot of companies.
(others usually tell you to re-install and update a clean system, before considering helping you). They were linked from the main product page Each time I needed an evaluation license, they changed that name/location of the request.
Last time I checked, it was a Developers test subscription. Redhat wins with their support and their cool Redhat network If you liked RHN, you should see Satellite Server in action.
Aside from acting as a proxy to reduce traffic and exposure,
it allows you to roll out your own RPMs and configuration files to groups of computers.
That way you can update apache and roll out httpd.conf to all your webservers with a minimum of effort.
In one way, GPL allows anyone to use the sources of any GPL O/S to 'build' a new O/S, as long as all copyrighted material is left out.
This has allowed a few people to 're-release' the combination/dependency/compatibility work of a commercial GPL O/S
In another way, it has also allowed another company (a certain Database company comes to mind) to do exactly the same thing.
All the original company can do (and did) is to tell the people that they have a deeper understanding of the O/S itself.
Internal knowledge, it seems, is unfakeable.
Technically, Red Hat would prefer home-coders to use Fedora Core.
That way the home coders have access to all the latest Linux Bling (Yippee!) and Red Hat has a large testing crowd,
to see how well all those Bling features work out in the 'real world'.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is, essentially, a (previous) version of Fedora Core that has proven itself to be rock-solid.
On the other hand (like the post above), CentOS allows people to have a good look at RHEL without having to request a temporary 'test licence'
(Yes they are available on request, you just have to dig a little deeper to find them).
On the subject of Red Hat actually tolerating CentOS, I have spoken to some people of RH and they seem to get along
rather well with the CentOS people.
If you follow the original thread on the article's link, you'll see that Theo is mostly upset at someone making a statement that he finds stupid and flaming the poor guy into oblivion.
On one hand, I have to agree with Theo that adding virtualization does not benefit the security of a machine.
OpenBSD programmer's obsession with finding and fixing that last 10% of security holes gives them a jaded view of any piece of software that is not in OpenBSD.
Indeed, Xen might not be quite as bug-free as OpenBSD and it might not (currently) provide more security than is currently present in x86 hardware and O/S'es.
What he does not see, though, is that current Virtualization is merely in an infant state.
CPU developers are still trying to find ways of segmenting Virtual Machines in better, more secure ways than are currently possible.
If OpenBSD van at least get its Virtualization act together and thing -WITH- the virtualization developers, they might be able to make a difference.
I know there are currently holes in Virtualization security. Blue Pill is living proof.
The discussion going on about it, w.r.t. detection and prevention will eventually allow future generations virtualization to be more secure.
What Virtualization -does- allow you to do, is set up a fully featured Development-, Test- and Acceptance- server on the same piece of hardware. With a bit of trickery it even allows on-the-fly hybernation-type full backups and restores os a machine, without even stopping the machine itself. Like an Ignite tape on steroids.
I think the original question on the list was a reasonable one, if only for the wrong reasons.
Virtualization allows for fully-controlled testing and forensic environments.
Copying the full DomU currently running on the firewall and restoring it to a testing/development server gives you an environment to test a new firewall design or to examine a hacked machine in a sandbox environment, without the hacker's scripts/tools finding out about it, allowing for forensic examination.
(Network Associates has been using virtualization to study virii for quite a while, now).
Microsoft is adding more and more features to have poeple use their (noisy) console for things it was never designed for. With this, they hope to sell the machine to more people that were still in doubt about buying a console. Maybe they will even make a few sales to people that simply want a TV tuner with a decent programme listing, like the way people bought PlayStation2's as a DVD player.
I'm perfectly happy with my Playstation as a Game Console and BD-ROM player.
It's quiet and has all the outputs I need to make that perfect connection to my Home Cinema equipment.
Yes, I have Linux on there so I can use it to watch 'downloaded' media content, but it's not the reason I bought it.
(An XboX can't even do that without a PC with Windows Media Player 11 on a networking doing all the hard work.)
With Linux, a PS3 can already use any linux-supported (HD)TV receiver, or any other (Linux supported) USB device.
Because of HDTV and ever-more-powerful processors, one machine will someday sit in the living room, recording your TV shows, string your music, doubling as Internet Appliance for browsing an e-mail.
At the very least.
If people will still have hard-wired phones, the machine will answer the phone for you.
Home Automation will also be interesting (toggling lights when you're on vacation, climate control, remote alarm check-up/signaling, providing access to the networked webcam in the baby room).
The possible privacy issues are just as endless.
Any machine successful enough gets the attention of 'the power that be' and will be used for things people will not like. Just as phone companies log your calls, ISP's keep track of all your sent and received e-mail and cars with LoJack are already monitored (Did I mention Cell Phone tracing?), every bit of information will be monitored, logged and, if you're unlucky, scanned and reported.
Everything automated can also be controlled.
Just like TiVO's deleting shows at the broadcaster's command and digital music becoming suddenly unplayable , someone will always be annoyed at the endless possibilities and will want to keep the possibilities within limits.
What will -really- make the device sell is something I don't know yet.
It's 'killer feature' maybe has not even been invented yet.
In that case,
Please prove to me that there is no flying spaghetti monster.
Did anyone look at the names of the people that built teh first American Atom Bomb? Not exactly English names, eh? They sound more like, wel..., German. The US simply 'acquired' the German nuclear Physicists after WWII to build the first -working- Atom Bomb. Wikipedia Nuclear Weapon: The first nuclear weapons were created in the United States by an international team, including many displaced scientists from central Europe, which included Germany, with assistance from the United Kingdom and Canada during World War II as part of the top-secret "Manhattan Project". While the first weapons were developed primarily out of fear that Nazi Germany would develop them first, they were eventually used against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Also interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
Macrovision invented a special system with copyright bits and epiry dates.3 10234
n slation
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/22/1
They have already been in the news a lot:
http://daringfireball.net/2007/02/macrovision_tra
Thanks! ;-)
I'm an incredible scatterbrain and I just found the html formatting tags at the bottom of the text box.
I thought I'd try making sense for a change
It took about 6 edits/reviews, but I'm glad the effort was appreciated
I have to admit that I am not a Bluetooth Expert, but I do have a degree in Electrical Engineering.
With embedded devices (especially low-power ones, like bluetooth headsets),
the trick is in making the hardware comply with the protocol,
but the art is doing so with as little (electrical) effort as possible.
If he can design a chip that takes care of the entire Bluetooth side of things,
which consumes only a fraction of what a microcontroller does,
that chip design saves engeineers of embedded devices a lot of effort.
They are, however, expected to pay for the use of his design.
This form of outsourced development is what makes the patent-world tick.
Actually accomplishing the same, without infringeing on those patents, is one of the things makes the F/OSS world tick.
My guess is, that he probably came in contact with the early Bluetooth ideas and tinkered with those in his spare time in College.
This, of itself, means that the implementations he designed in college are owned by said college, which applied for a patent and got lucky
You are indeed correct, except for a few details: (from Wikipedia:) The Bluetooth specification was first developed in 1994 by Sven Mattisson and Jaap Haartsen, who were working for Ericsson Mobile Platforms in Lund, Sweden at the time[1]. ...
(the Bluetooth consortium) was established by Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Toshiba and Nokia, and later joined by many other companies as Associate or Adopter members
What's most surprising is, that one of the founding members has stop developing a while ago:
But, back to the story at hand:
Suominem had 4 patents on implementations of bluetooth protocols
People are still allowed to develop their own bluetooth hardware and software, but if they want to use existing systems, they'll have to pay the license fees for those patents.
(kinda like licensing the Quake Engine to make Half-life, before the engine went OSS)
Broadcomm bought a license, but Nokia did not.
(They probably decided they would code their own, then failed)
F.E.A.R. and FarCry are two games that managed to scare the pants off me. The best part of F.E.A.R. is that it -makes- you confront your fears. (darkness, heights, ghosts, death, the usual) The bad part of F.E.A.R. is the way it simple -eats- memory. It easily fills 1.5 GB of RAM The best part of FarCry is the sheer scale of the levels. You can walk back for 15 mins to pick up that one weapon you dropped. The only bad part of FarCry is the lack of 'real' savegames / quicksaves. It's truly annoying to spend 30 minutes trying to kill 16 people without dying, and then faling off a bridge before you get to the save-point.
This was actually the exact system I was thinking of when I was reading this. ;-)
( feel free to patent this mechanism, as long as my name is mentioned anywhere in the patent
A: Record vote on Electronic Machine.
(This can be either a paper stub or a WORM card, be electrionic, magnetic or (low-power) RFID)
The machine will dispense the vote medium and direct the voter to the next step
B: Verify vote.
The voter will present the vote medium to a single, non-networked machine with no writeable storage.
This machine will simply display (and pronounce) the vote on the vote medium
C: Cast Vote.
The Vote Medium will be accepted by a Receiving Machine.
It will perform a rudimentary check of the device (to check for bit-errorrs, etc) and keep an internal record of the received votes on WORM media in case of power failure. (E.G. EPROM)
In case of power failure, the WORM media will still contain the received votes and the machine can continue accepting new votes without a re-count.
D: Tally votes.
At the end of the voting session, the tally can be either displayed on a screen or written to a Digital Medium (providing a digital signature previously stored on the First Sector of the WORM media).
E: (optional) Recount votes.
In case of a recount (or a malfunction) the received Vote Media can be recovered from the inside of the machine. (with a locking mechanism which only a Voting Supervisor can unlock)
The Medium can then be re-counted by placing the Vote Medium in another Voting Machine or by manual rescanning. (scanning device connected directly to an electronic display).
This system retains Voter Anonymity by recording only the vote.
Single Voting can me reassured by either
A/ handing out the medium upon presenting a valid ID to receive the medium, or
B/ by sending out Blank Medium by mail and having people precent ID to receive a replacement Vote Medium
(in case it gets lost in the mail)