Next up was a device that measured my perscription. I had to stare at a little picture while it zoomed in and out of focus. Apparently this determines my exact perscription, none of that "Is this better, or that" lens swapping. I wonder why eye doctors don't use this all the time.
Well, there's a number of reasons... the machines are expensive, and they're even more expensive for really accurate models. They aren't perfect, and sometimes get it wrong (but that's usually pretty obvious when the lenses you get just don't work for you, and a second check on a different machine should catch this).
But the #1 reason? If you check somebody's eyes in 30 seconds with a machine, instead of spending 10 minutes doing it by hand, many people don't think you're doing it properly, or don't think they're getting "their money's worth". It's utterly stupid, but so are the majority of the people who go to an optician - remember, it's the same people that TV is made for.
Rumour has it that 1000W and 1200W powersupplies are soon to be standard
Those numbers are meaningless marketing. Power supply manufacturers keep increasing them to make their supplies sound more powerful, but the reality is that they're just finding new (unhelpful) ways to add up the numbers and get a larger figure.
Fundamentally, you cannot describe the power consumption of a PC PSU using a single number. There are too many variables. You *can* describe the drain of an assembled, running PC at a given point in time using a single number, but the only connection it has to the PSU 'rating' is that it will definitely be smaller. You'll find some more informative numbers printed on a sticker on the power supply, telling you the peak drain for each of the rails, but what really matters is the power consumption of all the devices in the computer.
In practice, these '800W' power supplies that you see today are just half a dozen rails (at varying voltages), each of which can supply a peak current of between 100W and 300W. Most of them cannot supply peak current to every rail simultaneously. People upgrade their power supplies to handle high-end video cards and think this means they need to consume 800W instead of 300W. It doesn't. It means that one of the rails supplying their video card needed to handle 200W instead of 150W, or something on that order. Overclockers rarely need a larger amount of power, they need a more expensive power supply that puts out smoother voltage when a noisy load (overclocked CPU) is applied. Etcetera.
So sure, we may soon be needing power supplies that say '1200W' on the box. But that doesn't mean they will consume 50% more power than one that says '800W'.
Let's get beyond the simple binary 'all closed source is bad for customers/users, all open source is good". In an ideal world yes, but open source developers as people have many of the same motivations as closed source developers
Let's not. The simple binary is in fact the right answer, so long as you don't complicate it. Here's what I mean:
A software project can have many attributes that determine how good or bad it is for you. One of these is whether or not it is free software. A free software project is always superior to a non-free project that is otherwise identical (if you're the user). It has been repeatedly shown that this particular attribute is not tied to any of the others - it doesn't determine their values. It may share causes with some of them, but there are many possible causes to choose from, so just knowing whether or not it's free software doesn't tell you anything. So a project can be free but otherwise suck, or it can be proprietary but otherwise good, or any other combinations.
So long as you keep it as that one-bit value, 'free' vs 'non-free', it makes sense. The failure you're referring to lies in assuming that this bit affects any of the others - it doesn't really. Often people confuse 'free software' with 'community-driven', or 'resembles project X', and that's the mistake.
The open source code might *potentially* be resurrected by other developers, but it might not. Leaving customers/ users just as stranded as if it was a closed source project
Looking at this statement in those terms, things become more clear. The free software project can be resurrected by somebody else, the non-free project cannot be resurrected. So it's definitely better to have free software here, because then you've got a chance, instead of having no chance.
Any individual project may be easier or harder to resurrect, and it may be more or less likely to need it. But these things are not determined by whether or not the project is free software. You'll have to look at other aspects of the project to discover them. Better yet, look at the reasons why the project is the way it is, that tells you even more.
A large part of building a sustainable business is to solve this problem and build structures that survive change. Sustainable software is built in layers so that no single team determines the life of the whole.
Of course, a lot of people get this wrong. They manage to build a structure that survives change, but does so because it isn't dependant on the skills of the individuals at all. That sounds good, but it really means that the system cannot benefit from the skills of the current employees - in effect, everybody is reduced to a minimum baseline level, in order to ensure that they can be replaced. This is one of the symptoms of the classic 'big software house' disease. It's not enough to get good people, keep them, and survive after they leave - you've got to do all that without impeding their work.
Very few people manage to build a structure that survives major change and can still benefit from the expertise of the workers. It's really hard.
How big do you expect this number of excess sectors to be in a competitive market where size is a major selling point of storage media?
It varies between manufacturers, but I believe it's normally something like a few Mb. Yes, current drives do this - it's part of their 'fail-safe' behaviour. They have some spare sectors so that they can silently replace defective ones.
How much data can you keep from deletion?
This is an interesting question. Probably doesn't occur very often, but in combination with something like truecrypt it could work well (so that the drive cannot tell which sectors contain real data and which are padding).
See that number under RAW_VALUE? That's how many sectors have been moved. In most hard drives, that number will read 0. Mine is greater, because it's an old hard drive, and in a heavily-used laptop to boot.
No, it's confusingly named. That is actually the number of sectors which the drive has removed from the map.
Corporations don't see people as "citizens" anymore. We're not even their customers -- we're consumers. Language always gives one away.
This is very true. It's always a good idea to see what a corporation calls you.
If you are a client, then they think of you as an integral part of the process. You are involved in the development of whatever they are selling to you, and it is built around your needs. Outsourcing companies, good hotels, and lap dancers think like this.
If you are a customer, then they think of you as an individual who makes a take-it-or-leave-it decision about their product. They will attempt to make as many people as possible want to take it, but won't worry too much about missing a few around the edges. Still, they need to keep you happy and won't do something that's bad for you without a really good reason. The good ISPs and expensive high street stores think like this.
If you are a consumer, then they think of you as tied up, prone, on the floor, while they defecate their products onto you and then send you an invoice. It doesn't matter what you think, you don't get to make a choice. The big media companies think like this. So do the telephone carriers, and most other monopolies.
Wasn't a free market and capitalism supposed to drive innovation and technology?
You have to realise that when a capitalist is talking about 'innovation' they mean 'greed'. Not new things that are good for you - new ways for the plutocrat to acquire your money.
Actually, you need some level of self-policing to curb the problem if you want to demonstrate that laws are not necessary.
That's a disingenuous myth. It's far, far better to have laws than self-policing.
Why?
Because laws come with other laws guaranteeing you due process. 'Self-policing' means a corporate does whatever they feel like to you. This GoDaddy nonsense is a classic example: $200, pay-or-be-damned, no evidence, no appeals, no way to argue your case.
The best thing of all is neither laws nor self-policing, but rather a common carrier. That's an entity which moves data for everybody and every purpose without limits, and in exchance is not responsible for any of the data they move. Sure the terrorists can use it, but that's better than government or corporate intervention. Whenever this is reasonably practical, it's better than all the alternatives. It may not be practical for the sale of firearms, but it's definitely practical for the sale of DNS names.
As far as I know, the only limitation that modern firmware places on securely erasing data is smart buffering. i.e. the firmware sees 10 writes to the same sectors in the buffer and chooses to only write the last one to save time. Although that is a problem, modern erasing software ensures that all X amount of specified writes actually get written.
The big problem is that the firmware can remap the physical layout in any way it likes. There's no guarantee that the sector 5 you just wrote to is the same sector 5 you wrote to six months ago - the only guarantee is that if you write some data to sector 5, and then later you ask for sector 5 back again, you get back the data you wrote. Successive writes aren't necessarily placed in the same location. Flash memory is notable for rarely putting two writes in the same place, but hard drives do it too (just not so often). So far as I know, the current desktop drives only remap for reliability and not for performance... but that's quite bad enough (and it seems likely that they'll start doing it for performance sooner or later).
A secondary problem is that secure erasing requires knowledge of the physical layout (to know what sectors and pattern to write in - you may need to overwrite the adjacent sectors in both directions, depending on how the disk is laid out, but which ones are they?) and the firmware hides that information.
There may be others, those are just the ones I'm aware of.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
It wouldn't, but you're nearly right. Simply placing a conductive object inside a magnetic field does nothing at all. In order for something to happen there must be motion. When you're using a coil powered from regular mains AC, the power resembles a sine wave, so the field is oscillating back and forth - this is sufficient to have a small effect, but you really want to move the object relative to the coil or you're mostly wasting power (and unlikely to stop the media from working, using a little coil like that). Specifically, the object needs to move across the direction of the field, not along it. A regular coil has field lines that move out from the top of the coil, move around it in a circle, and meet again at the bottom of the coil - so the overall shape in three dimensions is like a torus, with the hole going down the centre of the coil. So you want to move the object repeatedly towards and away from the side of the coil; that cuts the field at 90 degrees, which is where you'll get the maximum effect.
Powering down the coil slowly accomplishes nothing directly - it's not about changing power levels. If you want to make the coil have a stronger effect without moving anything, you need to oscillate it faster, but that's impractical. Just move the media towards and away from the coil, in close proximity, a few times. Speed doesn't matter much, but the power developed by the coil and the length of time you spend doing it does. Moving the media towards the end of the coil (where the hole is) does very little; moving it towards the side is best. However, if you want to actually *remove* all traces of magnetism from something, then you do want to gradually reduce the power level - you see this most often in a monitor's degaussing coil. This may be necessary for tapes and floppies, if the drive can't handle media that has been randomly magnetised and you want to use the media again, but it's not required if you just want to wipe the data before disposal.
Not to mention that the whole "residuum magnetism" that may actually have existed in 90s HDs isnt simply possible anymore with todays track density. Any kind of remnand from the last state would be well under the paramangetic limit and completely replaced by thermal noise.
That may be true at some point in the future but it currently is not, and won't be without radical changes in the storage method. There must be a certain amount of tolerance in the current systems in order to compensate for drifting effects. The problem is that if you magnetise a surface such that there are two fields with opposing polarities next to each other, they will over time drift together and kinda-sorta cancel each other out (or at least, you will no longer be able to tell which one was where). So that hard drives keep their data for some number of years, the fields have to be sufficiently strong and spaced out for the drive head to still be able to identify them after they have sat there for a year. That means the head is writing strong, clear fields, and then after a few months it reads back a weaker, fuzzier field.
Now, if the head then writes a strong, clear field over the top of the fuzzy one... then there will be residual traces of the fuzziness in the space between the clear fields. Forensic analysis can use a far more expensive and accurate device to read the fields, and so it can spot several generations of this stuff - it's like a buildup of sediment.
That's not the only possible technique (I don't know which one the professional data recovery companies use), but it's one that drives based around the current methods will always suffer, simply because they must have those tolerances. You can't build a drive where the residuals are completely unreadable, because it means your data will be unreadable after a few months - you have to allow enough for the data to be readable, and that means that residuals can be readable too. Anywhere that you have tolerances like this, you can build a device with a finer tolerance and discover more data.
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is sufficient.
That's not what the text you quoted said, nor is it correct. It's true that overwriting 35 times doesn't accomplish anything more, though. The quote said:
For any modern PRML/EPRML drive, a few passes of random scrubbing is the best you can do.
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is the best you can do [from software / without breaking the drive]. That's because the firmware makes it almost impossible to 'securely' erase data from the drives, so you just can't do any better. It's nowhere near 'sufficient'; in fact it's almost useless against any modern hardware analysis. (The best you can do, if you don't want to keep the drive, is to heat the platters until they melt; that is guaranteed to destroy the data, but almost everything else isn't).
The other important part of the quote is:
Conversely, with modern high-density drives, even if you've got 10KB of sensitive data on a drive and can't erase it with 100% certainty, the chances of an adversary being able to find the erased traces of that 10KB in 80GB of other erased traces are close to zero.
This is true, but more commonly you've got several Gb of sensitive data, and the 'enemy' manages to recover some percentage of it. There are companies who do this stuff on the open market - you send them your drive, pay a figure on the order of several thousand dollars, and a while later they send you back most of your data. Their customers tend to be law enforcement, divorce lawyers, private detectives, and companies who are big enough to afford it but not big enough to have a proper backup system in place for their laptop hard drives. They don't need to recover 100% of the porn that has been in your browser cache, just a few pages from some of the sites.
The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current licensing rate for the goods sold to date. (If there are NO goods currently employing the patent, the licensing rate will be zero.)
That's incomplete: patent trolls can still sit on patents until they become widely implemented, then use them for extortion ("you may not have to pay us any money, but we can shut down your business with an injunction if you don't settle"). They can also shut out free software developers, who can't pay for licensing rights. Here's a better version:
A compulsory license is available for any patent at a rate of 25% of the price at point of sale (same rules as sales tax or VAT) with no other restrictions. So if you're selling the widget for £10 on the street, you must pay £2.50 to the patent holder for each unit sold. Patent holders must additionally either manufacture the device themselves, or provide a 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' license of their own choice to any party who wishes to purchase it, or the patent is void. No patent license is required to create an item, only to sell it.
The rest of your rules aren't necessary. Business methods are not sold, therefore cannot be patented. Trivial software will be made available for free on the internet; if combining many trivial pieces of software results in a non-trivial piece of software that cannot be reasonable made available for free, then it will be sold, and the inventor gets paid for it.
Under this system, I believe all the current problems would be solved while still making patents work as they are supposed to. Non-commercial free software isn't sold, so they can create without restrictions. Commercial free software developers may still have to negotiate their own license, depending on what they want to do (mysql sells their code so they need to pay, but only for the copies that are sold), and that's good. The very high 25% figure is intentional - truly commercial enterprises couldn't afford it, and would have to negotiate their own license. However, the patent holder cannot artificially inflate the price - if they want to charge £100 for every license, but you can produce and sell the product for £10, then people will just use the 25% license instead. This forces the patent to be licensed at 'fair market value', fixing the current problem where drug companies are setting the prices for vital drugs so high that 3rd world countries just can't have them. Schemes like the MP3 patent licensing would continue to work as they always have, except that free software developers would know they were safe.
Because patent licenses are only required for sale, non-sale users aren't afflicted by them. The big group here is researchers: they don't sell the objects they create, so they can do what they want.
It's even still possible to do a little market manipulation here - you can offer your 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' license at one price, but your 'monopolistic, discriminatory' license at a lower price. The important thing is that you cannot gain a true monopoly like this - you can still squeeze money out of people, but you cannot effectively control their actions. Neither can you price them out of the market, because that 25% cap is still there.
So long as you produce and sell your invention (either yourself or through a licensee) at a fair market rate, you have an effective monopoly over the sale of that item, because your version will be 25% cheaper than the competition - nobody will buy the competing product which is identical but costs more. If your invention can be produced effectively for free and given away (like most trivial software patents) then its fair market rate is zero; this says that you should think of less trivial inventions. I believe this accomplishes precisely what the patent system is supposed to do,
The only way to get around this is to make sure you're hiring the type of people who won't do this sort of thing because of a strong sense of ethics.
People with a strong sense of ethics are not allowed into senior management posts in large companies, because they would report the company for accounting fraud (at least).
SLOC/day isn't a horrible metric if you tightly specify it to be lines of completed, tested and controlled code per day.
Bugs/KSLOC (i.e. error density) is a decent metric for code quality, so knowing the number of lines of code does have some usefulness.
As a general rule, when I'm working on improving some already-existing code, I leave it shorter and simpler than when I started. It's not true every time but it is most times. That's the problem with both these metrics - my SLOC/day (on days when I'm not implementing something new) is often negative. Error density in the whole codebase often increases - because I reduced the total LOC quite a bit but only fixed one 'bug'.
I think this is usually a good thing; simpler code tends to be faster and more reliable. A well-executed project should rapidly scale up to a large amount of code, and then gradually reduce that size (although this cycle may repeat often during the development process).
Sometimes it really is better to not measure something.
of a huge sample of 900+ *peer reviewed* papers about climate change, 0 contested that it was occuring or that it was a result of humans.
You don't contest things like that in a peer reviewed paper. You just don't. Peer reviewed papers do not make speculations without evidence, and it's nefariously difficult to find evidence that A is not somehow causing B. So of course they wouldn't.
It's widely known and understood in the scientific community that there is no conclusive evidence for any of the following points:
That global warming is occurring
That humans are causing global warming
That vehicle emissions are a significant component of human causes of global warming
There is a whole raftload of circumstancial evidence that global warming is occurring - that's stuff which makes it look likely but doesn't actually prove anything one way or the other. In the absence of an actual proof, it's reasonable to assume that it's probably occurring, especially since from the historical record we would expect the planet to currently be getting warmer, but you have to remember that this is just an educated guess. It's much like the question of whether there is a faster solution to the NP-complete problems - most computer scientists believe that there isn't on the basis of circumstancial evidence, but nobody's managed to prove it yet.
There are loads of hypotheses about the causes of global warming. There is no conclusive evidence and very little circumstancial evidence for it. About the best we have are some models which say that some of the hypotheses could work - no real evidence that any particular one of them is happening. The notion that human (vehicle) emissions are somehow responsible is an emotional and political one. Most scientists avoid comment on this because nobody's really sure yet. So yeah, you won't see people contesting it in peer reviewed papers - or supporting it.
There is evidence that human emissions cause acid rain which causes property damage, and that CFC emissions cause ozone depletion. People then assume 'emissions == bad' and start blaming them for other things. But science is still struggling to prove conclusively that global warming is even real, it's way too soon to say what the causes are.
The problem here is people overreacting on the basis of non-science and calling it science. If you want to argue that some law or other should be passed because the action you're banning might be bad, then go ahead and do that, but present it how it is. Don't claim scientific support for an idea that researchers are still busy trying to find evidence for. Don't mistake a scientist's belief in something for a result that proves it. Belief on the part of scientists is the cause of research, not the result. When science has a real answer, the scientists won't believe in it any more - they'll know it's true. Belief is what they do to things which they aren't sure about yet.
Imagine you are a system administrator. Won't it be nice to be able to ssh into your server the moment you get a warning?
Not until the cellphones are convincingly secure. The current ones are laughably broken (attack vectors via bluetooth and sometimes even SMS for people to take over your phone and capture your ssh key). This is unlikely to happen while the firmware is proprietary crud, and the firmware won't stop being proprietary crud until the networks stop using it as a method for controlling you (mostly selling you their data products, but also games and music and stuff like that).
Give me a phone with free software on it and then we'll talk. Until then, no way am I trusting any authentication keys to them. I think it will take a long time.
Ok, what's a non-tangle cord? One that magically uncoils itself?
Actually, yes, pretty much. The sheathing of a non-tangle cord is vaguely elastic, like rubber - in the absence of other constraints, it will straighten itself out. It doesn't actually prevent tangling, per se. If you just coil it up and put it down, it'll uncoil right away - if you constrain it (with a tie or a bag) it'll push itself into a something reasonably like a good coil, so it doesn't get tangled as easily.
Great for headphones. I can't imagine why you would want one on a mouse.
Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that.
Close, but not quite. Ubuntu is a classic dotcom strategy by one of the winners in the dotcom game - and it's a safe bet that Shuttleworth is out to do it again. How did he win the first time? By building a highly visible company and then selling it, to great personal advantage. A lot of what Canonical is doing makes a lot more sense when you keep that in mind. They don't need to figure out how to build revenue, they just need to get eyeballs and market share, so that the company has considerable sale value.
As for Redhat, they probably don't consider Ubuntu to be a threat because they realise this. Redhat's market is, as has been noted, high-end enterprise users. That means that both Redhat and their users must be run by people with a deep understanding of the business world. Anybody with considerable business experience can see what Canonical are doing - it's not like they're trying to hide it, even if they don't go out and announce these things. The important thing is that enterprise users don't want to buy from a company who might not still be there in five years time. Redhat have 'staying power' - they've been through a lot and they're still playing at the top levels of the market, so they feel good to enterprise users. Canonical just doesn't smell like that. It smells like a rich kid's toy, and when he gets tired of playing he'll cash in and make a stupidly huge amount of money, and then the company could become anything. It's just not a safe bet that Canonical will still be there and doing the same things in five years. So enterprise customers are going to feel uneasy about Ubuntu, and go with the safer Redhat instead. Anything they want will just be duplicated by the Redhat engineers anyway.
Redhat are playing in the 'big business' game now. That means they have slightly perverse priorities, but they aren't stupid and neither are their customers. A lot of things change when your customers aren't stupid.
In one room there is a crystal ball with a fortune tellers head projected on the inside somehow. As you ride all the way around it the face somehow matches every angle even as a dozen people are looking at different spots.
I've never seen the thing, but you just described an effect normally created with a hologram. You don't see it often because there isn't normally much point. Presumably they thought it would look spooky because it's so uncommon.
So what? At the very least, that is criminal mischief, already a crime. So should we make more laws against already illegal things?
I think the problem here is that those laws don't apply to branches of the government, or to your corporate masters (who will simply require your permission to do these things, if you want to keep your job).
You should make laws that actually work against the primary threats, instead of letting them do things that would be illegal if you did them yourself.
Remember the taxpayers? The guys who pay for DARPA?
This argument is fallacious because the taxpayers did not have their taxes reduced as a result of the federal spending cuts. Neither was there a reduction in the growth of the national debt. The government is still taking the money from the taxpayers, they just aren't spending it on science any more.
You're free to give as much of your money to scientific researchers (of your choosing, no less!) as you'd like.
Researchers are always very happy to receive donations, but - and this is very important - nobody runs serious academic projects directly on donations. Why not? Because serious projects take months and need a steady revenue stream. If you try to run a project on donations, and in months 6 to 9 you don't get any donations, then you're screwed. There is a need for an organisation to collect such funds from individuals and distribute it to researchers via some kind of grant system. The government is traditionally one of the largest organisations doing this, in most countries.
There are lots of ways (infinite, for discussions purposes) that money for "science" could be spent
You didn't make a point here, but presumably you're implying that the government was redistributing the money to other scientific endeavours. It wasn't. Or maybe you're implying that it was rightfully redistributed to military or spying endeavours. The research budget has always been a tiny fraction of the amounts those departments receive, so sending the money there wouldn't make any visible difference, and anyway would be far less than the funding increases they've been given over the past few years.
Giving confiscated money (that is, taxes) "to science" or "to academic institutions" via the government may occasionally make sense, but mostly it seems like supporting eating contests as a means to combat starvation.
Strangely constrasting from the previous paragraph, this is the anarchist thesis. While I can easily support the idea of reducing government spending and taxation and thereby reducing the amount of government being done, there have been no tax cuts here (although some taxes have been redistributed from some people to other people, total tax revenue hasn't really changed, certainly not by comparison to the spending cuts).
In general, your post seems irrelevant. Whether or not it is good for a government to be involved in science, the point remains that the current US federal government is anti-science and that is having an effect on the economy.
Now that the US Governement is pretty much anti-science, and that the US debt is soaring to ever more dangerous summits, I am not so sure the USA can maintain their advance on the rest of the world.
The government is not anti-science. Focusing in on the stem cell and evolution debate and using that to characterize all government science programs is the fallacy of composition.
Making up a reason for the grandparent's comment and then saying it is false is the straw man fallacy. The current US government is pretty much anti-science, not because they order scientists to withhold non-favourable comments about evolution and stem cells, but because they have been systematically eliminating the supply of government money to academic institutions. It is much much harder to get a government grant in the US for research than it was ten years ago. Remember DARPA? The guys who paid for the internet? Well they don't do that any more, and the same thing has been repeated across most branches of the federal government.
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Next up was a device that measured my perscription. I had to stare at
a little picture while it zoomed in and out of focus. Apparently this
determines my exact perscription, none of that "Is this better, or that"
lens swapping. I wonder why eye doctors don't use this all the time.
Well, there's a number of reasons... the machines are expensive, and they're even more expensive for really accurate models. They aren't perfect, and sometimes get it wrong (but that's usually pretty obvious when the lenses you get just don't work for you, and a second check on a different machine should catch this).
But the #1 reason? If you check somebody's eyes in 30 seconds with a machine, instead of spending 10 minutes doing it by hand, many people don't think you're doing it properly, or don't think they're getting "their money's worth". It's utterly stupid, but so are the majority of the people who go to an optician - remember, it's the same people that TV is made for.
Rumour has it that 1000W and 1200W powersupplies are soon to be standard
Those numbers are meaningless marketing. Power supply manufacturers keep increasing them to make their supplies sound more powerful, but the reality is that they're just finding new (unhelpful) ways to add up the numbers and get a larger figure.
Fundamentally, you cannot describe the power consumption of a PC PSU using a single number. There are too many variables. You *can* describe the drain of an assembled, running PC at a given point in time using a single number, but the only connection it has to the PSU 'rating' is that it will definitely be smaller. You'll find some more informative numbers printed on a sticker on the power supply, telling you the peak drain for each of the rails, but what really matters is the power consumption of all the devices in the computer.
In practice, these '800W' power supplies that you see today are just half a dozen rails (at varying voltages), each of which can supply a peak current of between 100W and 300W. Most of them cannot supply peak current to every rail simultaneously. People upgrade their power supplies to handle high-end video cards and think this means they need to consume 800W instead of 300W. It doesn't. It means that one of the rails supplying their video card needed to handle 200W instead of 150W, or something on that order. Overclockers rarely need a larger amount of power, they need a more expensive power supply that puts out smoother voltage when a noisy load (overclocked CPU) is applied. Etcetera.
So sure, we may soon be needing power supplies that say '1200W' on the box. But that doesn't mean they will consume 50% more power than one that says '800W'.
Let's get beyond the simple binary 'all closed source is bad for customers/users, all open source is good". In an ideal world yes, but open source developers as people have many of the same motivations as closed source developers
Let's not. The simple binary is in fact the right answer, so long as you don't complicate it. Here's what I mean:
A software project can have many attributes that determine how good or bad it is for you. One of these is whether or not it is free software. A free software project is always superior to a non-free project that is otherwise identical (if you're the user). It has been repeatedly shown that this particular attribute is not tied to any of the others - it doesn't determine their values. It may share causes with some of them, but there are many possible causes to choose from, so just knowing whether or not it's free software doesn't tell you anything. So a project can be free but otherwise suck, or it can be proprietary but otherwise good, or any other combinations.
So long as you keep it as that one-bit value, 'free' vs 'non-free', it makes sense. The failure you're referring to lies in assuming that this bit affects any of the others - it doesn't really. Often people confuse 'free software' with 'community-driven', or 'resembles project X', and that's the mistake.
The open source code might *potentially* be resurrected by other developers, but it might not. Leaving customers/ users just as stranded as if it was a closed source project
Looking at this statement in those terms, things become more clear. The free software project can be resurrected by somebody else, the non-free project cannot be resurrected. So it's definitely better to have free software here, because then you've got a chance, instead of having no chance.
Any individual project may be easier or harder to resurrect, and it may be more or less likely to need it. But these things are not determined by whether or not the project is free software. You'll have to look at other aspects of the project to discover them. Better yet, look at the reasons why the project is the way it is, that tells you even more.
A large part of building a sustainable business is to solve this problem and build structures that survive change. Sustainable software is built in layers so that no single team determines the life of the whole.
Of course, a lot of people get this wrong. They manage to build a structure that survives change, but does so because it isn't dependant on the skills of the individuals at all. That sounds good, but it really means that the system cannot benefit from the skills of the current employees - in effect, everybody is reduced to a minimum baseline level, in order to ensure that they can be replaced. This is one of the symptoms of the classic 'big software house' disease. It's not enough to get good people, keep them, and survive after they leave - you've got to do all that without impeding their work.
Very few people manage to build a structure that survives major change and can still benefit from the expertise of the workers. It's really hard.
How big do you expect this number of excess sectors to be in a competitive market where size is a major selling point of storage media?
It varies between manufacturers, but I believe it's normally something like a few Mb. Yes, current drives do this - it's part of their 'fail-safe' behaviour. They have some spare sectors so that they can silently replace defective ones.
How much data can you keep from deletion?
This is an interesting question. Probably doesn't occur very often, but in combination with something like truecrypt it could work well (so that the drive cannot tell which sectors contain real data and which are padding).
See that number under RAW_VALUE? That's how many sectors have been moved. In most hard drives, that number will read 0. Mine is greater, because it's an old hard drive, and in a heavily-used laptop to boot.
No, it's confusingly named. That is actually the number of sectors which the drive has removed from the map.
The idea is that if the ads are cool you will tell your friends about them, and then they will see them and spread them to their friends, hence viral.
Do you really expect marketdroids to leave it at that?
I bet they're already planning ways to infect you with a disease that makes you have to buy their products.
Corporations don't see people as "citizens" anymore. We're not even their customers -- we're consumers. Language always gives one away.
This is very true. It's always a good idea to see what a corporation calls you.
If you are a client, then they think of you as an integral part of the process. You are involved in the development of whatever they are selling to you, and it is built around your needs. Outsourcing companies, good hotels, and lap dancers think like this.
If you are a customer, then they think of you as an individual who makes a take-it-or-leave-it decision about their product. They will attempt to make as many people as possible want to take it, but won't worry too much about missing a few around the edges. Still, they need to keep you happy and won't do something that's bad for you without a really good reason. The good ISPs and expensive high street stores think like this.
If you are a consumer, then they think of you as tied up, prone, on the floor, while they defecate their products onto you and then send you an invoice. It doesn't matter what you think, you don't get to make a choice. The big media companies think like this. So do the telephone carriers, and most other monopolies.
Wasn't a free market and capitalism supposed to drive innovation and technology?
You have to realise that when a capitalist is talking about 'innovation' they mean 'greed'. Not new things that are good for you - new ways for the plutocrat to acquire your money.
Actually, you need some level of self-policing to curb the problem if you want to demonstrate that laws are not necessary.
That's a disingenuous myth. It's far, far better to have laws than self-policing.
Why?
Because laws come with other laws guaranteeing you due process. 'Self-policing' means a corporate does whatever they feel like to you. This GoDaddy nonsense is a classic example: $200, pay-or-be-damned, no evidence, no appeals, no way to argue your case.
The best thing of all is neither laws nor self-policing, but rather a common carrier. That's an entity which moves data for everybody and every purpose without limits, and in exchance is not responsible for any of the data they move. Sure the terrorists can use it, but that's better than government or corporate intervention. Whenever this is reasonably practical, it's better than all the alternatives. It may not be practical for the sale of firearms, but it's definitely practical for the sale of DNS names.
As far as I know, the only limitation that modern firmware places on securely erasing data is smart buffering. i.e. the firmware sees 10 writes to the same sectors in the buffer and chooses to only write the last one to save time. Although that is a problem, modern erasing software ensures that all X amount of specified writes actually get written.
The big problem is that the firmware can remap the physical layout in any way it likes. There's no guarantee that the sector 5 you just wrote to is the same sector 5 you wrote to six months ago - the only guarantee is that if you write some data to sector 5, and then later you ask for sector 5 back again, you get back the data you wrote. Successive writes aren't necessarily placed in the same location. Flash memory is notable for rarely putting two writes in the same place, but hard drives do it too (just not so often). So far as I know, the current desktop drives only remap for reliability and not for performance... but that's quite bad enough (and it seems likely that they'll start doing it for performance sooner or later).
A secondary problem is that secure erasing requires knowledge of the physical layout (to know what sectors and pattern to write in - you may need to overwrite the adjacent sectors in both directions, depending on how the disk is laid out, but which ones are they?) and the firmware hides that information.
There may be others, those are just the ones I'm aware of.
Just holding the media next to a magnet, even an AC electromagnet, and turning the magnet on and off, doesn't erase the data as effectively as moving the media from close to the coil to far away. Or at least that's what I was always told. I suppose if you had a circuit that powered down the coil slowly, it would have much the same effect.
It wouldn't, but you're nearly right. Simply placing a conductive object inside a magnetic field does nothing at all. In order for something to happen there must be motion. When you're using a coil powered from regular mains AC, the power resembles a sine wave, so the field is oscillating back and forth - this is sufficient to have a small effect, but you really want to move the object relative to the coil or you're mostly wasting power (and unlikely to stop the media from working, using a little coil like that). Specifically, the object needs to move across the direction of the field, not along it. A regular coil has field lines that move out from the top of the coil, move around it in a circle, and meet again at the bottom of the coil - so the overall shape in three dimensions is like a torus, with the hole going down the centre of the coil. So you want to move the object repeatedly towards and away from the side of the coil; that cuts the field at 90 degrees, which is where you'll get the maximum effect.
Powering down the coil slowly accomplishes nothing directly - it's not about changing power levels. If you want to make the coil have a stronger effect without moving anything, you need to oscillate it faster, but that's impractical. Just move the media towards and away from the coil, in close proximity, a few times. Speed doesn't matter much, but the power developed by the coil and the length of time you spend doing it does. Moving the media towards the end of the coil (where the hole is) does very little; moving it towards the side is best. However, if you want to actually *remove* all traces of magnetism from something, then you do want to gradually reduce the power level - you see this most often in a monitor's degaussing coil. This may be necessary for tapes and floppies, if the drive can't handle media that has been randomly magnetised and you want to use the media again, but it's not required if you just want to wipe the data before disposal.
Not to mention that the whole "residuum magnetism" that may actually have existed in 90s HDs isnt simply possible anymore with todays track density. Any kind of remnand from the last state would be well under the paramangetic limit and completely replaced by thermal noise.
That may be true at some point in the future but it currently is not, and won't be without radical changes in the storage method. There must be a certain amount of tolerance in the current systems in order to compensate for drifting effects. The problem is that if you magnetise a surface such that there are two fields with opposing polarities next to each other, they will over time drift together and kinda-sorta cancel each other out (or at least, you will no longer be able to tell which one was where). So that hard drives keep their data for some number of years, the fields have to be sufficiently strong and spaced out for the drive head to still be able to identify them after they have sat there for a year. That means the head is writing strong, clear fields, and then after a few months it reads back a weaker, fuzzier field.
Now, if the head then writes a strong, clear field over the top of the fuzzy one... then there will be residual traces of the fuzziness in the space between the clear fields. Forensic analysis can use a far more expensive and accurate device to read the fields, and so it can spot several generations of this stuff - it's like a buildup of sediment.
That's not the only possible technique (I don't know which one the professional data recovery companies use), but it's one that drives based around the current methods will always suffer, simply because they must have those tolerances. You can't build a drive where the residuals are completely unreadable, because it means your data will be unreadable after a few months - you have to allow enough for the data to be readable, and that means that residuals can be readable too. Anywhere that you have tolerances like this, you can build a device with a finer tolerance and discover more data.
That's not what the text you quoted said, nor is it correct. It's true that overwriting 35 times doesn't accomplish anything more, though. The quote said:
For new 2000-era drives, simply overwriting with random bytes is the best you can do [from software / without breaking the drive]. That's because the firmware makes it almost impossible to 'securely' erase data from the drives, so you just can't do any better. It's nowhere near 'sufficient'; in fact it's almost useless against any modern hardware analysis. (The best you can do, if you don't want to keep the drive, is to heat the platters until they melt; that is guaranteed to destroy the data, but almost everything else isn't).
The other important part of the quote is:
This is true, but more commonly you've got several Gb of sensitive data, and the 'enemy' manages to recover some percentage of it. There are companies who do this stuff on the open market - you send them your drive, pay a figure on the order of several thousand dollars, and a while later they send you back most of your data. Their customers tend to be law enforcement, divorce lawyers, private detectives, and companies who are big enough to afford it but not big enough to have a proper backup system in place for their laptop hard drives. They don't need to recover 100% of the porn that has been in your browser cache, just a few pages from some of the sites.
The holder of a patent MUST either manufacture themselves or license manufacturing rights to any second parties on the same terms. The penalties for patent infringement shall be limited to legal costs plus the average current licensing rate for the goods sold to date. (If there are NO goods currently employing the patent, the licensing rate will be zero.)
That's incomplete: patent trolls can still sit on patents until they become widely implemented, then use them for extortion ("you may not have to pay us any money, but we can shut down your business with an injunction if you don't settle"). They can also shut out free software developers, who can't pay for licensing rights. Here's a better version:
A compulsory license is available for any patent at a rate of 25% of the price at point of sale (same rules as sales tax or VAT) with no other restrictions. So if you're selling the widget for £10 on the street, you must pay £2.50 to the patent holder for each unit sold. Patent holders must additionally either manufacture the device themselves, or provide a 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' license of their own choice to any party who wishes to purchase it, or the patent is void. No patent license is required to create an item, only to sell it.
The rest of your rules aren't necessary. Business methods are not sold, therefore cannot be patented. Trivial software will be made available for free on the internet; if combining many trivial pieces of software results in a non-trivial piece of software that cannot be reasonable made available for free, then it will be sold, and the inventor gets paid for it.
Under this system, I believe all the current problems would be solved while still making patents work as they are supposed to. Non-commercial free software isn't sold, so they can create without restrictions. Commercial free software developers may still have to negotiate their own license, depending on what they want to do (mysql sells their code so they need to pay, but only for the copies that are sold), and that's good. The very high 25% figure is intentional - truly commercial enterprises couldn't afford it, and would have to negotiate their own license. However, the patent holder cannot artificially inflate the price - if they want to charge £100 for every license, but you can produce and sell the product for £10, then people will just use the 25% license instead. This forces the patent to be licensed at 'fair market value', fixing the current problem where drug companies are setting the prices for vital drugs so high that 3rd world countries just can't have them. Schemes like the MP3 patent licensing would continue to work as they always have, except that free software developers would know they were safe.
Because patent licenses are only required for sale, non-sale users aren't afflicted by them. The big group here is researchers: they don't sell the objects they create, so they can do what they want.
It's even still possible to do a little market manipulation here - you can offer your 'reasonable and non-discriminatory' license at one price, but your 'monopolistic, discriminatory' license at a lower price. The important thing is that you cannot gain a true monopoly like this - you can still squeeze money out of people, but you cannot effectively control their actions. Neither can you price them out of the market, because that 25% cap is still there.
So long as you produce and sell your invention (either yourself or through a licensee) at a fair market rate, you have an effective monopoly over the sale of that item, because your version will be 25% cheaper than the competition - nobody will buy the competing product which is identical but costs more. If your invention can be produced effectively for free and given away (like most trivial software patents) then its fair market rate is zero; this says that you should think of less trivial inventions. I believe this accomplishes precisely what the patent system is supposed to do,
The only way to get around this is to make sure you're hiring the type of people who won't do this sort of thing because of a strong sense of ethics.
People with a strong sense of ethics are not allowed into senior management posts in large companies, because they would report the company for accounting fraud (at least).
SLOC/day isn't a horrible metric if you tightly specify it to be lines of completed, tested and controlled code per day.
Bugs/KSLOC (i.e. error density) is a decent metric for code quality, so knowing the number of lines of code does have some usefulness.
As a general rule, when I'm working on improving some already-existing code, I leave it shorter and simpler than when I started. It's not true every time but it is most times. That's the problem with both these metrics - my SLOC/day (on days when I'm not implementing something new) is often negative. Error density in the whole codebase often increases - because I reduced the total LOC quite a bit but only fixed one 'bug'.
I think this is usually a good thing; simpler code tends to be faster and more reliable. A well-executed project should rapidly scale up to a large amount of code, and then gradually reduce that size (although this cycle may repeat often during the development process).
Sometimes it really is better to not measure something.
You don't contest things like that in a peer reviewed paper. You just don't. Peer reviewed papers do not make speculations without evidence, and it's nefariously difficult to find evidence that A is not somehow causing B. So of course they wouldn't.
It's widely known and understood in the scientific community that there is no conclusive evidence for any of the following points:
There is a whole raftload of circumstancial evidence that global warming is occurring - that's stuff which makes it look likely but doesn't actually prove anything one way or the other. In the absence of an actual proof, it's reasonable to assume that it's probably occurring, especially since from the historical record we would expect the planet to currently be getting warmer, but you have to remember that this is just an educated guess. It's much like the question of whether there is a faster solution to the NP-complete problems - most computer scientists believe that there isn't on the basis of circumstancial evidence, but nobody's managed to prove it yet.
There are loads of hypotheses about the causes of global warming. There is no conclusive evidence and very little circumstancial evidence for it. About the best we have are some models which say that some of the hypotheses could work - no real evidence that any particular one of them is happening. The notion that human (vehicle) emissions are somehow responsible is an emotional and political one. Most scientists avoid comment on this because nobody's really sure yet. So yeah, you won't see people contesting it in peer reviewed papers - or supporting it.
There is evidence that human emissions cause acid rain which causes property damage, and that CFC emissions cause ozone depletion. People then assume 'emissions == bad' and start blaming them for other things. But science is still struggling to prove conclusively that global warming is even real, it's way too soon to say what the causes are.
The problem here is people overreacting on the basis of non-science and calling it science. If you want to argue that some law or other should be passed because the action you're banning might be bad, then go ahead and do that, but present it how it is. Don't claim scientific support for an idea that researchers are still busy trying to find evidence for. Don't mistake a scientist's belief in something for a result that proves it. Belief on the part of scientists is the cause of research, not the result. When science has a real answer, the scientists won't believe in it any more - they'll know it's true. Belief is what they do to things which they aren't sure about yet.
Imagine you are a system administrator. Won't it be nice to be able to ssh into your server the moment you get a warning?
Not until the cellphones are convincingly secure. The current ones are laughably broken (attack vectors via bluetooth and sometimes even SMS for people to take over your phone and capture your ssh key). This is unlikely to happen while the firmware is proprietary crud, and the firmware won't stop being proprietary crud until the networks stop using it as a method for controlling you (mostly selling you their data products, but also games and music and stuff like that).
Give me a phone with free software on it and then we'll talk. Until then, no way am I trusting any authentication keys to them. I think it will take a long time.
Ok, what's a non-tangle cord? One that magically uncoils itself?
Actually, yes, pretty much. The sheathing of a non-tangle cord is vaguely elastic, like rubber - in the absence of other constraints, it will straighten itself out. It doesn't actually prevent tangling, per se. If you just coil it up and put it down, it'll uncoil right away - if you constrain it (with a tie or a bag) it'll push itself into a something reasonably like a good coil, so it doesn't get tangled as easily.
Great for headphones. I can't imagine why you would want one on a mouse.
Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that.
Close, but not quite. Ubuntu is a classic dotcom strategy by one of the winners in the dotcom game - and it's a safe bet that Shuttleworth is out to do it again. How did he win the first time? By building a highly visible company and then selling it, to great personal advantage. A lot of what Canonical is doing makes a lot more sense when you keep that in mind. They don't need to figure out how to build revenue, they just need to get eyeballs and market share, so that the company has considerable sale value.
As for Redhat, they probably don't consider Ubuntu to be a threat because they realise this. Redhat's market is, as has been noted, high-end enterprise users. That means that both Redhat and their users must be run by people with a deep understanding of the business world. Anybody with considerable business experience can see what Canonical are doing - it's not like they're trying to hide it, even if they don't go out and announce these things. The important thing is that enterprise users don't want to buy from a company who might not still be there in five years time. Redhat have 'staying power' - they've been through a lot and they're still playing at the top levels of the market, so they feel good to enterprise users. Canonical just doesn't smell like that. It smells like a rich kid's toy, and when he gets tired of playing he'll cash in and make a stupidly huge amount of money, and then the company could become anything. It's just not a safe bet that Canonical will still be there and doing the same things in five years. So enterprise customers are going to feel uneasy about Ubuntu, and go with the safer Redhat instead. Anything they want will just be duplicated by the Redhat engineers anyway.
Redhat are playing in the 'big business' game now. That means they have slightly perverse priorities, but they aren't stupid and neither are their customers. A lot of things change when your customers aren't stupid.
In one room there is a crystal ball with a fortune tellers head projected on the inside somehow. As you ride all the way around it the face somehow matches every angle even as a dozen people are looking at different spots.
I've never seen the thing, but you just described an effect normally created with a hologram. You don't see it often because there isn't normally much point. Presumably they thought it would look spooky because it's so uncommon.
So what? At the very least, that is criminal mischief, already a crime. So should we make more laws against already illegal things?
I think the problem here is that those laws don't apply to branches of the government, or to your corporate masters (who will simply require your permission to do these things, if you want to keep your job).
You should make laws that actually work against the primary threats, instead of letting them do things that would be illegal if you did them yourself.
Remember the taxpayers? The guys who pay for DARPA?
This argument is fallacious because the taxpayers did not have their taxes reduced as a result of the federal spending cuts. Neither was there a reduction in the growth of the national debt. The government is still taking the money from the taxpayers, they just aren't spending it on science any more.
You're free to give as much of your money to scientific researchers (of your choosing, no less!) as you'd like.
Researchers are always very happy to receive donations, but - and this is very important - nobody runs serious academic projects directly on donations. Why not? Because serious projects take months and need a steady revenue stream. If you try to run a project on donations, and in months 6 to 9 you don't get any donations, then you're screwed. There is a need for an organisation to collect such funds from individuals and distribute it to researchers via some kind of grant system. The government is traditionally one of the largest organisations doing this, in most countries.
There are lots of ways (infinite, for discussions purposes) that money for "science" could be spent
You didn't make a point here, but presumably you're implying that the government was redistributing the money to other scientific endeavours. It wasn't. Or maybe you're implying that it was rightfully redistributed to military or spying endeavours. The research budget has always been a tiny fraction of the amounts those departments receive, so sending the money there wouldn't make any visible difference, and anyway would be far less than the funding increases they've been given over the past few years.
Giving confiscated money (that is, taxes) "to science" or "to academic institutions" via the government may occasionally make sense, but mostly it seems like supporting eating contests as a means to combat starvation.
Strangely constrasting from the previous paragraph, this is the anarchist thesis. While I can easily support the idea of reducing government spending and taxation and thereby reducing the amount of government being done, there have been no tax cuts here (although some taxes have been redistributed from some people to other people, total tax revenue hasn't really changed, certainly not by comparison to the spending cuts).
In general, your post seems irrelevant. Whether or not it is good for a government to be involved in science, the point remains that the current US federal government is anti-science and that is having an effect on the economy.
The government is not anti-science. Focusing in on the stem cell and evolution debate and using that to characterize all government science programs is the fallacy of composition.
Making up a reason for the grandparent's comment and then saying it is false is the straw man fallacy. The current US government is pretty much anti-science, not because they order scientists to withhold non-favourable comments about evolution and stem cells, but because they have been systematically eliminating the supply of government money to academic institutions. It is much much harder to get a government grant in the US for research than it was ten years ago. Remember DARPA? The guys who paid for the internet? Well they don't do that any more, and the same thing has been repeated across most branches of the federal government.