Adobe--maybe--but I'm not buying the strawbale idea.
I think the idea with straw bales is that you cover them inside and out with concrete stucco or adobe. Thus you have fireproof and vermin-free structures.:-)
Yes. The closest you'll get to this is modern-day Slovenia, but many EU countries are on their way. Well the russians used to have something a little like that The Russians NEVER had anything like an Open-Sourced Government. Their "communism" was nothing of the sort and was fucked from the get-go.
Let's see...When I buy or build a house, I don't want some "vendor" to insist on a restrictive license telling me what I can and can't do with my house. And I'd like to be able to help my friends build similar houses, if they want them.
Don't find a home anywhere in America... state and local governments tend to have very restrictive laws about what you can and can't do with your house, and also laws about helping people build thier own houses, unless you've paid your registration and union dues...
The US is actually very interested in fuel economy: Corporate Average Fuel Economy [doc.gov] is very much responsible for pushing manufacturers to increase fuel economy.
I wonder if you read the link you referenced...
"The passenger car standard, currently at 27.5 mpg, has not been increased since the 1986 model year."
This clearly shows that the US is not interested in fuel economy. The US hasn't raised the bar on passenger car fuel economy in sixteen years!
I have been driving a tdi Golf for 30 months now, and am constantly amazed at the performance of the car and the fact that I spend $20 USD to fill up every 450-500 miles. I wonder how people have been brainwashed into accepting $25 fills of ultra-premium every 250 miles, and how long this will go on.
Nor are birds. At least according to the US government. They excluded from protection under animal welfare laws, and thus should not be worried about, eh?
The actual exclusion is set down in 9 CFR part 1, and reads as follows:
"Animal means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warmblooded animal, which is being used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes: Birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus bred for use in research, and horses not used for research purposes and other farm animals..."
When the top-of-the-line graphics card costs half of what it does today (heck, say... $150, instead of $300, or even $400), THEN that's cause to celebrate new manufacturing processes.
Funny thing, I just purchased a new AOpen Xabre 400 that performs beautifully (with signed, WHQL drivers that XP doesn't complain about!) - and I paid $105.00. This is a 64MB card with 8x AGP. It also has DVI and SVGA out. This is top of the line, as far as mass market hardware goes.
I looked at the ATI and nVidia based cards and features, and the Xabre trounced them on price/performance. (caveat - I'm not in to FPS) The deciding factor was that it was the cheapest card with 1080*720 resolution DVI output, and OMFG do DVDs look good like this!:-)
Anyway, that 80 gig Maxtor does not add much to the cost of the node.
It's not the price of a hard disk in a cluster node that causes the trouble, it's the fact that you now have one more power-drawing, heat-generating, moving part - that's more likely to fail than anything else in the system!
and also the fact that millions of lives were saved from a conflict in Asia
Actually, much research has been done on this topic. Conclusions from everyone have been that fewer than 100,000 people would have been killed (on both sides) during a ground invasion of Japan.
Do a little Googling, and please help dispel this belief that dropping atomic bombs on Japan saved any lives.
people seem to forget that most people dont use a laptop as a portable supercomputer.
Due to budget cuts at a large corporation who will remain nameless, 4000 IT-type people are now being limited to one computer each, with a preference towards laptop with docking station at work. (Choice of IBM X, T, or A series) This rule applies to all but a few hundred developers, who generally are allowed a Sun, sgi, or Mac in addition to their IBM laptop.
With networked storage and 60GB laptop drives, desktop replacement "laptops" will soon rule the corporate market, IMNSHO.
This was originally planned to be done with very small mirrors! (no joke!) which would aim incoming light to the corresponding outgoing port....they have found a way to avoid the mirrors (which have an obvious bottleneck themselves, as well as potential mechanical failure)
You make it sound like such tiny mirrors would not work... In fact, the DLP projector in my living room has around 800,000 mirrors in it, all on a DMD chip. Sure, bending the optics as Chiaro does is cool, but I don't think it is necessarily any faster or more reliable than mirror based optical switching/routing.
They plant these things in the scalps of newborns? Talk about big brother!
My cat has an RFID tag implanted under her skin on the right-hand side of her neck. When they "installed" it (via injection) and demonstrated it with a reader, I pulled my corp security badge out of my pocket and waved it at their reader. It registered, but as an error, and not a cat.:-)
The system we're using is called "Home Again" and I think it's a pretty damn good idea. For a pet, that is.
I think this is just an attempt at getting all those Mach 3 razor packs back out in front of shoppers. It must make it hard to sell them when they are locked up with the cigarettes all the time.
Hopefully you are kidding and actually realize that the RFIDs are for tracking pallates of razors. I have to say, I fully understand why they're doing this. I've bought Mach 3 razors on the streets of some Eastern European cities for well under the retail costs in those countries. Of course this happens when a pallate is "lost" in shipping...
You see, the Boston College IT department, under strict orders from the Administration*, has for the past two years had to back up their transparent proxy logs, and keep a record of every last packet of information travelling from the Internet to the dormitory ethernets.
The cost of DLT tapes the wear and tear on their StorageTek robot was breaking the bank. After raising tuition from $27,000 USD to $31,000 USD in just three years, they still couldn't afford to keep a permanent record of every CD and DVD pirated by their students.
At some point, the IT department made an offer to all faculty: "Come up with a way for us to back up our logs and we'll service your department first for the next ten years."
Of course it was the oft-neglected chemistry department that so needed support for their purple Silly-Gs and ancient AlphaStations. They kicked into gear with a trip to Economy Hardware on Beacon Street and the rest, as they say, is history.
*who were themselves were under strict orders from their Lawyers, who happen to be owned by RIAA
In order to fill one rack with this much horsepower, you would need at least two empty racks next to it to compensate for the power draw and (much) increased cooling needs.
Consider some facts:
1. the MIPS chips consume only 17 watts 2. sane datacenter engineers put their air handling gear on the roof.
If a 4U 16-processor SGI could outrun our full-sized Origin 2400 for $300,000, I could see buying one.
privatization usually involves taking something away from the influence of a select few whose sole motivation is political gain and placing it under the influence of an arbitrarily large subset of the public whose sole motivation is the increase of its value
Good Lord man, what planet are you from!?! Do a quantitative analysis of privatizations in this world and tell me that you're not spouting complete bullshit. I'd love to hear about any privatizations that actually did place an institution under the influence of "an arbitrarily large subset of the public" and not into the hands of an even smaller select few whos sole motivation is monitary gain.
There's a nice, safe air-gap between your local Internet connection and anything "THAT" serious on military networks.
Of course there is a safe-air gap, but unless every machine allowed to connect to those networks is physically locked down, every IO port disabled, and every removable media drive locked with a physical device, you're going to have people downloading sensitive material and moving it on to unsecured networks.
Granted it's been a few years, but I have seen young underpaid geeks walk up to such systems wearing paper badges with "NO CLEARANCE" stamped in red ink on them, and proceed to insert floppy disks into said systems in order to defragment drives or install drivers.
Intead, for us stuck here in North America. We get CDMA, and no bluetooth to speak of (except as an option on some high end notebooks). Sure we can buy an adapter for the notebook. But no phones.
You're not trying hard enough. I have T-Mobile in Boston. I have a Nokia 6310i phone. I have a 3800 series iPaq. I regularly read Slashdot from my iPaq while on the tram home from work.
I actually really like the idea of this PCMCIA card, as my thinkpad doesn't have bluetooth, and the Belkin USB-Bluetooth adapter I bought for it absolutely breaks Win2k. (or maybe I just need a new Thinkpad... hmm...)
Something the article does not specify but which my software driven Ramdrive allows me to do is to actually load a disk image into the drive on bootup
You wouldn't be so kind as to reply with a link to said software ram drive?
I used this trick on my PowerMac 7100 back in the day, having loaded it up with 136MB ram, an insane amount for 1996... I used to run Marathon off the built-in System 7.5 software ramdisk.:-)
I wonder if the resolution on these mice is at all wavelength dependent. If it were, than a blue LED would be superior to a red LED, since blue is at about 400nm and red is closer to 700nm.
IIRC this wouldn't be too practical for cordless optical mice, as the blue would take more energy to generate the same amount of light. Any physics person want to support/correct me?
Not unless at least one of the Root servers changes from being UNIX based... Come now.. can you imagine the size of the windows cluster needed to offer a stable Root server? It would fill a warehouse!
Really I fail to see why you would say this. The IBM workstation sitting below my desk running Windows 2000 has several times the horsepower of the last root server I heard about. (IIRC they're a mishmash of six or seven unix variants running on five different hardware platforms.)
RFC 2870 specifies "2.3 At any time, each (root) server MUST be able to handle a load of requests for root data which is three times the measured peak of such requests on the most loaded server in then current normal conditions"
I believe that normal load is around 280 million requests per day, or 3300 requests per second.
These are not complex transactions. There isn't any writing going on to slow things down. The space requirements for a root server running Win2k would likely be 5U. Smaller than an e450, I do believe. And with 2-4 2GHz Xeon processors, a hell of a lot faster too.
Slashdot Mirror
Adobe--maybe--but I'm not buying the strawbale idea.
:-)
I think the idea with straw bales is that you cover them inside and out with concrete stucco or adobe. Thus you have fireproof and vermin-free structures.
What's next?:
Open-sourced Government?...
Yes. The closest you'll get to this is modern-day Slovenia, but many EU countries are on their way.
Well the russians used to have something a little like that
The Russians NEVER had anything like an Open-Sourced Government. Their "communism" was nothing of the sort and was fucked from the get-go.
Let's see...When I buy or build a house, I don't want some "vendor" to insist on a restrictive license telling me what I can and can't do with my house. And I'd like to be able to help my friends build similar houses, if they want them.
Don't find a home anywhere in America... state and local governments tend to have very restrictive laws about what you can and can't do with your house, and also laws about helping people build thier own houses, unless you've paid your registration and union dues...
Do we all have compact fluorescent lights in our houses? Or some other type of energy efficient lighting? -check-
Do we have proper insulation in the walls? It's surprising that many houses do not. -check-
How about a fuel cell electricity generator that runs off natural gas? -um... what?-
Or maybe even something as simple as kitchen cabinets that are big enough, and not made from particle board? -check-
Cat 5 in the walls? -check-
Front door security camera, with a truly secure way to access it from the Internet? -check-
Stereo sound in every room? -whatever-
A bathroom fan that actually will clear the stink out of the room? -my shit doesn't stink-
I don't want the house of the future: I just want what's possible with the technology of TODAY.
-Build it. It's not hard. Home Depot + $8k on the 'ole Amex, and I managed to make my 70 year old condo livable while inflating its value $60k.-
The US is actually very interested in fuel economy: Corporate Average Fuel Economy [doc.gov] is very much responsible for pushing manufacturers to increase fuel economy.
I wonder if you read the link you referenced...
"The passenger car standard, currently at 27.5 mpg, has not been increased since the 1986 model year."
This clearly shows that the US is not interested in fuel economy. The US hasn't raised the bar on passenger car fuel economy in sixteen years!
I have been driving a tdi Golf for 30 months now, and am constantly amazed at the performance of the car and the fact that I spend $20 USD to fill up every 450-500 miles. I wonder how people have been brainwashed into accepting $25 fills of ultra-premium every 250 miles, and how long this will go on.
Nor are birds. At least according to the US government. They excluded from protection under animal welfare laws, and thus should not be worried about, eh?
The actual exclusion is set down in 9 CFR part 1, and reads as follows:
"Animal means any live or dead dog, cat, nonhuman primate, guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or any other warmblooded animal, which is being
used, or is intended for use for research, teaching, testing, experimentation, or exhibition purposes, or as a pet. This term excludes: Birds, rats of the genus Rattus and mice of the genus Mus bred for use in research, and horses not used for research purposes and other farm animals..."
When the top-of-the-line graphics card costs half of what it does today (heck, say... $150, instead of $300, or even $400), THEN that's cause to celebrate new manufacturing processes.
:-)
Funny thing, I just purchased a new AOpen Xabre 400 that performs beautifully (with signed, WHQL drivers that XP doesn't complain about!) - and I paid $105.00. This is a 64MB card with 8x AGP. It also has DVI and SVGA out. This is top of the line, as far as mass market hardware goes.
I looked at the ATI and nVidia based cards and features, and the Xabre trounced them on price/performance. (caveat - I'm not in to FPS) The deciding factor was that it was the cheapest card with 1080*720 resolution DVI output, and OMFG do DVDs look good like this!
Anyway, that 80 gig Maxtor does not add much to the cost of the node.
It's not the price of a hard disk in a cluster node that causes the trouble, it's the fact that you now have one more power-drawing, heat-generating, moving part - that's more likely to fail than anything else in the system!
and also the fact that millions of lives were saved from a conflict in Asia
Actually, much research has been done on this topic. Conclusions from everyone have been that fewer than 100,000 people would have been killed (on both sides) during a ground invasion of Japan.
Do a little Googling, and please help dispel this belief that dropping atomic bombs on Japan saved any lives.
1. Nokia Tri-band GSM phone 6310i (phone calls, modem for iPaq)
2. Blackberry (Exchange email, calendar, tasks)
3. iPaq 3800 (ebooks, web surfing, games)
4. Samsung Yepp (mp3 player)
5. Magellan GPS (navigation while driving)
After using a Blackberry with our corporate Exchange servers I found my PDA was pretty much useless in comparison.
Once I get the GSM/GPRS module for my iPaq, I'll probably be using that most of the time. The only missing device is GPS.
people seem to forget that most people dont use a laptop as a portable supercomputer.
Due to budget cuts at a large corporation who will remain nameless, 4000 IT-type people are now being limited to one computer each, with a preference towards laptop with docking station at work. (Choice of IBM X, T, or A series) This rule applies to all but a few hundred developers, who generally are allowed a Sun, sgi, or Mac in addition to their IBM laptop.
With networked storage and 60GB laptop drives, desktop replacement "laptops" will soon rule the corporate market, IMNSHO.
Could a GPS/radar-enabled autopilot auto-auto-rotate, that is know your altitude and adjust the pitch for you?
Gyroscopes are what you need - Kamen's Segway makes great use of them for pitch adjustment.
This was originally planned to be done with very small mirrors! (no joke!) which would aim incoming light to the corresponding outgoing port. ...they have found a way to avoid the mirrors (which have an obvious bottleneck themselves, as well as potential mechanical failure)
You make it sound like such tiny mirrors would not work... In fact, the DLP projector in my living room has around 800,000 mirrors in it, all on a DMD chip. Sure, bending the optics as Chiaro does is cool, but I don't think it is necessarily any faster or more reliable than mirror based optical switching/routing.
The fact that Japan doesn't use barcodes will come as a big surprise to Sony....and Toyota...and Mitsubishi.... Only the US and Canada? ...ouch.
I think you've missed a critical point. UPC is "Universal Product Code." Not all bar codes are UPCs, and not all UPCs are bar codes.
They plant these things in the scalps of newborns? Talk about big brother!
:-)
My cat has an RFID tag implanted under her skin on the right-hand side of her neck. When they "installed" it (via injection) and demonstrated it with a reader, I pulled my corp security badge out of my pocket and waved it at their reader. It registered, but as an error, and not a cat.
The system we're using is called "Home Again" and I think it's a pretty damn good idea. For a pet, that is.
I think this is just an attempt at getting all those Mach 3 razor packs back out in front of shoppers. It must make it hard to sell them when they are locked up with the cigarettes all the time.
Hopefully you are kidding and actually realize that the RFIDs are for tracking pallates of razors. I have to say, I fully understand why they're doing this. I've bought Mach 3 razors on the streets of some Eastern European cities for well under the retail costs in those countries. Of course this happens when a pallate is "lost" in shipping...
You see, the Boston College IT department, under strict orders from the Administration*, has for the past two years had to back up their transparent proxy logs, and keep a record of every last packet of information travelling from the Internet to the dormitory ethernets.
The cost of DLT tapes the wear and tear on their StorageTek robot was breaking the bank. After raising tuition from $27,000 USD to $31,000 USD in just three years, they still couldn't afford to keep a permanent record of every CD and DVD pirated by their students.
At some point, the IT department made an offer to all faculty: "Come up with a way for us to back up our logs and we'll service your department first for the next ten years."
Of course it was the oft-neglected chemistry department that so needed support for their purple Silly-Gs and ancient AlphaStations. They kicked into gear with a trip to Economy Hardware on Beacon Street and the rest, as they say, is history.
*who were themselves were under strict orders from their Lawyers, who happen to be owned by RIAA
by writing software that is less bloated and more efficient and is geared towards a portable solution.
:-)
Last I checked, the older versions of WordPerfect still worked... And there's always vi.
In order to fill one rack with this much horsepower, you would need at least two empty racks next to it to compensate for the power draw and (much) increased cooling needs.
Consider some facts:
1. the MIPS chips consume only 17 watts
2. sane datacenter engineers put their air handling gear on the roof.
If a 4U 16-processor SGI could outrun our full-sized Origin 2400 for $300,000, I could see buying one.
privatization usually involves taking something away from the influence of a select few whose sole motivation is political gain and placing it under the influence of an arbitrarily large subset of the public whose sole motivation is the increase of its value
Good Lord man, what planet are you from!?! Do a quantitative analysis of privatizations in this world and tell me that you're not spouting complete bullshit. I'd love to hear about any privatizations that actually did place an institution under the influence of "an arbitrarily large subset of the public" and not into the hands of an even smaller select few whos sole motivation is monitary gain.
There's a nice, safe air-gap between your local Internet connection and anything "THAT" serious on military networks.
Of course there is a safe-air gap, but unless every machine allowed to connect to those networks is physically locked down, every IO port disabled, and every removable media drive locked with a physical device, you're going to have people downloading sensitive material and moving it on to unsecured networks.
Granted it's been a few years, but I have seen young underpaid geeks walk up to such systems wearing paper badges with "NO CLEARANCE" stamped in red ink on them, and proceed to insert floppy disks into said systems in order to defragment drives or install drivers.
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
Intead, for us stuck here in North America. We get CDMA, and no bluetooth to speak of (except as an option on some high end notebooks). Sure we can buy an adapter for the notebook. But no phones.
You're not trying hard enough. I have T-Mobile in Boston. I have a Nokia 6310i phone. I have a 3800 series iPaq. I regularly read Slashdot from my iPaq while on the tram home from work.
I actually really like the idea of this PCMCIA card, as my thinkpad doesn't have bluetooth, and the Belkin USB-Bluetooth adapter I bought for it absolutely breaks Win2k. (or maybe I just need a new Thinkpad... hmm...)
Something the article does not specify but which my software driven Ramdrive allows me to do is to actually load a disk image into the drive on bootup
:-)
You wouldn't be so kind as to reply with a link to said software ram drive?
I used this trick on my PowerMac 7100 back in the day, having loaded it up with 136MB ram, an insane amount for 1996... I used to run Marathon off the built-in System 7.5 software ramdisk.
I wonder if the resolution on these mice is at all wavelength dependent. If it were, than a blue LED would be superior to a red LED, since blue is at about 400nm and red is closer to 700nm.
IIRC this wouldn't be too practical for cordless optical mice, as the blue would take more energy to generate the same amount of light. Any physics person want to support/correct me?
Not unless at least one of the Root servers changes from being UNIX based... Come now.. can you imagine the size of the windows cluster needed to offer a stable Root server? It would fill a warehouse!
Really I fail to see why you would say this. The IBM workstation sitting below my desk running Windows 2000 has several times the horsepower of the last root server I heard about. (IIRC they're a mishmash of six or seven unix variants running on five different hardware platforms.)
RFC 2870 specifies "2.3 At any time, each (root) server MUST be able to handle a load of requests for root data which is three times the measured peak of such requests on the most loaded server in then current normal conditions"
I believe that normal load is around 280 million requests per day, or 3300 requests per second.
These are not complex transactions. There isn't any writing going on to slow things down. The space requirements for a root server running Win2k would likely be 5U. Smaller than an e450, I do believe. And with 2-4 2GHz Xeon processors, a hell of a lot faster too.