It's really quite obvious. Current drives have continuous media. Put very simply, this tends to "smear out" the magnetic field, because there is no magnetic break between the N and S poles of one bit, and the poles of another. This has two bad effects: unreliable bits (location in space), and the possibility that bits will simply flip as the head passes over them. By isolating very, very small domains in a structured way, with nonmagnetic regions between them, the problems are avoided since the bits, being isolated from one another, will not be subject to domain creep or interference.
Science works by induction. We observe phenomenon X under conditions Y,Z.., we observe it again under slightly varying conditions, eventually we work out a rule and predict the conditions under which we will observe X.
So far we have found life just about everywhere on this planet where long chain carbon molecules can be stable. We have found it using a variety of substrates to obtain energy, including oxygen and sulfur which are common in the universe. Even talking about "life" begs the question; the term includes organisms based on two different genetic storage means (DNA and RNA), and several different cell structures. Just on this planet, we observe that the phenomenon of life occurs under widely varying conditions. We observe that our sun is mainstream.
Based on our observations, the probability that life is common in the universe has to be very high, though we have no proof that it exists off our planet. So why would anyone even suggest that both outcomes are equally probable? I'm afraid the answer is religion and cultural conditioning, which seems to be confined more or less to the Third World and the US.
It's worth pointing out that this cultural conditioning is far from universal; although Giordano Bruno was burned by the Catholics for asserting the plurality of inhabited worlds, I think that most Europeans with a scientific education would take it pretty much for granted. Why so many loud people in the US have this obsession with our uniqueness I don't know, though I could make all kinds of pop psychological/sociological suggests. But I won't, because it would be unscientific.
And this is why I am glad I live in Europe and not in the US. You are describing three well known problems in US culture:
No win no fee litigation
Free comment allowed on sub judice matters
Lack of rights of the individual in the workplace
Although European (EU mainstream) countries are far from perfect in this, legal restraints make it much harder for ambulance chasers to make fortunes by publicly exaggerating allegations, and employment law means that there are proper remedies at reasonable cost which means that companies are not exposed to excessive risks from ordinary human behaviour. (I might add that we don't suffer so much from kneejerk Protestant fundamentalism, but I think that's a sideshow.)
Interestingly, when I had to do the training in the UK, our (US) trainer was quite clued up on UK law, and commented that a number of the overbearing rules that get applied in the US would be rejected by employment tribunals in the UK as unreasonable grounds for dismissal ("you guys are lucky").
Bottom line: your comments may well be correct for the US as it is, but are a sad commentary on the US legal profession and the relationships inside US companies.
US law can get very broadly interpreted indeed if you have rich enough lawyers. There was the case some years ago of an HR company which called itself "Gentium" (Latin for people. Intel sued. How you could possibly confuse an HR company with a microprocessor seems a far stretch, but Intel won. In Europe, they wouldn't even have been allowed to take the case to court, because European law is quite clear on exclusive categories of trade mark registration.
Pinball Alleys -> Watching service engineer -> Understanding relays and solenoids -> Understandingg tubes -> Understanding transistors and ICs -> Becoming electronic engineer -> Discovering embedded systems -> Learning Unix -> Becoming system architect.
For many of my generation, the pinball was the first electronic machine you could interact with, before even programmable calculators, and a lot more interesting than BASIC on green and white alternate line paper. Understanding how it worked was an introduction to what could be done with simple boolean logic, latching relays, and electromechanical counters.
Now get off my lawn before the robot mower hits you.
There is. Tubes. (possibly before you were born)
on
Stupid Data Center Tricks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't know how old these tape machines were, but I can assure you that back in the day we had power systems that used vacuum tubes, and the tube space needed to be air cooled. The air temperature could reach several hundred Celsius if the fans stopped. Shortly after this would come the plop of inrushing air as the envelope of a KT88 collapsed at the hottest point. It would not be good design practice to series the units like this, but again back in the day thermal management wasn't even a black art. The last piece of electronic equipment I recall that used large power tubes in its control circuits was still in service in 1982, and the power resistors had to be replaced regularly because otherwise they would eventually burn out.
This was a server room at an (unnamed) UK PLC. The air conditioning had remote management, and the remote management notified the maintenance people that attention was needed. So someone was sent out, on a Friday afternoon.
When he arrived, most of the staff had gone home and the skeleton IT staff didn't want to hang around. So, they sent him away on the basis that his work wasn't "scheduled".
Everybody came back on Monday to find totally fried servers.
If the US is anything like the UK, the median income of WSJ readers is something like 5 times the national average, and it speaks to a group for whom money is the measure of everything. I imagine you pay for the WSJ because you believe that reading it will increase your income by far more than it costs you. What services will Murdoch develop that a mass readership will pay for?
I agree with most of what you say, but there is a middle way. This is to put up warnings with clear explanations of the risk level, with the option not to show them again but to put an icon in a suitable location. We need new icons to replace the lock, because it is not really an appropriate symbol. What is being locked up?
And the first time that your newly installed browser points to a plain old HTTP page it should say something like "This is an unsecured page. Anything you read on it, and any forms you fill in, can be read by almost anybody. Most pages on the Internet are like this. You should not use them unless you are happy for the whole world to know what you are doing.", followed by an option "In future,replace this warning with an xxx symbol in the lower left corner of this window".
I'm saying that nowadays with hosting services sharing certificates among multiple subdomains, you should not trust a signed SSL certificate that is not for that exact domain any more than you should trust a self-signed certificate. It should be important that the certificate be for the exact domain being accessed, but currently it isn't, for commercial rather than security reasons.
Incidentally, "Wow, where to start" is not an argument.
There was an (apocryphal?) story that Lucas's ignition systems only worked at all because Joe Lucas had a pact with the Devil, and every time Joe wondered if he'd made a mistake, an ignition system failed somewhere.
The problem is that the browser designers are making the assumption that you only use encryption because you are engaging in activities which entail financial risk. They assume that viewing plain old HTTP pages means that you aren't doing this. This assumption is fast going obsolete; we (as a company) use HTTPS for everything that requires a login, because the cost of encryption is so small and it is so easy just to write if(isSecure()) in our servlets. Others are going the same way.
Logically, the levels of security should be:
No private data - HTTP
No personal data or login details - HTTPS + self-signed
No login details - HTTPS with trusted cert but no authentication from the site to the user
Secure - HTTPS, signed cert, authentication from site to user.
However, this would involve educating users, which everybody hates doing.
I have a hard time with this. I am operating a web site which provides information to identified users. I have a self-signed certificate which correctly identifies itself as belonging to my site. What is wrong with this? I want you to identify yourself to me, securely, before I will tell you anything.
In another scenario, someone is using a shared certificate issued by a "trusted" supplier, but owing to the domain structure it could be cloned and used in a MiM attack. My browser doesn't care.
My conclusion from all this is that, in fact, even the browser vendors have it backwards. They want us to trust, more or less blindly, anything corporate. They want us to distrust anything that is not corporate. In effect, they want us to buy the message "I'm a banker, trust me", rather than "read this contract carefully before signing". In the scheme of things, being issued by a "trusted" CA should rank _below_ being exactly site-specific, not above. That it does not do so seems more for the convenience of corporates than for Internet security in general.
Our power from sunbeams goes through three meters, actually. (Watts generated, total generation, and return to grid.) One of our neighbours said the other day that a lot of people she knew were thinking about getting PV installed, but it had taken someone (us) actually to do it before they would believe that what they were being told by the Government. The root problem with all beneficial change is innate conservatism that causes people to fear the new.
Watch Derby. Small footprint, backed by IBM, some very nice features indeed (efficient backups and table compression can be called while running) and, although it is actually 100% java you do not need java to run it. It is a very nice way to run small, simple databases (like MySQL 3.2x was designed for), but with features like efficient complex joins and easy window selects. Oh yes, and there's a commercial version (Cloudscape). Oracle faffing with MySQL is a gift to IBM.
I worked for a while in an environment full of classical musicians. They would happily listen to old vinyl records with hisses and scratches, because what they were listening to was the music in their heads.
First of all, when I was 15, fusion was 20 years in the future. Now I'm 60 and it's 70 years in the future, according to that anti-science tract Scientific American. I'm not holding my breath (I'll be dead anyway).
Second, once there's something cheaper, wind farms will be worth removing for the materials alone. Who wants to remove cyanide and heavy metal laden mine tailings?
You may be correct, but you have not the slightest evidence to back up that claim. There are many, many other issues to consider, such as environmental pressure or the lack thereof, and the difficulty of abstract thought before there were any abstractions - the bootstrap problem. Our present ability to think of new tools in an environment surrounded by them is not, perhaps, that impressive. The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
Wind turbines are a nice "intermediate technology" while we look for something better in the long term, because when it comes they can just be removed, whereas the mess left by coal or nuclear plants stays around for a long time. So it does not harm to put them in "scenic" areas, in the long term. Whereas, if we don't do something positive, in the long term you won't be doing any skiing in the Alps, because they'll look like Pikes Peak.
As for Australia, yes. What are you personally doing about it? (Asks he, smugly regarding his home solar PV plant, high efficiency insulation, rainwater collection system and fertiliser-free vegetable patch)
Some nasty comments on this thread. I've worked for a (US) company where the management basically decided to get rid of two very competent VPs and came up with some very trumped up charges, so I know that dirty office politics is often more to blame than anything else. This smells of excuses, not a cover up.
A quick look at the HP share price also suggests what a lot of influential people may think; the sudden fall off the side of a cliff suggests a perception that either this is seen as a bad move which will affect future earnings, whether it is seen as reflecting on the competence of the remaining HP Board, or the probability of their finding an adequate replacement.
It depends on your relationship with your MP. My wife knows our MP well and yes, she will get rapid replies to emails. But I was specifically writing in the context of people sending off emails as a result of stuff read on pressure group websites.
Any MP will tell you one well written letter in an envelope with a stamp is worth uncounted numbers of emails, because someone has bothered to communicate, and where one person takes action, many others think the same but cannot be bothered. In a democracy, we should express our views by voting, or demonstrating, not by spamming. Sites like 38degrees could easily be more responsible, but they suffer from a degree of self-righteousness that (to them) justifies encouraging annoying behaviour.
Where I live, we have a very effective resident's pressure group. We have one person who directly contacts councillors, one person who is a planning specialist, and access to legal and scientific information. The rest of us supply funds and do the office jobs. We also have a fund big enough to apply for legal injunctions. This is extremely effective; local Government gets one targeted message, and they know that it has considerable real support.
Although the NHS provides medical care (contrary to Republican lies), Hawking's round the clock nursing care does not, I believe, come from Government. AFAIK he wrote his first popular book to raise the cash for his nursing care, making use of his back story.
There is nothing wrong with this. But it makes me a little unhappy that he's so ready to provide rent-a-quotes outside his area of expertise. People are confused enough about what scientists actually do, how they work and what they know about. Scientists have a duty, because it's their calling, to be very clear about what they can, and cannot, talk about with authority. (I don't always succeed in this myself but nowadays I do try to make a point of saying, when necessary, "actually I don't know anything about this" in a technical meeting. It's surprising how often that other people then admit, well, they don't really know either and we have to go off and do the research.
I think you're right. Compared to wishful thinking like space elevators, almost infinite supplies of hydrogen from fusion-derived electrolysis, and all the other schemes invented by physicists to get funding for blue-sky projects, greed is actually a pretty credible propellant. Though, looking around, I have to say it's just as environmentally destructive as oil.
Hawking is a physicist not an engineer or a biologist, and it shows. (He's also not very good at metaphysics, since he seems sometimes unable to understand that physics can't ultimately answer "why" questions. On the other hand, I'm not much good at thermodynamics, but at least I don't pontificate about black holes.)
Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really quite obvious. Current drives have continuous media. Put very simply, this tends to "smear out" the magnetic field, because there is no magnetic break between the N and S poles of one bit, and the poles of another. This has two bad effects: unreliable bits (location in space), and the possibility that bits will simply flip as the head passes over them. By isolating very, very small domains in a structured way, with nonmagnetic regions between them, the problems are avoided since the bits, being isolated from one another, will not be subject to domain creep or interference.
So far we have found life just about everywhere on this planet where long chain carbon molecules can be stable. We have found it using a variety of substrates to obtain energy, including oxygen and sulfur which are common in the universe. Even talking about "life" begs the question; the term includes organisms based on two different genetic storage means (DNA and RNA), and several different cell structures. Just on this planet, we observe that the phenomenon of life occurs under widely varying conditions. We observe that our sun is mainstream.
Based on our observations, the probability that life is common in the universe has to be very high, though we have no proof that it exists off our planet. So why would anyone even suggest that both outcomes are equally probable? I'm afraid the answer is religion and cultural conditioning, which seems to be confined more or less to the Third World and the US.
It's worth pointing out that this cultural conditioning is far from universal; although Giordano Bruno was burned by the Catholics for asserting the plurality of inhabited worlds, I think that most Europeans with a scientific education would take it pretty much for granted. Why so many loud people in the US have this obsession with our uniqueness I don't know, though I could make all kinds of pop psychological/sociological suggests. But I won't, because it would be unscientific.
Although European (EU mainstream) countries are far from perfect in this, legal restraints make it much harder for ambulance chasers to make fortunes by publicly exaggerating allegations, and employment law means that there are proper remedies at reasonable cost which means that companies are not exposed to excessive risks from ordinary human behaviour. (I might add that we don't suffer so much from kneejerk Protestant fundamentalism, but I think that's a sideshow.)
Interestingly, when I had to do the training in the UK, our (US) trainer was quite clued up on UK law, and commented that a number of the overbearing rules that get applied in the US would be rejected by employment tribunals in the UK as unreasonable grounds for dismissal ("you guys are lucky").
Bottom line: your comments may well be correct for the US as it is, but are a sad commentary on the US legal profession and the relationships inside US companies.
US law can get very broadly interpreted indeed if you have rich enough lawyers. There was the case some years ago of an HR company which called itself "Gentium" (Latin for people. Intel sued. How you could possibly confuse an HR company with a microprocessor seems a far stretch, but Intel won. In Europe, they wouldn't even have been allowed to take the case to court, because European law is quite clear on exclusive categories of trade mark registration.
For many of my generation, the pinball was the first electronic machine you could interact with, before even programmable calculators, and a lot more interesting than BASIC on green and white alternate line paper. Understanding how it worked was an introduction to what could be done with simple boolean logic, latching relays, and electromechanical counters.
Now get off my lawn before the robot mower hits you.
I don't know how old these tape machines were, but I can assure you that back in the day we had power systems that used vacuum tubes, and the tube space needed to be air cooled. The air temperature could reach several hundred Celsius if the fans stopped. Shortly after this would come the plop of inrushing air as the envelope of a KT88 collapsed at the hottest point. It would not be good design practice to series the units like this, but again back in the day thermal management wasn't even a black art. The last piece of electronic equipment I recall that used large power tubes in its control circuits was still in service in 1982, and the power resistors had to be replaced regularly because otherwise they would eventually burn out.
When he arrived, most of the staff had gone home and the skeleton IT staff didn't want to hang around. So, they sent him away on the basis that his work wasn't "scheduled".
Everybody came back on Monday to find totally fried servers.
If the US is anything like the UK, the median income of WSJ readers is something like 5 times the national average, and it speaks to a group for whom money is the measure of everything. I imagine you pay for the WSJ because you believe that reading it will increase your income by far more than it costs you. What services will Murdoch develop that a mass readership will pay for?
And the first time that your newly installed browser points to a plain old HTTP page it should say something like "This is an unsecured page. Anything you read on it, and any forms you fill in, can be read by almost anybody. Most pages on the Internet are like this. You should not use them unless you are happy for the whole world to know what you are doing.", followed by an option "In future,replace this warning with an xxx symbol in the lower left corner of this window".
Yes, I know it won't happen.
Incidentally, "Wow, where to start" is not an argument.
There was an (apocryphal?) story that Lucas's ignition systems only worked at all because Joe Lucas had a pact with the Devil, and every time Joe wondered if he'd made a mistake, an ignition system failed somewhere.
Logically, the levels of security should be:
However, this would involve educating users, which everybody hates doing.
In another scenario, someone is using a shared certificate issued by a "trusted" supplier, but owing to the domain structure it could be cloned and used in a MiM attack. My browser doesn't care.
My conclusion from all this is that, in fact, even the browser vendors have it backwards. They want us to trust, more or less blindly, anything corporate. They want us to distrust anything that is not corporate. In effect, they want us to buy the message "I'm a banker, trust me", rather than "read this contract carefully before signing". In the scheme of things, being issued by a "trusted" CA should rank _below_ being exactly site-specific, not above. That it does not do so seems more for the convenience of corporates than for Internet security in general.
Now someone please explain why I'm wrong.
Our power from sunbeams goes through three meters, actually. (Watts generated, total generation, and return to grid.) One of our neighbours said the other day that a lot of people she knew were thinking about getting PV installed, but it had taken someone (us) actually to do it before they would believe that what they were being told by the Government. The root problem with all beneficial change is innate conservatism that causes people to fear the new.
Watch Derby. Small footprint, backed by IBM, some very nice features indeed (efficient backups and table compression can be called while running) and, although it is actually 100% java you do not need java to run it. It is a very nice way to run small, simple databases (like MySQL 3.2x was designed for), but with features like efficient complex joins and easy window selects. Oh yes, and there's a commercial version (Cloudscape). Oracle faffing with MySQL is a gift to IBM.
I worked for a while in an environment full of classical musicians. They would happily listen to old vinyl records with hisses and scratches, because what they were listening to was the music in their heads.
Second, once there's something cheaper, wind farms will be worth removing for the materials alone. Who wants to remove cyanide and heavy metal laden mine tailings?
You may be correct, but you have not the slightest evidence to back up that claim. There are many, many other issues to consider, such as environmental pressure or the lack thereof, and the difficulty of abstract thought before there were any abstractions - the bootstrap problem. Our present ability to think of new tools in an environment surrounded by them is not, perhaps, that impressive. The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
As for Australia, yes. What are you personally doing about it? (Asks he, smugly regarding his home solar PV plant, high efficiency insulation, rainwater collection system and fertiliser-free vegetable patch)
A quick look at the HP share price also suggests what a lot of influential people may think; the sudden fall off the side of a cliff suggests a perception that either this is seen as a bad move which will affect future earnings, whether it is seen as reflecting on the competence of the remaining HP Board, or the probability of their finding an adequate replacement.
It depends on your relationship with your MP. My wife knows our MP well and yes, she will get rapid replies to emails. But I was specifically writing in the context of people sending off emails as a result of stuff read on pressure group websites.
Where I live, we have a very effective resident's pressure group. We have one person who directly contacts councillors, one person who is a planning specialist, and access to legal and scientific information. The rest of us supply funds and do the office jobs. We also have a fund big enough to apply for legal injunctions. This is extremely effective; local Government gets one targeted message, and they know that it has considerable real support.
There is nothing wrong with this. But it makes me a little unhappy that he's so ready to provide rent-a-quotes outside his area of expertise. People are confused enough about what scientists actually do, how they work and what they know about. Scientists have a duty, because it's their calling, to be very clear about what they can, and cannot, talk about with authority. (I don't always succeed in this myself but nowadays I do try to make a point of saying, when necessary, "actually I don't know anything about this" in a technical meeting. It's surprising how often that other people then admit, well, they don't really know either and we have to go off and do the research.
I think you're right. Compared to wishful thinking like space elevators, almost infinite supplies of hydrogen from fusion-derived electrolysis, and all the other schemes invented by physicists to get funding for blue-sky projects, greed is actually a pretty credible propellant. Though, looking around, I have to say it's just as environmentally destructive as oil.
Some people, however, are likely to misunderstand your post because, quite simply, they don't even begin to appreciate how much energy it would require to colonise another planet, or how likely we would be to exterminate ourselves by destroying our atmosphere if we even diverted significant resources to putting lots of stuff outside it. Basically, between "let's get off Earth" and "oh look, space colony", they engage in lots of vague handwaving about nonexistent technologies, nonexistent methods of energy generation, and nonexistent materials, the ability to create any of which in great enough quantities would imply a civilisation that really wouldn't need to waste them on a colonial experiment.