It's not really "lock free". The algorithms in the slides still have WHILE loops wrapped around atomic compare-and-swap operations, so they are effectively spin locks, tying up the CPU while the other CPUs do something. However, the design is such that the WHILE loops shouldn't stall for too long.
This concept has two parts - a way of constructing bigger atomic operations from hardware-supported word-sized atomic operations, and a scheme for resizing arrays while they're in use. The latter is more important, especially in Java; stalls due to array resizing are a headache in real time systems with dynamic memory. It works about the way you'd expect; there are flags indicating the location (old or new) of each array element as the array is copied. Making all this work correctly is touchy.
Concurrent algorithms like this are incredibly hard to write, and you need formal methods to get them right. The author of the paper still hasn't figured out to code a FIFO under these rules.
Google has thus become a major supporting player in the spammer ecosystem.
As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.
The head of Applied Materials' solar division said in a 2007 talk at Stanford that their current production process costs about 2 years of output for a solar panel. He thinks they can get that down to 6 months of output; he said some things about improvements to the sputtering process. which is derived from IC manufacturing technology where the wafers are smaller.
They'll probably do it. What Applied Materials does is improve semiconductor process technology. They're the world's largest maker of semiconductor fab equipment. This led them into making LCD displays, and then solar panels.
The "free" model is breaking down for Craigslist. I just wrote an article about this on Techdirt. Craigslist allows free ads, but not unlimited free ads. The intent is to allow individuals to post a few ads a week. But for some advertisers, that's not enough.
Craigslist has all the usual defenses. They have limits on how much each account can post. They have a CAPTCHA. They have E-mail account validation. They check for excessive posting from one IP address. And they have a flagging system to catch any remaining spam.
All those defenses have been breached. There are power tools for Craiglist spammers. Commerciallyavailable power tools. Multiple accounts are created for ad spamming. OCR is used to break the CAPTCHA. Jiffy Gmail Creator ("Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited
Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?") is used to create vast numbers of GMail accounts to receive the account validation replies. IP proxies are used to get around per-IP limitations. Postings flagged off are automatically reposted.
Against these industrial strength automated posting tools, Craigslist is losing. Major areas of the site are over 90% spam, and angry users are deserting the site. Craigslist is trying phone verification, but even that has been broken. (Read the Techdirt article and the Black Hat SEO forums for how that's done.)
Craigslist is being hit because it's the biggest free ad site, but attack tools are available for other ad and social networking sites. You can read about it on the "Black Hat SEO" forums.
Hypercard was something of a rip-off of ZoomRacks, a good idea that suffered from coming out on Atari hardware in the 1980s.
Hypercard itself was kind of a neat idea, but its programming language, Hypertalk, was all too much like COBOL. It also had a terrible approach to data access, with forms like FIELD 6 OF CARD 372. If the thing had a relational database model underneath, it could have been very more broadly useful, rather than merely cute.
From capacity to "service level agreements" that guarantee little, cloud computing has business problems.
I went to this talk at Stanford by the head of "cloud computing" at Amazon. Technically, Amazon's approach to "cloud computing" is quite impressive. As a business, it works for a special reason - Amazon's load is 4X greater than normal during the buying season before Xmas. Amazon has to size their data centers for the Xmas buying season. For the rest of the year they have vast excess capacity. That's why Amazon's "cloud" is so cheap to use.
So Amazon's "cloud" is a great service, unless you need it during November and December.
Providing in-home installation services would not be forward progress. Eliminating the need for in-home installation services would be.
Cabling for home entertainment systems needs to be simplified drastically. Current large-screen TVs have far too many connectors. The home entertainment industry has been unable to make all the boxes talk to each other and self-configure. The display vendors, the cable box vendors, the media player vendors, and the "amplifier" vendors each want to be in charge. The game console people don't worry about integration much. So we don't have idiot-resistant plug and play, even though that's technically possible. (It is getting better, though; if you're all HDMI, things do interoperate better. Aspect ratio, for example, is handled automatically.)
Apple probably isn't in a position to make that happen, though. Apple may sell a "media center" box, but they won't be the only one.
Just as banks report interest income to the IRS, and employers report wage income, credit card merchant providers should report credit card income. It's income; you deduct business expenses on your return. Good way to catch tax evaders.
The Real reason that ISDN isn't more popular in the rural areas is that most of the time it is priced in a really silly price-range.
I know. US Telcos really blew ISDN. (The guy who writes Dilbert used to be in the ISDN department at PacBell.) In Switzerland, ISDN and analog phone lines are the same price.
ISDN has better sound quality than almost everything else in residential telephony. End to end digital, uncompressed, with no lags.
This is what ISDN is good for. It's not very demanding of loop quality, and you get uncompressed digital voice, plus modest data capability.
ISDN voice handsets are common in Europe. The Swiss PTT likes them. European practice is to power them from the
central office, so you don't need power at the subscriber end. US practice is to power ISDN gear from the subscriber end, which makes them unreliable as a primary phone connection.
There's no fundamental reason, though, why central office power for ISDN can't be used in the US. The gear is available.
The problem is that many rural lines have analog repeaters out on poles somewhere, and those are't compatible with DSL, ISDN, or much of anything else. See Rural Telephony Workshop Report..
Most of this stuff has been on trucks for ten years. Eaton's VORAD anti-collision radar goes back further than that. But now, everybody with more than one rig has some kind of tracking system.
Yes. Burn a CD, and send it by Registered Mail ($4.30), with options Restricted Delivery ($4.30), Signature Confirmation ($2.20), and Return Receipt ($2.20). It's a classic USPS service, and it's not computerized much. There are several little forms and labels to fill out when you send this at a post office, and the recipient has to be personally and physically present to sign for the item when it is delivered.
For that reason, it's useful when sending something important. The recipient has to sign for the item, the USPS checks their ID, and you get that physical signature card back. Which means that if there's a leak, it's easy to prove in court that they got it and nobody else did. It also gets across the idea that if anything funny happens, they won't have any excuses.
That's very true, and a real problem with wind. You get maybe 25-30% of nameplate capacity on average, and that's in a good wind area. Hydroelectric plants have similar numbers, but it's seasonal and there's some predictability. Solar plants have trouble hitting 25%, but at least you know when you're going to get power, and that peak output coincides with peak air conditioning load.
Nuclear plants run above 80%. So can gas turbines, but the fuel costs get you if you run them that hard, so they're mostly used for peaking. Coal plants are a bit lower; more maintenance.
Oil-fired plants work OK, but are now too expensive to operate much.
How can a company with 4% of the market be bound by anti-trust laws?
Read up on the
Kodak case. Kodak tried to keep third-party maintenance firms from buying Kodak repair parts. The monopoly was defined as being in spare parts for Kodak copiers, not the entire copier market. That went to the Supreme Court, and Kodak lost.
Yes, Google Health supports advertising. Spamming, even. Read the developer guidelines. Google just doesn't run the ads themselves. That's outsourced to "affiliates".
There are some rules for affiliates, like "one spam per week per user" and "no popups or popunders". Other than that, consumers are fair game. In particular, affiliates are not prohibited from using Google health data to target ads, as long as they "disclose" that somewhere in
their "privacy policy". The policy says "Only use Google Health user data for the purposes disclosed in your privacy policy, and obtain users' opt-in consent if personally identifiable health data will be used for ad targeting." So a bit of fine print, and the affiliate 0wns your health history.
It's a typical slimeball tactic - pretend to be the good guy, encourage "affiliates" to do the bad stuff.
Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
ITU CVA 1005: "Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequencies arbitrarily lower than 3 000 GHz propagated without artificial guide". That's the international definition. There are currently discussions over whether this limit should be raised.
The US FCC does not currently allocate spectrum above 300GHz, but there is already pressure on the FCC to act in that area.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really "lock free". The algorithms in the slides still have WHILE loops wrapped around atomic compare-and-swap operations, so they are effectively spin locks, tying up the CPU while the other CPUs do something. However, the design is such that the WHILE loops shouldn't stall for too long.
This concept has two parts - a way of constructing bigger atomic operations from hardware-supported word-sized atomic operations, and a scheme for resizing arrays while they're in use. The latter is more important, especially in Java; stalls due to array resizing are a headache in real time systems with dynamic memory. It works about the way you'd expect; there are flags indicating the location (old or new) of each array element as the array is copied. Making all this work correctly is touchy.
Concurrent algorithms like this are incredibly hard to write, and you need formal methods to get them right. The author of the paper still hasn't figured out to code a FIFO under these rules.
Ars Technica reports that mail from GMail is now being blocked by some anti-spam vendors. Now that there are tools for automatically creating GMail accounts in bulk, GMail has become very popular with spammers. GMail is widely used as the reply address in spam emails, especially ones associated with bulk-created Blogger accounts. Check the reply address in most "replica watch" spams, for example.
Google has thus become a major supporting player in the spammer ecosystem. As a result, GMail isn't really a viable option for serious e-mail users any more. It's like being on Hotmail.
The head of Applied Materials' solar division said in a 2007 talk at Stanford that their current production process costs about 2 years of output for a solar panel. He thinks they can get that down to 6 months of output; he said some things about improvements to the sputtering process. which is derived from IC manufacturing technology where the wafers are smaller.
They'll probably do it. What Applied Materials does is improve semiconductor process technology. They're the world's largest maker of semiconductor fab equipment. This led them into making LCD displays, and then solar panels.
The "free" model is breaking down for Craigslist. I just wrote an article about this on Techdirt. Craigslist allows free ads, but not unlimited free ads. The intent is to allow individuals to post a few ads a week. But for some advertisers, that's not enough.
Craigslist has all the usual defenses. They have limits on how much each account can post. They have a CAPTCHA. They have E-mail account validation. They check for excessive posting from one IP address. And they have a flagging system to catch any remaining spam.
All those defenses have been breached. There are power tools for Craiglist spammers. Commercially available power tools. Multiple accounts are created for ad spamming. OCR is used to break the CAPTCHA. Jiffy Gmail Creator ("Who Else Wants to Create Unlimited Gmail Accounts in Seconds Flat Without Breaking a Sweat?") is used to create vast numbers of GMail accounts to receive the account validation replies. IP proxies are used to get around per-IP limitations. Postings flagged off are automatically reposted.
Against these industrial strength automated posting tools, Craigslist is losing. Major areas of the site are over 90% spam, and angry users are deserting the site. Craigslist is trying phone verification, but even that has been broken. (Read the Techdirt article and the Black Hat SEO forums for how that's done.)
Craigslist is being hit because it's the biggest free ad site, but attack tools are available for other ad and social networking sites. You can read about it on the "Black Hat SEO" forums.
OK, the poles look pretty much like the other locations where landers have taken pictures. Now what?
So far, from what we know of Mars terrain, it makes Nevada look exciting.
The game industry already has a copy-protect mechanism that works. It's called "game consoles".
Really. If you have enough access to the machine to boot your own OS and rewrite the disk, of course you can take over the machine.
Now if someone manages to do this from the outside, that's news.
Hypercard was something of a rip-off of ZoomRacks, a good idea that suffered from coming out on Atari hardware in the 1980s.
Hypercard itself was kind of a neat idea, but its programming language, Hypertalk, was all too much like COBOL. It also had a terrible approach to data access, with forms like FIELD 6 OF CARD 372. If the thing had a relational database model underneath, it could have been very more broadly useful, rather than merely cute.
From capacity to "service level agreements" that guarantee little, cloud computing has business problems.
I went to this talk at Stanford by the head of "cloud computing" at Amazon. Technically, Amazon's approach to "cloud computing" is quite impressive. As a business, it works for a special reason - Amazon's load is 4X greater than normal during the buying season before Xmas. Amazon has to size their data centers for the Xmas buying season. For the rest of the year they have vast excess capacity. That's why Amazon's "cloud" is so cheap to use.
So Amazon's "cloud" is a great service, unless you need it during November and December.
Nah. "Geekdom" used to be about doing stuff. Now it's about owning stuff. Marketing has taken over "geek" the way it took over "cool".
Providing in-home installation services would not be forward progress. Eliminating the need for in-home installation services would be.
Cabling for home entertainment systems needs to be simplified drastically. Current large-screen TVs have far too many connectors. The home entertainment industry has been unable to make all the boxes talk to each other and self-configure. The display vendors, the cable box vendors, the media player vendors, and the "amplifier" vendors each want to be in charge. The game console people don't worry about integration much. So we don't have idiot-resistant plug and play, even though that's technically possible. (It is getting better, though; if you're all HDMI, things do interoperate better. Aspect ratio, for example, is handled automatically.)
Apple probably isn't in a position to make that happen, though. Apple may sell a "media center" box, but they won't be the only one.
Just as banks report interest income to the IRS, and employers report wage income, credit card merchant providers should report credit card income. It's income; you deduct business expenses on your return. Good way to catch tax evaders.
The Real reason that ISDN isn't more popular in the rural areas is that most of the time it is priced in a really silly price-range.
I know. US Telcos really blew ISDN. (The guy who writes Dilbert used to be in the ISDN department at PacBell.) In Switzerland, ISDN and analog phone lines are the same price.
ISDN has better sound quality than almost everything else in residential telephony. End to end digital, uncompressed, with no lags.
Here's one that actually works. It's an exoskeleton for street luge.
This is what ISDN is good for. It's not very demanding of loop quality, and you get uncompressed digital voice, plus modest data capability.
ISDN voice handsets are common in Europe. The Swiss PTT likes them. European practice is to power them from the central office, so you don't need power at the subscriber end. US practice is to power ISDN gear from the subscriber end, which makes them unreliable as a primary phone connection. There's no fundamental reason, though, why central office power for ISDN can't be used in the US. The gear is available.
The problem is that many rural lines have analog repeaters out on poles somewhere, and those are't compatible with DSL, ISDN, or much of anything else. See Rural Telephony Workshop Report..
Most of this stuff has been on trucks for ten years. Eaton's VORAD anti-collision radar goes back further than that. But now, everybody with more than one rig has some kind of tracking system.
This looks like a marketing stunt. Note that posts, barriers, and security people for line control were all on hand for this "unexpected" event.
Apple probably isn't even paying them. All they'd have to do is send anonymous text messages for a few of their fanboys, er, customers.
He's right. Anti-virus tools only work against previous-generation attacks and inept attackers.
It's just a movie.
Yes. Burn a CD, and send it by Registered Mail ($4.30), with options Restricted Delivery ($4.30), Signature Confirmation ($2.20), and Return Receipt ($2.20). It's a classic USPS service, and it's not computerized much. There are several little forms and labels to fill out when you send this at a post office, and the recipient has to be personally and physically present to sign for the item when it is delivered.
For that reason, it's useful when sending something important. The recipient has to sign for the item, the USPS checks their ID, and you get that physical signature card back. Which means that if there's a leak, it's easy to prove in court that they got it and nobody else did. It also gets across the idea that if anything funny happens, they won't have any excuses.
That's very true, and a real problem with wind. You get maybe 25-30% of nameplate capacity on average, and that's in a good wind area. Hydroelectric plants have similar numbers, but it's seasonal and there's some predictability. Solar plants have trouble hitting 25%, but at least you know when you're going to get power, and that peak output coincides with peak air conditioning load.
Nuclear plants run above 80%. So can gas turbines, but the fuel costs get you if you run them that hard, so they're mostly used for peaking. Coal plants are a bit lower; more maintenance. Oil-fired plants work OK, but are now too expensive to operate much.
How can a company with 4% of the market be bound by anti-trust laws?
Read up on the Kodak case. Kodak tried to keep third-party maintenance firms from buying Kodak repair parts. The monopoly was defined as being in spare parts for Kodak copiers, not the entire copier market. That went to the Supreme Court, and Kodak lost.
Yes, Google Health supports advertising. Spamming, even. Read the developer guidelines. Google just doesn't run the ads themselves. That's outsourced to "affiliates".
There are some rules for affiliates, like "one spam per week per user" and "no popups or popunders". Other than that, consumers are fair game. In particular, affiliates are not prohibited from using Google health data to target ads, as long as they "disclose" that somewhere in their "privacy policy". The policy says "Only use Google Health user data for the purposes disclosed in your privacy policy, and obtain users' opt-in consent if personally identifiable health data will be used for ad targeting." So a bit of fine print, and the affiliate 0wns your health history.
It's a typical slimeball tactic - pretend to be the good guy, encourage "affiliates" to do the bad stuff.
Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.
More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.
ITU CVA 1005: "Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequencies arbitrarily lower than 3 000 GHz propagated without artificial guide". That's the international definition. There are currently discussions over whether this limit should be raised.
The US FCC does not currently allocate spectrum above 300GHz, but there is already pressure on the FCC to act in that area.