To a first approximation, it needs the.mozilla directory mapped in -- that takes care of cache, cookies, preferences, etc.
That breaks the security model. Now information can escape from the jail and contaminate other browser instances. In fact, if you can write the.mozilla directory, you can make Mozilla/Firefox do anything. You can change the security preferences, add plugins, and put in security holes.
It's not that easy.
Another big, fat book of examples. Yawn
on
PHP 5 in Practice
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Another one of those huge low-density books of examples. Do we really need another one.
What's really hard today is finding a good reference manual.
The original manual for Algol was 17 pages. The original manual for Scheme was 21 pages.
456 pages for PHP is a bit much. A big plastic card that boiled the language down to two pages - now that would be useful.
Reading vision papers is very frustrating. At one time I had a shelf full of collections of papers on vision. You can read all these "my algorithm worked really great on these test cases" papers, and still have no idea if it's any good. You can read the article on the vision algorithm used by the Stanford team to win the DARPA Grand Challenge, and it won't be obvious that it's a useful approach. But it is.
This is, unfortunately, another Roland the Plogger article on Slashdot. So this probably isn't a major breakthrough. It doesn't sound like one.
That report on supercomputing doesn't indicate growth:
"Clusters have proven themselves as capable servers to handle a sizable portion
of the HPC workload."
"More than half of the respondents expect their budgets for
all HPC tools will decline (43%) or remain the same (17%) over the next two years."
"U.S. industrial users/buyers really want and need faster computers that fit their
budgets and that don't require specialized programming skills."
Also, that study doesn't reflect "most companies". It reflects 30 companies that use supercomputers today, most of which are very large aerospace or automotive companies.
They're not buying the tightly-coupled high end supercomputers, either; most of the new systems are clusters of conventional machines.
And that's why Microsoft Vista is so paranoid, and insists on talking to the mothership in Redmond regularly. Microsoft is gradually going to shut this down. Once the hardware changes to require Vista, and the monitors change to require HDCP, they just have to wait for the old hardware to die off.
Actually, so is Christianity. It took several hundred years of wars to get the Catholic Church under control. The period when the Catholic Church ran the world is called the "Dark Ages" for good reason. We might have had the Industrial Revolution a thousand years earlier without it.
(It's interesting to consider what might have happened if a few more ideas had been developed at the height of the Roman Empire. Not technical ideas - business methods and concepts. The Roman Empire had an elaborate legal system, but they never developed the concept of the corporation, or of a common carrier. All they had was individual ownership. Nobody thought to develop a postal service or a stagecoach line. If large private organizations had been developed before large religious organizations, history might have been quite different.)
This is another one of those crap articles that links to a blog, which links to other blogs, and doesn't link to the actual source of the problem.
Which is WalMart Video Downloads (Beta).. And which is currently returning the message "Site Temporarily Unavailable
The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later."
So see what happens when it comes back up.
Of course, the real problem is probably that, having downloaded, you can only play the resulting download with Windows Media Player.
I just heard that talk; he gave it at EE380 at Stanford a few weeks ago.
First, this is a supercomputer guy talking. He's talking about number-crunching. His "13 dwarfs" are mostly number-crunching inner loops.
Second, what he's really pushing is getting everybody in academia to do research his way - on FPGA-based rackmount emulators.
Basic truth about supercomputers - the commercial market is zilch. You have to go down to #60 on the list of the top 500 supercomputer before you find the first real commercial customer. It's BMW, and the system is a cluster of 1024 Intel x86 1U servers, running Red Hat Linux. Nothing exotic; just a big server farm set up for computation.
More CPUs will help in server farms, but there we're I/O bound to the outside world, not talking much to neighboring CPUs. If you have hundreds of CPUs on a chip, how do you get data in and out? But we know the answer to that - put 100Gb/s Ethernet controllers on the chip. No major software changes needed.
This brings up one of the other major architectural truths: shared memory multiprocessors are useful, and clusters are useful. Everything in between is a huge pain. Supercomputer guys fuss endlessly over elaborate interconnection schemes, but none of them are worth the trouble. The author of this paper thinks that all the programming headaches of supercomputers will have to be brought down to desktop level, but that's probably not going to happen. What problem would it solve?
What we do get from the latest rounds of shrinkage are better mobile devices. The big wins commercially are in phones, not desktops or laptops. Desktops have been mostly empty space inside for years now. In fact, that's true of most non-mobile consumer electronics. We're getting lower cost and smaller size, rather than more power.
Consider cars. For the first half of the 20th century, the big thing was making engines more powerful. By the 1960s, engine power was a solved problem, (the 1967 turbine-powered Indy car finally settled that issue) and cars really haven't become significantly more powerful since then. (Brakes and suspensions, though, are far better.)
It will be very interesting to see what happens with the Cell. That's the first non-shared memory multiprocessor to be produced in volume. If it turns out to be a dead end, like the Itanium, it may kill off interest in that sort of thing for years.
There are some interesting potential applications for massive parallelism for vision and robotics applications. I expect to see interesting work in that direction. The more successful vision algorithms do much computation, most of which is discarded. That's a proper application for many-CPU machines, though not the Cell, unless it gets more memory per CPU. Tomorrow's robots may have a thousand CPUs. Tomorrow's laptops, probably not.
It's Roland the Plogger, wrong as usual, spamming to promote his blog. The Slashdot editors gave him two links this time, one without a "nofollow". Ka-ching!
OK, now the real info. Thermal energy storage has been around for years. There are thousands of installations. It's used when there's a big difference between day and night power rates. During the night, water is chilled, or ice frozen; during the day, the cold water is used for air conditioning. See
Thermal Energy
Storage Strategies
for Commercial
HVAC Systems for details on how to configure such a system. Also see CALMAC, which makes such gear. It was a spinoff from their ice-rink equipment business.
VRML was supposed to be replaced by X3D, which is simply VRML 97 with XML delimiters instead of VRML delimiters. "Spinning logos in only 40 bytes" were promised. That went nowhere for years. But, surprisingly, it's coming back. But for completely different applications. Not virtual worlds, but 3D images of industrial gear.
I think it's pretty clear, as another poster pointed out, that Bifrost is primarily SELinux plus a particular policy set, an approach to "jailing" apps and some other bits related to system activation and theft deterrence.
It's not the machinery that's the problem. It's getting the apps to live within the security policy that's the problem.
Suppose we wanted to build a secure Firefox to run in a jail. For each page, we create a jailed process that has permission to write to one window on the screen and to talk to one host on the Internet, and very little else. That's a strong basis for a secure browser. And it will work fine for most pages.
So what doesn't work any more? Cookies - the jailed process can't access any persistent state. Cacheing, although we could have a separate cache file for each site and make that work securely. Mashups - can't talk to more than one site. Off-site image links - ditto. Downloads - you can download, and maybe even run something in a subprocess, but when it exits, the download is lost. Tabbed browsing - puts multiple sites in one window.
Those are the real problems.
But for the OLPC system, it might be appropriate to have a browser with those restrictions. Educational content doesn't really need any of those features. On a machine with no hard drive, like the OLPC machine, you don't want to be permanently downloading much anyway.
It would make sense, though, to have that jailing capability in a browser and use it for secure
pages. You don't want your online banking page in a mashup or frame, you don't want to download a game from it, and you don't want it cached.
It's probably too late, though. Even if it works now.
Consider VRML. Remember VRML, 3D worlds on the desktop.? Too slow, too much bandwidth, lousy framerates back in 1997. Load up an old VRML browser today. With modern GPUs, it looks great and works smoothly. Nobody cares.
Java has a strange history. It was supposed to be a lightweight semi-interpreted language for use in web browsers. It ended up being the replacement for COBOL as a business application language, something nobody expected.
What seems to have gone wrong in applet land is that, early on, Sun produced a huge collection of mediocre libraries. This, coupled with a linkage system that brought in the whole library if you needed any part of it, bloated applets to excessive size. Remember, at the time, most users were on dialup. So that just couldn't work.
Also, as an aesthetic issue, Java's early fonts and visible objects were ugly. That was enough to turn off web designers.
On the server, none of this mattered. A memory-safe language with decent execution speed was a huge win. When a Java servlet fails, you get a reasonable error message, not corrupted memory. That was enough to make it a success on servers.
Java bloat continues to be a problem. There seems to be an excess of "packaging" associated with the language. Not clear why.
It's not hard to do this. Several groups had systems this tight working back in the 1980s. For that matter, Multics had it right in the late 1960s. Linux has it now, in NSA SELinux.
It breaks existing applications, of course. The OLPC people have a huge advantage - they don't care about existing applications. They can say to application developers, "these are the security constraints - design to them." That's a huge win.
Somebody should have done this by now for phones and palmtops, but, unfortunately, those things started out so underpowered they barely had an operating system. So they have their own legacy problems.
Given the PS3's architecture, that's to be expected. It has a decent GPU on the back end, and all those underutilized Cell CPUs to do things like generate procedural textures. The obvious approach for textures on the PS3 should yield a look like Pixar's All Renderman All the Time, with every pixel generated by little shader programs written in San Raphael, instead of compositing in real-world images like everybody else.
The big advantage of procedural textures is that they survive zooming in. In the film world, this isn't as critical, because you know how close the camera will get to a background, and you only put in detail the camera can see. In games, the user can move around and get close to a textured surface, which usually looks terrible.
The article is vague. It's not even clear if the problem occurs when the laptop is not plugged into the charger. The power supply for some backlights can produce over 100v, so there is a potential shock source even on battery power.
If the problem is related to the charger power supply, that's a clear safety hazard. Check for a UL logo, and go to the UL web site to check on whether the power supply actually has approval. If the power supply is made in China, it must have a hologram UL sticker with the UL approval number. There are power supplies out there with forged UL approvals, and UL is trying to crack down. (Those are the power supplies that fail in power supply tests on PC websites. UL tests them loaded up to their rated value and runs them for hours at full load, so the UL logo means it really can deliver whatever power it's supposed to deliver.)
I know my house was built a long long time ago (1951) and the upstairs, while someone put in grounded outlets, it doesn't physically have the ground hooked up - due to the wiring used at the time of it being built.
That's an electrical code violation. If you have to have a 3-prong outlet on a 2-wire circuit, you must use a GFCI outlet, which gives you electric shock protection. That's allowed by the US National Electrical Code. The outlet plate should then be marked "Isolated Ground". This warns people that plugging in a computer there may have problems, because it can't dump static and noise into protective ground as usual.
If you're going to wire up power, read a manual on how to do it. It's not rocket science, but there are very specific rules and screwing up is dangerous.
This is described as energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI, of 1.9, which
is not all that great. Ethanol from corn has a value of about 1.25, and that number is from its proponents. Anything below 1.0 is a lose.
US oil production has a value of about 3. That number declines over time; it was as high as 100 in the early days of oil production. (Look up "Spindletop") Saudi oil production has a value of about 10. Wind energy has a value of around 5. Solar power values depend on how long the equipment lasts; energy breakeven on solar cells happens some time around 5 years.
The first mechanized garage was built in 1932 and ran until 1979.
This isn't even the first automated parking garage in New York City. There was one working around 1970.
The layout was well worked out. It looked like a little parking garage with two stalls, with no sign of any machinery. You parked your car and got out. Then, solid barriers rose out of the floor around the car, a big freight elevator door opened behind the car, the pallet on which the car was parked moved into the elevator, the elevator doors closed, and shortly thereafter, an empty pallet was delivered. Then the barriers went back down, leaving an empty parking stall.
Light beams and photocells were used for safety interlocks. The light beams were modulated, so extraneous light wouldn't bother them, and the modulation was at about 5Hz, so you could see this.
Technically, the biggest problem was with limit switches. The system depended on hundreds of mechanical limit switches for position feedback, and they were not reliable enough, so the system could stall. This became worse with wear.
"religions that are clearly made up...."
the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism."
Most, if not all, religions are "made up". In some cases, we know when and by whom.
Christian Science was made up by Mary Baker Eddy in 1866. Mormonism was made up by Joseph Smith in 1830. Islam was made up by Mohammed around 610. Christianity was more of a group project; most modern doctrine comes from a committee meeting in 325. In 431, there was a another meeting for a feature upgrade, and the Virgin Mary was added.
Novell and Microsoft tried to find a way around the GPL, via a patent cross-licensing deal. This may backfire. "The stock is likely to trade down before the Foundation discloses its ruling as investors stay on the sidelines to avoid the worst-case scenario, analysts said."
What will probably happen is that Novell agrees not to use Microsoft patents in GPL code. Which is what should happen.
It's too late for "Linux on the desktop". Now it has to be "Linux on the Laptop". With WiFi. And that just doesn't work very well.
Yes, there are resources for running Linux on laptops. And they're very funny.
Linux-Laptop.net This is a collection of links to blogs of people who were able to get Linux to run on a laptop. Really.
Tuxmobil.org A collection of links to other sites about Linux. With ads.
Linux.org's laptop page. Most of the listings are for machines that are no longer manufactured, or even for defunct manufacturers. Compaq and DEC are listed, but Leonovo isn't.
Ubuntu's support wiki for laptops. Big table of laptops, what doesn't work, and what hacks might make them work. Dell's current laptop line, the Inspiron 1501/1505/1705, isn't listed. Even for ones that work, there are instructions like this:
This is installation instructions for Hoary. I was unable to complete a successful install with Warty, and I looked, but was unable to find anyone else who had completed an install of Warty. You must first upgrade to BIOS version A32..... For information on doing this without a windows partition, go here:... Type in at boot: linux pci=noacpi noapic to prevent it from freezing partway through install (this seems to be a recurring problem with Dell laptops)....
Debian will detect the screen resolution incorrectly.... To fix this once everything has installed, boot to the Root Terminal or use Applications-System Tools-Root Terminal. Once logged in, type (without quotes) "sudo nano/etc/X11/xorg.conf" and edit...
This is no better than it was four years ago. Maybe worse. You can't even get the WalMart Linux laptop any more.
Linux on the server, sure. Linux on the desktop, maybe. Linux on the laptop, not ready for prime time.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that's useful.
Today I could use ones for Perl and Python; I'm converting someone else's regular expressions from Perl to Python. Both have almost the same syntax.
To a first approximation, it needs the .mozilla directory mapped in -- that takes care of cache, cookies, preferences, etc.
That breaks the security model. Now information can escape from the jail and contaminate other browser instances. In fact, if you can write the .mozilla directory, you can make Mozilla/Firefox do anything. You can change the security preferences, add plugins, and put in security holes.
It's not that easy.
Another one of those huge low-density books of examples. Do we really need another one.
What's really hard today is finding a good reference manual. The original manual for Algol was 17 pages. The original manual for Scheme was 21 pages. 456 pages for PHP is a bit much. A big plastic card that boiled the language down to two pages - now that would be useful.
Reading vision papers is very frustrating. At one time I had a shelf full of collections of papers on vision. You can read all these "my algorithm worked really great on these test cases" papers, and still have no idea if it's any good. You can read the article on the vision algorithm used by the Stanford team to win the DARPA Grand Challenge, and it won't be obvious that it's a useful approach. But it is.
This is, unfortunately, another Roland the Plogger article on Slashdot. So this probably isn't a major breakthrough. It doesn't sound like one.
That report on supercomputing doesn't indicate growth:
"Clusters have proven themselves as capable servers to handle a sizable portion of the HPC workload."
"More than half of the respondents expect their budgets for all HPC tools will decline (43%) or remain the same (17%) over the next two years."
"U.S. industrial users/buyers really want and need faster computers that fit their budgets and that don't require specialized programming skills."
Also, that study doesn't reflect "most companies". It reflects 30 companies that use supercomputers today, most of which are very large aerospace or automotive companies. They're not buying the tightly-coupled high end supercomputers, either; most of the new systems are clusters of conventional machines.
And that's why Microsoft Vista is so paranoid, and insists on talking to the mothership in Redmond regularly. Microsoft is gradually going to shut this down. Once the hardware changes to require Vista, and the monitors change to require HDCP, they just have to wait for the old hardware to die off.
Actually, so is Christianity. It took several hundred years of wars to get the Catholic Church under control. The period when the Catholic Church ran the world is called the "Dark Ages" for good reason. We might have had the Industrial Revolution a thousand years earlier without it.
(It's interesting to consider what might have happened if a few more ideas had been developed at the height of the Roman Empire. Not technical ideas - business methods and concepts. The Roman Empire had an elaborate legal system, but they never developed the concept of the corporation, or of a common carrier. All they had was individual ownership. Nobody thought to develop a postal service or a stagecoach line. If large private organizations had been developed before large religious organizations, history might have been quite different.)
This is another one of those crap articles that links to a blog, which links to other blogs, and doesn't link to the actual source of the problem.
Which is WalMart Video Downloads (Beta).. And which is currently returning the message "Site Temporarily Unavailable The Wal-Mart Video Downloads store is currently unavailable due to temporary site maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please try again later."
So see what happens when it comes back up.
Of course, the real problem is probably that, having downloaded, you can only play the resulting download with Windows Media Player.
I just heard that talk; he gave it at EE380 at Stanford a few weeks ago.
First, this is a supercomputer guy talking. He's talking about number-crunching. His "13 dwarfs" are mostly number-crunching inner loops. Second, what he's really pushing is getting everybody in academia to do research his way - on FPGA-based rackmount emulators.
Basic truth about supercomputers - the commercial market is zilch. You have to go down to #60 on the list of the top 500 supercomputer before you find the first real commercial customer. It's BMW, and the system is a cluster of 1024 Intel x86 1U servers, running Red Hat Linux. Nothing exotic; just a big server farm set up for computation.
More CPUs will help in server farms, but there we're I/O bound to the outside world, not talking much to neighboring CPUs. If you have hundreds of CPUs on a chip, how do you get data in and out? But we know the answer to that - put 100Gb/s Ethernet controllers on the chip. No major software changes needed.
This brings up one of the other major architectural truths: shared memory multiprocessors are useful, and clusters are useful. Everything in between is a huge pain. Supercomputer guys fuss endlessly over elaborate interconnection schemes, but none of them are worth the trouble. The author of this paper thinks that all the programming headaches of supercomputers will have to be brought down to desktop level, but that's probably not going to happen. What problem would it solve?
What we do get from the latest rounds of shrinkage are better mobile devices. The big wins commercially are in phones, not desktops or laptops. Desktops have been mostly empty space inside for years now. In fact, that's true of most non-mobile consumer electronics. We're getting lower cost and smaller size, rather than more power.
Consider cars. For the first half of the 20th century, the big thing was making engines more powerful. By the 1960s, engine power was a solved problem, (the 1967 turbine-powered Indy car finally settled that issue) and cars really haven't become significantly more powerful since then. (Brakes and suspensions, though, are far better.)
It will be very interesting to see what happens with the Cell. That's the first non-shared memory multiprocessor to be produced in volume. If it turns out to be a dead end, like the Itanium, it may kill off interest in that sort of thing for years.
There are some interesting potential applications for massive parallelism for vision and robotics applications. I expect to see interesting work in that direction. The more successful vision algorithms do much computation, most of which is discarded. That's a proper application for many-CPU machines, though not the Cell, unless it gets more memory per CPU. Tomorrow's robots may have a thousand CPUs. Tomorrow's laptops, probably not.
It's Roland the Plogger, wrong as usual, spamming to promote his blog. The Slashdot editors gave him two links this time, one without a "nofollow". Ka-ching!
OK, now the real info. Thermal energy storage has been around for years. There are thousands of installations. It's used when there's a big difference between day and night power rates. During the night, water is chilled, or ice frozen; during the day, the cold water is used for air conditioning. See Thermal Energy Storage Strategies for Commercial HVAC Systems for details on how to configure such a system. Also see CALMAC, which makes such gear. It was a spinoff from their ice-rink equipment business.
VRML was supposed to be replaced by X3D, which is simply VRML 97 with XML delimiters instead of VRML delimiters. "Spinning logos in only 40 bytes" were promised. That went nowhere for years. But, surprisingly, it's coming back. But for completely different applications. Not virtual worlds, but 3D images of industrial gear.
I think it's pretty clear, as another poster pointed out, that Bifrost is primarily SELinux plus a particular policy set, an approach to "jailing" apps and some other bits related to system activation and theft deterrence.
It's not the machinery that's the problem. It's getting the apps to live within the security policy that's the problem.
Suppose we wanted to build a secure Firefox to run in a jail. For each page, we create a jailed process that has permission to write to one window on the screen and to talk to one host on the Internet, and very little else. That's a strong basis for a secure browser. And it will work fine for most pages.
So what doesn't work any more? Cookies - the jailed process can't access any persistent state. Cacheing, although we could have a separate cache file for each site and make that work securely. Mashups - can't talk to more than one site. Off-site image links - ditto. Downloads - you can download, and maybe even run something in a subprocess, but when it exits, the download is lost. Tabbed browsing - puts multiple sites in one window.
Those are the real problems.
But for the OLPC system, it might be appropriate to have a browser with those restrictions. Educational content doesn't really need any of those features. On a machine with no hard drive, like the OLPC machine, you don't want to be permanently downloading much anyway.
It would make sense, though, to have that jailing capability in a browser and use it for secure pages. You don't want your online banking page in a mashup or frame, you don't want to download a game from it, and you don't want it cached.
It's probably too late, though. Even if it works now.
Consider VRML. Remember VRML, 3D worlds on the desktop.? Too slow, too much bandwidth, lousy framerates back in 1997. Load up an old VRML browser today. With modern GPUs, it looks great and works smoothly. Nobody cares.
Java has a strange history. It was supposed to be a lightweight semi-interpreted language for use in web browsers. It ended up being the replacement for COBOL as a business application language, something nobody expected.
What seems to have gone wrong in applet land is that, early on, Sun produced a huge collection of mediocre libraries. This, coupled with a linkage system that brought in the whole library if you needed any part of it, bloated applets to excessive size. Remember, at the time, most users were on dialup. So that just couldn't work.
Also, as an aesthetic issue, Java's early fonts and visible objects were ugly. That was enough to turn off web designers.
On the server, none of this mattered. A memory-safe language with decent execution speed was a huge win. When a Java servlet fails, you get a reasonable error message, not corrupted memory. That was enough to make it a success on servers.
Java bloat continues to be a problem. There seems to be an excess of "packaging" associated with the language. Not clear why.
It's not hard to do this. Several groups had systems this tight working back in the 1980s. For that matter, Multics had it right in the late 1960s. Linux has it now, in NSA SELinux.
It breaks existing applications, of course. The OLPC people have a huge advantage - they don't care about existing applications. They can say to application developers, "these are the security constraints - design to them." That's a huge win.
Somebody should have done this by now for phones and palmtops, but, unfortunately, those things started out so underpowered they barely had an operating system. So they have their own legacy problems.
You're right; NEC article 406 says that the correct marking is "No Equipment Ground" in that situation.
Given the PS3's architecture, that's to be expected. It has a decent GPU on the back end, and all those underutilized Cell CPUs to do things like generate procedural textures. The obvious approach for textures on the PS3 should yield a look like Pixar's All Renderman All the Time, with every pixel generated by little shader programs written in San Raphael, instead of compositing in real-world images like everybody else.
The big advantage of procedural textures is that they survive zooming in. In the film world, this isn't as critical, because you know how close the camera will get to a background, and you only put in detail the camera can see. In games, the user can move around and get close to a textured surface, which usually looks terrible.
The article is vague. It's not even clear if the problem occurs when the laptop is not plugged into the charger. The power supply for some backlights can produce over 100v, so there is a potential shock source even on battery power.
If the problem is related to the charger power supply, that's a clear safety hazard. Check for a UL logo, and go to the UL web site to check on whether the power supply actually has approval. If the power supply is made in China, it must have a hologram UL sticker with the UL approval number. There are power supplies out there with forged UL approvals, and UL is trying to crack down. (Those are the power supplies that fail in power supply tests on PC websites. UL tests them loaded up to their rated value and runs them for hours at full load, so the UL logo means it really can deliver whatever power it's supposed to deliver.)
I know my house was built a long long time ago (1951) and the upstairs, while someone put in grounded outlets, it doesn't physically have the ground hooked up - due to the wiring used at the time of it being built.
That's an electrical code violation. If you have to have a 3-prong outlet on a 2-wire circuit, you must use a GFCI outlet, which gives you electric shock protection. That's allowed by the US National Electrical Code. The outlet plate should then be marked "Isolated Ground". This warns people that plugging in a computer there may have problems, because it can't dump static and noise into protective ground as usual.
If you're going to wire up power, read a manual on how to do it. It's not rocket science, but there are very specific rules and screwing up is dangerous.
This is described as energy returned on energy invested, or EROEI, of 1.9, which is not all that great. Ethanol from corn has a value of about 1.25, and that number is from its proponents. Anything below 1.0 is a lose.
US oil production has a value of about 3. That number declines over time; it was as high as 100 in the early days of oil production. (Look up "Spindletop") Saudi oil production has a value of about 10. Wind energy has a value of around 5. Solar power values depend on how long the equipment lasts; energy breakeven on solar cells happens some time around 5 years.
The first mechanized garage was built in 1932 and ran until 1979. This isn't even the first automated parking garage in New York City. There was one working around 1970.
The layout was well worked out. It looked like a little parking garage with two stalls, with no sign of any machinery. You parked your car and got out. Then, solid barriers rose out of the floor around the car, a big freight elevator door opened behind the car, the pallet on which the car was parked moved into the elevator, the elevator doors closed, and shortly thereafter, an empty pallet was delivered. Then the barriers went back down, leaving an empty parking stall.
Light beams and photocells were used for safety interlocks. The light beams were modulated, so extraneous light wouldn't bother them, and the modulation was at about 5Hz, so you could see this.
Technically, the biggest problem was with limit switches. The system depended on hundreds of mechanical limit switches for position feedback, and they were not reliable enough, so the system could stall. This became worse with wear.
"religions that are clearly made up. ..."
the same cannot be said of any other religion from Christianity to Taoism to neo-paganism."
Most, if not all, religions are "made up". In some cases, we know when and by whom. Christian Science was made up by Mary Baker Eddy in 1866. Mormonism was made up by Joseph Smith in 1830. Islam was made up by Mohammed around 610. Christianity was more of a group project; most modern doctrine comes from a committee meeting in 325. In 431, there was a another meeting for a feature upgrade, and the Virgin Mary was added.
The page with the article goes into an infinite reload loop if Salon's cookie is disabled, demonstrating that Salon can't write good software.
Novell and Microsoft tried to find a way around the GPL, via a patent cross-licensing deal. This may backfire. "The stock is likely to trade down before the Foundation discloses its ruling as investors stay on the sidelines to avoid the worst-case scenario, analysts said."
What will probably happen is that Novell agrees not to use Microsoft patents in GPL code. Which is what should happen.
It's too late for "Linux on the desktop". Now it has to be "Linux on the Laptop". With WiFi. And that just doesn't work very well.
Yes, there are resources for running Linux on laptops. And they're very funny.
This is no better than it was four years ago. Maybe worse. You can't even get the WalMart Linux laptop any more.
Linux on the server, sure. Linux on the desktop, maybe. Linux on the laptop, not ready for prime time.