Re:Information is power, don't they get it?
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Gates on Google
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· Score: 1
"Microsoft fails to recognize the 4 primary operations for a computer: <a) to d) snipped>"
"their operating system should be a giant model-view-controller process, where each 'application' could register itself to any kind of information available to the system"
Heh, and who controls this? So far it looks like each "worm could register itself to any kind of information available to the system". So that's done already, so's a) to d) in a way;).
If I wrote a search engine, and someone new (no cookies etc etc) just types "chip". From that search it's likely the person is not very smart or just very lazy;). I would tag the person with the relevant "not so smart" cookie, and give results similar to what these bunch like at the top, and a list of top matches of other alternative meanings of chip (with "More results like this"/"Smilar pages" options for each area).
Yeah, but when they start talking about AI. It appears a lot of AI designs are pretty nondeterministic compared to programming.
And complex computer programs aren't that deterministic. Not that reliable and predictable.
Just select a suitable dog, and it'll be more reliable and predictable than the blind person its supposed to help. Whereas there are many complex computer systems which don't seem to be nearly that reliable and predictable.
It'll be hard to build a machine that could do as much for a blind person that a dog could do.
Just go list down the features: 1) Most dogs have at least some theory of mind so it is easier for them to have some understanding of the owner's needs even if the owner doesn't explicitly state them - owner could be unconscious or somewhat conscious but incoherent/not his usual self. 2) They can learn the owners habits. 3) They are many many generations ahead of any AI I've seen, and my bullshit meter doesn't swing to the limit when it comes to claims about dogs being intelligent. Heck some are probably smarter than more than a few people one might know;) 4) Very cheap for what they do. 5) Low maintenance for what they do - in fact having to take the dog for walks is a "feature" - the owner gets health benefits too;).
Maybe you could just use your artificial eyes to look at sunsets and other nice stuff (some ladies are very easy on the eyes;) ), and keep them shut/switch them off the rest of the time.
My worry is if artificial vision ends up artificially expensive.
Anyway I wouldn't mind having one or two additional auxiliary "video in" ports, in addition to my eyes, if there weren't any serious side effects.
Well much programming can be viewed as an exercise in data compression. You take lots of requirements and constraints with lots of redundancies and overlaps and compress it to code.
A smart programmer can do very good compression. A wise programmer will do it so that you can add likely stuff later and recompress without taking too much time (perhaps at the expense of lower compression).
Of course if it's bad programming it's an exercise in data loss, corruption or explosion;).
Yah, maybe they should build them into high-end drives or something:)..
Anyway, in a few years probably MRAM would be a better choice. Spinning disks may be cheaper for some time, but the MRAM would be good for a nonvolatile buffer.
"You should see dust I'm dealing with. The Antec filters get absolutely caked beyond belief if they aren't cleaned frequently. And unprotected boxes get filled with dust after a year."
Where are your boxes? If they are in a room you use regularly, maybe you should consider buying a decent airfilter device for your _whole_ room - given that the room is so dusty.
All that dust probably isn't that great for your lungs etc.
Be careful when blowing out the dust. You want the dust out of the computer, but you'd also want that dust out of the room.
Cluster the cheap desktop computers, add some expensive glue and storage that keeps things reliable and run stuff like OpenSSI.
Simplistically speaking you split the desktop computer into two. One is part of a "Big Server", the other is the "Thin Client".
If multicore CPUs and virtualization becomes common this isn't going to be that hard.
Of course if users randomly pull the plug on their nodes that does make things a bit problematic. So I suspect the current "thick desktop" stuff is going to be around for a while.
Given the thick desktop isn't that expensive, it's just _managing_ them that's usually the problem. One should just stick with the thick desktop, add those hardware cards that cause the computer to rollback to a known disk state on reboot. When hardware virtualization becomes common (pacifica, vanderpool etc) this will be even easier to do - you could be updating the client computer with a new image with updates etc whilst the user is using one image. No need to pull the whole computer off line while reimaging it. You just reimage one of the "virtual computer"s. The next reboot would run the updated virtual computer. Dual core CPUs etc will actually make this not too bad.
The persistent storage, 24/7 processing, and backups would be on the main server/cluster.
While a simple broadcast network is basically a transmitter and receiver. The Internet is not like that.
The Internet is a group of networks all run by various parties. The different networks need to cooperate+agree if they want to hook up to each other.
So if you actually want to "broadcast" or communicate via the Internet from a ship or satellite, you'd need at least a connection to the Internet. Someone has to allow you to connect to them, and the routes to your visible IP have to be advertised to the relevant networks.
If you are sending stuff various governments really disapprove of, you will find that no one will allow you to connect to them for long.
If you just signed up a throwaway DSL/dialup account while they can keep shutting you down, it's cheap for you to keep setting another one up (spammers do that all the time).
With the ocean liner/satellite approach, that's not so cheap.
In theory SATA makes it possible (and should be quite cheap to do).
Should be able to unmount the drive, cut the power. Wait for spin down. Unlock and remove the drive caddies from the bays.
Maybe the more expensive stuff would have an autolocking mechanism that prevents you from removing the HDD before the platters have slowed down to safe rpms.
It's not such a dumb idea. Retransmission sucks when latency is high.
So if you are going to use IP between planets it's not going to matter so much whether you use UDP or TCP, after all the link layer communications protocols will ensure the message delivery in 99.9999% of the cases (add more 9s depending on usage).
Basically what is likely to happen would be all data would be sent with signals that have tons of forward error correction. So that even if only 0.1% of the signal gets through successfully they can still reconstruct the message, so that there is no need to retransmit. If the message doesn't get through the first go, something exceptional is probably happening.
If there is a need to retransmit - the application (and people) might as well know anyway that there is a problem, and judge whether a retransmission is desirable - rather than waiting for an indeterminate time for TCP to retransmit and finally get the data.
After all maybe some antenna somewhere is broken or knocked the wrong direction. So the receiver (application/human) might as well be informed that something exceptional has happened and send a _different_ message of their own (rather than ask for a retransmission) and notify the sender.
The applications using the network are likely to be quite different anyway - not like anyone is going to click on a link and wait hours for a page to appear. You'd probably have stuff like HTTP/FTP by mail:).
Or Google/search by mail either send a batch of queries, or send an AI query agent program/script over to do queries (and make new queries based on the results).
"Set up a blatently illegal server system well off shore, enjoy the benefits of satellite based internet access. Sell movies and music an pennies on the dollar at high quality...."
Which ISP supplies you the bandwidth?
That range of IPs can be blacklisted by the Government.
Already people in the US don't seem to have any problems blacklisting ip ranges of ENTIRE countries (even blocking legit communications).
So if only a few dozen groups/ships are doing that, there's no problem at all.
And a company asked a bunch of employees to create the program, and owns the program by contract.
And it is undeterminable who/what supplied the exact parameters/seed value that created the work.
Does it become public domain? Or can the computer+program now pay for its own power and sustenance by its works of art? Or perhaps even its freedom...;)
They release drivers. But often they are binary only and only work on a few versions of the Linux kernel.
While you say they could ship source and let people compile, that means more bloat in a way - people need to install a compiler and the rest of the stuff they need, plus the relevant kernel source code and headers.
Plus it's not always possible for hardware vendors to ship source - NDA, licensing, secrets etc etc.
Another example is vmware:
Practically every time I update the linux kernel for some security problem, I have to do something like the following: su - cd/usr/src/linux make cloneconfig make modules prepare vmware-config.pl
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft fails to recognize the 4 primary operations for a computer:
;).
<a) to d) snipped>"
"their operating system should be a giant model-view-controller process, where each 'application' could register itself to any kind of information available to the system"
Heh, and who controls this? So far it looks like each "worm could register itself to any kind of information available to the system". So that's done already, so's a) to d) in a way
If I wrote a search engine, and someone new (no cookies etc etc) just types "chip". From that search it's likely the person is not very smart or just very lazy ;). I would tag the person with the relevant "not so smart" cookie, and give results similar to what these bunch like at the top, and a list of top matches of other alternative meanings of chip (with "More results like this"/"Smilar pages" options for each area).
Yeah, but when they start talking about AI. It appears a lot of AI designs are pretty nondeterministic compared to programming.
;) ;).
And complex computer programs aren't that deterministic. Not that reliable and predictable.
Just select a suitable dog, and it'll be more reliable and predictable than the blind person its supposed to help. Whereas there are many complex computer systems which don't seem to be nearly that reliable and predictable.
It'll be hard to build a machine that could do as much for a blind person that a dog could do.
Just go list down the features:
1) Most dogs have at least some theory of mind so it is easier for them to have some understanding of the owner's needs even if the owner doesn't explicitly state them - owner could be unconscious or somewhat conscious but incoherent/not his usual self.
2) They can learn the owners habits.
3) They are many many generations ahead of any AI I've seen, and my bullshit meter doesn't swing to the limit when it comes to claims about dogs being intelligent. Heck some are probably smarter than more than a few people one might know
4) Very cheap for what they do.
5) Low maintenance for what they do - in fact having to take the dog for walks is a "feature" - the owner gets health benefits too
Many more...
Maybe you could just use your artificial eyes to look at sunsets and other nice stuff (some ladies are very easy on the eyes ;) ), and keep them shut/switch them off the rest of the time.
My worry is if artificial vision ends up artificially expensive.
Anyway I wouldn't mind having one or two additional auxiliary "video in" ports, in addition to my eyes, if there weren't any serious side effects.
BTW did you see the recent slashdot story about an IBM article.
Funny.
Well much programming can be viewed as an exercise in data compression. You take lots of requirements and constraints with lots of redundancies and overlaps and compress it to code.
;).
A smart programmer can do very good compression. A wise programmer will do it so that you can add likely stuff later and recompress without taking too much time (perhaps at the expense of lower compression).
Of course if it's bad programming it's an exercise in data loss, corruption or explosion
Yah, maybe they should build them into high-end drives or something :)..
Anyway, in a few years probably MRAM would be a better choice. Spinning disks may be cheaper for some time, but the MRAM would be good for a nonvolatile buffer.
Why not just use battery backed RAM? It doesn't have to be the super-fast power hungry desktop RAM. 100+MB/sec would be more than good enough.
Stick in a few of those low self-discharge "watch" batteries that last for years.
If the batteries run out, just behave like a normal harddrive.
Then you'll have a reasonably fast nonvolatile cache, and the drive can take its time to figure out what is the best way to write out all the data.
"You should see dust I'm dealing with. The Antec filters get absolutely caked beyond belief if they aren't cleaned frequently. And unprotected boxes get filled with dust after a year."
Where are your boxes? If they are in a room you use regularly, maybe you should consider buying a decent airfilter device for your _whole_ room - given that the room is so dusty.
All that dust probably isn't that great for your lungs etc.
Be careful when blowing out the dust. You want the dust out of the computer, but you'd also want that dust out of the room.
Cluster the cheap desktop computers, add some expensive glue and storage that keeps things reliable and run stuff like OpenSSI.
Simplistically speaking you split the desktop computer into two. One is part of a "Big Server", the other is the "Thin Client".
If multicore CPUs and virtualization becomes common this isn't going to be that hard.
Of course if users randomly pull the plug on their nodes that does make things a bit problematic. So I suspect the current "thick desktop" stuff is going to be around for a while.
Given the thick desktop isn't that expensive, it's just _managing_ them that's usually the problem. One should just stick with the thick desktop, add those hardware cards that cause the computer to rollback to a known disk state on reboot. When hardware virtualization becomes common (pacifica, vanderpool etc) this will be even easier to do - you could be updating the client computer with a new image with updates etc whilst the user is using one image. No need to pull the whole computer off line while reimaging it. You just reimage one of the "virtual computer"s. The next reboot would run the updated virtual computer. Dual core CPUs etc will actually make this not too bad.
The persistent storage, 24/7 processing, and backups would be on the main server/cluster.
Clusters of computers. More than 100K computers. For trivial use.
:).
They even give you an API.
Doh
While a simple broadcast network is basically a transmitter and receiver. The Internet is not like that.
The Internet is a group of networks all run by various parties. The different networks need to cooperate+agree if they want to hook up to each other.
So if you actually want to "broadcast" or communicate via the Internet from a ship or satellite, you'd need at least a connection to the Internet. Someone has to allow you to connect to them, and the routes to your visible IP have to be advertised to the relevant networks.
If you are sending stuff various governments really disapprove of, you will find that no one will allow you to connect to them for long.
If you just signed up a throwaway DSL/dialup account while they can keep shutting you down, it's cheap for you to keep setting another one up (spammers do that all the time).
With the ocean liner/satellite approach, that's not so cheap.
I'm looking for cheap hotswap for HDDs.
In theory SATA makes it possible (and should be quite cheap to do).
Should be able to unmount the drive, cut the power. Wait for spin down. Unlock and remove the drive caddies from the bays.
Maybe the more expensive stuff would have an autolocking mechanism that prevents you from removing the HDD before the platters have slowed down to safe rpms.
It's already been done (many space probes were a lot further away). See
If a message didn't get through, usually you can't do anything about it anyway or something went significantly wrong and higher layer intervention is needed. I doubt that an automatic network level retransmit would be that useful.
It's not such a dumb idea. Retransmission sucks when latency is high.
.
:).
So if you are going to use IP between planets it's not going to matter so much whether you use UDP or TCP, after all the link layer communications protocols will ensure the message delivery in 99.9999% of the cases (add more 9s depending on usage)
Basically what is likely to happen would be all data would be sent with signals that have tons of forward error correction. So that even if only 0.1% of the signal gets through successfully they can still reconstruct the message, so that there is no need to retransmit. If the message doesn't get through the first go, something exceptional is probably happening.
If there is a need to retransmit - the application (and people) might as well know anyway that there is a problem, and judge whether a retransmission is desirable - rather than waiting for an indeterminate time for TCP to retransmit and finally get the data.
After all maybe some antenna somewhere is broken or knocked the wrong direction. So the receiver (application/human) might as well be informed that something exceptional has happened and send a _different_ message of their own (rather than ask for a retransmission) and notify the sender.
The applications using the network are likely to be quite different anyway - not like anyone is going to click on a link and wait hours for a page to appear. You'd probably have stuff like HTTP/FTP by mail
Or Google/search by mail either send a batch of queries, or send an AI query agent program/script over to do queries (and make new queries based on the results).
SeaWhores.
*clap* *clap* *clap*
Just the potential wordplays might be worth it...
"Set up a blatently illegal server system well off shore, enjoy the benefits of satellite based internet access. Sell movies and music an pennies on the dollar at high quality...."
Which ISP supplies you the bandwidth?
That range of IPs can be blacklisted by the Government.
Already people in the US don't seem to have any problems blacklisting ip ranges of ENTIRE countries (even blocking legit communications).
So if only a few dozen groups/ships are doing that, there's no problem at all.
What happens if some worm spreads to computers with zero or guessable passwords pand carries copies of the "work" with it?
On a windows machine, the entire drives are effectively publicly shared folders if the administrator password is trivial.
There were a number of worms proving that people do use trivial admin passwords.
And a company asked a bunch of employees to create the program, and owns the program by contract.
;)
And it is undeterminable who/what supplied the exact parameters/seed value that created the work.
Does it become public domain? Or can the computer+program now pay for its own power and sustenance by its works of art? Or perhaps even its freedom...
Many hardware vendors do try to support Linux.
/usr/src/linux
They release drivers. But often they are binary only and only work on a few versions of the Linux kernel.
While you say they could ship source and let people compile, that means more bloat in a way - people need to install a compiler and the rest of the stuff they need, plus the relevant kernel source code and headers.
Plus it's not always possible for hardware vendors to ship source - NDA, licensing, secrets etc etc.
Another example is vmware:
Practically every time I update the linux kernel for some security problem, I have to do something like the following:
su -
cd
make cloneconfig
make modules prepare
vmware-config.pl
I don't have to do this for windows.
So Linux is not that stable in that respect.
sudo?
If you have a lot of harddisk space then perhaps a filesystem that supports versioning/snapshots will be useful.
So even if you delete something it's not totally gone.
VMS did that long ago. Novell used to do that years ago. I believe Network Appliance has something similar.
Why do they have little league baseball, or junior soccer, or college level basketball?
;).
Of course sometimes the 15 year old could be the "pro"... And the older person is way out of his/her league
"The vast majority of people _are_ responsible in the army."
Vast majority? Which army?
Whether I laugh in disbelief or nod depends on the answer.
Well if you put off breeding till later ages then after a few generations it's likely that humans will live longer.