Starting in Victorian England there was substantial labour reform to do away with child labour and improve working conditions. During the industrial revolution people had gotten the idea they could use abuse cheap and underpaid labour in new factories, and got away with it for a while, but this eventually lead to reform.
Now while I find it plausible the similar scenario of reform may happen in China, I doubt it will happen soon. What has happened to western nations is not necessarily directly transferable to China. But I do believe things may improve, but clearly China's labour conditions are not sustainable, things will change one way or another.
They should have developed with Linux as their primary platform with fully open source drivers with GPGPU stream processing and everything, because that is a untapped niche. Because S3 sure as hell can't compete with Nvidia/AMD on outright performance even when you factor in cost.
A bullet is a very very small target for any radar to detect, even with very sensitive equipment. However something moving at 1000m/s is a very distinct doppler rader signature, wich makes it MUCH easier to detect. From there this is plausible.
It's just a patent, it doesn't represent any actual project planned and certainly is no waste of bailout/stimulous package money.
I for one welcom such advances, as some day our troops will be wearing exoskeletons which may be able to make movements for the wearer - this is a step towards the machine revolution, where we are all anhiliated by robotic exoskeletons where the human is either dead or no longer has control... oh crap.
Isn't the problem partly MLC? SLC has consistently better small random write performance. Many cheap SSDs use MLC for obvious reasons, it fairs well in benchmarking -MLC has relatively high read performance- but write performance hurts real bad in real world usage. You may get noticeable micro-lag anytime the OS writes to storage. Application loading may be snappy for example, but the whole system slows down while writes are done. It's good to see the truth coming out amongst all the benchmarketing
It's early days for SSDs. I'll be sticking with my power guzzling magnetic frisbe stacks for a while yet.
You considered battling mice with a cat in a server room? And this cat will be chasing and killing amongst all this equipment?
I would hazard a guess you're not a cat owner.
The unfortunate claws in that plan:
1 - If it is a old cat it will sit, watch the mice and drool.
2 - If it is a kitten/younger cat it will do bad job of killing mice, a fantastic job of smearing dismembered ones all over your office and likely be shredding your cables and rearranging your paperwork itself.
3 - If it is an adult cat, it will alternate between watching and occasionally chasing, killing, and have the body weight to pull out and subsequently tangle cables it encounters. You'll be investigating a site-wide outage at 4am, get into the server room and find the cat fast a sleep in a birds nest of CAT6.
Desktop linux is still far away since [2009..2023] will be the year of desktop linux. Haiku seems to be suprising many with progress and stability, developers are using it full time and it's in a pre-alpha state! I would go so far to say Haiku could gain serious ground in desktop computing once it is 'good enough'. If BeOS's slick ease of use is retained. This will likely pick up users who've found the transition to Linux too hard or troublesome.
I wonder though, Haiku seems to be repeating the mistakes of Be, at this point it seems rather too good. BeOS was of course TOO good also, and was sat on hard by MS/Apple and whoever else was in the market, because it was superior *ducks*. The same happend with OS/2 which was also too good for it's own good.
OSS projects that are Good tend to prosper for just being so. But how will the linux camp react to competition?
You see, it could be doomed. Worse is Better is a troublesome law:
1. Build a demostration network utilizing spare and retired old 1ghz era out-of warranty hardware that you're about to sell off to the comp sci students for their study(/bittorrent) boxes. Show them a whizzy Gnome/KDE desktop, show how everything just works on the network and is easily administered with a gui, scripts, and documentation for the MCSE's to follow, demostrate some network security. Show no command lines.
To make that clearer: Generalizing here 64-bit has an overhead on memory bandwidth, however once you remove that bottleneck things really scream along. 64-bit precision isn't needed in many cases, then using 32-bit precision on 64-bit allows a speed up.
In portable media applications of this, you'd be literally hearing background noise from the processor rather than just from the lossy compression algorithm and the reproduction circuitry (notoriously big sources of noise).
If they are talking about imprecision on average of parts per million then you'd never hear it. Even 1 to 10000 is still within the noise floor of your average ipod.
The order of magnitude increase in computational performance could allow for improved compression algorithms with less destortion. The net result is this kind of thing has potential to vastly improve audio/video and battery life.
OSS introduces a unique security problem. To properly secure for government use, they would have to have in-house auditing of every single line of code in a project that comes in from a non-government source.
I've always wondered if there is a potential security risk in open source where contributors to a project could get malicious code into the software. It is possible, although difficult to have code that reads as perfectly innocent, appears to do something else however takes malicious action. At very least introduce a vulnerability
The reason I bring this up is I have heard of cases where a backdoor was written into software, and the offending code never found in a line-by-line audit. This happened in a previous workplace of mine, was kept rather hush-hush so we don't know what happened eventually. After having seen coding competitions where the object was to make innocent code do something malicious - and seen some very creative submissions.
Its the same old Windows trick: Google earth will run standalone out of a folder just fine, the only changes it would make at runtime are restoring a few registry settings and the cache folder. This would mean installing it somewhere first however and I haven't tested this with version 5.0 yet - installer may want to make low-level changes to the system that would prevent the application from running (like so many other Windows apps).
Then there are other tricks like simply disabling the thing from loading on boot.
Windows XP / Vista 32-bit users should consider Altiris SVS, google updater will work fine within this. Because it is virtualised when you disable the application, there will be effectively no trace on your machine.
I think not installing or uninstalling software because you don't agree with the EULA is silly. Voting with your feet doesn't really work, you need to take tangible action. In many cases the corporation would rather you walk away, since it keeps you quiet.
If you find a EULA bothersome what I say is, breach it, violated it, pirate it and hack the product to work how you want it.
Well not quite but I would like to see benchmarks from a more independant website that doesn't have an axe to grind.
Yet again the headline doesn't resemble the facts in the article and the benchmarks chosen are selective, yet some inconveniently show Ubuntu getting thumped. Ubuntu is great, and it is damn fast and lightweight, but Windows 7 is playing catch-up.
All versions of Ubuntu is soundly beaten by Windows 7 64-bit in the Richards benchmark.
Reveal authorial bias:
"It's clear from that graph that having a 64-bit OS can make a real difference in compute-intensive tasks, but it's not too pleasing to see Windows pip Linux to the post in nearly all results."
It'd be a really really bad idea to release the source code for the most widely attacked OS. Considering it is already heavily under attack from hackers because of its ubiquity (and er vunerability) it would be a worldwide security disaster to release source code on top of that. Microsoft is already rather slow to patch even with tight control of code and spec.
What you first need is the coding community to maintain it. This is rather the reverse of software that has emerged from OSS circles rather than been thrown to it as is (which is fine for a company abandoning something that is still Good but not Profitable). I don't think the author really grasps this amongst all the other rather obvious challenges he fails to address that face moving a completely proprietary stack to a free licence.
It's nice to imagine Windows being free as in beer, but beer really isn't free unless you steal it or brew it yourself.
I wondered why many fusion drive proposals are the slightly absurd mini-bomb machine gun kind, then realised perhaps it is because the Orion program really was that awesome in a nuclear-steam punk fantasy kind of way. However ludicrous it is to detonate 1000 nuclear warheads sequentially to reach orbit, you had to admit it'd be super-cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)"This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after."
Yet these equivalent fusion-based proposals seem to be only plausible with some assumptions of technological advancement, rather than with assumptions that people wouldn't mind the irreparable damage to the earths biosphere.
I think the approach is all wrong by many proposals so far. Thing is, we can create and contain fusion right now, and you can do it your backyard (no kidding - see lower). I think a plausible fusion drive would be something like a Bussard electrostatic confinement based drive. Essentially you are accelerating ions to high enough velocity for fusion, but allowing some to escape by a neutral charged nozzle.
We don't have fusion reactors right now that break even in any practical generative fashion, however that is absolutely not necessary. Give up the need to generate power from fusion, for example use an existing fission pile to power the thing, and you start to get results. The high-velocity fusion products become a nice boost to your specific impulse, along with your exhaust velocity much higher than any Ion or VASMIR thruster for any high-energy fuel leaking out the rear.
Ditch the perfectionist science and apply practical engineering and tune the thing for efficiency. Go to the stars.
Interestingly, electrostatic inertial confinement in a hard vacuum doesn't even need reactor walls .
What makes this even more exciting is that hobbyists build electrostatic confinement devices, and even get fusion reactions. Oh, OpenSource too.
Slashdot Mirror
Starting in Victorian England there was substantial labour reform to do away with child labour and improve working conditions. During the industrial revolution people had gotten the idea they could use abuse cheap and underpaid labour in new factories, and got away with it for a while, but this eventually lead to reform.
Now while I find it plausible the similar scenario of reform may happen in China, I doubt it will happen soon. What has happened to western nations is not necessarily directly transferable to China. But I do believe things may improve, but clearly China's labour conditions are not sustainable, things will change one way or another.
They should have developed with Linux as their primary platform with fully open source drivers with GPGPU stream processing and everything, because that is a untapped niche. Because S3 sure as hell can't compete with Nvidia/AMD on outright performance even when you factor in cost.
A bullet is a very very small target for any radar to detect, even with very sensitive equipment. However something moving at 1000m/s is a very distinct doppler rader signature, wich makes it MUCH easier to detect. From there this is plausible.
It's just a patent, it doesn't represent any actual project planned and certainly is no waste of bailout/stimulous package money.
I for one welcom such advances, as some day our troops will be wearing exoskeletons which may be able to make movements for the wearer - this is a step towards the machine revolution, where we are all anhiliated by robotic exoskeletons where the human is either dead or no longer has control... oh crap.
Isn't the problem partly MLC? SLC has consistently better small random write performance. Many cheap SSDs use MLC for obvious reasons, it fairs well in benchmarking -MLC has relatively high read performance- but write performance hurts real bad in real world usage. You may get noticeable micro-lag anytime the OS writes to storage. Application loading may be snappy for example, but the whole system slows down while writes are done. It's good to see the truth coming out amongst all the benchmarketing
It's early days for SSDs. I'll be sticking with my power guzzling magnetic frisbe stacks for a while yet.
You considered battling mice with a cat in a server room? And this cat will be chasing and killing amongst all this equipment?
I would hazard a guess you're not a cat owner.
The unfortunate claws in that plan:
1 - If it is a old cat it will sit, watch the mice and drool.
2 - If it is a kitten/younger cat it will do bad job of killing mice, a fantastic job of smearing dismembered ones all over your office and likely be shredding your cables and rearranging your paperwork itself.
3 - If it is an adult cat, it will alternate between watching and occasionally chasing, killing, and have the body weight to pull out and subsequently tangle cables it encounters. You'll be investigating a site-wide outage at 4am, get into the server room and find the cat fast a sleep in a birds nest of CAT6.
I was thinking about this, and thought of a way to counter this threat...
Patch the vulnerability!
Who do I see about dropping off my resume?
the source opens YOU....
Since Vista is free anyway, right?
Desktop linux is still far away since [2009..2023] will be the year of desktop linux. Haiku seems to be suprising many with progress and stability, developers are using it full time and it's in a pre-alpha state! I would go so far to say Haiku could gain serious ground in desktop computing once it is 'good enough'. If BeOS's slick ease of use is retained. This will likely pick up users who've found the transition to Linux too hard or troublesome.
I wonder though, Haiku seems to be repeating the mistakes of Be, at this point it seems rather too good. BeOS was of course TOO good also, and was sat on hard by MS/Apple and whoever else was in the market, because it was superior *ducks*. The same happend with OS/2 which was also too good for it's own good.
OSS projects that are Good tend to prosper for just being so. But how will the linux camp react to competition?
You see, it could be doomed. Worse is Better is a troublesome law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
There is no direct evidence for the hair being human, it just could be. The hyena could have had any modern primate for lunch.
There are plenty of peer reviewed research papers showing Linux is more secure than windows.
Checkbox humour? I'm glad you asked, you know what I mean like:
Slashdot Posting Form
...
...
[ ] TFA is a troll
[ ] Get off grass
[ ] Did anyone else read that as...
[ ] _______ ^H^H^H^H^H ________
[x] In soviet russia
[ ] IANAL, but...
Somehow we got on to Quantum Poultridynamics, Chicken entrail entanglement is interesting however, may lead to a method of predicting future.
Seriously, this article is a masterful slashdot troll!
I just posted something that was sure to be modded insightful +5, but it has vanished! Seriously!
1. Build a demostration network utilizing spare and retired old 1ghz era out-of warranty hardware that you're about to sell off to the comp sci students for their study(/bittorrent) boxes. Show them a whizzy Gnome/KDE desktop, show how everything just works on the network and is easily administered with a gui, scripts, and documentation for the MCSE's to follow, demostrate some network security. Show no command lines.
2. There is no step two.
Transistors are naively analog. It's ironic that we use them for digital logic locked to a frequency cycle.
To make that clearer: Generalizing here 64-bit has an overhead on memory bandwidth, however once you remove that bottleneck things really scream along. 64-bit precision isn't needed in many cases, then using 32-bit precision on 64-bit allows a speed up.
In portable media applications of this, you'd be literally hearing background noise from the processor rather than just from the lossy compression algorithm and the reproduction circuitry (notoriously big sources of noise).
If they are talking about imprecision on average of parts per million then you'd never hear it. Even 1 to 10000 is still within the noise floor of your average ipod.
The order of magnitude increase in computational performance could allow for improved compression algorithms with less destortion. The net result is this kind of thing has potential to vastly improve audio/video and battery life.
OSS introduces a unique security problem. To properly secure for government use, they would have to have in-house auditing of every single line of code in a project that comes in from a non-government source.
I've always wondered if there is a potential security risk in open source where contributors to a project could get malicious code into the software. It is possible, although difficult to have code that reads as perfectly innocent, appears to do something else however takes malicious action. At very least introduce a vulnerability
The reason I bring this up is I have heard of cases where a backdoor was written into software, and the offending code never found in a line-by-line audit. This happened in a previous workplace of mine, was kept rather hush-hush so we don't know what happened eventually. After having seen coding competitions where the object was to make innocent code do something malicious - and seen some very creative submissions.
Its the same old Windows trick: Google earth will run standalone out of a folder just fine, the only changes it would make at runtime are restoring a few registry settings and the cache folder. This would mean installing it somewhere first however and I haven't tested this with version 5.0 yet - installer may want to make low-level changes to the system that would prevent the application from running (like so many other Windows apps).
Then there are other tricks like simply disabling the thing from loading on boot.
Windows XP / Vista 32-bit users should consider Altiris SVS, google updater will work fine within this. Because it is virtualised when you disable the application, there will be effectively no trace on your machine.
I think not installing or uninstalling software because you don't agree with the EULA is silly. Voting with your feet doesn't really work, you need to take tangible action. In many cases the corporation would rather you walk away, since it keeps you quiet.
If you find a EULA bothersome what I say is, breach it, violated it, pirate it and hack the product to work how you want it.
Yet again the headline doesn't resemble the facts in the article and the benchmarks chosen are selective, yet some inconveniently show Ubuntu getting thumped. Ubuntu is great, and it is damn fast and lightweight, but Windows 7 is playing catch-up.
All versions of Ubuntu is soundly beaten by Windows 7 64-bit in the Richards benchmark. Reveal authorial bias:
"It's clear from that graph that having a 64-bit OS can make a real difference in compute-intensive tasks, but it's not too pleasing to see Windows pip Linux to the post in nearly all results."
owned^H^H^H^H
Did anyone else read that as "Single scientists join compound for singles...".
It'd be a really really bad idea to release the source code for the most widely attacked OS. Considering it is already heavily under attack from hackers because of its ubiquity (and er vunerability) it would be a worldwide security disaster to release source code on top of that. Microsoft is already rather slow to patch even with tight control of code and spec.
What you first need is the coding community to maintain it. This is rather the reverse of software that has emerged from OSS circles rather than been thrown to it as is (which is fine for a company abandoning something that is still Good but not Profitable). I don't think the author really grasps this amongst all the other rather obvious challenges he fails to address that face moving a completely proprietary stack to a free licence.
It's nice to imagine Windows being free as in beer, but beer really isn't free unless you steal it or brew it yourself.
The Fermi paradox is a pet hate of mine, it really establishes nothing, they would be here is an assumption, it's not even a falsifiable one.
There are far too many approaches to the paradox other than the They Are Not Here.
If 'they' had the capability to cross interstellar space they would more than have the ability to stay hidden for one.
If they were here, would we be able to identify them? We've probably been scanned to a molecular level and been unware of it.
I wondered why many fusion drive proposals are the slightly absurd mini-bomb machine gun kind, then realised perhaps it is because the Orion program really was that awesome in a nuclear-steam punk fantasy kind of way. However ludicrous it is to detonate 1000 nuclear warheads sequentially to reach orbit, you had to admit it'd be super-cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion) "This extreme design could be built with materials and techniques that could be obtained in 1958 or were anticipated to be available shortly after."
Yet these equivalent fusion-based proposals seem to be only plausible with some assumptions of technological advancement, rather than with assumptions that people wouldn't mind the irreparable damage to the earths biosphere.
I think the approach is all wrong by many proposals so far. Thing is, we can create and contain fusion right now, and you can do it your backyard (no kidding - see lower). I think a plausible fusion drive would be something like a Bussard electrostatic confinement based drive. Essentially you are accelerating ions to high enough velocity for fusion, but allowing some to escape by a neutral charged nozzle.
We don't have fusion reactors right now that break even in any practical generative fashion, however that is absolutely not necessary. Give up the need to generate power from fusion, for example use an existing fission pile to power the thing, and you start to get results. The high-velocity fusion products become a nice boost to your specific impulse, along with your exhaust velocity much higher than any Ion or VASMIR thruster for any high-energy fuel leaking out the rear.
Ditch the perfectionist science and apply practical engineering and tune the thing for efficiency. Go to the stars.
Interestingly, electrostatic inertial confinement in a hard vacuum doesn't even need reactor walls .
What makes this even more exciting is that hobbyists build electrostatic confinement devices, and even get fusion reactions. Oh, OpenSource too.
http://www.fusor.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confinement
Now figure out how to make a drive out of a Fusor, strap some solar cells on it, and convince a private space launch company to put in orbit.
Some would question whether intelligent life has even been found on earth.
Some go further to doubt it will even emerge, artificial intelligence may not get there, so far all we have is artificial stupidity.