I never miss any of my favorite shows anymore, and there is always something good on TV, no matter what the time and day. Maybe if enough Tivo users watch a particular show then it won't be cancelled. It seems that they always cancel my favorite shows before it even lasts a single season. SPOOOOOON! That's why I participate in the stats gathering.
I am working for a start up and have long hours, but I still get to see every one of my favorite shows.
It can only record one channel at a time, but worse case I could always get my VCR to record a second show if I wanted to. There are rarely 2 shows on at the same time that I want to watch. I am lucky if there is one show on that I want to watch, so Tivo has really made tv watching fun again.
One of the cool things that it can do that a VCR can't is that you can watch a recording, while Tivo is recording another show.
It can only record about 15 hours of video at medium quality. I am going to put in the extra 80GB hard drive so that I can record another 60 hours of medium quality video. I want to record and store entire seasons of my favorite shows and then store them as DiVX on DVD-R. I should be able to fit about 9 hours of VHS quality video on every DVD-R:)
One of the cool things that Tivo could allow is that they could put on less popular shows on at 4am in the morning, and anyone that really wants to watch the show can have Tivo pick it up. It would also be cool to put on education classes on at night, or on a particular channel.
Here are some hard numbers that prove you need 2 to 4 times the the number of windows boxes to support the same number of clients as you do when you use Linux and either Tux 2.0 or Chromium X15 WebServer 1.0.
Tux is a kernel mode web server, but X15 is a user mode web server and has the same performance.
I am wondering if the Amiga can ever rise from the ashes like the Phoenix?
It is interesting that it will run on both x86 and PPC platforms. This will help it gain ground. Unfortunately they chose QNX as their kernel, which is not only proprietary, but also has few fanatical supporters. (unlike either *BSD or Linux, both of which have lots of fanatical supporters.) It is at least a UNIX like kernel, and very high performance.
It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel. Then you would have had the supporters of that OS adding the the core supporters of Amiga. Worse case, how hard would it be to make *BSD or Linux be API compatible with QNX?
All that being said, I would love to see a demo of it, and to see just how fast it is and how well it runs all the programs. I bet we can look forward to ports of open office and mozilla rather quickly as soon as a few developers get their hands on a copy. The full set of GNU tools will also probably be quickly ported to the new environment.
I have a feeling that this is the last chance for Amiga, it is sink or swim. If they don't succeed this time, then it is all over for the platform.
And even then I think that Amiga has a lot to prove in a market that is crowed with Windows, Linux/X and Mac OS X in the top 3 places. No one else is even a contendor on the desktop. OS2 is dead, BeOS is dead. They have to prove that they are worth the price. BeOS was arguably as good or better than the new Amiga, and it never caught on.
You could basically write a game that put a display up on multiple X terminals. This would have multiple views into the same world and allow multiple keyboard and mouse inputs to that world. The server system and network would have to be very fast to support this game. It is practically impossible to cheat with this setup too.
The other end of the spectrum would have the game distributed onto each machine, with all updates from every machine being multicast to every other client at the same time. This would allow each client system to distribute part of the load of the game and its display across the network. You would need a very fast network for this.
In between these two extremes is a central server that has clients connect to the server. The best way to distribute the work on this system is to look at what needs to be done. The local system will render the view and play the sounds. It will need to send it's mouse and control movements to the central server. The central server will look at all the inputs and send back update information to all the clients.
It can also be slowly uploading the information it will need for the next level while you are playing the current level. You may also have an encrypted CD at each client that can only read the information when the server gives it a valid key. The key is not cached. You may also want to authenticate that the client is valid by performing a checksum on some portion of the system in memory and returning that to the server.
This way the rules are all on the server, so cheating will be at a minimum. But they will have all the map data, so a hacked client may give them more info than the other players have.
The next step is to also download the rules to the clients at game time and let the clients decide what is happening for themselves, then send an update to the main server which just distributes the info to the other clients on a need to know basis. This would eliminate all mouse and keyboard data uploads.
But having modified clients that allow cheating could be bad. You can minimize this by providing stripped binaries that authenticate to the server, but a determined cracker can get around that.
in no time flat. Before the end of the year we will have full access to all the hardware on both systems and have full system specs. And nothing either side does will have any effect on it.
I look forward to ripping DVD's on the PS2 using the hardware decoder, then using a software DIVX to recompress the video so that it would fit on a CD-R. For personal use only. If I want to watch a movie that I bought on some other format or on another hardware platform, then that is my business and allowed under fair use. It would be nice to stream the videos to any screen in the house.
I had a lot of hopes for the indrema, but all to naught. Maybe a hacked Xbox, or hacked PS2 could be the indrema and be a great platform for developing Linux based gaming. Especially if the games where developed using a cross platform game library like SDL so that the games would be easy to cross port to any system.
The processing I do involves receiving, processing and transmiting millions of messages containing patient data, billing, and lab reports everyday. In near real time. To and from 50 systems on multiple 100Mb ethernet cards. If I used a scripting language to do all the processing it would take a week to do a days worth of messages. At peak times, even with heavily optimized C we can still run 5 to 10 minutes behind in passing messages between systems.
And the disk is _not_ the bottleneck, it has 20 disks that are mirrored and stripped (hardware RAID 10) using multiple controllers, so it has no problem keeping up with the quad processor IBM. We easily read and write data at about 160MB a second. If anything a lot of the receiving systems are the bottleneck.
All the main routines are in C. They are wired together using ksh, perl and tcl scripts. And before you ask, we pretty much know what tasks can be scripted and what tasks need C from about 50 years of in house experience with a team of 10 programmers at this particular task.
We also already have the libraries we need. Libraries that are tried and true with years of testing and experience on the 20 different systems that we fully support.
This is an interesting question. What kind of programming languages will a klingon develop. But I think that I want to examine the character of a klingon programmer (from the internet, original attribution lost):
Klingon Programmer
Top 20 things likely to be overheard if you had a Klingon Programmer:
1. Defensive programming? Never! Klingon programs are always on the offense. Yes, offensive programming is what we do best.
2. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
3. This machine is GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
4. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
5. Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
6. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
8. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
9. I have challenged the entire ISO-9000 quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest on the holodeck. They will not concern us again.
10. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
11. By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
12. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
13. Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
14. Our competitors are without honor!
15. Python? That is for children. A Klingon Warrior uses only machine code, keyed in on the front panel switches in raw binary.
16. Klingon programs don't do accountancy. For that, you need a Ferengi.
17. Klingon multitasking systems do not support "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine.
18. Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!
19. My program has just dumped Stova Core!
20. Behold, the keyboard of Kalis! The greatest Klingon code warrior that ever lived!
That is a good point... most of my programming is stringing unix commands together in a shell script.
Most of the time when I am writing in C it is because nothing else is fast enough for the task at hand. You still can't beat C for speed. And I don't do that much user interaction with the C programs.
Even though it is harder to write and maintain, I can process a text file at least 100 times faster in C than I can with a scripted language. Even Perl isn't as fast as C.
I haven't used python, what is it's speed like compared to C?
I got really excited about the --enable-bounded option, so I looked for it in the man page, and it doesn't exist. Hard to use a feature that I don't know how it works.... Is this a new feature? Do _all_ compilers have it?
And no, you should bounds check everything before you use it, at least in your development environment. A few strategically placed asserts() can go a long way in finding errors you never knew you had. I am asking for a complier flag to have the compiler do an assert before every use of an array, at least during testing phases.
Dude, I am a every experienced C programmer. I am not complaining that these things are not possible to do in C, I am complaining that they aren't part of the standard C library.
Why do we have to reinvent the wheel everytime when the language itself can provide the facilities? Especially when most security holes are because people are _not_ doing things right?
And you really need to relax and take a deep breath before you post. A course on anger management should help too.
one of the really cool features back in the day of the bbs was a program that would detect when you were downloading an image and display it as it came in. This worked totally seperate from the terminal program.
Wouldn't it be cool if you would put a machine on the network that watched every packet going by and detected when you were receiving a stream of data and would write that stream of data to the drive and then convert it to DivX? Then it could have streaming software and a web server to show you everything that is available and to present it to anyone in the house.
Guess what? Google doesn't cache images! And I bet they compress the cached page too.
So, let's get wild and say that there is 120TB of html pages that we care about... if you compress these pages then they would fit in 10 TB. Still plenty of room on a 20 TB RAM Disk for the index to all these pages.
And besides, I'm just guessing... They might have 8GB of RAM in every machine, for all I know.
evolution is never over. But it works a lot faster in small isolated populations.
When we get into space we will have far flung colonies spread out over the entire solar system, with small groups of people who are going to have very limited contact with the rest of humanity for generations. The radiation levels will be much higher than normal. Gravity is going to be much lower. Foods will be different than on Earth.
We are going to see some very strange cults, and strange mutations as we move into space. It would be interesting to explore the possiblities in a story about someone who has to take supplies off to a lot of remote outposts.
And as far as machines replacing humans, hardly. This reminds me a lot of the outlandish claims that we would be able to predict the weather for years in advance back in the 1950's. We are still lucky to have an accurate 5 day forcast. And just this winter they failed to forcast a storm that put down 6 inches of snow across the entire NW of the US.
I predict that we will be lucky to have machines as smart as a rat in my lifetime and that my great grand children will not meet an artificial intelligence as smart as they are. We will see expert systems being used in things like medicine and law and other narrowly defined areas of human knowledge, but those will be idiot savants that are totally useless outside their area of expertise.
We will move to a new economy that is totally alien to what we have now. Capitalism and communism are rapidly becoming as meaningless as talking about things in terms of divine right and fiefal duties. It can either be a paradise, or a new dark age, I am not sure which will happen yet.
The simple fact is that most peoples in the world live pretty much the same way that they have lived since history began to be recorded. They use animals to farm for food. I doubt that this will change in the next 1000 years.
Sadly the overlords of these peasants _do_ have access to the most advanced technologies... How much chance does a farmer have against a MiG23? Or against a squad of soldiers armed with AK 47's? Not much. And even if we do have AI robots, those robots will answer to the overlords too.
caused by the C libraries poor implementation of strings, and by the lack of any runtime bounds checking?
The argument that these things slow down code too much doesn't make much sense, considering that we have to do the runtime bounds checking ourself, everytime, and that we occasionally make mistakes.
I think that it is time we drop all insecure functions from the standard C library and replace the library with a bounds checking version that also was more complete and consistent.
It would also be interesting to have a taint flag on the standard C compiler like the perl compiler has to detect when people are using user input as format strings and the like, without cleaning the input first.
If they made a 2GB RAM Drive in each of their 10,000 machines then that would be 20 TB of storage. This seems sufficient to me for most storage needs.
You would still need to be able to direct searches to the machines that have the part of the data you need. This would take a high speed network and some clever programming. But it is doable.
I always was amazed at the speed of googles search engine, now I have a little more clue as to why it is so fast.
Sounds to me like they might be able to sell their database software as a money making product at some point. Oracle, watch out!
That was my first thought too... Security isn't something you do one time, or for a fixed duration in time. It is a continuous process of incremental improvements over time. A kind of arms war as the attackers and defenders learn from each other.
Until MS stops throwing out their code every couple of years and starting from scratch, they will have security problems. Fresh code has new problems. Look at the 2.2 linux kernel... It has only needed one security patch in the past couple of years. As things mature you find and fix all the bugs in it and it gets more and more solid and secure.
Errr, no. The earth is already in geostationary orbit with the moon. (And the Moon is also in orbit around the moon, its a complexe wobbling dance.) That means that the earth is always over the same place on the moon. If anything else is also in geostationary orbit with the moon, then it would be in the same orbit, but in a different location than the earth, and so would _never_ intersect with the earth.
The earths gravity may tend to pull the satelite off course, but that is a different matter all together, and you can always put the satellite 180 degrees away from the earth on the dark side of the moon to counteract that.
There are also 5 locations called Lagrange points where the gravity of the moon and the earth balance each other out and you can place satelites there and they will tend to stay in that location. One point is exactly between the moon and the earth, 2 other points are about 20 degrees on either side of the main point, and is also a location on the opposite side of the earth from the moon and on the opposite side of the moon from the earth.
Let's say that it is a calm day, absolutely no wind, and I am floating in hydrogen ballon 10 miles above the ground.
If I drop an egg or an anvil those things will fall strait down to the ground. If I hang a string down to the ground and then let go of the string, then it will also fall strait to the ground.
If I could magically float 100 miles off the ground over the same spot then if I dropped an anvil or an egg or a string, then they will also fall strait to the ground.
If you cut one of these elevators at a point below that which centrifical force can hold it up, it would fall strait to the ground. It would be a huge tangle of filliment where the station used to be.
errrrr, the moon _does_ rotate... It spins once everytime it goes around the earth. If it didn't spin, it wouldn't always keep the same face to Earth as it orbits.
It _is_ a conductor... And it will be a 22,000 mile long generator that is powered by moving through the suns magnetic field. It should generate a lot of power.:)
I think that there are going to be a lot of issues with building a structure this big, and people will die and there will be disasters, but in the end everything will work out and riding a space elevator into space will be about as exciting as riding an elevator to the top of a tall building, or driving over a bridge.
Until space colonies are self supporting there will be a need for massive resupply from the ground to support even a few people and rockets make the shipping costs for these supplies prohibatively expensive.
The ability to ship people and supplies up in an elevator will make it economical for companies to start up their own space stations. It will make it fesible for small groups of wealthy people to start up their own space colonies. Space hotels will be able to make money. It will also make it cost effective to manufacture items in space and send them in the downward travelling containers.
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I never miss any of my favorite shows anymore, and there is always something good on TV, no matter what the time and day. Maybe if enough Tivo users watch a particular show then it won't be cancelled. It seems that they always cancel my favorite shows before it even lasts a single season. SPOOOOOON! That's why I participate in the stats gathering.
:)
I am working for a start up and have long hours, but I still get to see every one of my favorite shows.
It can only record one channel at a time, but worse case I could always get my VCR to record a second show if I wanted to. There are rarely 2 shows on at the same time that I want to watch. I am lucky if there is one show on that I want to watch, so Tivo has really made tv watching fun again.
One of the cool things that it can do that a VCR can't is that you can watch a recording, while Tivo is recording another show.
It can only record about 15 hours of video at medium quality. I am going to put in the extra 80GB hard drive so that I can record another 60 hours of medium quality video. I want to record and store entire seasons of my favorite shows and then store them as DiVX on DVD-R. I should be able to fit about 9 hours of VHS quality video on every DVD-R
One of the cool things that Tivo could allow is that they could put on less popular shows on at 4am in the morning, and anyone that really wants to watch the show can have Tivo pick it up. It would also be cool to put on education classes on at night, or on a particular channel.
Tux is a kernel mode web server, but X15 is a user mode web server and has the same performance.
Thanks a lot! The only reference I could find to this feature was in the NEWS in my /usr/share/doc/glibc/ directory. :)
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for pointing out the documentation to me.
I'm testing out some of my code with it already! Wooo hoooo!
I am wondering if the Amiga can ever rise from the ashes like the Phoenix?
It is interesting that it will run on both x86 and PPC platforms. This will help it gain ground. Unfortunately they chose QNX as their kernel, which is not only proprietary, but also has few fanatical supporters. (unlike either *BSD or Linux, both of which have lots of fanatical supporters.) It is at least a UNIX like kernel, and very high performance.
It would have been better to emulate Apple in picking a free kernel. Then you would have had the supporters of that OS adding the the core supporters of Amiga. Worse case, how hard would it be to make *BSD or Linux be API compatible with QNX?
All that being said, I would love to see a demo of it, and to see just how fast it is and how well it runs all the programs. I bet we can look forward to ports of open office and mozilla rather quickly as soon as a few developers get their hands on a copy. The full set of GNU tools will also probably be quickly ported to the new environment.
I have a feeling that this is the last chance for Amiga, it is sink or swim. If they don't succeed this time, then it is all over for the platform.
And even then I think that Amiga has a lot to prove in a market that is crowed with Windows, Linux/X and Mac OS X in the top 3 places. No one else is even a contendor on the desktop. OS2 is dead, BeOS is dead. They have to prove that they are worth the price. BeOS was arguably as good or better than the new Amiga, and it never caught on.
This is actually very interesting to me...
You could basically write a game that put a display up on multiple X terminals. This would have multiple views into the same world and allow multiple keyboard and mouse inputs to that world. The server system and network would have to be very fast to support this game. It is practically impossible to cheat with this setup too.
The other end of the spectrum would have the game distributed onto each machine, with all updates from every machine being multicast to every other client at the same time. This would allow each client system to distribute part of the load of the game and its display across the network. You would need a very fast network for this.
In between these two extremes is a central server that has clients connect to the server. The best way to distribute the work on this system is to look at what needs to be done. The local system will render the view and play the sounds. It will need to send it's mouse and control movements to the central server. The central server will look at all the inputs and send back update information to all the clients.
It can also be slowly uploading the information it will need for the next level while you are playing the current level. You may also have an encrypted CD at each client that can only read the information when the server gives it a valid key. The key is not cached. You may also want to authenticate that the client is valid by performing a checksum on some portion of the system in memory and returning that to the server.
This way the rules are all on the server, so cheating will be at a minimum. But they will have all the map data, so a hacked client may give them more info than the other players have.
The next step is to also download the rules to the clients at game time and let the clients decide what is happening for themselves, then send an update to the main server which just distributes the info to the other clients on a need to know basis. This would eliminate all mouse and keyboard data uploads.
But having modified clients that allow cheating could be bad. You can minimize this by providing stripped binaries that authenticate to the server, but a determined cracker can get around that.
in no time flat. Before the end of the year we will have full access to all the hardware on both systems and have full system specs. And nothing either side does will have any effect on it.
I look forward to ripping DVD's on the PS2 using the hardware decoder, then using a software DIVX to recompress the video so that it would fit on a CD-R. For personal use only. If I want to watch a movie that I bought on some other format or on another hardware platform, then that is my business and allowed under fair use. It would be nice to stream the videos to any screen in the house.
I had a lot of hopes for the indrema, but all to naught. Maybe a hacked Xbox, or hacked PS2 could be the indrema and be a great platform for developing Linux based gaming. Especially if the games where developed using a cross platform game library like SDL so that the games would be easy to cross port to any system.
The processing I do involves receiving, processing and transmiting millions of messages containing patient data, billing, and lab reports everyday. In near real time. To and from 50 systems on multiple 100Mb ethernet cards. If I used a scripting language to do all the processing it would take a week to do a days worth of messages. At peak times, even with heavily optimized C we can still run 5 to 10 minutes behind in passing messages between systems.
And the disk is _not_ the bottleneck, it has 20 disks that are mirrored and stripped (hardware RAID 10) using multiple controllers, so it has no problem keeping up with the quad processor IBM. We easily read and write data at about 160MB a second. If anything a lot of the receiving systems are the bottleneck.
All the main routines are in C. They are wired together using ksh, perl and tcl scripts. And before you ask, we pretty much know what tasks can be scripted and what tasks need C from about 50 years of in house experience with a team of 10 programmers at this particular task.
We also already have the libraries we need. Libraries that are tried and true with years of testing and experience on the 20 different systems that we fully support.
Hardly _blindly_ selecting C.
This has been around _forever_ no one even knows who started it now. I did attribute it as best as I could: anonymous.
If you look for "Klingon Programmer" on google you can see thousands of pages of the same thing over and over.
This is an interesting question. What kind of programming languages will a klingon develop. But I think that I want to examine the character of a klingon programmer (from the internet, original attribution lost):
Klingon Programmer
Top 20 things likely to be overheard if you had a Klingon Programmer:
1. Defensive programming? Never! Klingon programs are always on the offense. Yes, offensive programming is what we do best.
2. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
3. This machine is GAGH! I need dual Pentium processors if I am to do battle with this code!
4. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
5. Indentation?! - I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
6. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' - they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
8. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
9. I have challenged the entire ISO-9000 quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest on the holodeck. They will not concern us again.
10. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
11. By filing this bug report you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
12. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
13. Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
14. Our competitors are without honor!
15. Python? That is for children. A Klingon Warrior uses only machine code, keyed in on the front panel switches in raw binary.
16. Klingon programs don't do accountancy. For that, you need a Ferengi.
17. Klingon multitasking systems do not support "time-sharing". When a Klingon program wants to run, it challenges the scheduler in hand-to-hand combat and owns the machine.
18. Perhaps it IS a good day to die! I say we ship it!
19. My program has just dumped Stova Core!
20. Behold, the keyboard of Kalis! The greatest Klingon code warrior that ever lived!
That is a good point... most of my programming is stringing unix commands together in a shell script.
Most of the time when I am writing in C it is because nothing else is fast enough for the task at hand. You still can't beat C for speed. And I don't do that much user interaction with the C programs.
Even though it is harder to write and maintain, I can process a text file at least 100 times faster in C than I can with a scripted language. Even Perl isn't as fast as C.
I haven't used python, what is it's speed like compared to C?
I got really excited about the --enable-bounded option, so I looked for it in the man page, and it doesn't exist. Hard to use a feature that I don't know how it works.... Is this a new feature? Do _all_ compilers have it?
And no, you should bounds check everything before you use it, at least in your development environment. A few strategically placed asserts() can go a long way in finding errors you never knew you had. I am asking for a complier flag to have the compiler do an assert before every use of an array, at least during testing phases.
Dude, I am a every experienced C programmer. I am not complaining that these things are not possible to do in C, I am complaining that they aren't part of the standard C library.
Why do we have to reinvent the wheel everytime when the language itself can provide the facilities? Especially when most security holes are because people are _not_ doing things right?
And you really need to relax and take a deep breath before you post. A course on anger management should help too.
one of the really cool features back in the day of the bbs was a program that would detect when you were downloading an image and display it as it came in. This worked totally seperate from the terminal program.
Wouldn't it be cool if you would put a machine on the network that watched every packet going by and detected when you were receiving a stream of data and would write that stream of data to the drive and then convert it to DivX? Then it could have streaming software and a web server to show you everything that is available and to present it to anyone in the house.
Guess what? Google doesn't cache images! And I bet they compress the cached page too.
So, let's get wild and say that there is 120TB of html pages that we care about... if you compress these pages then they would fit in 10 TB. Still plenty of room on a 20 TB RAM Disk for the index to all these pages.
And besides, I'm just guessing... They might have 8GB of RAM in every machine, for all I know.
evolution is never over. But it works a lot faster in small isolated populations.
When we get into space we will have far flung colonies spread out over the entire solar system, with small groups of people who are going to have very limited contact with the rest of humanity for generations. The radiation levels will be much higher than normal. Gravity is going to be much lower. Foods will be different than on Earth.
We are going to see some very strange cults, and strange mutations as we move into space. It would be interesting to explore the possiblities in a story about someone who has to take supplies off to a lot of remote outposts.
And as far as machines replacing humans, hardly. This reminds me a lot of the outlandish claims that we would be able to predict the weather for years in advance back in the 1950's. We are still lucky to have an accurate 5 day forcast. And just this winter they failed to forcast a storm that put down 6 inches of snow across the entire NW of the US.
I predict that we will be lucky to have machines as smart as a rat in my lifetime and that my great grand children will not meet an artificial intelligence as smart as they are. We will see expert systems being used in things like medicine and law and other narrowly defined areas of human knowledge, but those will be idiot savants that are totally useless outside their area of expertise.
We will move to a new economy that is totally alien to what we have now. Capitalism and communism are rapidly becoming as meaningless as talking about things in terms of divine right and fiefal duties. It can either be a paradise, or a new dark age, I am not sure which will happen yet.
The simple fact is that most peoples in the world live pretty much the same way that they have lived since history began to be recorded. They use animals to farm for food. I doubt that this will change in the next 1000 years.
Sadly the overlords of these peasants _do_ have access to the most advanced technologies... How much chance does a farmer have against a MiG23? Or against a squad of soldiers armed with AK 47's? Not much. And even if we do have AI robots, those robots will answer to the overlords too.
caused by the C libraries poor implementation of strings, and by the lack of any runtime bounds checking?
The argument that these things slow down code too much doesn't make much sense, considering that we have to do the runtime bounds checking ourself, everytime, and that we occasionally make mistakes.
I think that it is time we drop all insecure functions from the standard C library and replace the library with a bounds checking version that also was more complete and consistent.
It would also be interesting to have a taint flag on the standard C compiler like the perl compiler has to detect when people are using user input as format strings and the like, without cleaning the input first.
If they made a 2GB RAM Drive in each of their 10,000 machines then that would be 20 TB of storage. This seems sufficient to me for most storage needs.
You would still need to be able to direct searches to the machines that have the part of the data you need. This would take a high speed network and some clever programming. But it is doable.
I always was amazed at the speed of googles search engine, now I have a little more clue as to why it is so fast.
Sounds to me like they might be able to sell their database software as a money making product at some point. Oracle, watch out!
That was my first thought too... Security isn't something you do one time, or for a fixed duration in time. It is a continuous process of incremental improvements over time. A kind of arms war as the attackers and defenders learn from each other.
Until MS stops throwing out their code every couple of years and starting from scratch, they will have security problems. Fresh code has new problems. Look at the 2.2 linux kernel... It has only needed one security patch in the past couple of years. As things mature you find and fix all the bugs in it and it gets more and more solid and secure.
Is it ironic that there is no White Male History Month?
And the thing that pisses me off most about being a white male is that only about 3% of us get to be in charge of everything and I'm not in that 3%.
When is it going to be _my_ turn to be The Man?
Sounds like a great idea! When are you going to be done doing it?
Didn't you know? Anyone who recommends a new feature is in charge of implementing it.
Good Luck!
Errrr, moon is in orbit around the Earth that is. doh!
Errr, no. The earth is already in geostationary orbit with the moon. (And the Moon is also in orbit around the moon, its a complexe wobbling dance.) That means that the earth is always over the same place on the moon. If anything else is also in geostationary orbit with the moon, then it would be in the same orbit, but in a different location than the earth, and so would _never_ intersect with the earth.
The earths gravity may tend to pull the satelite off course, but that is a different matter all together, and you can always put the satellite 180 degrees away from the earth on the dark side of the moon to counteract that.
There are also 5 locations called Lagrange points where the gravity of the moon and the earth balance each other out and you can place satelites there and they will tend to stay in that location. One point is exactly between the moon and the earth, 2 other points are about 20 degrees on either side of the main point, and is also a location on the opposite side of the earth from the moon and on the opposite side of the moon from the earth.
Let's say that it is a calm day, absolutely no wind, and I am floating in hydrogen ballon 10 miles above the ground.
If I drop an egg or an anvil those things will fall strait down to the ground. If I hang a string down to the ground and then let go of the string, then it will also fall strait to the ground.
If I could magically float 100 miles off the ground over the same spot then if I dropped an anvil or an egg or a string, then they will also fall strait to the ground.
If you cut one of these elevators at a point below that which centrifical force can hold it up, it would fall strait to the ground. It would be a huge tangle of filliment where the station used to be.
errrrr, the moon _does_ rotate... It spins once everytime it goes around the earth. If it didn't spin, it wouldn't always keep the same face to Earth as it orbits.
It _is_ a conductor... And it will be a 22,000 mile long generator that is powered by moving through the suns magnetic field. It should generate a lot of power. :)
I think that there are going to be a lot of issues with building a structure this big, and people will die and there will be disasters, but in the end everything will work out and riding a space elevator into space will be about as exciting as riding an elevator to the top of a tall building, or driving over a bridge.
Until space colonies are self supporting there will be a need for massive resupply from the ground to support even a few people and rockets make the shipping costs for these supplies prohibatively expensive.
The ability to ship people and supplies up in an elevator will make it economical for companies to start up their own space stations. It will make it fesible for small groups of wealthy people to start up their own space colonies. Space hotels will be able to make money. It will also make it cost effective to manufacture items in space and send them in the downward travelling containers.
Dude,
I hate to tell you this, but the soviet union isn't communist anymore. We won, they are now a democracy just like us now.
You might want to occassionally watch the news or read a paper every once in a while...