"We know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about the depths of the oceans on our own planet".
Do you really want to drop nuclear waste (ie: the most dangerous thing we've ever manufactured, modulo the safety claims) into an unknown environment ?
Before we potentially cause catastrophic harm to an environment, perhaps we should know something about it first ?
There are lots of ways to get rid of nuclear waste. Every one I've come across has serious drawbacks, mainly due to the nature of the waste, the harm it can do if the safety controls are breached, and the longevity of that harmful state...
Err, yes, but a US family's garbage isn't radioactive for a significant fraction of a million years!
There are differences between landfill sites for domestic waste, and those for nuclear waste, with there being significantly less choice in the nuclear sites...
The perennial question is one of waste disposal. It's all very well having a realtively clean source of energy right now, but if you have to guard against people getting hurt for X years, where X is a very large number...
They claim the graphite and silicon carbide around the pebbles will keep it sealed for ~ 1 million years, which is impressive. It'll be interesting to see if humanity is around in ~1 million years...
It also produces about 19 tons of radioactive waste (in the form of these coated pebbles) every year. That's going to be some landfill site, if the technology takes off...
... I have something of a soft-spot for SGI, and it's nice to see them still making high-profile sales - it'll do their government profile no end of good:-)
512 processors running a single image is pretty cool:-))
So, assuming that at some stage, we all have to pay to send email to (wherever). That creates a market pressure to set up email servers in (!wherever) that other people use webmail to get to...
I guess once you get a critical mass of people used to paying for email, and it's accepted as "what happens", then it won't be an issue, but getting to that happy stage is another ball-game.
Not sure if ISP's would be in favour or not. The market pressure applies to them the most directly of all. On the other hand, if it works, it'll reduce their bandwidth (I saw a statistic that 50% of email is now spam), and the more-confident of them can probably apply a mark-up for email...
Corporations are stuck, unless they're *really* big, I think. But who cares about corporations:-)
Or, you could read "The runaway brain" for a coffee-table-type treatment, or Kauffman's "The origins of order" if you have good maths.
The brain is sure as hell not designed for arts and humour... These may be bi-products which have become socially important and hence selected for, but they definitely weren't a "goal"
"Goals" were things like breathing & bodily control, judgment, and ultimately planning. That there's about 90% of our history. Walking upright came a lot later... The earliest "art" we know of (French caves, can't remember the place's name...) was so recent on evolutionary time, that you could blink and miss it.
If you're talking cro-magnon onwards, then perhaps the things you mentioned play some part. I still dispute "primary function" though...
I was considering setting up a download of a database dump for hostip.info using BitTorrent, but it's too awkward to create, and there's no guarantee that there's any saving, as far as I can see (people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle). Instead, I let people download the meta-data, and construct the DB - much faster:-)
The idea of fixed nodes is less "cool" I guess, with less of the "dynamic network adapting to the load", but probably more useful...
So, China will have its own proprietary format, with no-one outside the country really caring much - the global market is far larger than the chinese one. Seems to me this is just another control mechanism over the media and modern culture...
You know, I see it exactly the other way around. I think it's an amazing testament to the level of complexity the brain can model that something calculating millions (billions ?) of moves by brute force is not eating the human alive. (Possible poor choice of metaphor:-)
Consider that the brain evolved to keep the person alive (primary funciton), and then think about just how "over-engineered" ("engineered" firmly in quotes:-) it really is for that task.
People are amazed at what humans achieve using their brains, but it pales into insignificance compared to the brain itself. The only reason it's not given the recognition it deserves is that it's commonplace and mundane. That doesn't make it one iota less remarkable, however.
... now it's not that the compiler is too slow on the computer, but the super-optimiser that runs the compiler 2000 times on the code to get the speed as fast as possible, that runs too slow on the computer...
According to Computer Shopper, AMD and Cray are collabarating on a new chip interconnect method, which they claim runs 20x the speed of current solutions, called 'Red Storm'...
Just a 'news in brief' item, so no real details...
Hmm. re-reading my post, I can see why you replied like you did, so let me spell out the case I have:
There's a DB with (currently) about 30 million rows in it, it's the audit trail for a clients adserver. Queries are run on the db by their clients to figure out their usage, click-throughs etc. over periods. The ad-server gets anything from 0 to ~20 inserts per second across some 200 sites, and depending on the client policy, is cleared daily,weekly,monthly or yearly of that clients data.
Now, my understanding of the vacuum command was that it effectively took the DB offline (not good with the hit-rate I have), and my understanding of 'auto-vacuum' was that it would negate that effective downtime. It appears that that is not the case.
MySQL copes with this quite happily. I was simply investigating whether postgres would cope equally happily... more strings to the bow etc...
Ok, this is nice - One thing that's always put me off postgres is the need for vacuuming. It seems to me it's a labour-intensive task that the computer ought to do on its own, without my help:-)
This must be one of the most long-running Slashdot stories I've ever seen, and one of the most vehement:-) I wonder what a plot of stories/posts over time would look like...
When at college, I remember "radio bonk" where some enterprising student would sneak into another students room and hide a microphone, broadcasting the nightly "entertainment" over the airwaves for all to hear...
Sounds like a small radio transmitter and could make the perps. life a lot easier:-)
... despite the denial, who honestly thought MS would sit back while Apple muscled in on the media (ie: home user) territory that MS has more or less had to itself since WMP started to become useable ?
All that effort put into DRM, and no R to M ? Don't think so...
Despite the posts above about the requirement for patent licences to use the format (how can you patent a file format, I mean prior art!!) this is a step in the right direction.
I expect the open-source office apps to adopt it as an option, and I expect it to not work quite right enough when it goes through an MS->OO->MS cycle, but regardless, it's a wider chink in their armour than they had before, and it's a real argument that they're not obeying their own specs now "Look!" (if so, of course...)
Slashdot Mirror
"We know more about the dark side of the moon than we do about the depths of the oceans on our own planet".
Do you really want to drop nuclear waste (ie: the most dangerous thing we've ever manufactured, modulo the safety claims) into an unknown environment ?
Before we potentially cause catastrophic harm to an environment, perhaps we should know something about it first ?
There are lots of ways to get rid of nuclear waste. Every one I've come across has serious drawbacks, mainly due to the nature of the waste, the harm it can do if the safety controls are breached, and the longevity of that harmful state...
Simon.
Err, yes, but a US family's garbage isn't radioactive for a significant fraction of a million years!
There are differences between landfill sites for domestic waste, and those for nuclear waste, with there being significantly less choice in the nuclear sites...
Simon
The perennial question is one of waste disposal. It's all very well having a realtively clean source of energy right now, but if you have to guard against people getting hurt for X years, where X is a very large number...
...
They claim the graphite and silicon carbide around the pebbles will keep it sealed for ~ 1 million years, which is impressive. It'll be interesting to see if humanity is around in ~1 million years
It also produces about 19 tons of radioactive waste (in the form of these coated pebbles) every year. That's going to be some landfill site, if the technology takes off...
Simon.
... I have something of a soft-spot for SGI, and it's nice to see them still making high-profile sales - it'll do their government profile no end of good :-)
:-))
512 processors running a single image is pretty cool
Simon
I did. Although it looks a bit odd when projected to 6' across :-)
Simon.
So, assuming that at some stage, we all have to pay to send email to (wherever). That creates a market pressure to set up email servers in (!wherever) that other people use webmail to get to...
:-)
I guess once you get a critical mass of people used to paying for email, and it's accepted as "what happens", then it won't be an issue, but getting to that happy stage is another ball-game.
Not sure if ISP's would be in favour or not. The market pressure applies to them the most directly of all. On the other hand, if it works, it'll reduce their bandwidth (I saw a statistic that 50% of email is now spam), and the more-confident of them can probably apply a mark-up for email...
Corporations are stuck, unless they're *really* big, I think. But who cares about corporations
Simon
... looks like someone's pushing for recognition :-)
Simon
Or, you could read "The runaway brain" for a coffee-table-type treatment, or Kauffman's "The origins of order" if you have good maths.
The brain is sure as hell not designed for arts and humour... These may be bi-products which have become socially important and hence selected for, but they definitely weren't a "goal"
"Goals" were things like breathing & bodily control, judgment, and ultimately planning. That there's about 90% of our history. Walking upright came a lot later... The earliest "art" we know of (French caves, can't remember the place's name...) was so recent on evolutionary time, that you could blink and miss it.
If you're talking cro-magnon onwards, then perhaps the things you mentioned play some part. I still dispute "primary function" though...
Simon.
I was considering setting up a download of a database dump for hostip.info using BitTorrent, but it's too awkward to create, and there's no guarantee that there's any saving, as far as I can see (people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle). Instead, I let people download the meta-data, and construct the DB - much faster :-)
The idea of fixed nodes is less "cool" I guess, with less of the "dynamic network adapting to the load", but probably more useful...
Simon.
Don't joke!
Simon.
So, China will have its own proprietary format, with no-one outside the country really caring much - the global market is far larger than the chinese one. Seems to me this is just another control mechanism over the media and modern culture...
Simon
You know, I see it exactly the other way around. I think it's an amazing testament to the level of complexity the brain can model that something calculating millions (billions ?) of moves by brute force is not eating the human alive. (Possible poor choice of metaphor :-)
:-) it really is for that task.
Consider that the brain evolved to keep the person alive (primary funciton), and then think about just how "over-engineered" ("engineered" firmly in quotes
People are amazed at what humans achieve using their brains, but it pales into insignificance compared to the brain itself. The only reason it's not given the recognition it deserves is that it's commonplace and mundane. That doesn't make it one iota less remarkable, however.
Simon
Cheers, my friend.
Simon.
... now it's not that the compiler is too slow on the computer, but the super-optimiser that runs the compiler 2000 times on the code to get the speed as fast as possible, that runs too slow on the computer...
:-)
That's all right then
Simon
According to Computer Shopper, AMD and Cray are collabarating on a new chip interconnect method, which they claim runs 20x the speed of current solutions, called 'Red Storm' ...
Just a 'news in brief' item, so no real details...
Simon
Cheers :-)
:-)
I think I'll set up a copy of the db at home, and see how it fares
Simon
Hmm. re-reading my post, I can see why you replied like you did, so let me spell out the case I have:
There's a DB with (currently) about 30 million rows in it, it's the audit trail for a clients adserver. Queries are run on the db by their clients to figure out their usage, click-throughs etc. over periods. The ad-server gets anything from 0 to ~20 inserts per second across some 200 sites, and depending on the client policy, is cleared daily,weekly,monthly or yearly of that clients data.
Now, my understanding of the vacuum command was that it effectively took the DB offline (not good with the hit-rate I have), and my understanding of 'auto-vacuum' was that it would negate that effective downtime. It appears that that is not the case.
MySQL copes with this quite happily. I was simply investigating whether postgres would cope equally happily... more strings to the bow etc...
Simon
Ok, this is nice - One thing that's always put me off postgres is the need for vacuuming. It seems to me it's a labour-intensive task that the computer ought to do on its own, without my help :-)
Simon.
Not to ignite the flames at all (actually, I would prefer a straight answer)...
We have one client who uses postgres, the rest are all mysql-based... Is there an unbiased (as far as can be) comparison ?
Simon
This must be one of the most long-running Slashdot stories I've ever seen, and one of the most vehement :-) I wonder what a plot of stories/posts over time would look like...
Simon
When at college, I remember "radio bonk" where some enterprising student would sneak into another students room and hide a microphone, broadcasting the nightly "entertainment" over the airwaves for all to hear...
:-)
Sounds like a small radio transmitter and could make the perps. life a lot easier
Simon.
... despite the denial, who honestly thought MS would sit back while Apple muscled in on the media (ie: home user) territory that MS has more or less had to itself since WMP started to become useable ?
All that effort put into DRM, and no R to M ? Don't think so...
Simon.
"are you on bad crack? It's $19.60 at Amazon, not $24.95."
....
Wow! Amazon are certainly diversifying. I wonder if it'll get past customs if they gift-wrap it... Only if it's the good stuff though
Simon
Despite the posts above about the requirement for patent licences to use the format (how can you patent a file format, I mean prior art!!) this is a step in the right direction.
I expect the open-source office apps to adopt it as an option, and I expect it to not work quite right enough when it goes through an MS->OO->MS cycle, but regardless, it's a wider chink in their armour than they had before, and it's a real argument that they're not obeying their own specs now "Look!" (if so, of course...)
Simon.
Well, we've just found the boundaries of the DMCA. It covers everything in the house, the garage, but not, repeat not, the garage door :-)
This presumably means that automated sprinkler systems for the lawn also lie outside the DMCA, but IANAL.
Simon.