I hate to sound like a killjoy but that kind of noise is exactly the sort of thing that screws up microphones - it's hard for a computer to filter it out. The brain does so well but I don't think our filters are that good yet.
If this noise is everywhere - sirens, other people's phones, etc etc, then every time you are on your mobile and go near another source of this noise it's gonna hose your conversation completely.
Mmm, call waiting - hang on, I have to answer that or you can't hear a damned thing I am saying for "HISSSSSSSSSS". That'll be useful - NOT.
CB
Aside from the fact that a lot of Aussie ISP's would have to cut loose their webcache administrators...
Well implemented caches can bring a 50% bandwidth saving without really affecting the freshness of content. As we move towards a more broadband network, with more streaming content, those rates could easily rise to 75% or 90%.
Australia is risking letting itself get left behind the change in net content because the objects that the cache must hit to achieve those rates are amongst the most 'copyright contentious'... chunks of movie files, news clips, mp3's, etc. If it is illegal for their ISP's to cache such content, then they will find themselves needing vastly more international bandwidth than anyone else, and that won't be cheap. I heard recently, on/. I think, of someone putting a huge pipe from west coast US down to Oz, and at that rate, they're gonna need it, then they're gonna fill it.
Also, the most content it is most worthwhile caching is foreign origin content. Ie, content not covered by Oz copyright laws? Or are they claiming simply that if you are not the copyright holder, so you can't cache it. Muppets.
It is fairly clear that the legislators either have a very old view of how the internet works (proxy caches weren't that big a deal 3 years ago) or a very poor view of how the internet works. It's almost like saying that you don't own a particular IP/mac address so arp caches are illegal.
Given the preposterous nature of that part of the legislation (go on, turn off caching, see what your users say...) it would seem entirely possible that the government of Australia, which as has been said has become the laughing stock of the world for IT policy (or is that dictatorial IT policy? I seem to recall a lot of very severe censorship laws recently).
On thing... didn't Australia pass a law guaranteeing the right to decompile and reverse engineer? Or didn't that go through. It gave me such HOPE for open source when I heard that. If that IS the case, how does that sit with banning DeCSS? Right to reverse engineer guaranteed, erm, except when we say. Riiiiggghhhtttt. Perhaps someone can clear that up for me.
We've already seen an article, here I think, that a bloke with IBM or someone was talking about non-dynamic RAM with low power requirements to run and NO power requirements to maintain state. Now I wouldn't be surprised if in fact it could stand a powered refresh every day or so to offset the effects of random magnetic fields - hell you could put a field detector on the MM and it could open a circuit for a powered refresh every time it thought it was required.
You don't want a disk in a mobile device, for a simple reason - torque. A fast spinning disk is essentially a gyroscope. While it would keep the device stable for use, the cost is horrific forces on the axles of the disks. Go on, run around with a mobile computer containing and 10K rpm disk and see how long it takes to fail. I'd be surprised if it worked at the end of the day.
So, clearly the computer of the future will contain two levels of RAM - something designed for performance with whatever power requirements that entails, and a larger bulk designed for stability over speed, which replaces the hard disk. Only it doesn't, because no matter how optimised it is for stability, it's still gonna spank a disk completely for response time and throughput. In 10 years, memory designed for stability without power (or with only a tiny backup battery rated at '12 months backup') is still gonna look quite nice compared to modern RAM for speed and such.
So you'd have everything you would normally put into cache and main RAM in your fast RAM, and all the contents of your disk, as well as swapped-out memory pages, in your 'slow' RAM.
To turn your computer off, all you do is flush the DRAM contents to stable RAM. How long's that gonna take? 0.1 secs, tops.
To turn it on, all you do is a/ read from slow RAM enough to give the user their desktop, and start swapping the relevant parts of the OS into DRAM.
That removes the power requirements of the disk, which are quite high, removes most of the power requirements of DRAM, as there isn't much (perhaps only 10-20 GB - shockingly low for 2010), and leaves your computer safe to cart round with you. All we need now is a decent display. And as for all you guys worrying about interface. Imagine you strap something around each elbow that detects the nerve impulses bound for your forearms where the muscles that control your fingers are located. Wireless of course, encrypted link to the computer. I'm sure you'll learn to 'want to type' without actually moving your fingers and control your computer that way.
If you could put such a device on your head, or better still implant it, imagine the "macros" you could use. Your computer is under attack? You think of being protected, and it replaced inetd.conf with a more secure one and hups inetd. and shuts down some other programs. and enables network logging. and performs reverse lookup on all ip's currently talking to you. and traceroutes them. and keeps the results... and and and and and
Given the utility of such an interface to users of realtime computer systems, no not fighter pilots at all, guv, honest, I'm sure we'll see it or something like it by 2010. Once they exist they'll get cheaper and cheaper (until they fry someone's head, then they'll get expensive for a while til that problem is fixed), and then you'll be able to go down to Sony or Toshiba or GE and request surgery to have a neural link implanted.
Most of the stuff people archive tends to be logs or other such chunks of 'low value per byte' data - expensive stuff tends to get kept live and backed up regularly. The only other thing that I think is habitually backed up is stuff like important configs, important content - in other words, things which must NOT be lost, but which are frequently obselete in a few months. With hard drives expanding fast, most critical data can just be migrated onto evre more capable storage systems. I know where I work (an ISP), customers get backups done for them, and no-one thinks about the long-term viability of those backups because all critical data is backed up regularly, because it is kept live. Who cares about last year's web pages? As for an entropic nightmare of backups of backups:> The tools for controlling backups and the speed of backups are improving fast enough that we spend LESS time doing backups, not more. Plus with speciality data vaults coming more into play, I see the future being one of many people and companies with data, backed up by their choice of 'backup provider', who keep backups, and who in turn are backed up by national or international 'secure backup services', unseen companies known only to those in the business, who aren't interested in backing up less than a coupla hundred terabytes per customer. There's been a few rumbles about very high-density CD's and laser-read semi-biological crystals as storage media, the notable point being a move from '2-D' storage media to '3-D'. Which makes me wonder if some physical process of copying a crystal block might take over the informational process of writing a new one. Data usage is expanding to fill the services that are provided, and technology races to stay ahead of that demand. Given that we are not yet storing data by the electron excitation states of atoms ("NEW from Store-TEK - a Titanium based storage cell, allowing a whole byte per atom! Forget your 4-bit arrays and buy the new...") I think that the storage media industry has got plenty of cards to play to meet the expanding needs of data storage. Cache-Boy
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to sound like a killjoy but that kind of noise is exactly the sort of thing that screws up microphones - it's hard for a computer to filter it out. The brain does so well but I don't think our filters are that good yet. If this noise is everywhere - sirens, other people's phones, etc etc, then every time you are on your mobile and go near another source of this noise it's gonna hose your conversation completely. Mmm, call waiting - hang on, I have to answer that or you can't hear a damned thing I am saying for "HISSSSSSSSSS". That'll be useful - NOT. CB
Aside from the fact that a lot of Aussie ISP's would have to cut loose their webcache administrators...
/. I think, of someone putting a huge pipe from west coast US down to Oz, and at that rate, they're gonna need it, then they're gonna fill it.
Well implemented caches can bring a 50% bandwidth saving without really affecting the freshness of content. As we move towards a more broadband network, with more streaming content, those rates could easily rise to 75% or 90%.
Australia is risking letting itself get left behind the change in net content because the objects that the cache must hit to achieve those rates are amongst the most 'copyright contentious'... chunks of movie files, news clips, mp3's, etc. If it is illegal for their ISP's to cache such content, then they will find themselves needing vastly more international bandwidth than anyone else, and that won't be cheap. I heard recently, on
Also, the most content it is most worthwhile caching is foreign origin content. Ie, content not covered by Oz copyright laws? Or are they claiming simply that if you are not the copyright holder, so you can't cache it. Muppets.
It is fairly clear that the legislators either have a very old view of how the internet works (proxy caches weren't that big a deal 3 years ago) or a very poor view of how the internet works. It's almost like saying that you don't own a particular IP/mac address so arp caches are illegal.
Given the preposterous nature of that part of the legislation (go on, turn off caching, see what your users say...) it would seem entirely possible that the government of Australia, which as has been said has become the laughing stock of the world for IT policy (or is that dictatorial IT policy? I seem to recall a lot of very severe censorship laws recently).
On thing... didn't Australia pass a law guaranteeing the right to decompile and reverse engineer? Or didn't that go through. It gave me such HOPE for open source when I heard that. If that IS the case, how does that sit with banning DeCSS? Right to reverse engineer guaranteed, erm, except when we say. Riiiiggghhhtttt. Perhaps someone can clear that up for me.
Evil Cachemaster
We've already seen an article, here I think, that a bloke with IBM or someone was talking about non-dynamic RAM with low power requirements to run and NO power requirements to maintain state. Now I wouldn't be surprised if in fact it could stand a powered refresh every day or so to offset the effects of random magnetic fields - hell you could put a field detector on the MM and it could open a circuit for a powered refresh every time it thought it was required.
You don't want a disk in a mobile device, for a simple reason - torque. A fast spinning disk is essentially a gyroscope. While it would keep the device stable for use, the cost is horrific forces on the axles of the disks. Go on, run around with a mobile computer containing and 10K rpm disk and see how long it takes to fail. I'd be surprised if it worked at the end of the day.
So, clearly the computer of the future will contain two levels of RAM - something designed for performance with whatever power requirements that entails, and a larger bulk designed for stability over speed, which replaces the hard disk. Only it doesn't, because no matter how optimised it is for stability, it's still gonna spank a disk completely for response time and throughput. In 10 years, memory designed for stability without power (or with only a tiny backup battery rated at '12 months backup') is still gonna look quite nice compared to modern RAM for speed and such.
So you'd have everything you would normally put into cache and main RAM in your fast RAM, and all the contents of your disk, as well as swapped-out memory pages, in your 'slow' RAM.
To turn your computer off, all you do is flush the DRAM contents to stable RAM. How long's that gonna take? 0.1 secs, tops.
To turn it on, all you do is a/ read from slow RAM enough to give the user their desktop, and start swapping the relevant parts of the OS into DRAM.
That removes the power requirements of the disk, which are quite high, removes most of the power requirements of DRAM, as there isn't much (perhaps only 10-20 GB - shockingly low for 2010), and leaves your computer safe to cart round with you. All we need now is a decent display. And as for all you guys worrying about interface. Imagine you strap something around each elbow that detects the nerve impulses bound for your forearms where the muscles that control your fingers are located. Wireless of course, encrypted link to the computer. I'm sure you'll learn to 'want to type' without actually moving your fingers and control your computer that way.
If you could put such a device on your head, or better still implant it, imagine the "macros" you could use. Your computer is under attack? You think of being protected, and it replaced inetd.conf with a more secure one and hups inetd. and shuts down some other programs. and enables network logging. and performs reverse lookup on all ip's currently talking to you. and traceroutes them. and keeps the results... and and and and and
Given the utility of such an interface to users of realtime computer systems, no not fighter pilots at all, guv, honest, I'm sure we'll see it or something like it by 2010. Once they exist they'll get cheaper and cheaper (until they fry someone's head, then they'll get expensive for a while til that problem is fixed), and then you'll be able to go down to Sony or Toshiba or GE and request surgery to have a neural link implanted.
Anyway, I've done the Cyberpunk thing enough.
Cache-boy
Most of the stuff people archive tends to be logs or other such chunks of 'low value per byte' data - expensive stuff tends to get kept live and backed up regularly. The only other thing that I think is habitually backed up is stuff like important configs, important content - in other words, things which must NOT be lost, but which are frequently obselete in a few months. With hard drives expanding fast, most critical data can just be migrated onto evre more capable storage systems. I know where I work (an ISP), customers get backups done for them, and no-one thinks about the long-term viability of those backups because all critical data is backed up regularly, because it is kept live. Who cares about last year's web pages? As for an entropic nightmare of backups of backups :> The tools for controlling backups and the speed of backups are improving fast enough that we spend LESS time doing backups, not more. Plus with speciality data vaults coming more into play, I see the future being one of many people and companies with data, backed up by their choice of 'backup provider', who keep backups, and who in turn are backed up by national or international 'secure backup services', unseen companies known only to those in the business, who aren't interested in backing up less than a coupla hundred terabytes per customer. There's been a few rumbles about very high-density CD's and laser-read semi-biological crystals as storage media, the notable point being a move from '2-D' storage media to '3-D'. Which makes me wonder if some physical process of copying a crystal block might take over the informational process of writing a new one. Data usage is expanding to fill the services that are provided, and technology races to stay ahead of that demand. Given that we are not yet storing data by the electron excitation states of atoms ("NEW from Store-TEK - a Titanium based storage cell, allowing a whole byte per atom! Forget your 4-bit arrays and buy the new...") I think that the storage media industry has got plenty of cards to play to meet the expanding needs of data storage. Cache-Boy