If your filesystem is designed to distribute the writes properly, the failure time is comparable to the MBF of hard drives.
Though personally, I think the way to go on servers is to use 64GB of RAM and put most of it as a RAM disk. Depending on your application, you can either have a shell script copy the data back to a hard drive for persistent data, or use that kernel driver to mirror the data to a hard drive. Software RAID 1 would work, too.
NSA isn't a god-like organization. They have limits like anyone else.
It seems that in the vast majority of cases the NSA handles involving encryption, they don't bother to try breaking the crypto itself. Rather, they find some backdoor (keylogger, mishandled key management, etc.). It may seem like cheating to use human error to break the crypto, but in the real world, humans make errors all the time, so you can rely on it in your investigations.
Therefore, it's likely the NSA can't break PGP, simply because it's a waste of effort to try.
Alcohol is a hydrocarbon I do wonder if it couldn't be converted into something close to gasoline or other fuels we use now.
Yes, though it's not really the most efficient source. In theory, any biomass can be gasified (basically heating it up in an oxygen-poor environment so it won't burn, which gives off mostly methane and hydrogen and leaves almost pure carbon), and then turned into gas using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Discounting coal (since it's not a carbon neutral source), algae is by far the most efficient source of biomass for such a scheme.
I suspect some form of Fischer-Tropsch gas is going to be run in cars, since we won't have to convert all the cars to get it to work, event though it's probably less energy efficient overall than biodesiel or pure electric.
In theory (not necessarily reality, hence inflation) there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. (read money) So what builds wealth for some ALWAYS takes wealth from someone else.
No. Thinking of the economy as a zero-sum game was one of the base assumptions of mercantilism, and has been throughly discredited. The practical effect of such a theory is that nations try to gobble up as much land as they can in order to control the wealth (more specifically, gold, or in more modern times, oil), thus leading to good ol' European imperialism.
It wasn't called either OSS or Free Software yet, but early efforts on UNIX and the Internet fit into the modern definitions of the terms. All the critical bits of Internet infrastructure software (bind, sendmail, the BSD TCP/IP stack, etc.) were developed in an open source fashion. UNIX was given away by AT&T for the cost of the media, and was improved on by many others (most notably BSD), who often gave away their own changes, too.
And if you look at the end of that page, there's a link to a PC World story about the upcoming Wine 1.0. Written in 2002.
I don't want to sound like I'm just harping on the Wine guys, though. The Windows API is often poorly documented even when Microsoft isn't changing a function to do something completely different in their new release. Considering that, Wine is quite a piece of work.
Hydrocarbons are fine if you're creating them from carbon that was already in the atmosphere and just burning them again. Nature's own carbon sinks (oceanic algae, mostly) will catch up and then we're back where we started.
We've got an awful lot of technology and infrastructure that already works with hydrocarbons, and there's no sense throwing it away if we don't have to. Producing gas on Fischer-Tropsch out of biomass is only evil if you're the type of environmentalist that is mostly concerned with bringing down corporations rather than coming up with real solutions.
Carbon neutral isn't the end of the story. The exact composition of the end molecule matters. If you're absorbing CO2 to make your fuel, but make methane after burning your fuel, then it's a bigger problem because methane is a much greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
For sequestering with plants, the best way, by far, is algae. It grows far faster than any other plant with a minimum of nutrients beyond carbon and water. Most of the plant material that was turned into oil millions of years ago started out as algae. If you could figure out a way to jump start oceanic algae growth to absorb the carbon we've been dumping, I'm sure you'd get a Nobel Prize.
That sounds like a great plan. Because I want to look at the moon and see the latest Billboard charts.
That's pretty much inevitable. However, commercial buildup of space is likely to happen much faster and cheaper than a government-run institution. Getting to the moon in less than 10 years and then having no viable plan to go back for 40 is the hallmark of an inefficient bureaucracy.
At best, NASA may provide a publicly accessible launch platform (space elevator, launch ring, whatever) for private ventures to use. NASA will probably continue to send unmanned scientific probes out, but it's going to be the corporations that make the first mars colony work.
You need at least one coded reference implementation or else you'll end up with something in the standard which is difficult/impossible to implement. Especially in a 6,000+ page standard.
ISO would be well advised to take the method the IETF uses, which is to have two independent teams implement the standard based on the documentation before an RFC can reach a Draft Standard status. I suspect ODF would have only benefited from this process by cutting down its rough edges, while OOXML would have been so cumbersome that it would be simply dropped.
No, that's not how supply and demand meet up. If the lower price point means the company can sell more units, then it is often adventagous to pass that savings on. Only a very naive businessperson would automatically assume that their best option is to just pocket that extra £10 per unit.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the price will be reduced by £10. It may only be £7, depending on the demand at the new price point.
This is why video game consoles come down in price every time the RAM market goes down. IIRC, the PSX was looking at a break-even proposition during development, but a drop in the memory market meant it was profitable by the time it launched, and has been ever since because of further memory price reductions.
There's no reason you couldn't have fat if you wanted that (and it certainly does add to the flavor), though bones might be harder. However, many of the most common meat dishes (burgers) don't use bones at all, many others have bones only out of necessity (t-bone steak, ribs), and some of the finest cuts are completely boneless (tenderloins).
Sure, there are some soups and such that use bone as flavor, but I think the vast majority of dishes treat bones as undesirable. Many of the meals that do use bones would likely disappear or become luxury items. Sad, perhaps, but it'd hardly be the first food to go away due to technological or economic change.
If the technique is viable, I don't think PETA would have to make that argument. Economics alone would kill factory farms within 5 years, with real animal meat becoming a high luxury item.
In vitro meat would likely be extremely lean, relatively energy efficient (compared to raising cows), would be boneless, and largely free of microbes and other potential toxins. Yes, it is a little weird, but a field trip to a slaughter house should cure people of that feeling.
That's always been true, though. America's public school system has always done poorly in world ranking, but its university system is far better and attracts a lot of foreign talent.
In the past, most of that foreign talent tended to stay in the US (like Einstein or Tesla), but that might be changing.
SF is in a tough position. Its fan base is the group most likely to either TiVo the commercials away or just bittorrent the whole thing. The problem with product placement is that it's usually hard to work any meaningful placement into a SF story. Cylon skinjobs would be a lot more conspicuous if they came with an "Intel Inside" on their forehead.
I suspect commercials are going to be something that people choose to watch, like Superbowl commericals, or the "Will it Blend?" guy.
Slashdot Mirror
If your filesystem is designed to distribute the writes properly, the failure time is comparable to the MBF of hard drives.
Though personally, I think the way to go on servers is to use 64GB of RAM and put most of it as a RAM disk. Depending on your application, you can either have a shell script copy the data back to a hard drive for persistent data, or use that kernel driver to mirror the data to a hard drive. Software RAID 1 would work, too.
NSA isn't a god-like organization. They have limits like anyone else.
It seems that in the vast majority of cases the NSA handles involving encryption, they don't bother to try breaking the crypto itself. Rather, they find some backdoor (keylogger, mishandled key management, etc.). It may seem like cheating to use human error to break the crypto, but in the real world, humans make errors all the time, so you can rely on it in your investigations.
Therefore, it's likely the NSA can't break PGP, simply because it's a waste of effort to try.
Alcohol is a hydrocarbon I do wonder if it couldn't be converted into something close to gasoline or other fuels we use now.
Yes, though it's not really the most efficient source. In theory, any biomass can be gasified (basically heating it up in an oxygen-poor environment so it won't burn, which gives off mostly methane and hydrogen and leaves almost pure carbon), and then turned into gas using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Discounting coal (since it's not a carbon neutral source), algae is by far the most efficient source of biomass for such a scheme.
I suspect some form of Fischer-Tropsch gas is going to be run in cars, since we won't have to convert all the cars to get it to work, event though it's probably less energy efficient overall than biodesiel or pure electric.
Then stop exhaling and farting. You're releasing dangerous carbon.
And did that CO2 originally come from 1) carbon sequestered millions of years ago, or 2) carbon that was already circulating.
#1 is very bad, and what we have now. #2 is ignorable, and it's what you get from all these plant-based fuel ideas.
In theory (not necessarily reality, hence inflation) there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. (read money) So what builds wealth for some ALWAYS takes wealth from someone else.
No. Thinking of the economy as a zero-sum game was one of the base assumptions of mercantilism, and has been throughly discredited. The practical effect of such a theory is that nations try to gobble up as much land as they can in order to control the wealth (more specifically, gold, or in more modern times, oil), thus leading to good ol' European imperialism.
It wasn't called either OSS or Free Software yet, but early efforts on UNIX and the Internet fit into the modern definitions of the terms. All the critical bits of Internet infrastructure software (bind, sendmail, the BSD TCP/IP stack, etc.) were developed in an open source fashion. UNIX was given away by AT&T for the cost of the media, and was improved on by many others (most notably BSD), who often gave away their own changes, too.
FOSS is a lot more than just Linux and GNU.
The Internet? UNIX?
And if you look at the end of that page, there's a link to a PC World story about the upcoming Wine 1.0. Written in 2002.
I don't want to sound like I'm just harping on the Wine guys, though. The Windows API is often poorly documented even when Microsoft isn't changing a function to do something completely different in their new release. Considering that, Wine is quite a piece of work.
Classpath has been almost reaching 1.0 status for about six years now. I expect to see Wine reach 1.0 first.
An Open Source Java would have been nice 10 years ago, back when somebody still cared.
Hydrocarbons are fine if you're creating them from carbon that was already in the atmosphere and just burning them again. Nature's own carbon sinks (oceanic algae, mostly) will catch up and then we're back where we started.
We've got an awful lot of technology and infrastructure that already works with hydrocarbons, and there's no sense throwing it away if we don't have to. Producing gas on Fischer-Tropsch out of biomass is only evil if you're the type of environmentalist that is mostly concerned with bringing down corporations rather than coming up with real solutions.
Carbon neutral isn't the end of the story. The exact composition of the end molecule matters. If you're absorbing CO2 to make your fuel, but make methane after burning your fuel, then it's a bigger problem because methane is a much greater greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
For sequestering with plants, the best way, by far, is algae. It grows far faster than any other plant with a minimum of nutrients beyond carbon and water. Most of the plant material that was turned into oil millions of years ago started out as algae. If you could figure out a way to jump start oceanic algae growth to absorb the carbon we've been dumping, I'm sure you'd get a Nobel Prize.
It's a DeLorean. It needed a good push to get to 88mph even with gasoline.
That sounds like a great plan. Because I want to look at the moon and see the latest Billboard charts.
That's pretty much inevitable. However, commercial buildup of space is likely to happen much faster and cheaper than a government-run institution. Getting to the moon in less than 10 years and then having no viable plan to go back for 40 is the hallmark of an inefficient bureaucracy.
At best, NASA may provide a publicly accessible launch platform (space elevator, launch ring, whatever) for private ventures to use. NASA will probably continue to send unmanned scientific probes out, but it's going to be the corporations that make the first mars colony work.
More like fixing 40+ years of hard drive manufacturers lieing to us about storage space.
You need at least one coded reference implementation or else you'll end up with something in the standard which is difficult/impossible to implement. Especially in a 6,000+ page standard.
ISO would be well advised to take the method the IETF uses, which is to have two independent teams implement the standard based on the documentation before an RFC can reach a Draft Standard status. I suspect ODF would have only benefited from this process by cutting down its rough edges, while OOXML would have been so cumbersome that it would be simply dropped.
I say it's a waste compared to stimulating private space exploration.
No, that's not how supply and demand meet up. If the lower price point means the company can sell more units, then it is often adventagous to pass that savings on. Only a very naive businessperson would automatically assume that their best option is to just pocket that extra £10 per unit.
Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that the price will be reduced by £10. It may only be £7, depending on the demand at the new price point.
This is why video game consoles come down in price every time the RAM market goes down. IIRC, the PSX was looking at a break-even proposition during development, but a drop in the memory market meant it was profitable by the time it launched, and has been ever since because of further memory price reductions.
There's no reason you couldn't have fat if you wanted that (and it certainly does add to the flavor), though bones might be harder. However, many of the most common meat dishes (burgers) don't use bones at all, many others have bones only out of necessity (t-bone steak, ribs), and some of the finest cuts are completely boneless (tenderloins).
Sure, there are some soups and such that use bone as flavor, but I think the vast majority of dishes treat bones as undesirable. Many of the meals that do use bones would likely disappear or become luxury items. Sad, perhaps, but it'd hardly be the first food to go away due to technological or economic change.
If the technique is viable, I don't think PETA would have to make that argument. Economics alone would kill factory farms within 5 years, with real animal meat becoming a high luxury item.
In vitro meat would likely be extremely lean, relatively energy efficient (compared to raising cows), would be boneless, and largely free of microbes and other potential toxins. Yes, it is a little weird, but a field trip to a slaughter house should cure people of that feeling.
It beats 1.21 jiggawatts to levitate a squirrel.
That's always been true, though. America's public school system has always done poorly in world ranking, but its university system is far better and attracts a lot of foreign talent.
In the past, most of that foreign talent tended to stay in the US (like Einstein or Tesla), but that might be changing.
Does medical liquid HE work like audiophile wooden volume knobs?
SF is in a tough position. Its fan base is the group most likely to either TiVo the commercials away or just bittorrent the whole thing. The problem with product placement is that it's usually hard to work any meaningful placement into a SF story. Cylon skinjobs would be a lot more conspicuous if they came with an "Intel Inside" on their forehead.
I suspect commercials are going to be something that people choose to watch, like Superbowl commericals, or the "Will it Blend?" guy.
Or Blade Runner with Atari, or the first season of Earth: Final Conflict with MCI. I seem to recall a Zima sign somewhere on Babylon 5, too.