hm, I had lights & a webcam controllable from the web in '96 or so (and a fan to boot). Maybe the waybackwhen machine still has it, mattheij.com or mattheij.nl... people wouldn't believe it was real either, got lots of 'nice fake' comments, but doing it was easier than faking it.
funny how that should be rated 'funny', it should be 'informative'. Every bit of light reflected off a solar panel is lost. Also note how these stories ('new material will make solar panels xx% more efficient') appear every few weeks. If I add up all the 'improvements' over the last year or so I'm way over 100% !
I have already bought my solar panels (see site), and more efficient ones would probably be out of range for a long time, but if co generation ever were to take off black solar panels would be 'in vogue' for sure.
Oh, I fully agree with you that it won't be for current technology. No such thing is possible in my view. We'd need to forget about performance as goal #1, but go for robustness instead. How was that old joke ? If carpenters built stuff the way programmers do the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. Count me in the micro kernel camp (the plan 9 way, not the 'hurd' way). Something solid, no eye candy but functionality. I find it amazing how much time goes into 'theming' and all kinds of nonsense and how little goes into the foundation, the hardware interfaces and so on. But progress takes time, and for now in a practical sense Linux seems to have the momentum behind it to make some change, long term it is not the be-all-end-all of computing, a more drastic change will need to be made.
it's a simple matter of economics. Right now it makes more sense for MS to sell the software because there is still money in it. I said 'there will come a point', I did not say that point was already here.
Look at it this way, if right now a user has a pirated XP at home that user is NOT a linux user. If he has linux instead then he will go to work in the morning and maybe start talking to his boss about how cool linux is and that he would be far more productive if he had that instead. It's a contrived example, but just to make the point, any user of your stuff, pirated or not is better than none at all, it just means that you have to look for other ways to make money off that user than through the initial license purchase.
that is a very wrong conclusion to draw. In order to maintain their position 'dominance in the marketplace' is the key word. At one point in order to maintain marketshare MS may have to start giving away the core os just to get people to use it. Marketshare is everything, think 'icq', never sold a single license, worth a lot of dough. If all those using pirated windows would switch to Linux overnight MS would have a very serious problem. Their 'installed base' would go down a sizeable fraction and that would really hurt. It would also give the OSS world that much more incentive to deliver top notch stuff. (whereas right now the accent is very much on eye candy and less on rock solid functionality) (yes I use linux:)
it actually might be, but enforcing that is another matter. That being said I'd be more pleased if MS started accepting liability towards their REGISTERED users instead of allowing those who install pirated copies to upgrade. In fact the 'upgrade' issue would probably go away all by itsself because MS would have to make sure they sell a solid product. Way too much money being lost. TCO studies historically look at things like purchase price, not at value of time/money lost because of sloppy products, which can be several orders of magnitude larger than the license cost of the original product.
In other news MS successfully argues in court that Borland should now be declared illegal because 'all those worms and viruses are written with this tool'.
ah I see, yet another two-for-one scheme. thanks ! I used to know the cpu types by heart but there are *so* many of them that I just gave up... Getting old:)
India and Pakistan have been on the brink of an all out war for quite a while now (the Kashmir conflict). Yes, they are a risk. More so than say France, Brittain, the US or China. Probably less so than the former USSR but a risk none theless.
Your point about the US supplying a large proportion of the serious firepower that so called rogue states now possess is well taken, in fact historically the US seems to have most of its trouble from places where they have meddled in the past. If not for the Afghan debacle a CIA operative called Usama Bin Laden would never have gotten as far off the ground as he did. But then we'd have had a - god forbid - communist Afghanistan (for about 8 years or so until the USSR imploded). See Iran, Korea, Iraq (ask the British about that one) and so on.
thank you for giving me an excellent idea (well that remains to be seen:)
it should be possible to make that global trust matrix work, it just depends on how you define 'peer'. I'll have to think about this for a bit, but I have a gut feeling that it really can be done.
The 'classic' definition of one's peers are the people that you ALREADY have contact with, the internet definition of 'peers' is anybody else that is also connected. And at that level trust basically does not exist. But you can trust your friends, they can trust theirs and so on. A bit like what terrorist/espionage/criminals use, you 'vouch' for someone, and because of that you allow someone else to trust their data. A bit like a cross between napster and 6 degrees.
I bought a dual XEON online, and after logging in to it for the first time and catting/proc/cpuinfo it showed 4 cpus !!
For a while there I thought I'd received a nice free upgrade, but alas, it was two dual core XEON's rather than 4 single core XEONS. It is a bit faster than a two cpu box, but not a whole lot.
All this stuff about 'securing our nuclear stockpiles' is so much hogwash. The stockpiles are pretty secure as it is, it would take more than just a few guys with guns to get to anything that's bomb grade. IN THE US. The really dangerous stockpiles are the ones that have little or no oversight at all or where oversight was only added after the horse already left the barn. Countries like, but not neccesarily limited to Pakistan, Iran, former USSR, India and so on are far more of a risk in this respect than the US. In Africa there are natural nuclear reactors where the 'yellowcake' can be dug up by a bunch of determined guys with shovels and a lack of desire to live. It wouldn't take a whole lot to pack a container full of this stuff, a timing mechanism and a bunch of diesel for a very large dirty bomb that can be set of by remote in a shipping yard or so. Not that it would kill a lot of people, but it could shut down a major harbour for a long long time. Of course the countries that are most likely to be at risk are also partners in the so called war on terrorism so we can't really offend them. And when that islamic coup happens in Pakistan (anybody have any odds on that ?) it will be *far* too late to get moving. Nuclear proliferation has gone way too far to put the genie back in the bottle unless there will be a genuine international effort to round up *ALL* the fissionable material (including that in the US) and to place it under international (UN) oversight. The current reasoning seems to be that only 'democratic' countries can have it, unless you manage to join the nuclear club in secret because then you become untouchable. And those are the real weapons of mass distruction we're talking about, not some imagined gas cannisters or non existant Iraqi bombs...
easy to fix, simply encase your machine in some foam... the noise is actually made by the attraction between the conductors in the capacitors, as the capactitors get charged/discharged the (usually rolled up aluminum foil with some acid soaked insulator in between) the conductors vibrate a little. Cheaper capacitors vibrate more (more loosely wound->more space to vibrate !). For maximum security use tantalium caps ! (fire hazard, great pyrotechnics if you overload them).
that was my first programmable device, probably the start of the end of my school and the beginning of my career as a programmer !
Re:If only we had this for software engineering...
on
Synthetic Life In The Lab
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
that has actually been on my todo list for quite a while now, I have been sketching some bits & pieces (input / output studs), and I've been looking at 'wrapping' the bricks in some kind of object brokerage architecture.
I keep finding myself writing the same 'idiomatic' code over and over again, and as a kid I used to be a big lego fan.
Neat things: blocks operating on blocks, container blocks (abstraction, look 'inside' the block and see other blocks)
as long as we don't know how to take care of the non-artificial kind of life I think we should stay the hell away from introducing artificial kinds.
Just think about what *one* lab escaped 'pregnant' self replicating lifeform could do to our ecology. We're doing enough harm as it is, no need to bypass 4 billion years (sorry creationists) of evolution of the predator-prey relationship.
Or would you like your tap to give you 'green scum' instead of water ?
Slashdot Mirror
ok, he *was* begging for it :)
no kidding, sci/tech section !
hm, I had lights & a webcam controllable from the web in '96 or so (and a fan to boot). Maybe the waybackwhen machine still has it, mattheij.com or mattheij.nl... people wouldn't believe it was real either, got lots of 'nice fake' comments, but doing it was easier than faking it.
please mod this up into high heaven. I'm not sure about the lawyer bit though :)
Ok, I'm game. ww.com menu on the left. This should be fun! They'd better change the contest phrase :)
hehe, forget that link. colo in Toronto seems to be down just now :(
I have already bought my solar panels (see site), and more efficient ones would probably be out of range for a long time, but if co generation ever were to take off black solar panels would be 'in vogue' for sure.
Oh, I fully agree with you that it won't be for current technology. No such thing is possible in my view. We'd need to forget about performance as goal #1, but go for robustness instead. How was that old joke ? If carpenters built stuff the way programmers do the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization. Count me in the micro kernel camp (the plan 9 way, not the 'hurd' way). Something solid, no eye candy but functionality. I find it amazing how much time goes into 'theming' and all kinds of nonsense and how little goes into the foundation, the hardware interfaces and so on. But progress takes time, and for now in a practical sense Linux seems to have the momentum behind it to make some change, long term it is not the be-all-end-all of computing, a more drastic change will need to be made.
Look at it this way, if right now a user has a pirated XP at home that user is NOT a linux user. If he has linux instead then he will go to work in the morning and maybe start talking to his boss about how cool linux is and that he would be far more productive if he had that instead. It's a contrived example, but just to make the point, any user of your stuff, pirated or not is better than none at all, it just means that you have to look for other ways to make money off that user than through the initial license purchase.
that is a very wrong conclusion to draw. In order to maintain their position 'dominance in the marketplace' is the key word. At one point in order to maintain marketshare MS may have to start giving away the core os just to get people to use it. Marketshare is everything, think 'icq', never sold a single license, worth a lot of dough. If all those using pirated windows would switch to Linux overnight MS would have a very serious problem. Their 'installed base' would go down a sizeable fraction and that would really hurt. It would also give the OSS world that much more incentive to deliver top notch stuff. (whereas right now the accent is very much on eye candy and less on rock solid functionality) (yes I use linux :)
it actually might be, but enforcing that is another matter. That being said I'd be more pleased if MS started accepting liability towards their REGISTERED users instead of allowing those who install pirated copies to upgrade. In fact the 'upgrade' issue would probably go away all by itsself because MS would have to make sure they sell a solid product. Way too much money being lost. TCO studies historically look at things like purchase price, not at value of time/money lost because of sloppy products, which can be several orders of magnitude larger than the license cost of the original product.
In other news MS successfully argues in court that Borland should now be declared illegal because 'all those worms and viruses are written with this tool'.
hehe. it doesn't happen often that I laugh out loud reading /, thank you for making my day.
ah I see, yet another two-for-one scheme. thanks ! I used to know the cpu types by heart but there are *so* many of them that I just gave up... :)
Getting old
Your point about the US supplying a large proportion of the serious firepower that so called rogue states now possess is well taken, in fact historically the US seems to have most of its trouble from places where they have meddled in the past. If not for the Afghan debacle a CIA operative called Usama Bin Laden would never have gotten as far off the ground as he did. But then we'd have had a - god forbid - communist Afghanistan (for about 8 years or so until the USSR imploded). See Iran, Korea, Iraq (ask the British about that one) and so on.
it should be possible to make that global trust matrix work, it just depends on how you define 'peer'. I'll have to think about this for a bit, but I have a gut feeling that it really can be done.
The 'classic' definition of one's peers are the people that you ALREADY have contact with, the internet definition of 'peers' is anybody else that is also connected. And at that level trust basically does not exist. But you can trust your friends, they can trust theirs and so on. A bit like what terrorist/espionage/criminals use, you 'vouch' for someone, and because of that you allow someone else to trust their data. A bit like a cross between napster and 6 degrees.
I bought a dual XEON online, and after logging in to it for the first time and catting /proc/cpuinfo it showed 4 cpus !!
For a while there I thought I'd received a nice free upgrade, but alas, it was two dual core XEON's rather than 4 single core XEONS. It is a bit faster than a two cpu box, but not a whole lot.
Neat feature though.
All this stuff about 'securing our nuclear stockpiles' is so much hogwash. The stockpiles are pretty secure as it is, it would take more than just a few guys with guns to get to anything that's bomb grade. IN THE US. The really dangerous stockpiles are the ones that have little or no oversight at all or where oversight was only added after the horse already left the barn. Countries like, but not neccesarily limited to Pakistan, Iran, former USSR, India and so on are far more of a risk in this respect than the US. In Africa there are natural nuclear reactors where the 'yellowcake' can be dug up by a bunch of determined guys with shovels and a lack of desire to live. It wouldn't take a whole lot to pack a container full of this stuff, a timing mechanism and a bunch of diesel for a very large dirty bomb that can be set of by remote in a shipping yard or so. Not that it would kill a lot of people, but it could shut down a major harbour for a long long time. Of course the countries that are most likely to be at risk are also partners in the so called war on terrorism so we can't really offend them. And when that islamic coup happens in Pakistan (anybody have any odds on that ?) it will be *far* too late to get moving. Nuclear proliferation has gone way too far to put the genie back in the bottle unless there will be a genuine international effort to round up *ALL* the fissionable material (including that in the US) and to place it under international (UN) oversight. The current reasoning seems to be that only 'democratic' countries can have it, unless you manage to join the nuclear club in secret because then you become untouchable. And those are the real weapons of mass distruction we're talking about, not some imagined gas cannisters or non existant Iraqi bombs...
easy to fix, simply encase your machine in some foam... the noise is actually made by the attraction between the conductors in the capacitors, as the capactitors get charged/discharged the (usually rolled up aluminum foil with some acid soaked insulator in between) the conductors vibrate a little. Cheaper capacitors vibrate more (more loosely wound->more space to vibrate !). For maximum security use tantalium caps ! (fire hazard, great pyrotechnics if you overload them).
as a publicity stunt it worked like a dream though.
hehe, bet you knew Jesus before he was a superstar too :)
interesting ! do you have any info on that ? I missed out on that completely.
that was my first programmable device, probably the start of the end of my school and the beginning of my career as a programmer !
that has actually been on my todo list for quite a while now, I have been sketching some bits & pieces (input / output studs), and I've been looking at 'wrapping' the bricks in some kind of object brokerage architecture.
I keep finding myself writing the same 'idiomatic' code over and over again, and as a kid I used to be a big lego fan.
Neat things: blocks operating on blocks, container blocks (abstraction, look 'inside' the block and see other blocks)
as long as we don't know how to take care of the non-artificial kind of life I think we should stay the hell away from introducing artificial kinds.
Just think about what *one* lab escaped 'pregnant' self replicating lifeform could do to our ecology. We're doing enough harm as it is, no need to bypass 4 billion years (sorry creationists) of evolution of the predator-prey relationship.
Or would you like your tap to give you 'green scum' instead of water ?