LTSP provides an operating system over a network, in this case Linux - as in the patent. LTSP provides this operating system disk image in an encrypted and compressed form, as in the patent. LTSP even provides login credentials for clients, which is even better than this patent. LTSP can also provide a mounting point for various preferences (most preferences are in fact in the/home/* directories), as in the patent. These preferences are automatically synced (on save) as in the patent. LTSP also has options of providing a different operating system according to the architecture of the devices requesting an image (for instance i386 or amd), as in the patent. LTSP can furthermore provide specific preferences to the hardware by a simple configuration file, as in the patent.
LTSP does everything this patent grants, and more. The point is that the patent doesn't show anything NEW or even INVENTIVE at all.
LTSP is actually just a bunch of bash scripts. There are even more ancient technologies that do the same, just thought that perhaps more people might be familiar with LTSP to give an example.
Actually thanks to him, there is still so much more to learn that we don't know. Thanks to him, our view of the heavens surpassed the visible spectrum and we have so much more to observe.
It is said that education is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance. With every discovery we only uncover a small part of the world, but at the same time shows how much is still yet to be known.
RIP Sir Bernard Lowell.
P.S. If it is any comfort it is nice to know he died peacefully, instead of what could have happened :
I think in general the more you know the people the better the expectations. The problem with most chain stores (or large vendors) is that the personel are always temporary and very litle invested in their product or their relationship with the customer. This is not necessarily the companies fault, but the fact that most view their job as just something to get through summer already means quality will be determined by 'procedures' rather than human contact and trust.
Kudos to your supervisor for being more of a human being than most chain stores allow. Wish more were like him.
There is also a video series to go along with this book by the best teacher I ever had. For someone who perhaps might have trouble learning syntax, Scheme is very simple. The book teaches mostly concepts which can then be applied to any computing problem. I cannot recommend it enough, though perhaps to a modern audience it might be deemed "too advanced", however the general approach might make it easier as you are given more the reasons 'why' something is done than simply 'how' it is done. Many people with memory problems can work better by seeing the purpose of things as rote repetition is more difficult.
For programming simple games in Scheme you could use the following which already has many examples built it as well as extensive documentation and code samples:
http://racket-lang.org/
Good luck with your endeavors! My advice is to go slow, as in learning anything the journey is half the fun!
This is a fast moving business. You can't keep electronics on the shelf for several months anymore - they age almost as much as dried goods. Thus inventory management must be spot on or you lose profits, or better, increasing manufacturing with little delay (which in electronics is difficult but not impossible) .
The only problem with this is that if you don't have the units in stock you aren't selling them, and if you aren't selling them you aren't making money.
Lent is 40 days before Easter, Advent 4 weeks before Christmas, both traditionally days of fast and abstinence. The Second Vatican Council pretty much eliminated them however.
I was taught assembler in my second year of school. It's kinda like construction work -- with a toothpick for a tool. So when I made my senior year, I threw my code away, And learned the way to program that I still prefer today.
Now, some folks on the Internet put their faith in C++. They swear that it's so powerful, it's what God used for us. And maybe it lets mortals dredge their objects from the C. But I think that explains why only God can make a tree.
For God wrote in Lisp code When he filled the leaves with green. The fractal flowers and recursive roots: The most lovely hack I've seen. And when I ponder snowflakes, never finding two the same, I know God likes a language with its own four-letter name.
Now, I've used a SUN under Unix, so I've seen what C can hold. I've surfed for Perls, found what Fortran's for, Got that Java stuff down cold. Though the chance that I'd write COBOL code is a SNOBOL's chance in Hell. And I basically hate hieroglyphs, so I won't use APL.
Now, God must know all these languages, and a few I haven't named. But the Lord made sure, when each sparrow falls, that its flesh will be reclaimed. And the Lord could not count grains of sand with a 32-bit word. Who knows where we would go to if Lisp weren't what he preferred?
And God wrote in Lisp code Every creature great and small. Don't search the disk drive for man.c, When the listing's on the wall. And when I watch the lightning Burn unbelievers to a crisp, I know God had six days to work, So he wrote it all in Lisp.
Yes, God had a deadline. So he wrote it all in Lisp.
Log tables were needed for more precision. Slide rules usually would go only to 4 digit, while a good table could put you up to 7 digits, though carrying around that 200 pages was a bit cumbersome. Plus your tables often had sine,cos and other functions.
Thank you much for the informative post. I was just reading the blurb on their website, and it gives the impression that it is for fusion energy. I suppose it is mostly for PR reasons, but the blurb gives the impression that it is solely for fusion research (from their site) :
<quote> The National Ignition Facility: Ushering in a New Age for Science
Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. Ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are now bringing that long-sought goal much closer to realization. [...] Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, academia, and many industrial partners throughout the nation. </quote>
While the model might work, it still doesn't answer the question : where did the water on the asteroids come from? And furthermore, why is a "foreign" source of water required?
Water comes from two very abundant elements: hydrogen and oxygen - why do they need to come from somewhere else ?
A much more interesting question would be where the heavy post-lead elements came from. In many science textbooks they explain the origin of the heavy elements as coming from the nucleus of stars - yet we see in the earth's crust elements that cannot be formed in the stars - for instance Uranium, which has a half life of several billion years. Furthermore there was no star formation in our near vicinity where the earth is presently - much less stars which could compress their cores to produce the heavy elements. Where did these come from, and is it at all common elsewhere? With such a long half-life it seems that it could serve as a tracer for aging the other planets relative of to the earth.
Anyone know of any articles on this or links to share?
Actually the center is designed for fusion energy research. Their website is more informative:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
Nuclear Weapons Testing is done at Los Alamos : http://www.lanl.gov/ ; most testing is now simulated.
It really is an interesting project. I wonder how they will harvest the energy produced by this method, as it would seem rather hard to contain by the nature of the 192 beams.
Interesting to note that J. S. Bach has 3 pieces on the disk, and I would add, rightfully so ! If anyone was to represent Western Music, it would certainly be Bach.
Well I think the first problem is that you assume that "in order to vote on something correctly we need to know what is going on". The problem is that the actual voting process is completely agnostic to whether you actually know anything or not. Even if you were to make a scientific study and analysis of a certain policy up for vote, there will be the hundreds who won't bother studying the question at all. The democratic process has no intrinsic method of filtering competence from incompetence at the voting booth. In fact to even suggest something like a requirement to vote (such as property ownership) , have been deemed 'undemocratic'.
The problem is actually more fundamental than just good media, and I don't see an easy answer.
A human being may possess reason (or be of rational nature), but it doesn't mean they always act rationally. I never mentioned that competition is good, simply that it exists. In fact competition of itself doesn't guarantee any outcome, and not every natural selection necessitates the extinction of other options.
If there is no such thing as human nature than what is this human being that you are talking about?
Well even FOSS is primarily copying applications that existed firstly as proprietary ones. E.g. OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office, GIMP vs Photoshop, Scribus vs InDesign, etc... Even Gnome is ostensibly a copy of a windowed OS. Most of the first motivations of writing GCC was to provide a toolchain to replace and be better than the proprietary ones.
Plus FOSS has always claimed to be better (ethical, practical, whatever) than closed source.
Competetion is part of our nature, it works. It is sometimes called evolutionary pressure, survival of the fittest.
Considering that probably 90% of the world's information is gathered, produced, or stored by Microsoft software, and that the US Security services are above all an information retrieval service, they would be completely incompetent if they did not have some sort of special 'relationship' with Microsoft.
Even with official channels, it is always better to have someone on the inside who can verify or enhance the publicly available information.
I would say that if they don't have moles in Microsoft, they aren't doing their jobs correctly.
According to Wikipedia the USS Savannah cost 50 million to build, about 28 million for the reactor. The internets say that she cost a little over $2 mil a year more than a conventional ship, back when fuel oil was $20/ton, due to the crew requirements.
Yet at today's prices it would be interesting if it were economical. Also to be noted was the Savannah was not really built for economic viability but for a showpiece.
She is supposedly docked in Maryland now, not far from Baltimore. On my next trip to Annapolis I will have to try to see her.
Yes, the USS Skate was the first to surface at the North Pole. My father still has stories to tell of his time on that boat! The USS Nautilus was the first nuclear powered submarine.
Just as a related question - why don't we see nuclear power on other vessels, for instance long distance tankers? It would seem ideal for long cruises and save tons on fuel weight.
For the court to hear the case, it must pay lawyers and judges for their time, secretaries to make notes and keep the building open and guarded. Those costs are quite substantial.
Furthermore if I want to defend myself in court, I have to pay someone who is usually not giving his time for free.
This for saying that I am a douche you have in fact wasted the time of not only me, but many other people as well, and indirectly the whole judicial system by taking a limited resource from the common good.
No, there ought to be a threshold to where the court should refuse to hear a complaint. In fact it has to in order to insure that the system could work.
It is refreshing to see that lawmakersmare actually thinking ahead for once.
However the true problems are not technical, as with any engineering where there is a well known problem there will be some sort of solution. The real problem is human.
It happens everyday: we see bad drivers and we blame thmem on the traffic, on the damage to the cars, etc. but who to blame if you automatic car runs into something? The programmer ? The one who turned it on? The sleeping passenger?
These are the real problems to be solved: where to put the blame when something goes wrong. Getting the car to drive itself is nothing in comparison to this. Human beings haven't been too successful in this problem for a long time, though perhaps new tech can bring these quetions more to the forefront.
Most posts here are talking about the control aspect, but I think it would be more interesting as an authentication.
When electric cars become viable, we need some sort of mechanism/grid for charging them up, similar to a gas station. This sort of thing would be great: just drive to the outlet, insert the plug and your credit card gets charged per k.w hr. Similar to the card swipe rfd payment options at pumps now.
Slashdot Mirror
LTSP provides an operating system over a network, in this case Linux - as in the patent. /home/* directories), as in the patent. These preferences are automatically synced (on save) as in the patent.
LTSP provides this operating system disk image in an encrypted and compressed form, as in the patent.
LTSP even provides login credentials for clients, which is even better than this patent.
LTSP can also provide a mounting point for various preferences (most preferences are in fact in the
LTSP also has options of providing a different operating system according to the architecture of the devices requesting an image (for instance i386 or amd), as in the patent.
LTSP can furthermore provide specific preferences to the hardware by a simple configuration file, as in the patent.
LTSP does everything this patent grants, and more. The point is that the patent doesn't show anything NEW or even INVENTIVE at all.
LTSP is actually just a bunch of bash scripts. There are even more ancient technologies that do the same, just thought that perhaps more people might be familiar with LTSP to give an example.
LTSP images are also encrypted and compressed. Changes can be put in sync over NFS or whatever. LTSP is done over DHCP via TFTP.
This stuff is ancient. Really can't see how they can patent what was old even in the 1980's.
One could even argue theat emacs-client does this via Emacs server, but some wouldn't call Emacs an operating system.
Actually thanks to him, there is still so much more to learn that we don't know. Thanks to him, our view of the heavens surpassed the visible spectrum and we have so much more to observe.
It is said that education is the progressive discovery of our own ignorance. With every discovery we only uncover a small part of the world, but at the same time shows how much is still yet to be known.
RIP Sir Bernard Lowell.
P.S. If it is any comfort it is nice to know he died peacefully, instead of what could have happened :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/5362829/Sir-Bernard-Lovell-claims-Russians-tried-to-kill-him-with-radiation.html
I think in general the more you know the people the better the expectations. The problem with most chain stores (or large vendors) is that the personel are always temporary and very litle invested in their product or their relationship with the customer. This is not necessarily the companies fault, but the fact that most view their job as just something to get through summer already means quality will be determined by 'procedures' rather than human contact and trust.
Kudos to your supervisor for being more of a human being than most chain stores allow. Wish more were like him.
The best book by which I learned programming was this classic:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
There is also a video series to go along with this book by the best teacher I ever had. For someone who perhaps might have trouble learning syntax, Scheme is very simple. The book teaches mostly concepts which can then be applied to any computing problem. I cannot recommend it enough, though perhaps to a modern audience it might be deemed "too advanced", however the general approach might make it easier as you are given more the reasons 'why' something is done than simply 'how' it is done. Many people with memory problems can work better by seeing the purpose of things as rote repetition is more difficult.
For programming simple games in Scheme you could use the following which already has many examples built it as well as extensive documentation and code samples:
http://racket-lang.org/
Good luck with your endeavors! My advice is to go slow, as in learning anything the journey is half the fun!
This is a fast moving business. You can't keep electronics on the shelf for several months anymore - they age almost as much as dried goods. Thus inventory management must be spot on or you lose profits, or better, increasing manufacturing with little delay (which in electronics is difficult but not impossible) .
The only problem with this is that if you don't have the units in stock you aren't selling them, and if you aren't selling them you aren't making money.
Lent is 40 days before Easter, Advent 4 weeks before Christmas, both traditionally days of fast and abstinence. The Second Vatican Council pretty much eliminated them however.
No, no, no. Everyone knows God wrote the universe in LISP. He only had six days after all !
For those too young to remember the song by Julia Eklar
http://www.songworm.com/lyrics/songworm-parody/EternalFlame.html
I was taught assembler in my second year of school.
It's kinda like construction work -- with a toothpick for a tool.
So when I made my senior year, I threw my code away,
And learned the way to program that I still prefer today.
Now, some folks on the Internet put their faith in C++.
They swear that it's so powerful, it's what God used for us.
And maybe it lets mortals dredge their objects from the C.
But I think that explains why only God can make a tree.
For God wrote in Lisp code
When he filled the leaves with green.
The fractal flowers and recursive roots:
The most lovely hack I've seen.
And when I ponder snowflakes, never finding two the same,
I know God likes a language with its own four-letter name.
Now, I've used a SUN under Unix, so I've seen what C can hold.
I've surfed for Perls, found what Fortran's for,
Got that Java stuff down cold.
Though the chance that I'd write COBOL code
is a SNOBOL's chance in Hell.
And I basically hate hieroglyphs, so I won't use APL.
Now, God must know all these languages, and a few I haven't named.
But the Lord made sure, when each sparrow falls,
that its flesh will be reclaimed.
And the Lord could not count grains of sand with a 32-bit word.
Who knows where we would go to if Lisp weren't what he preferred?
And God wrote in Lisp code
Every creature great and small.
Don't search the disk drive for man.c,
When the listing's on the wall.
And when I watch the lightning
Burn unbelievers to a crisp,
I know God had six days to work,
So he wrote it all in Lisp.
Yes, God had a deadline.
So he wrote it all in Lisp.
Log tables were needed for more precision. Slide rules usually would go only to 4 digit, while a good table could put you up to 7 digits, though carrying around that 200 pages was a bit cumbersome. Plus your tables often had sine,cos and other functions.
Now I feel old.
Thank you much for the informative post. I was just reading the blurb on their website, and it gives the impression that it is for fusion energy. I suppose it is mostly for PR reasons, but the blurb gives the impression that it is solely for fusion research (from their site) :
<quote>
The National Ignition Facility: Ushering in a New Age for Science
Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. Ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are now bringing that long-sought goal much closer to realization.
[...]
Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, academia, and many industrial partners throughout the nation.
</quote>
Your post makes a lot more sense however.
While the model might work, it still doesn't answer the question : where did the water on the asteroids come from? And furthermore, why is a "foreign" source of water required?
Water comes from two very abundant elements: hydrogen and oxygen - why do they need to come from somewhere else ?
A much more interesting question would be where the heavy post-lead elements came from. In many science textbooks they explain the origin of the heavy elements as coming from the nucleus of stars - yet we see in the earth's crust elements that cannot be formed in the stars - for instance Uranium, which has a half life of several billion years. Furthermore there was no star formation in our near vicinity where the earth is presently - much less stars which could compress their cores to produce the heavy elements. Where did these come from, and is it at all common elsewhere? With such a long half-life it seems that it could serve as a tracer for aging the other planets relative of to the earth.
Anyone know of any articles on this or links to share?
Actually the center is designed for fusion energy research. Their website is more informative:
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
Nuclear Weapons Testing is done at Los Alamos : http://www.lanl.gov/ ; most testing is now simulated.
It really is an interesting project. I wonder how they will harvest the energy produced by this method, as it would seem rather hard to contain by the nature of the 192 beams.
Interesting to note that J. S. Bach has 3 pieces on the disk, and I would add, rightfully so ! If anyone was to represent Western Music, it would certainly be Bach.
Well I think the first problem is that you assume that "in order to vote on something correctly we need to know what is going on". The problem is that the actual voting process is completely agnostic to whether you actually know anything or not. Even if you were to make a scientific study and analysis of a certain policy up for vote, there will be the hundreds who won't bother studying the question at all. The democratic process has no intrinsic method of filtering competence from incompetence at the voting booth. In fact to even suggest something like a requirement to vote (such as property ownership) , have been deemed 'undemocratic'.
The problem is actually more fundamental than just good media, and I don't see an easy answer.
A human being may possess reason (or be of rational nature), but it doesn't mean they always act rationally. I never mentioned that competition is good, simply that it exists. In fact competition of itself doesn't guarantee any outcome, and not every natural selection necessitates the extinction of other options.
If there is no such thing as human nature than what is this human being that you are talking about?
Well even FOSS is primarily copying applications that existed firstly as proprietary ones. E.g. OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office, GIMP vs Photoshop, Scribus vs InDesign, etc... Even Gnome is ostensibly a copy of a windowed OS. Most of the first motivations of writing GCC was to provide a toolchain to replace and be better than the proprietary ones.
Plus FOSS has always claimed to be better (ethical, practical, whatever) than closed source.
Competetion is part of our nature, it works. It is sometimes called evolutionary pressure, survival of the fittest.
Considering that probably 90% of the world's information is gathered, produced, or stored by Microsoft software, and that the US Security services are above all an information retrieval service, they would be completely incompetent if they did not have some sort of special 'relationship' with Microsoft.
Even with official channels, it is always better to have someone on the inside who can verify or enhance the publicly available information.
I would say that if they don't have moles in Microsoft, they aren't doing their jobs correctly.
undoing bad mod
According to Wikipedia the USS Savannah cost 50 million to build, about 28 million for the reactor. The internets say that she cost a little over $2 mil a year more than a conventional ship, back when fuel oil was $20/ton, due to the crew requirements.
Yet at today's prices it would be interesting if it were economical. Also to be noted was the Savannah was not really built for economic viability but for a showpiece.
She is supposedly docked in Maryland now, not far from Baltimore. On my next trip to Annapolis I will have to try to see her.
Thanks for the info -
To save on costs ot seems Slashdot has outsourced all editing to India.
Yes, the USS Skate was the first to surface at the North Pole. My father still has stories to tell of his time on that boat! The USS Nautilus was the first nuclear powered submarine.
Just as a related question - why don't we see nuclear power on other vessels, for instance long distance tankers? It would seem ideal for long cruises and save tons on fuel weight.
For the court to hear the case, it must pay lawyers and judges for their time, secretaries to make notes and keep the building open and guarded. Those costs are quite substantial.
Furthermore if I want to defend myself in court, I have to pay someone who is usually not giving his time for free.
This for saying that I am a douche you have in fact wasted the time of not only me, but many other people as well, and indirectly the whole judicial system by taking a limited resource from the common good.
No, there ought to be a threshold to where the court should refuse to hear a complaint. In fact it has to in order to insure that the system could work.
It is refreshing to see that lawmakersmare actually thinking ahead for once.
However the true problems are not technical, as with any engineering where there is a well known problem there will be some sort of solution. The real problem is human.
It happens everyday: we see bad drivers and we blame thmem on the traffic, on the damage to the cars, etc. but who to blame if you automatic car runs into something? The programmer ? The one who turned it on? The sleeping passenger?
These are the real problems to be solved: where to put the blame when something goes wrong. Getting the car to drive itself is nothing in comparison to this. Human beings haven't been too successful in this problem for a long time, though perhaps new tech can bring these quetions more to the forefront.
Most posts here are talking about the control aspect, but I think it would be more interesting as an authentication.
When electric cars become viable, we need some sort of mechanism/grid for charging them up, similar to a gas station. This sort of thing would be great: just drive to the outlet, insert the plug and your credit card gets charged per k.w hr. Similar to the card swipe rfd payment options at pumps now.