It's not as bad as it might sound. The only "internet-type" involvement in the process is actually data being moved over MILNET. Very little of MILNET is publicly accessible. When the ballots get to the DoD, they are faxed to the appropriate election officials in Jefferson City, MO.
Not ideal, but it's not as insecure as I would have imagined.
According to Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, by Shane Johnson, the NCC-1701-A Enterprise was a rechristening of the Ti-Ho, with hull registry number NCC-1798.
I'm going to take a shower now, because I feel dirty knowing that.
I always thought that unmanned dirigibles would be great for something like this. Or for additional cellular (and wi-fi) capacity for special events, e.g. the olympics.
I mean, a couple of gyroscopes and some electric motors is all it would take to keep the thing approximately where it's supposed to be. They could carry batteries that recharge using solar cells during the day.
And then I thought, surely someone else has thought of this -- but I never hear anything about them, so maybe not.
If it's now being said by the Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School, you might say that it's no longer just being said by the long-haired hackers, but now it is also coming from the ivory tower.
If you read the press release, they claim that previous 2 teraflop machines fill up entire rooms, with more than a dozen racks. I'm not so sure this is the case: for instance, Apple claims 798 gigaflops to a rack with the Xserve; by my reckoning that works out to needing 2.5 racks to get 2 teraflops. And that's just with dual 1.3 GHz G4 CPUs; I'd imagine there is an upcoming Xserve rev featuring dual 2.0 GHz G5's.
Don't get me wrong, it's still an impressive achievement (especially if it uses as much less power as claimed.)
The professor teaching my cognitive science class was trying to make a point about visual perception. He said, "Picture a pumpkin." My brain produces an image of a jack-o-lantern, or maybe a pie. "Now," he said, "picture the WORD pumpkin."
My knee-jerk, instantaneous reaction was: "what font?"
I would have been a lot more willing to chip into a legal defense fund, just to prove the RIAA wrong, than to give money to some kid who just bent over and gave them $12,000. Hell, the university should have chipped in some of their legal staff, because what's next? Is the RIAA going to sue colleges for contracting somebody to provide them with
search services?
> Apple themselves have made public demonstrations > trying to debunk the myth that clock speed is > processing power. Being known for sticking to >"slower" processors, it seems that Apple is finally > starting to cave into the demands of the consumers.
No, the 970 ("G5") is STILL that much faster per clock cycle. It should put Apple way ahead of any IA32 processors in terms of throughput, at least for a while.
my impression
on
C&W Bails Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Is that Exodus and other hosting centers are having trouble because they're players in a shrinking middle market for the business of hosters that are:
Too big to use a dedicated host at a place like dreamhost or rackspace
Not big enough to host their own data center, as most major corporations are starting to do
The price/capability ratio of dedicated hosts (probably Linux/BSD on x86 hardware with really fat pipes) is falling. The difference in total cost between hosting something at Exodus and just building a good server room somewhere on a corporate campus or two is falling. (Initial build-out is expensive, but property is a pretty safe place to sink money these days, plus you can expense it and keep expensing the depreciation.)
I'm not saying there's nobody that needs Exodus-type services, but it's mostly folks that don't fit into one of these other (growing) categories.
How likely is it that the San Jose Mercury News would get slashdotted? Not very, I'd guess.
That aside, does anybody else think it would be a good idea to implement something on slashdot that checked every n minutes to see if a link was still responding, and if it wasn't, rendered page views with links to the google cached version instead?
I think this would be a great idea. It would keep smaller sites from getting hammered too badly, but would still keep pageviews going to the site, or at least a cached version of the site, so they still get the props. For bigger sites that can handle the increased load, it wouldn't change anything.
If operating system and application developers didn't have to worry (much) about volatile RAM or slow disks anymore, it would radically change the kind of software that is needed (and possible.)
What sorts of applications can you envision for a handheld device with several TB of storage and a battery life of around 24 hours? Or a laptop with several hundred. Or a workgroup server with several thousand. What kind of new operating systems would we need? How could the average application developer begin to prepare for such a possibility?
I'm serious. I'd like to know what sorts of things would suddenly change, and what sould suddenly become possible, if this kind of tech was actually affordable in, say, 5 years.
Just after Apple bought NeXT, I played with their "yellow box" development tools on a windows machine. This was basically a port of the ObjC runtimes and several of the basic NeXT frameworks that now make up the core of the Cocoa APIs. They had versions of TextEdit and Stickies that ran on my Windows NT workstation as part of the developer tools. (Talk about creepy.)
Anyway, my point is, Apple has been thinking for a long time about the day when they would need one of their apps to run on a Microsoft operating system.
I keep my regular backups on a Firewire-connected IDE hard disk, but I've thought about doing this for my "essential files" -- like old email, project files and accounting data. The disk is a "hot" backup of my machine that I can easily restore from, while the tape would be something I can keep in a safe deposit box or some such in case of catastrophe. One is for convenience, the other is for insurance.
My primary reasoning is, "Hmm. I don't need to use the tape that often. I can either get a backup unit that is also a video camera, or... not."
The information isn't cheap to come by because it is updated so often and used by so few, but a lot of smaller airports are public knowledge. Private pilots know where to get it. But really, all a small Cessna needs to take off or land is about 1/2 mile of relatively flat terrain. If conditions were right an experienced pilot could land on a well-mowed field or dirt road. But most established airports with attended hangars & other services are listed on charts e.g. the ones from Jeppesen.
And the reason nobody ever sees aviation fuel pumps is because you're never at little airports like this. Even small planes fly much faster than cars can travel, so they're not always closely spaced, but believe me, they're everywhere. Probably at least one to a county (in the midwest.)
If you're running cgi instead of some kind of persistent process, who cares about security -- your site runs like molasses anyway...
Anyway, ince Apache 2.0 doesn't have a lot of benefits over 1.3 for most "little guys," and because everything's multithreaded it's significantly harder to debug, I suspect it won't stabilize until somebody with a lot of resources wants it to be stabilized (like IBM or HP.)
I like to think of Rendezvous as a much smarter analogue to NetBEUI, which I often refer to as the "butt sniffing protocol" that Windows machines use to detect each other in the absence of IP networking.
Is there some reason that your one mac user can't just mount the NT shares directly, using OSX's built-in samba client support? Also, Windows 2000 Server supports Appletalk over TCP/IP, fwiw.
I evaluated several databases over the weekend for a project I'm working on. I needed the DB to run on linux, I needed to access it via JDBC, and it needs to support arbitrarily large BLOBs. I tried MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL, DB2 and SAPDB.
I'm sure it was just something I was doing wrong, but I was getting data corruption with MySQL on anything larger than 500k. Postgres' JDBC drivers don't stream things, they have to load the entire byte stream into memory -- so it failed utterly. It also used about 10x the memory it needed to load the file, and didn't release it even after garbage collection -- so poo on it.
I tried MS SQL, and it worked flawlessly, but like I said, I need the database to run on Linux.
I installed SAPDB on a Red Hat box, spent a few hours figuring out the management commands, and was successfully loading/retrieving binaries of up to 100MB with no problem. Very fast throughput, all things considered, and the commands aren't too difficult once you figure out what they're supposed to freaking BE. I guess it helps to have a working understanding of Oracle 7 administration, because the concepts are pretty much the same, just with different names.
So, even though I'm kind of sad that the codebase is poorly set up and it won't run on *BSD or MacOS X, I'll be using SAPDB for this project because it meets my needs quite handily.
I think that if a community could be arranged around SAPDB to clean up/standardize its codebase, it would be a Good Thing and I would like to get involved. But it's going to take somebody going through that spaghetti and figuring out what's what.
Does anyone know how subversion compares with Slide from the Jakarta Project? Slide is also a WebDAV/DeltaV client and server. In the past, I've been more interested in Slide because it has a more "pluggable" back end (Slide is in Java, and I am a pretty good Java programmer, not so much with the C.) Easier to embed/extend for my own uses.
For example, are the two interoperable in any way? Can you use one's client to talk to the other?
While I agree that it sucks you'd have to pay for the upgrade having just bought your computer, I disagree with characterizing 10.2 as a bug fix. 10.1.x has been _extremely_ stable for me, perhaps even more so than my Linux machines since all Mac hardware is so standardized. I'm really looking forward to the new features, especially iCal, the first calendar program I've ever heard of that uses open interoperabity standards that have been around for going on five years.
Maybe you should get a "white box" 802.11 base station from D-Link or somebody like that, and put the saved hundreds of dollars toward the upgrade? It's all the same stuff as far as your airport card is concerned.
I'm mostly worried about how 10.2 is going to interact with the fink distribution. It's going to suck for me if all the fink stuff suddenly stops working because it was built against library versions that don't exist anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
> Can't they just use an email -> fax gateway of some sort?
They ARE using such a system. I know it's fashionable to post without reading the article, but jeez. More info here:
http://www.sos.mo.gov/news.asp?id=375
It's not as bad as it might sound. The only "internet-type" involvement in the process is actually data being moved over MILNET. Very little of MILNET is publicly accessible. When the ballots get to the DoD, they are faxed to the appropriate election officials in Jefferson City, MO.
Not ideal, but it's not as insecure as I would have imagined.
According to Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, by Shane Johnson, the NCC-1701-A Enterprise was a rechristening of the Ti-Ho, with hull registry number NCC-1798.
I'm going to take a shower now, because I feel dirty knowing that.
I always thought that unmanned dirigibles would be great for something like this. Or for additional cellular (and wi-fi) capacity for special events, e.g. the olympics.
I mean, a couple of gyroscopes and some electric motors is all it would take to keep the thing approximately where it's supposed to be. They could carry batteries that recharge using solar cells during the day.
And then I thought, surely someone else has thought of this -- but I never hear anything about them, so maybe not.
Maybe, but a lot more "regular" business people read the Harvard Business Review than read EFF publications or RMS' stuff.
If it's now being said by the Harvard Business School and Cardozo Law School, you might say that it's no longer just being said by the long-haired hackers, but now it is also coming from the ivory tower.
If you read the press release, they claim that previous 2 teraflop machines fill up entire rooms, with more than a dozen racks. I'm not so sure this is the case: for instance, Apple claims 798 gigaflops to a rack with the Xserve; by my reckoning that works out to needing 2.5 racks to get 2 teraflops. And that's just with dual 1.3 GHz G4 CPUs; I'd imagine there is an upcoming Xserve rev featuring dual 2.0 GHz G5's.
Don't get me wrong, it's still an impressive achievement (especially if it uses as much less power as claimed.)
The professor teaching my cognitive science class was trying to make a point about visual perception. He said, "Picture a pumpkin." My brain produces an image of a jack-o-lantern, or maybe a pie. "Now," he said, "picture the WORD pumpkin."
My knee-jerk, instantaneous reaction was: "what font?"
I would have been a lot more willing to chip into a legal defense fund, just to prove the RIAA wrong, than to give money to some kid who just bent over and gave them $12,000. Hell, the university should have chipped in some of their legal staff, because what's next? Is the RIAA going to sue colleges for contracting somebody to provide them with search services?
> Apple themselves have made public demonstrations
> trying to debunk the myth that clock speed is
> processing power. Being known for sticking to
>"slower" processors, it seems that Apple is finally
> starting to cave into the demands of the consumers.
No, the 970 ("G5") is STILL that much faster per clock cycle. It should put Apple way ahead of any IA32 processors in terms of throughput, at least for a while.
Is that Exodus and other hosting centers are having trouble because they're players in a shrinking middle market for the business of hosters that are:
The price/capability ratio of dedicated hosts (probably Linux/BSD on x86 hardware with really fat pipes) is falling. The difference in total cost between hosting something at Exodus and just building a good server room somewhere on a corporate campus or two is falling. (Initial build-out is expensive, but property is a pretty safe place to sink money these days, plus you can expense it and keep expensing the depreciation.)
I'm not saying there's nobody that needs Exodus-type services, but it's mostly folks that don't fit into one of these other (growing) categories.
How likely is it that the San Jose Mercury News would get slashdotted? Not very, I'd guess.
That aside, does anybody else think it would be a good idea to implement something on slashdot that checked every n minutes to see if a link was still responding, and if it wasn't, rendered page views with links to the google cached version instead?
I think this would be a great idea. It would keep smaller sites from getting hammered too badly, but would still keep pageviews going to the site, or at least a cached version of the site, so they still get the props. For bigger sites that can handle the increased load, it wouldn't change anything.
Sorry for being OT.
>>I wish some higher level languages would force the use of comments in code, make it part of the declaration for a class or function.
Python *does* make comments part of the declaration of a class or function, though it's not required. Makes documenting things a bit easier, imho.
If operating system and application developers didn't have to worry (much) about volatile RAM or slow disks anymore, it would radically change the kind of software that is needed (and possible.)
What sorts of applications can you envision for a handheld device with several TB of storage and a battery life of around 24 hours? Or a laptop with several hundred. Or a workgroup server with several thousand. What kind of new operating systems would we need? How could the average application developer begin to prepare for such a possibility?
I'm serious. I'd like to know what sorts of things would suddenly change, and what sould suddenly become possible, if this kind of tech was actually affordable in, say, 5 years.
Just after Apple bought NeXT, I played with their "yellow box" development tools on a windows machine. This was basically a port of the ObjC runtimes and several of the basic NeXT frameworks that now make up the core of the Cocoa APIs. They had versions of TextEdit and Stickies that ran on my Windows NT workstation as part of the developer tools. (Talk about creepy.)
Anyway, my point is, Apple has been thinking for a long time about the day when they would need one of their apps to run on a Microsoft operating system.
I keep my regular backups on a Firewire-connected IDE hard disk, but I've thought about doing this for my "essential files" -- like old email, project files and accounting data. The disk is a "hot" backup of my machine that I can easily restore from, while the tape would be something I can keep in a safe deposit box or some such in case of catastrophe. One is for convenience, the other is for insurance.
My primary reasoning is, "Hmm. I don't need to use the tape that often. I can either get a backup unit that is also a video camera, or... not."
If it works reliably, why not?
The information isn't cheap to come by because it is updated so often and used by so few, but a lot of smaller airports are public knowledge. Private pilots know where to get it. But really, all a small Cessna needs to take off or land is about 1/2 mile of relatively flat terrain. If conditions were right an experienced pilot could land on a well-mowed field or dirt road. But most established airports with attended hangars & other services are listed on charts e.g. the ones from Jeppesen.
And the reason nobody ever sees aviation fuel pumps is because you're never at little airports like this. Even small planes fly much faster than cars can travel, so they're not always closely spaced, but believe me, they're everywhere. Probably at least one to a county (in the midwest.)
If you're running cgi instead of some kind of persistent process, who cares about security -- your site runs like molasses anyway...
Anyway, ince Apache 2.0 doesn't have a lot of benefits over 1.3 for most "little guys," and because everything's multithreaded it's significantly harder to debug, I suspect it won't stabilize until somebody with a lot of resources wants it to be stabilized (like IBM or HP.)
I like to think of Rendezvous as a much smarter analogue to NetBEUI, which I often refer to as the "butt sniffing protocol" that Windows machines use to detect each other in the absence of IP networking.
Is there some reason that your one mac user can't just mount the NT shares directly, using OSX's built-in samba client support? Also, Windows 2000 Server supports Appletalk over TCP/IP, fwiw.
Is this with the standard HttpConnector, or with the new (still marked unstable) CoyoteConnector?
I evaluated several databases over the weekend for a project I'm working on. I needed the DB to run on linux, I needed to access it via JDBC, and it needs to support arbitrarily large BLOBs. I tried MySQL, Postgres, MS SQL, DB2 and SAPDB.
I'm sure it was just something I was doing wrong, but I was getting data corruption with MySQL on anything larger than 500k. Postgres' JDBC drivers don't stream things, they have to load the entire byte stream into memory -- so it failed utterly. It also used about 10x the memory it needed to load the file, and didn't release it even after garbage collection -- so poo on it.
I tried MS SQL, and it worked flawlessly, but like I said, I need the database to run on Linux.
I installed SAPDB on a Red Hat box, spent a few hours figuring out the management commands, and was successfully loading/retrieving binaries of up to 100MB with no problem. Very fast throughput, all things considered, and the commands aren't too difficult once you figure out what they're supposed to freaking BE. I guess it helps to have a working understanding of Oracle 7 administration, because the concepts are pretty much the same, just with different names.
So, even though I'm kind of sad that the codebase is poorly set up and it won't run on *BSD or MacOS X, I'll be using SAPDB for this project because it meets my needs quite handily.
I think that if a community could be arranged around SAPDB to clean up/standardize its codebase, it would be a Good Thing and I would like to get involved. But it's going to take somebody going through that spaghetti and figuring out what's what.
Does anyone know how subversion compares with Slide from the Jakarta Project? Slide is also a WebDAV/DeltaV client and server. In the past, I've been more interested in Slide because it has a more "pluggable" back end (Slide is in Java, and I am a pretty good Java programmer, not so much with the C.) Easier to embed/extend for my own uses.
For example, are the two interoperable in any way? Can you use one's client to talk to the other?
While I agree that it sucks you'd have to pay for the upgrade having just bought your computer, I disagree with characterizing 10.2 as a bug fix. 10.1.x has been _extremely_ stable for me, perhaps even more so than my Linux machines since all Mac hardware is so standardized. I'm really looking forward to the new features, especially iCal, the first calendar program I've ever heard of that uses open interoperabity standards that have been around for going on five years.
Maybe you should get a "white box" 802.11 base station from D-Link or somebody like that, and put the saved hundreds of dollars toward the upgrade? It's all the same stuff as far as your airport card is concerned.
I'm mostly worried about how 10.2 is going to interact with the fink distribution. It's going to suck for me if all the fink stuff suddenly stops working because it was built against library versions that don't exist anymore.
>I'd like to see any Willow vs my clothing remover ray gun.
no contest. everybody wins!