Our current economic system has created existential risks by discounting the risks of centralization and just-in-time production and just-barely-works systems without huge margins of resiliency. One tragedy-in-the-making example is the USA recently selling off its emergency strategic grain supplies........
Good stuff except that the Yellowstone volcano risk is vastly bigger than any emergency grain supply we ever considered.
We are not talking about a regional disaster but one so big that with the modern population and population distribution we would be well and goodly firetrucked.
You point is spot on if we consider lesser but still massive disasters. Most folk consider disaster planning of three days food and water to be a difficult investment. A continent wide disaster with spill over to other continents needs to address decades or more.
Wow... there is a lot of talk about the Yellowstone volcano. Do the authorities know more than they are saying to the public? Why all of the sudden interest in Yellowstone? Is an eruption imminent and we are not being told?
As a geologist the impact, size and risk of Yellowstone has been an ongoing learning experience.
Yellowstone like large eruptions and large asteroid impacts are global game changers. Any that wake up in the morning and think about this get concerned.
Both issues invoke magical thinking... we could make the problem go away by -________-.
What we do know is that historic eruptions did blanket North America with ash, we also have some decent data about how many and how often and when we might be due...
The un-interesting bit is the mumble foo about a computer program. Some think this is adding to the knowledge but the reality is hand drawn maps from 20 years ago tell the same OMG KYAGB story.
Add regions of Indonesia to the list right along side the Mammoth Mtn. caldera in California.
These game changing big events are well beyond any FEMA planning. Have a good cup of tea and enjoy the fireworks.
Microsoft's actions might seem "customer-centric," but really they're fighting for their lives.
If MS can be forced to give up European data, stored on European servers, that's game over for them. Lawsuits and investigations will flourish in Europe, because their data protection laws are much stronger/stricter than ours.
This could kill MS's European business.
What largish Linux push in Europe was squashed in favor of MicroSoft products?
Microsoft has a lot to lose if they ignore international law and act as the blind agent of a US court.
China is working to replace all MS and Cisco software already as well as replace all Intel and other non-Chinese processors with their own chip designs. Their early hardware efforts have shown that there are few technical problems in their way to nationalize large markets.
Except it isn't European data, Its an American's data stored under a European account in European servers. Small difference.
It is not the data that is the issue.
It is a US Judge requiring a company to reach out across international borders and as an agent of the judge grab the data and spirit it across international borders and deliver it to the judge. This something that the US judge could not require of the State Department, CIA or NSA any other government agency to do.
If it was not data the rule would be more obvious. If a storage company had a large box of cigars perhaps from some random country close to Florida could that company be compelled to ship that box of cigars to the judge to determine if the owner of the box of cigars was engaging in the trade of and trade with a foreign country that the US has issues with. Only by inspection of the contents of the box would the judge know.
Now it is possible that Cuban cigars are no longer the smoking gun of illegal trade with Cuba but the point is that this judge is forcing a company to reach out across international borders and do the judges bidding.
What if the company name was Blackwater Security Consulting (since renamed Academi) and that company was directed by a judge to import or export anything or anyone at the behest of the judge (with or without payment for services BTW).
If it was a physical container the decision in my mind is obvious that the judge is reaching, reaching, reaching well beyond charter and jurisdiction.
It gets more interesting if the transport of the physical container crosses other international borders. Most nations have laws that prohibit trafficking in stolen goods. So a packet map showing how each and every fragment of this container traveled could also be a topic of a United Nations inquiry. Blood diamonds, ebony, ivory... trafficking in crime tainted desirables and this judge covets this stuff.
It doesn't always have to boil down to price........
The Raspberry Pi is a lackluster board with a crummy SoC and limited I/O and no FPU. Not to say that the Raspberry Pi is total crap, it does its intended job very well and there is a lot of community support..........
OK I am a child of the 60s. Time not the drug thing...
The Raspberry Pi is an astounding teaching tool. It is open at all the important levels (hardware and software) that are impossible or impracticable for a student and class to explore on any other computer.
At the current price it is less expensive than most textbooks.
It supports all the tool chains a student needs support on and supports virtually any programming language worth teaching and worth learning.
The last turn of the Raspberry Pi gave it more USB ports and a better connector for the OS flash media (mSD). All good stuff.
I have built small MPI clusters with them and noticed that I quickly ran into problems that plague programmers of million dollar clusters that I have worked on. The Beaglebone Black is a nice baby step forward in ARM land.
This MIPS board that started this does need to match the price and features of the R-Pi or BBB if it is to have legs. I am a fan of the MIPS ISA but with modern compilers the ISA is almost a don't care.
Re this MIPS board do wish it had dual+ GigE networking. I do wish it had more DRAM. I do wish I knew more about it in detail.
Of interest the SD card, case and wall wart power supply cost as much as the board itself. All together it costs less than most textbooks....
Remember, penicillin is not an effective treatment for Influenza or other viral infections. There are some secondary infections where penicillin or another antibiotic has value BUT penicillin is not an effective treatment for Influenza.
This Ebola thing is dangerous... it is lethal enough and contagious enough to totally upend the health care and economic systems of the UK, France, Germany, US, Russia, Japan...
Most modern nations do not have infrastructure that permits long term quarantine of all but a small handful of individuals. Nothing in place will address the millions of travelers... stuck in transit.
I moved to Minnesota so I wouldn't have to worry about earthquakes, or tsunamis
But winters can bring their own challenges and different answers. A frozen week is a long frozen week....
Large trash bags make windproof and rainproof emergency layers and make taking trash away from the park easy too.
Keep that old comforter in the boot of the car and some old shoes, hat, dry clothing handy too.
Frozen food is difficult to eat... you will need something to cook/ heat food with. Something that does not kill you with carbon monoxide. Camping and picnic equipment makes great emergency kit if it is maintained and has fuel.
The kit, as described, is a barely adequate 36 hour kit, for four people.
......
OK for 36 hours in america all you really need is water.
Most individuals can fast for 36 hours.
In addition a can of tuna or a can of soup needs nothing beyond an opener and a fork or spoon to become food. If you are hungry it is just fine. If it is not fine you are not hungry...
It gets different if you are hiking or digging through rubble.
Shelter could be high on the list for many... A blue tarp is inexpensive.
Trash and sanitation need attention... The superdome and katrina would have been less evil if there were buckets on ropes and ways to just flush the crud over the side. Sadly too many had no clue about sanitation and EXPECTED others to clean up. This responsibility issue and an exclusion zone where only trained first responders can play is also a disaster in and of itself.
Reach and scope of the disaster can be overlooked.
A katrina wrecks an astounding area in some cases permanently. Politics imposes limits on rebuilding which gets manipulated by do-gooders.
A tornado totally wrecks a narrow band that can often be accessed by first responders in half a mile left/ right of the swath.
A quake is a regional disaster... small medium large... One lady in Napa was interviewed -- she had wine but ALL the wine glasses in her home had been broken. This points out the fragile chain of needs and reminds one about a king and his horse. The area of the Napa quake is modest and lightly populated.... other areas.. 50 miles south would be shit to pay disaster.
Economic resources of the area come to play. Does the population live paycheck to paycheck (Katrina) or is the population flush with a credit card that would let them move to another state and a work from home like Google and FB engineers.
So a blue tarp, water and some cans of tuna and the first 48 hours are covered for some... More than 48 hours and it gets nasty because restoration of services that takes longer than 36 hours quickly becomes a week or three.
Not sure where you live, but writable blu ray was available in 2002 initially. DVD in 1997, CD in 1988. We're a little past 5 years. Thats 12 for BD, 17 for DVD, and 26 for CD. There is a wealth of data on storage life on all of them if you know where to look.
Yes, yet there was a big deal not too long ago where DVD media began to come apart after about five years. The rumor was that it was a manufacturing FUBAR that lasted a couple years and impacted a lot of big name players.
I picked five years to comment because apparently the life of media has two statistical humps. The five year one points to short term risks unknown at day one and the 12 and 17 year data gives hope that the 40 to 100 year storage life expectation is possible. Bursts of defective media discovered a couple years after mfg remind folk that inexpensive could be foolish.
Home users had a spate of problems in 2003 or so... if my Google foo is telling.
If they only keep one copy, how do they detect and recover from bitrot?
Or is the stuff already not really important to keep more than one copy around
Data replication is an honest question. What if a copy was kept on spinning disks and the Blue-Ray media was backing store for spinning media.
A RAID design for the future need not have equal access times for ECC, voting and redundancy. It only needs to be reliable and the net sum of the parts inexpensive. Data rates on and off a single Blu-Ray are consistent with very long distance optical fibre data rates.
If I allow myself to think of this as heterogeneous RAID hardware design it makes sense. If I allow myself to think of this as an isolated magic solution it seems fragile.
You could have a robot unplug/plug HDs, but once you're accepting the latency of disk changes and spin-up, I imagine Blu-Ray disks would be much, much cheaper than a similar capacity of HDs.
Yes except the connectors are not rated for many disconnects and reconnects.
Hard drive media needs to spin up often. If the drive is not spun then there are risks of the media and heads having problems. The complexity of the electronics and component life expectancy on the drives may be less than Blu-Ray media. There are just too many moving (active) parts in the drive to believe that media with no moving parts has an equal MTBF value.
With deep pockets and money in the bank... this is worth a hard look.
This estimate also ignores the cost of a robotic system, powering that system, and maintanence and doesn't factor in costs for redundancy (they need two robotic systems, not one.) The whole thing is phenomenally stupid. As someone already pointed out before I got here to say the same, if you want to take data offline simply literally take it offline. Power down the friggin hard drive array completely. Power it back up when needed.
Bingo... but given the mass of data Facebook has set themselves up to store they would do well to try a multitude of things.
And redundancy of two at this scale is not going to be sufficient. The media will need to be organized as a RAID larger and wider than anything folk are used to thinking about.
A read error on one disc will need to be validated by a very big ECC code on the media and also on redundant media local and far away. Two copies gives little voting confidence as to which is incorrect so dust off your old HP-41 calculator and stat pack or perhaps SPSS and start working on the numbers. Then verify and check them with Haskell and R
Big robot data systems are interesting and even dangerous as they get bigger and faster.
Then there is the security of the OS running the robot. Stuxnet has a lesson to be applied here. Lots of stuff spinning... .
They'd also be cheaper, even at the bulk HDD rate that FB would pay.
A quick on-line search show a spindle of fifty 50GB Blu-Ray discs (2.5 TB) retails for about $100. A 4TB HDD costs about $140. So HDD is actually cheaper per byte of storage. Maybe wholesale price ratios are way different from retail, but I see no reason to assume that. So BluRay doesn't win on price, volume, or access speed. The concerns about moisture and big temperature swings seems odd. Are Facebook data centers exposed to the weather?
Seldom used data sitting in spinning power draining disks has a continuous power cost. Power and cooling are important data center considerations.
Facebook has an astounding pile of data in picture archives that after a couple months are only called on once in a while if ever again.
Layers of storage from the modern very quick SSD devices to spinning rust disks to perhaps BluRay seem to have a place when access time and space considerations come to play. I wish them luck.
One problem with BlueRay, DVD and CDROM media is the lack of data as storage beyond five years or so. But as a physical form factor goes these little devices do have a lot of potential. I wish them luck and wish I knew what vendor to invest in.
I happen to know a highly skilled person working as a security analist. He says his main customer for 0days is the NSA.......
Golly someone connected directly to gwolf has now been outed. Unless you are Kim Kardashian with 23 million followers a zero level direct connection might well be an individual name.
Further with 23 million followers for Kim; 600,000 for Robert Scoble; 83,000 for/. ; 42 million for B. Obama.... we are all connected within three or so degrees of K Bacon
He suggests a massive company like Google or Facebook will eventually have to take up the task of making Tor scale up to millions of users.
If one of those guys gets their hands on it you can forget about using it to hide anything from the government.
"Here's some bugs we've fixed for you guys. Trust us."
Oh yeah, because the current debug team we can trust so much...
There are two parts..
* Here is the bug.
* Here is a bug fix.
The first has a lot of value in an open source community. The second if taken with blind faith is a potential disaster.
As a pair the time window for attack can be reduced.
Gifts from the NSA are an interesting thing... Some might be triggered because they have evidence that others have knowledge of the flaw and are exploiting it. As the need for human intelligence grows the need for secure communication increases from individuals (assets) far afield. In that regard bug disclosures would be self serving but still be quality fixes the Tor community needs.
One important point to me in terms of global security is that "actions speak louder than words" and if the TLAs like the NSA pay attention to global bad actors things might find clarity in contrast to the thought police reaching out four+ degrees of connectivity for co-conspirators (almost the entire world today)
Speaking about bad actors... our news media outlets seem to have abandoned all attempts at quality, completeness and truth. The web does not have time editorial limitations the way airtime programming does and unedited content should be available. It is not obvious how one might edit out the payment for cigars unless the shop is a source of illegal Cubans for the local big wigs...
Decades ago news broadcast (Walter Cronkite time frame) news was a mandate and effectively a cost center not a profit center. This has gone to stink with the advent of cable and broadcast outside of the airwaves. But if the FCC can get in the middle of net neutrality these magazine format sensation and headline grabbing outlets could find their finances and marketing vastly different.
Well sure -- I do not know but would assert() that MS gave them a major sales effort. Full court press perhaps with promises and discounts.
Linux is not free. It does take work and is not monolithic. The biggest gap is one that customers of Munich must bridge in terms of document tools, multimedia tools, codecs and even Adobe Flash tools and development.
Having said this it is clear from the most recent blue screen of death Tuesday updates that any critical business could find themselves in a monster tangle with a botched patch, an aggressive zero day attack and any number of other risks. All of which would be worse if there was only one OS in the house.
Some might recall the old IBM executive directive that overhead slide presentations be prepared ONLY with a typewriter and only in black and white. The flood of artistic efforts and costs to contrive fancier more marketing rich eye catching song and dance presentations and production company tail wagging the dog expense was diverting and distracting from the ability to communicate content.
Decades ago at Silicon Graphics there was a move over MAC program to focus the company and eat your own cooking in the decision making levels of the company. If an SGI executive could not communicate with other parts of SGI with ONLY SGI tools customers would have the same problem and no mater how worthy the hardware could not get the job done.
The important lesson for the world and especially the US to understand is monoculture is a big risk as any that have looked into the Dutch Elm disease that killed more trees than Xerox (perhaps an exaggeration). The attack surface for computers and digital infrastructure and data should not be in the hands of one company or one QA, or one release test group.
There are a couple of ways to divide and identify the issues and needs. There are a lot of smart people on/. and we could make some positive comments --- but hey this is/.
And interesting specific yet easy to detect substances could be added to money to make it easy to track from one place to another. Each of the 12 reserve banks could use a unique easy to detect substance....
One step beyond serial number records... and one step beyond ultraviolet and edge stack marks.
Here my Comcast prerecorded announcement states "This conversation may be recorded for quality assurance." I hit record and say "Thank you for permission to record this conversation for quality assurance".
Replace "Child Porn" with "Subversive Material" and suddenly it doesn't see like such a good thing, does it?
Or, for you folks who like to "share", copyrighted movies, music, etc.
Or replace with any financial instrument bought and sold.
Remember Martha was locked up over a lost post-it note that implied that the sale/purchase of such and such a stock was likely profitable...
Given the interconnectivity of the modern world the vast majority of the technical community are connected to individuals that know or MIGHT have access to sensitive financial information.
Any recruiter or resume system that sees a bump in traffic from XYZtech might assume trouble as the rats flee the ship. They do not even have to mine it... it is visible.
Social issues, financial, sexual (legal), religious, emotional, medical..... can be fabricated from real and fabricated content....
There is some trouble lurking here: "The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) [18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521, 2701-2710], which was signed into law in 1986, amended the Federal Wiretap Act to account for the increasing amount of communications and data transferred and stored on computer systems. The ECPA protects against the unlawful interceptions of any wire communications--whether it's telephone or cell phone conversations, voicemail, email, and other data sent over the wires. The ECPA also includes protections for messages that are stored--email messages that are archived on servers, for instance. Now, under the law, unauthorized access to computer messages, whether in transit or in storage, is a federal crime." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
It is not clear to me that Google has the legal right to look into email beyond the notion of presenting marketing content that lines up with a user profile and perhaps a blind data base match against market content and marketing profiles.
Since CP is illegal no profile or other marketing activity can be sold or participated with by Google. To me nothing in any market driven activity can generate a CP profile and match.... the implication is that someone was buying or selling Google services to engage in CP.
It is possible that an image was discovered and a federal warrant caused Google to search for a match against a very specific image. The sharing of such images outside of law enforcement may itself be illegal especially if a service to discover such an image if Google was paid to search for it.
It is possible that an image transfer to a different suspect or legal honey pot was detected but that should trigger a search warrant.
As others have pointed out anything seen and disliked or disliked and searched for but not illegal could trigger a witch hunt. I know individuals that have a visceral dislike for: Rush Limbaugh, CNN, FoX, Kate Gosselin, Jodi Arias, Joe Arpaio and some would have inclinations to make accusations if they thought they could get away with it.
The good thing at this moment is that I do not know enough about this in any detail so others will have to dig into the reality.
Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now.
Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
Not once in 20. Every two years... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks Yes the number of inflicted individuals is too small \ to trigger major financial investment. Yes the inflicted individuals are mostly too poor to trigger major financial investment! Yes global risk is so large most research is department of defense funded.
This is so serious and so bad a global risk I dislike thinking about it except that the world needs to pay attention. Today the context for disease is big $$ pharma and big $$ agriculture. This has risks so large none with $$ want to touch it outside of some rarified well funded well secured facilities (a good thing IMO).
Consider how the EPA has extended its mandate to include the CO2 that you exhale and incur simply by eating and making a living and soon will be carbon taxing you... too. [...] Some historic "solutions" came to light January 27, 1945...
That's cute. But parody is better when it's not so exaggerated. Even the US right wing aren't stupid enough, insane enough, to go around saying that the EPA is going to tax breathing, nor invoke Nazi death camps to condemn US environmental regulations. The premise of the joke has to at least be believable.
Yes a bit of exaggeration yet the relentless move to legislate regulatory agencies that then craft regulations with the power of law is astounding. The terrible part is that to tear down man bad regulations the entire agency must be dismantled which does not happen for agencies that mostly do the right things.
The EPA is easy to point fingers at yet they do constantly work to extend their charter and reach.
Of interest was a bunch of EPA mandates involving rainwater runoff in Virginia. The state of Virginia won the first batch of litigation and the EPA was pushed back. However the fact that rain water catchment basins do not respect state boundaries. Coal does not respect state boundaries. Fumes from coal and other fuel fired power plants does not.... Then there was the individual in Oregon that put a rain barrel between his roof and garden. Oregon felt his roof water run off was property of the state of Oregon.
ALso, noise-cancelling technology isn't unique to, or even invented by BOSE. It's, AFAIK, a military patent.. and used in almost every modern headphone and smartphone made.
But what military?
Of interest if a military design was classified and if someone invented the same thing how could this be litigated. In some cases the disclosure need only be a public RFP that implies it is possible for another skilled in the art to go and do it.
Since the secrecy order covers methods and capabilities it could be that military hardware designs will never be used to show prior art.
FIrst rumor I heard on noise cancellation was for Israel tank communication systems. Second was old AT&T stuff in the acoustic labs at bell labs for navy designs.
The patent system is a closed ecosystem and if no one ever filed a patent on something invented 2000 years ago by a Roman a patent would get issued and used to extort funds from small players where the cost of litigation vs. the cost of paying extortion makes the decision.
The other issue is language. Many inventions use alternative language to isolate their filing from all others. Multiple devices to virtualize large storage could be used and not trigger a match from a filing involving redundant array of inexpensive disks etc...
Technical readers could discover some of these but there is no $$ in doing it. Some large organizations involved in natural language processing might crack this open as inventions in many nations are stolen and used in others. This is hard but translation from IEEE publication to PartentOffice to Chinese, Russian and more might prove to generate matches of interesting to national security and industry in general (pick your nation... no fixed answer is correct here).
Slashdot Mirror
Never give up a working phone when you get a new one.
Read above and now you know why.
A visit to the phone store can activate the old device perhaps
with the old SIM card...
I use my old phones to WiFi stream music and stuff into
my home. Bluetooth to the audio world for music.
Chromecast for other stuff...
Our current economic system has created existential risks by discounting the risks of centralization and just-in-time production and just-barely-works systems without huge margins of resiliency. One tragedy-in-the-making example is the USA recently selling off its emergency strategic grain supplies. .......
Good stuff except that the Yellowstone volcano risk is vastly bigger than any emergency grain supply we ever considered.
We are not talking about a regional disaster but one so big that with the modern population and population distribution
we would be well and goodly firetrucked.
You point is spot on if we consider lesser but still massive disasters. Most folk consider disaster planning of three days
food and water to be a difficult investment. A continent wide disaster with spill over to other continents needs to address
decades or more.
Wow ... there is a lot of talk about the Yellowstone volcano. Do the authorities know more than they are saying to the public? Why all of the sudden interest in Yellowstone? Is an eruption imminent and we are not being told?
As a geologist the impact, size and risk of Yellowstone has been an ongoing learning experience.
Yellowstone like large eruptions and large asteroid impacts are global game changers.
Any that wake up in the morning and think about this get concerned.
Both issues invoke magical thinking... we could make the problem go away by -________-.
What we do know is that historic eruptions did blanket North America with ash,
we also have some decent data about how many and how often and when we
might be due...
The un-interesting bit is the mumble foo about a computer program. Some think
this is adding to the knowledge but the reality is hand drawn maps from
20 years ago tell the same OMG KYAGB story.
Add regions of Indonesia to the list right along side the Mammoth Mtn. caldera in California.
These game changing big events are well beyond any FEMA planning.
Have a good cup of tea and enjoy the fireworks.
Microsoft's actions might seem "customer-centric," but really they're fighting for their lives.
If MS can be forced to give up European data, stored on European servers, that's game over for them.
Lawsuits and investigations will flourish in Europe, because their data protection laws are much stronger/stricter than ours.
This could kill MS's European business.
What largish Linux push in Europe was squashed in favor of MicroSoft products?
Microsoft has a lot to lose if they ignore international law and act as
the blind agent of a US court.
China is working to replace all MS and Cisco software already as
well as replace all Intel and other non-Chinese processors with their own
chip designs. Their early hardware efforts have shown that there
are few technical problems in their way to nationalize large markets.
Except it isn't European data, Its an American's data stored under a European account in European servers. Small difference.
It is not the data that is the issue.
It is a US Judge requiring a company to reach out across international borders and
as an agent of the judge grab the data and spirit it across international borders and
deliver it to the judge. This something that the US judge could not require of the
State Department, CIA or NSA any other government agency to do.
If it was not data the rule would be more obvious. If a storage company had
a large box of cigars perhaps from some random country close to Florida could that
company be compelled to ship that box of cigars to the judge to determine
if the owner of the box of cigars was engaging in the trade of and trade with
a foreign country that the US has issues with. Only by inspection of the
contents of the box would the judge know.
Now it is possible that Cuban cigars are no longer the smoking gun of illegal
trade with Cuba but the point is that this judge is forcing a company to reach out
across international borders and do the judges bidding.
What if the company name was Blackwater Security Consulting (since renamed Academi)
and that company was directed by a judge to import or export anything or anyone
at the behest of the judge (with or without payment for services BTW).
If it was a physical container the decision in my mind is obvious
that the judge is reaching, reaching, reaching well beyond charter and
jurisdiction.
It gets more interesting if the transport of the physical container crosses
other international borders. Most nations have laws that prohibit trafficking
in stolen goods. So a packet map showing how each and every fragment
of this container traveled could also be a topic of a United Nations inquiry.
Blood diamonds, ebony, ivory... trafficking in crime tainted desirables and
this judge covets this stuff.
It doesn't always have to boil down to price. .......
The Raspberry Pi is a lackluster board with a crummy SoC and limited I/O and no FPU. Not to say that the Raspberry Pi is total crap, it does its intended job very well and there is a lot of community support. .........
OK I am a child of the 60s. Time not the drug thing...
The Raspberry Pi is an astounding teaching tool.
It is open at all the important levels (hardware and software) that
are impossible or impracticable for a student and class to explore
on any other computer.
At the current price it is less expensive than most textbooks.
It supports all the tool chains a student needs support on and
supports virtually any programming language worth teaching
and worth learning.
The last turn of the Raspberry Pi gave it more USB ports and
a better connector for the OS flash media (mSD). All good stuff.
I have built small MPI clusters with them and noticed that I quickly
ran into problems that plague programmers of million dollar clusters that I have
worked on. The Beaglebone Black is a nice baby step forward in ARM land.
This MIPS board that started this does need to match the price and features
of the R-Pi or BBB if it is to have legs. I am a fan of the MIPS ISA but with
modern compilers the ISA is almost a don't care.
Re this MIPS board do wish it had dual+ GigE networking. I do wish it
had more DRAM. I do wish I knew more about it in detail.
Of interest the SD card, case and wall wart power supply cost as much as the
board itself. All together it costs less than most textbooks....
But golly folks do not ignore the Raspberry Pi.
Remember, penicillin is not an effective treatment for Influenza
or other viral infections. There are some secondary infections
where penicillin or another antibiotic has value BUT penicillin is
not an effective treatment for Influenza.
This Ebola thing is dangerous... it is lethal enough
and contagious enough to totally upend the health care
and economic systems of the UK, France, Germany, US,
Russia, Japan...
Most modern nations do not have infrastructure that permits
long term quarantine of all but a small handful of individuals.
Nothing in place will address the millions of travelers... stuck in
transit.
If this epidemic gets really bad, the social and economic consequences can kill a lot of people who don't even get the disease.
Given that five of the authors are dead of Ebola ....
This is really bad... and can only get worse.
I moved to Minnesota so I wouldn't have to worry about earthquakes, or tsunamis
But winters can bring their own challenges and different answers.
A frozen week is a long frozen week....
Large trash bags make windproof and rainproof emergency layers and
make taking trash away from the park easy too.
Keep that old comforter in the boot of the car and some old shoes, hat,
dry clothing handy too.
Frozen food is difficult to eat... you will need something to cook/ heat food with. Something
that does not kill you with carbon monoxide. Camping and picnic equipment makes great emergency
kit if it is maintained and has fuel.
The kit, as described, is a barely adequate 36 hour kit, for four people.
......
OK for 36 hours in america all you really need is water.
Most individuals can fast for 36 hours.
In addition a can of tuna or a can of soup needs nothing beyond
an opener and a fork or spoon to become food. If you are hungry it is just fine. If it is
not fine you are not hungry...
It gets different if you are hiking or digging through rubble.
Shelter could be high on the list for many...
A blue tarp is inexpensive.
Trash and sanitation need attention...
The superdome and katrina would have been less evil if
there were buckets on ropes and ways to just flush the crud over the
side. Sadly too many had no clue about sanitation and EXPECTED
others to clean up. This responsibility issue and an exclusion zone where
only trained first responders can play is also a disaster in and of itself.
Reach and scope of the disaster can be overlooked.
A katrina wrecks an astounding area in some cases permanently.
Politics imposes limits on rebuilding which gets manipulated
by do-gooders.
A tornado totally wrecks a narrow band that can often
be accessed by first responders in half a mile left/ right of the
swath.
A quake is a regional disaster... small medium large... ....
One lady in Napa was interviewed -- she had wine but ALL the wine
glasses in her home had been broken. This points out the fragile
chain of needs and reminds one about a king and his horse.
The area of the Napa quake is modest and lightly populated
other areas.. 50 miles south would be shit to pay disaster.
Economic resources of the area come to play.
Does the population live paycheck to paycheck (Katrina)
or is the population flush with a credit card that would
let them move to another state and a work from home
like Google and FB engineers.
So a blue tarp, water and some cans of tuna and
the first 48 hours are covered for some... More than
48 hours and it gets nasty because restoration of services
that takes longer than 36 hours quickly becomes a week
or three.
Not sure where you live, but writable blu ray was available in 2002 initially. DVD in 1997, CD in 1988. We're a little past 5 years. Thats 12 for BD, 17 for DVD, and 26 for CD. There is a wealth of data on storage life on all of them if you know where to look.
Yes,
yet there was a big deal not too long ago where DVD media began to come apart
after about five years. The rumor was that it was a manufacturing FUBAR that lasted
a couple years and impacted a lot of big name players.
I picked five years to comment because apparently the life of media has two statistical humps.
The five year one points to short term risks unknown at day one and the 12 and 17 year data gives
hope that the 40 to 100 year storage life expectation is possible. Bursts of defective media discovered
a couple years after mfg remind folk that inexpensive could be foolish.
Home users had a spate of problems in 2003 or so... if my Google foo is telling.
If they only keep one copy, how do they detect and recover from bitrot?
Or is the stuff already not really important to keep more than one copy around
Data replication is an honest question. What if a copy was kept on spinning disks
and the Blue-Ray media was backing store for spinning media.
A RAID design for the future need not have equal access times for ECC, voting
and redundancy. It only needs to be reliable and the net sum of the parts
inexpensive. Data rates on and off a single Blu-Ray are consistent with very long
distance optical fibre data rates.
If I allow myself to think of this as heterogeneous RAID hardware design it makes sense.
If I allow myself to think of this as an isolated magic solution it seems fragile.
You could have a robot unplug/plug HDs, but once you're accepting the latency of disk changes and spin-up, I imagine Blu-Ray disks would be much, much cheaper than a similar capacity of HDs.
Yes except the connectors are not rated for many disconnects and reconnects.
Hard drive media needs to spin up often. If the drive is not spun then there are
risks of the media and heads having problems. The complexity of the electronics
and component life expectancy on the drives may be less than Blu-Ray media.
There are just too many moving (active) parts in the drive to believe that media with
no moving parts has an equal MTBF value.
With deep pockets and money in the bank... this is worth a hard look.
This estimate also ignores the cost of a robotic system, powering that system, and maintanence and doesn't factor in costs for redundancy (they need two robotic systems, not one.) The whole thing is phenomenally stupid. As someone already pointed out before I got here to say the same, if you want to take data offline simply literally take it offline. Power down the friggin hard drive array completely. Power it back up when needed.
Bingo... but given the mass of data Facebook has set themselves up to store they would
do well to try a multitude of things.
And redundancy of two at this scale is not going to be sufficient.
The media will need to be organized as a RAID larger and wider
than anything folk are used to thinking about.
A read error on one disc will need to be validated by a very big ECC code
on the media and also on redundant media local and far away. Two copies
gives little voting confidence as to which is incorrect so dust off your old
HP-41 calculator and stat pack or perhaps SPSS and start working
on the numbers. Then verify and check them with Haskell and R
Big robot data systems are interesting and even dangerous as they
get bigger and faster.
Then there is the security of the OS running the robot. Stuxnet has
a lesson to be applied here. Lots of stuff spinning... .
They'd also be cheaper, even at the bulk HDD rate that FB would pay.
A quick on-line search show a spindle of fifty 50GB Blu-Ray discs (2.5 TB) retails for about $100. A 4TB HDD costs about $140. So HDD is actually cheaper per byte of storage. Maybe wholesale price ratios are way different from retail, but I see no reason to assume that. So BluRay doesn't win on price, volume, or access speed. The concerns about moisture and big temperature swings seems odd. Are Facebook data centers exposed to the weather?
Seldom used data sitting in spinning power draining disks has a continuous power cost.
Power and cooling are important data center considerations.
Facebook has an astounding pile of data in picture archives that after a couple months are
only called on once in a while if ever again.
Layers of storage from the modern very quick SSD devices to spinning rust disks to perhaps BluRay
seem to have a place when access time and space considerations come to play. I wish them luck.
One problem with BlueRay, DVD and CDROM media is the lack of data as storage beyond
five years or so. But as a physical form factor goes these little devices do have a lot of potential.
I wish them luck and wish I knew what vendor to invest in.
I happen to know a highly skilled person working as a security analist. He says his main customer for 0days is the NSA.......
Golly someone connected directly to gwolf has now been outed.
Unless you are Kim Kardashian with 23 million followers a zero
level direct connection might well be an individual name.
Further with 23 million followers for Kim; 600,000 for Robert Scoble; /. ; 42 million for B. Obama.... we are all connected within three
83,000 for
or so degrees of K Bacon
He suggests a massive company like Google or Facebook will eventually have to take up the task of making Tor scale up to millions of users.
If one of those guys gets their hands on it you can forget about using it to hide anything from the government.
"Here's some bugs we've fixed for you guys. Trust us."
Oh yeah, because the current debug team we can trust so much...
There are two parts..
* Here is the bug.
* Here is a bug fix.
The first has a lot of value in an open source community.
The second if taken with blind faith is a potential disaster.
As a pair the time window for attack can be reduced.
Gifts from the NSA are an interesting thing... Some might be triggered
because they have evidence that others have knowledge of the
flaw and are exploiting it. As the need for human intelligence
grows the need for secure communication increases from individuals
(assets) far afield. In that regard bug disclosures would be self
serving but still be quality fixes the Tor community needs.
One important point to me in terms of global security is that
"actions speak louder than words" and if the TLAs like the NSA
pay attention to global bad actors things might find clarity in contrast
to the thought police reaching out four+ degrees of connectivity
for co-conspirators (almost the entire world today)
Speaking about bad actors... our news media outlets seem to
have abandoned all attempts at quality, completeness and
truth. The web does not have time editorial limitations the way
airtime programming does and unedited content should be available.
It is not obvious how one might edit out the payment for cigars
unless the shop is a source of illegal Cubans for the local big
wigs...
Decades ago news broadcast (Walter Cronkite time frame) news
was a mandate and effectively a cost center not a profit center.
This has gone to stink with the advent of cable and broadcast
outside of the airwaves. But if the FCC can get in the middle
of net neutrality these magazine format sensation and headline
grabbing outlets could find their finances and marketing vastly different.
Well sure -- I do not know but would assert() that MS gave them a major
sales effort. Full court press perhaps with promises and discounts.
Linux is not free. It does take work and is not monolithic.
The biggest gap is one that customers of Munich must bridge
in terms of document tools, multimedia tools, codecs and
even Adobe Flash tools and development.
Having said this it is clear from the most recent blue screen
of death Tuesday updates that any critical business could find
themselves in a monster tangle with a botched patch, an aggressive
zero day attack and any number of other risks. All of which would
be worse if there was only one OS in the house.
Some might recall the old IBM executive directive that overhead
slide presentations be prepared ONLY with a typewriter and only
in black and white. The flood of artistic efforts and costs to contrive
fancier more marketing rich eye catching song and dance presentations
and production company tail wagging the dog expense was diverting
and distracting from the ability to communicate content.
Decades ago at Silicon Graphics there was a move over MAC program
to focus the company and eat your own cooking in the decision making
levels of the company. If an SGI executive could not communicate with
other parts of SGI with ONLY SGI tools customers would have the same
problem and no mater how worthy the hardware could not get the job done.
The important lesson for the world and especially the US to understand
is monoculture is a big risk as any that have looked into the Dutch Elm
disease that killed more trees than Xerox (perhaps an exaggeration).
The attack surface for computers and digital infrastructure and data should
not be in the hands of one company or one QA, or one release test group.
There are a couple of ways to divide and identify the issues and needs. /. and we could make some positive /.
There are a lot of smart people on
comments --- but hey this is
And interesting specific yet easy to detect substances
could be added to money to make it easy to track from
one place to another. Each of the 12 reserve banks could
use a unique easy to detect substance....
One step beyond serial number records... and one step
beyond ultraviolet and edge stack marks.
Listen with care...
Here my Comcast prerecorded announcement states "This conversation may be recorded
for quality assurance." I hit record and say "Thank you for permission to record this conversation
for quality assurance".
Replace "Child Porn" with "Subversive Material" and suddenly it doesn't see like such a good thing, does it?
Or, for you folks who like to "share", copyrighted movies, music, etc.
Or replace with any financial instrument bought and sold.
Remember Martha was locked up over a lost post-it note
that implied that the sale/purchase of such and such a stock
was likely profitable...
Given the interconnectivity of the modern world the vast majority
of the technical community are connected to individuals that know
or MIGHT have access to sensitive financial information.
Any recruiter or resume system that sees a bump in traffic from XYZtech
might assume trouble as the rats flee the ship. They do not even
have to mine it... it is visible.
Social issues, financial, sexual (legal), religious, emotional, medical.....
can be fabricated from real and fabricated content....
There is some trouble lurking here:
"The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) [18 U.S.C. Sections 2510-2521, 2701-2710], which was signed into law in 1986, amended the Federal Wiretap Act to account for the increasing amount of communications and data transferred and stored on computer systems. The ECPA protects against the unlawful interceptions of any wire communications--whether it's telephone or cell phone conversations, voicemail, email, and other data sent over the wires. The ECPA also includes protections for messages that are stored--email messages that are archived on servers, for instance. Now, under the law, unauthorized access to computer messages, whether in transit or in storage, is a federal crime." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
It is not clear to me that Google has the legal right to look into email beyond the notion of
presenting marketing content that lines up with a user profile and perhaps a blind data
base match against market content and marketing profiles.
Since CP is illegal no profile or other marketing activity can be sold or participated with
by Google. To me nothing in any market driven activity can generate a CP profile
and match.... the implication is that someone was buying or selling Google services
to engage in CP.
It is possible that an image was discovered and a federal warrant caused Google to
search for a match against a very specific image. The sharing of such images outside
of law enforcement may itself be illegal especially if a service to discover such an image
if Google was paid to search for it.
It is possible that an image transfer to a different suspect or legal honey pot
was detected but that should trigger a search warrant.
As others have pointed out anything seen and disliked or disliked and searched
for but not illegal could trigger a witch hunt. I know individuals that have a
visceral dislike for: Rush Limbaugh, CNN, FoX, Kate Gosselin, Jodi Arias,
Joe Arpaio and some would have inclinations to make accusations if they
thought they could get away with it.
The good thing at this moment is that I do not know enough about this
in any detail so others will have to dig into the reality.
Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now.
Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
Not once in 20. Every two years... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ebola_outbreaks
Yes the number of inflicted individuals is too small \ to trigger major financial investment.
Yes the inflicted individuals are mostly too poor to trigger major financial investment!
Yes global risk is so large most research is department of defense funded.
This is so serious and so bad a global risk I dislike thinking about it except that
the world needs to pay attention. Today the context for disease is big $$ pharma
and big $$ agriculture. This has risks so large none with $$ want to touch it
outside of some rarified well funded well secured facilities (a good thing IMO).
Consider how the EPA has extended its mandate to include the CO2 that you exhale and incur simply by eating and making a living and soon will be carbon taxing you... too. [...] Some historic "solutions" came to light January 27, 1945...
That's cute. But parody is better when it's not so exaggerated. Even the US right wing aren't stupid enough, insane enough, to go around saying that the EPA is going to tax breathing, nor invoke Nazi death camps to condemn US environmental regulations. The premise of the joke has to at least be believable.
Yes a bit of exaggeration yet the relentless move to legislate regulatory agencies that then craft regulations with the power of law is astounding.
The terrible part is that to tear down man bad regulations the entire agency must be dismantled which
does not happen for agencies that mostly do the right things.
The EPA is easy to point fingers at yet they do constantly work to extend their charter and reach.
Of interest was a bunch of EPA mandates involving rainwater runoff in Virginia. The state of Virginia
won the first batch of litigation and the EPA was pushed back. However the fact that rain water catchment
basins do not respect state boundaries. Coal does not respect state boundaries. Fumes from coal and other
fuel fired power plants does not.... Then there was the individual in Oregon that put a rain barrel between his
roof and garden. Oregon felt his roof water run off was property of the state of Oregon.
ALso, noise-cancelling technology isn't unique to, or even invented by BOSE. It's, AFAIK, a military patent.. and used in almost every modern headphone and smartphone made.
But what military?
Of interest if a military design was classified and if someone invented
the same thing how could this be litigated. In some cases the disclosure
need only be a public RFP that implies it is possible for another skilled
in the art to go and do it.
Since the secrecy order covers methods and capabilities it could be
that military hardware designs will never be used to show prior art.
FIrst rumor I heard on noise cancellation was for Israel tank communication
systems. Second was old AT&T stuff in the acoustic labs at bell labs for
navy designs.
The patent system is a closed ecosystem and if no one ever filed a patent
on something invented 2000 years ago by a Roman a patent would get issued
and used to extort funds from small players where the cost of litigation
vs. the cost of paying extortion makes the decision.
The other issue is language. Many inventions use alternative language
to isolate their filing from all others. Multiple devices to virtualize large
storage could be used and not trigger a match from a filing involving
redundant array of inexpensive disks etc...
Technical readers could discover some of these but there is no $$ in doing
it. Some large organizations involved in natural language processing might
crack this open as inventions in many nations are stolen and used
in others. This is hard but translation from IEEE publication to PartentOffice to
Chinese, Russian and more might prove to generate matches of interesting
to national security and industry in general (pick your nation... no fixed answer
is correct here).