Seconded. In my rating (OTM, which doesn't exist any longer), PO2 was about as high as you could go and still spend most of your time actually working on the gear. I definitely wasn't eager to sit at a desk and fill out PMS schedules. But we were often told, "Move up, not out." Given that those were the only choices offered, I eventually moved out.
In the Navy, curiosity can be a dangerous trait. On the one hand, I got a medal when I left one command, in part due to some of the reports I managed to coax out of the supply database. On the other hand, I later learned that the civilians at CACI were defintely less than pleased when I wrote them a letter pointing out how easily I had cracked the password security on that same supply database. You need to remember that you're in a world where the least common denominator rules, because sometimes the least common denominator is all that's left to guard against Very Bad Things.
These aren't toys any longer; they are artifacts. If you're serious about keeping your artifacts around, you need to remember this.
I volunteer at the Computer History Museum, and they're very particular about this. Wearing white cotton gloves as you pick up an old Atari joystick may seem silly, but that's the rule. There's very little information about how long plastics will last, so keep your grubby little fingers off.
The problem is that there are no complete plans for an Analytical Engine. Drawings and diagrams, yes, but nothing complete. For Difference Engine No. 2, the Science Museum had a (reasonably) complete set of plans. (They had to make a few tweaks, but they did everything they could to keep it in the spirit of the original design.)
Doron Swade's book The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the quest to build the first computer is a marvelous read; it was published in the U.K. as The Cogwheel Brain. You may have to search for it, though, because it is evidently out of print. (We have a copy from the San Jose Public Library, and they have five other copies available.)
You don't need to be overweight. I was just diagnosed with mild obstructive sleep apnea; I'm 70 inches tall and weigh 160 lbs. Supposedly your jaw construction can play a role. Since I already wear a night guard to protect my teeth from grinding away to powder, I may be able to get relief from a modified model that will adjust my jaw position.
A very simple remedy for many people is to avoid sleeping on your back. If you end up on your back while you sleep, you can try sewing a tennis-ball-sized pocket into the back of a t-shirt. Insert tennis ball before going to sleep, and you probably won't end up on your back very often. (Note that I haven't tried this myself -- yet.)
There are other sleep disorders besides apnea. Periodic Limb Movement Disorder looks pretty funny on a polysomnogram. Think "repeating at regular intervals" when you see the word "periodic," and "lasting for two hours" when you see the word "disorder", and you may get a sense of things. I didn't think my body could tell time that accurately, but the doctor joked that you could set your watch by it.
We had an art show in San Jose recently (last year?) where an artist created something similar. It looked a bit like the monolith from 2001, but it had an array of IR LEDs on its face. If you looked at it using a digital camera viewscreen, you could see what was going on. Without this mediation, it was just a black block. Neat idea.
I think George Carlin speculated that humanity's purpose is
to create Styrofoam(tm). The Earth needs it for some obscure
reason, and it couldn't make it itself.
"This would reduce physical fatigue so longer watches could be maintained."
I "stood" 12-hour watches mostly sitting behind a desk, working on the occasional equipment problem. (Ocean Systems Technician (Maintenance), for those who remember....) I can speak from experience that mental fatigue is the primary issue, especially when the watch runs overnight. By the time it's over, you're not nearly as effective.
I agree with the grandfather post: A larger crew means redundancy, especially in a combat situation where you may need to perform damage control and still keep hitting the enemy. An SK (Storekeeper) may not be flinging ordnance around, but he/she has eyes, hands, and a brain and can still do plenty of stuff a computer can't.
When it comes to keeping a multibillion dollar/pound/euro piece of metal off the ocean floor, cutting down on crew sounds like false economy.
I'd modify your assertion to say that a compromise of your raw biometric info is impossible to undo. I read an article recently in IEEE Spectrum about methods for hashing the stored information.
I don't have a citation handy, and I'm not even sure it's publicly available. As I recall, the particular method involved applying a programmable distortion to the image (e.g. fingerprint). Store the distorted pattern as the biometric, and then apply the same transform at the reader to check for a match.
Then, in the event of a compromise, the attacker only has the distorted pattern. If the distortion is one-way, it's difficult to reconstruct the original pattern. The distortion algorithm can be changed if people conclude it's insecure.
There are doubtless issues this article didn't cover, but I think there's some hope here.
I've been thinking about this recently, since I
spent about 15 hours (on and off) restoring my
mother-in-law's computer after a hard disk crash.
I put Norton Ghost 10.0 on her WinXP system, with automated backups to an external USB hard drive. I'm thinking of switching this to an internal drive, since the current situation requires that she leave the external drive plugged in all the time.
Ghost's advantage is its ability to restore the entire disk structure. I don't think I would trust a file-based backup for a full system restore. (I think file-based backup is fine for critical data.) Since 10.x allows for incremental images, you don't have bunches of huge files sitting around.
(I should point out that I have never actually had to restore from a Ghost backup, so I can't comment on its speed, usability, or quality in that regard.)
Ghost can also backup to a network drive. You could create a centralized server whose sole job is to act as a backup repository. If you aren't too concerned about the archive trail, you probably don't need RAID. If the system fails, you lose all of your backups, but you still have your source computers.
Now if your house burns down, then you have problems. Use file-based backup to put your critical files onto something you can send off-site. Whole-system restore may not be necessary in this case.
I wear reading glasses while using the computer,
and it helps a lot.
My vision absolutely stinks. I wear contact
lenses of about -8.5. I don't recall how this
translates to the old 20/whatever, but without
correction, I have to have my eyes about 4 inches
from what I need to read.
I blame a combination of bad genes and poor
reading habits. I spent a lot of time reading books
at a range of about 1 foot (perhaps less). My vision
started going bad about age 7. I was in bifocals only
a few years later, but I didn't really use them
correctly. Things just kept getting worse.
Twelve years ago, at about age 25, my optometrist
suggested I start using reading glasses for close in
work. The theory was that he was correcting my
distance vision, but I did so much close-in work that
my eyes adjusted for the preferred distance. Lather,
rinse, repeat.
I've been using reading glasses in the +1 or
+2 range since then, and my vision has proven
remarkably stable. (I have custom lenses, rather than
the standard drug-store variety, in part because I
have some astigmatism.) It definitely reduces the
strain on my eyes; forgetting my glasses at home
makes for a moderately unpleasant day.
Maybe I should try one of these "eye exercise"
therapies, but I worry that my eyes are just too far
gone. (How can I focus on distant objects when
anything beyond 6 inches is a blur?) My son (now 14)
doesn't have any need for glasses, but he spends a
lot more time outside than I ever did.
To restate: Consider reading glasses for close-in
work if this takes up a large part of your day. Also
consider getting more sleep and varying your
activities.
Dr. Moira Gunn (host of
"Tech
Nation"
on NPR) asserted that listening to an
audio book is not as distracting as
talking on a cell phone. She was recommending
audio books as a means of decreasing stress,
so she said nothing about the basis for her
assertion.
I listen to audio books and/or NPR while
riding my bicycle or driving to work. I don't
find it distracting, but perhaps I am a poor
judge. But I don't blow
through stop signs or traffic signals (plenty
of other bicyclists without headphones
do this), I keep one ear uncovered, and no one
has hit me yet.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I was
part of the group that developed the chipset for
the first Superdome systems (PA-RISC). I'm
probably a little biased.
A 64-way Superdome system is spread across
sixteen plug-in system boards.
(Imagine two refrigerators next to each other;
it really is that big.) A partition is made up
of one or more system boards. Within a partition,
each processor has all of the installed memory
in its address space. The chipset handled the
details of getting cache blocks back and forth
among the system boards.
That's a huge amount of memory to
have by direct access. Access is pretty fast,
too.
Still, they were doubtless pretty expensive.
HP-UX didn't allow for on-the-fly changes to
partitions, but the chipset supports it. (The
OS always lagged a bit behind. We built a chip
to allow going above 64-way, but the OS just
couldn't support it. A moral victory.) Perhaps
Linux could get that support in place a little
more quickly....
I received the following book for
Christmas:
Failure to Connect: How Computes Affect Our
Children's Minds -- and What We Can Do About
It by Jane M. Healy (ISBN 0-684-85539-9).
I put it on my "Books to Get" list a long time
ago for reasons that escape me now, apart from
general interest.
I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you
what I think of it. Still, you might have a
look.
In his novel 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserted/speculated that one petabyte would be sufficient space to store a lifetime's memories. (He didn't say if this was compressed.)
So, assuming you can handle the trivial exercise of transferring your memories (the implementation of which is left as an exercise for the reader), immortality is yours for the buying!
Transfer memories to Petabox. Sign with your public key, so everyone knows it's you. Don't encrypt!
Put Petabox in shipping container, along with retrieval instructions in English, Esperanto, and Chinese (to cover your bases).
Bury shipping container in Yucca Mountain. (It's unlikely to ever see any nuclear waste, and it'd be a shame to waste the space.)
Kill yourself.
Wait for a society (a) advanced enough to restore you and (b) rich enough to bother.
Regarding a robot rights movement - hopefully we will protect the integrity of our robots. Don't we as humans have a responsibility to use our robots properly and not to misuse or abuse them and shouldn't there be laws in place for those who don't?
I have been thinking along similar lines, off and on. Seems to me that we need to start thinking about our responsibilities toward our creations. If we don't, we will be woefully unprepared when/if we do manage to create something "alive."
Since the movie AI came up, I can point to one of the "Supertoys" stories on which the movie was based. There was a town (for lack of a better word) full of cast-off robots and devices. Everything was given the opportunity to perform its designed task, even if it wasn't particularly efficient. Wasteful of energy, perhaps, but I found it somehow noble.
So I try not to throw away things that can be fixed. My wife and I are in agreement that, once you fix something, you're emotionally invested in it. My 14-year-old CD player, her tape-based answering machine.... How could we even think of getting rid of them? Romantic, I know, but it's fun, too.
And I dislike "BattleBots"-style contests. It's wasteful, and it doesn't show appropriate respect. I'd rather see people devote their energies toward non-violent robot contests (and, of course, re-use as much of the last robot as is practical).
(Believers in evolution should have fun explaining why traits that are more pro-survival are recessive than those that are not.)
Sounds like a troll, but I feel like stepping on a soapbox...
Traits are "pro-survival" only in context. My awful vision would be an extreme deficit if I couldn't get corrective lenses. In 21st-century America, however, it's pretty well a null issue. Thanks to contact lenses, it isn't even a social issue. I can pass it along to my offspring without fear.
Blight resistance sounds like a marvelous trait, but suppose it always expresses itself in concert with diminished yield? When there's blight, at least some of your crops can produce. Outside of blight, you want this to recede into the background.
That's as close as I can come right now to a "why" explanation. The trouble with asking "why" is that evolution isn't required to have a purpose. It's a process that has produced good results throughout the life of our planet. (Good from our point of view, at any rate. Anaerobic bacteria might beg to differ, but they appear to have found niches of their own.)
The person who does our taxes didn't even ask about this, to my recollection. We filed our return a while ago, with that line at "0", and we have even received our refund.
But I've been thinking about it for the past few weeks, thinking about it hard enough to sift through Quicken, identify most of our out-of-state transactions (I doubt I found them all, but I got the big ones), and figure out how much tax we owe for them. It helps (or hinders, depending on your point of view) that I save just about every receipt I get my hands on.
The total bill is about $130. I pride myself on following the rules. Is my self-respect worth $130? Yes.
(As a Navy sailor, I once had to fill out a report on a part we were sending back for repair. I said the part was broken because I had dropped it on the floor. Both my supervisor and CPO thought I was stupid for telling the truth; they said I could get hauled up in front of the C.O. and ordered to pay for it myself. This would have been about $2000. I said my self-respect was worth at least that much. I never heard anything more about it, but I suspect that's partly because no one ever read the reports.)
Now I'm just trying to figure out if I should tell my wife. I handle the finances, so it's unlikely she'd find out on her own. Does it matter?
One other possibility for your second list: The vandal determined that the SCO server is vulnerable to a SYN flood and made use of that knowledge. I have no direct knowledge on these matters, but I suspect it's easier to set up a SYN flood attack than something more subtle.
Why spend time jimmying the back window if the door is open?
I thought the military was moving away from using your SSN as your ID number. I recall reading about some unknown smarty-pants who obtained several high-ranking officers' SSNs from the Congressional Record. (High-ranking officers are promoted by acts of Congress.)
I was in the Navy (enlisted) for almost six years. The exchange and commissary used to insist that we put our SSNs on checks, fer cryin out loud....
Except a couple of young kids choked on the little plastic pieces, so the toy maker altered them so they wouldn't go anywhere. They'd just go "poot!" and stick out about a quarter of an inch.
I think my brother had the nifty idea to take apart my Deep Space Probe (I think that was the name, but I never saw such a ship in the series). We found that if you filed off some little nubbins, they'd operate the same as the earlier toys.
Were that to happen today, could we be charged with "circumventing a protection device" under the DMCA?
You missed something: The article said the data included records for politicians and judges, too.
Hmm.... I can see some interesting wrinkles here:
If said crackers mess up the lives of a bunch of CA politicians, will we get better laws, or worse?
If the affected employees file a class-action lawsuit against someone (like, let's say, a company that shipped a product with a gaping security hole), won't any California judge have a conflict of interest?
I haven't seen anyone mention this, perhaps because I only went down to level 1: Wasn't there a remake of The Time Machine done in the 1970s?
No, I'm not talking about Time After Time. I mean The Time Machine: travel into the far future, Eloi, Morlocks, etc. I saw the first part of the movie on television, but I couldn't see the end because I had to go to bed. (Being seven or eight years old, you're often forced to abide by silly rules.) Here's what I recall:
The Time Traveller is a researcher for a company called (I think) Meta Corporation. He apparently has had free enough rein to build the time machine on company time. (Must've been something like HP Labs....)
TT's higher-ups are pressuring him to work on some sort of death ray, but he doesn't particularly favor the idea.
The time machine is very angular. How to describe it.... The base is a triangle, and the back (behind the saddle) is a triangle.
Travelling fast through time looks a lot like the Star Gate sequence of 2001. (Maybe I'm confused on this point. Forgive me. It was, what, twenty-five years ago?)
When TT visits the museum, he finds a scale model of Meta Corporation's death ray, built by... him!
Weena is captured by Morlocks and taken Down Below. TT follows, discovers Eloi clothing, and deduces that the Morlocks find Eloi tasty.
I had to go to bed, so I didn't see anything more.
I bought the book shortly thereafter. Even at that age, I could tell that things didn't quite match up. It didn't matter: I was entranced, particularly by Wells' description of the dying earth. His words painted the picture so well, I could see it:
As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal -- there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing -- against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about.
The last living thing on Earth? That's what I thought, and the image has stayed with me since. (I typed in the above quote from that very book. Its front cover has a picture from the 1960s version, which I didn't see until several years later. Big disapointment; I thought I was going to see the ending I had missed.)
I don't think I'll be seeing this latest remake; some books just can't be translated to the big screen. But could someone please tell me they've seen the 1970s version? I'd like to believe it wasn't just a dream....
At work, we use an application called Synchronize. It's a scheduling tool; you have your personal calendar, and you can set up meetings with others, make reminders and "to do" lists, etc. Especially nice for us is its wide range of front ends; we use HP-UX and Windows, and the Web site says they have others.
So we have an X-Windows client (Motif, actually) connecting to a server that must use some type of relational database. Application code is a given. What else do we need?
The date, young one, the date! Hmm.... Well, we weren't using it in 1991, according to one old-timer. However, I submit two data points:
The HP-UX client's "about" box says " Copyright 1989-1999".
The company's Web site says "Since 1990, enterprises of all sizes have relied on Synchronize...."
Not conclusive, I admit, but intriguing. Ask the company! It's in their own self-interest to cooperate, since it would appear they're in violation of this patent.
CrossWind Technologies
140 DuBois Street, Suite D
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Tel:(831) 469-1780 http://www.crosswind.com
Part of the problem is that the opt-out isn't forever. I have a cron job running that alerts me when my DoubleClick cookie changes away from OPT_OUT. I think I get at least one hit a week; when I look, the cookie has changed from "OPT_OUT" to "A".
What's happening here? I've heard that client-side Javascript can change cookies, and that some sites use older scripts that don't know about OPT_OUT. Regardless of why it's happening, the important this is that it does happen.
So why "A"? Probably just a bug in the script. I haven't let it sit around to see what happens to it; I just flip it back ASAP.
My solution is slightly kludgy. I have two Perl scripts:
The first prunes my cookie file of any entries with suffixes I haven't specified.
The second resets my DoubleClick cookie to OPT_OUT and randomizes my Preferences.com cookie. (They have no opt-out.)
I'd like to run this at least once a day, but I have two problems:
I run an HP-UX workstation that doesn't require rebooting.
Netscape doesn't crash that often, so I'd have to shut it down to change its cookies.
(Okay, these are "problems" only in relation to the issue at hand.)
So right now, I run the scripts when I get warned that my DoubleClick cookie has changed. As I said, that usually means at least once per week. Not ideal, but I can live with it.
I am an engineer; or, at least, I pretend to be one most of the day. I help design chipsets for high-end systems.
Yes, we provide some margin when we set operating frequencies. But we spend an awful lot of time determining the operating boundaries. The word "estimate" doesn't give the full flavor of what we do.
I'm not going to provide details, because they're probably confidential. But I will say this: We know the voltage/frequency/temperature points at which our chips stop working properly. And it's in our interests to push the frequency as high as it will go.
Call me a wimp. Go ahead. But I don't overclock my system, and I definitely wouldn't overclock anyone else's.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconded. In my rating (OTM, which doesn't exist any longer), PO2 was about as high as you could go and still spend most of your time actually working on the gear. I definitely wasn't eager to sit at a desk and fill out PMS schedules. But we were often told, "Move up, not out." Given that those were the only choices offered, I eventually moved out.
In the Navy, curiosity can be a dangerous trait. On the one hand, I got a medal when I left one command, in part due to some of the reports I managed to coax out of the supply database. On the other hand, I later learned that the civilians at CACI were defintely less than pleased when I wrote them a letter pointing out how easily I had cracked the password security on that same supply database. You need to remember that you're in a world where the least common denominator rules, because sometimes the least common denominator is all that's left to guard against Very Bad Things.
These aren't toys any longer; they are artifacts. If you're serious about keeping your artifacts around, you need to remember this.
I volunteer at the Computer History Museum, and they're very particular about this. Wearing white cotton gloves as you pick up an old Atari joystick may seem silly, but that's the rule. There's very little information about how long plastics will last, so keep your grubby little fingers off.
The problem is that there are no complete plans for an Analytical Engine. Drawings and diagrams, yes, but nothing complete. For Difference Engine No. 2, the Science Museum had a (reasonably) complete set of plans. (They had to make a few tweaks, but they did everything they could to keep it in the spirit of the original design.)
Doron Swade's book The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the quest to build the first computer is a marvelous read; it was published in the U.K. as The Cogwheel Brain. You may have to search for it, though, because it is evidently out of print. (We have a copy from the San Jose Public Library, and they have five other copies available.)
Can't wait to see it running!
You don't need to be overweight. I was just diagnosed with mild obstructive sleep apnea; I'm 70 inches tall and weigh 160 lbs. Supposedly your jaw construction can play a role. Since I already wear a night guard to protect my teeth from grinding away to powder, I may be able to get relief from a modified model that will adjust my jaw position.
A very simple remedy for many people is to avoid sleeping on your back. If you end up on your back while you sleep, you can try sewing a tennis-ball-sized pocket into the back of a t-shirt. Insert tennis ball before going to sleep, and you probably won't end up on your back very often. (Note that I haven't tried this myself -- yet.)
There are other sleep disorders besides apnea. Periodic Limb Movement Disorder looks pretty funny on a polysomnogram. Think "repeating at regular intervals" when you see the word "periodic," and "lasting for two hours" when you see the word "disorder", and you may get a sense of things. I didn't think my body could tell time that accurately, but the doctor joked that you could set your watch by it.
We had an art show in San Jose recently (last year?) where an artist created something similar. It looked a bit like the monolith from 2001, but it had an array of IR LEDs on its face. If you looked at it using a digital camera viewscreen, you could see what was going on. Without this mediation, it was just a black block. Neat idea.
I think George Carlin speculated that humanity's purpose is to create Styrofoam(tm). The Earth needs it for some obscure reason, and it couldn't make it itself.
"This would reduce physical fatigue so longer watches could be maintained."
I "stood" 12-hour watches mostly sitting behind a desk, working on the occasional equipment problem. (Ocean Systems Technician (Maintenance), for those who remember....) I can speak from experience that mental fatigue is the primary issue, especially when the watch runs overnight. By the time it's over, you're not nearly as effective.
I agree with the grandfather post: A larger crew means redundancy, especially in a combat situation where you may need to perform damage control and still keep hitting the enemy. An SK (Storekeeper) may not be flinging ordnance around, but he/she has eyes, hands, and a brain and can still do plenty of stuff a computer can't.
When it comes to keeping a multibillion dollar/pound/euro piece of metal off the ocean floor, cutting down on crew sounds like false economy.
I'd modify your assertion to say that a compromise of your raw biometric info is impossible to undo. I read an article recently in IEEE Spectrum about methods for hashing the stored information.
I don't have a citation handy, and I'm not even sure it's publicly available. As I recall, the particular method involved applying a programmable distortion to the image (e.g. fingerprint). Store the distorted pattern as the biometric, and then apply the same transform at the reader to check for a match.
Then, in the event of a compromise, the attacker only has the distorted pattern. If the distortion is one-way, it's difficult to reconstruct the original pattern. The distortion algorithm can be changed if people conclude it's insecure.
There are doubtless issues this article didn't cover, but I think there's some hope here.
I've been thinking about this recently, since I spent about 15 hours (on and off) restoring my mother-in-law's computer after a hard disk crash.
I put Norton Ghost 10.0 on her WinXP system, with automated backups to an external USB hard drive. I'm thinking of switching this to an internal drive, since the current situation requires that she leave the external drive plugged in all the time.
Ghost's advantage is its ability to restore the entire disk structure. I don't think I would trust a file-based backup for a full system restore. (I think file-based backup is fine for critical data.) Since 10.x allows for incremental images, you don't have bunches of huge files sitting around.
(I should point out that I have never actually had to restore from a Ghost backup, so I can't comment on its speed, usability, or quality in that regard.)
Ghost can also backup to a network drive. You could create a centralized server whose sole job is to act as a backup repository. If you aren't too concerned about the archive trail, you probably don't need RAID. If the system fails, you lose all of your backups, but you still have your source computers.
Now if your house burns down, then you have problems. Use file-based backup to put your critical files onto something you can send off-site. Whole-system restore may not be necessary in this case.
I wear reading glasses while using the computer, and it helps a lot.
My vision absolutely stinks. I wear contact lenses of about -8.5. I don't recall how this translates to the old 20/whatever, but without correction, I have to have my eyes about 4 inches from what I need to read.
I blame a combination of bad genes and poor reading habits. I spent a lot of time reading books at a range of about 1 foot (perhaps less). My vision started going bad about age 7. I was in bifocals only a few years later, but I didn't really use them correctly. Things just kept getting worse.
Twelve years ago, at about age 25, my optometrist suggested I start using reading glasses for close in work. The theory was that he was correcting my distance vision, but I did so much close-in work that my eyes adjusted for the preferred distance. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I've been using reading glasses in the +1 or +2 range since then, and my vision has proven remarkably stable. (I have custom lenses, rather than the standard drug-store variety, in part because I have some astigmatism.) It definitely reduces the strain on my eyes; forgetting my glasses at home makes for a moderately unpleasant day.
Maybe I should try one of these "eye exercise" therapies, but I worry that my eyes are just too far gone. (How can I focus on distant objects when anything beyond 6 inches is a blur?) My son (now 14) doesn't have any need for glasses, but he spends a lot more time outside than I ever did.
To restate: Consider reading glasses for close-in work if this takes up a large part of your day. Also consider getting more sleep and varying your activities.
Just today, I listened to an episode of "The California Report" where this topic was mentioned as an aside.
Dr. Moira Gunn (host of "Tech Nation" on NPR) asserted that listening to an audio book is not as distracting as talking on a cell phone. She was recommending audio books as a means of decreasing stress, so she said nothing about the basis for her assertion.
I listen to audio books and/or NPR while riding my bicycle or driving to work. I don't find it distracting, but perhaps I am a poor judge. But I don't blow through stop signs or traffic signals (plenty of other bicyclists without headphones do this), I keep one ear uncovered, and no one has hit me yet.
Take this with a grain of salt, because I was part of the group that developed the chipset for the first Superdome systems (PA-RISC). I'm probably a little biased.
A 64-way Superdome system is spread across sixteen plug-in system boards. (Imagine two refrigerators next to each other; it really is that big.) A partition is made up of one or more system boards. Within a partition, each processor has all of the installed memory in its address space. The chipset handled the details of getting cache blocks back and forth among the system boards.
That's a huge amount of memory to have by direct access. Access is pretty fast, too.
Still, they were doubtless pretty expensive. HP-UX didn't allow for on-the-fly changes to partitions, but the chipset supports it. (The OS always lagged a bit behind. We built a chip to allow going above 64-way, but the OS just couldn't support it. A moral victory.) Perhaps Linux could get that support in place a little more quickly....
I received the following book for Christmas: Failure to Connect: How Computes Affect Our Children's Minds -- and What We Can Do About It by Jane M. Healy (ISBN 0-684-85539-9). I put it on my "Books to Get" list a long time ago for reasons that escape me now, apart from general interest.
I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you what I think of it. Still, you might have a look.
In his novel 3001 Arthur C. Clarke asserted/speculated that one petabyte would be sufficient space to store a lifetime's memories. (He didn't say if this was compressed.)
So, assuming you can handle the trivial exercise of transferring your memories (the implementation of which is left as an exercise for the reader), immortality is yours for the buying!
Regarding a robot rights movement - hopefully we will protect the integrity of our robots. Don't we as humans have a responsibility to use our robots properly and not to misuse or abuse them and shouldn't there be laws in place for those who don't?
I have been thinking along similar lines, off and on. Seems to me that we need to start thinking about our responsibilities toward our creations. If we don't, we will be woefully unprepared when/if we do manage to create something "alive."
Since the movie AI came up, I can point to one of the "Supertoys" stories on which the movie was based. There was a town (for lack of a better word) full of cast-off robots and devices. Everything was given the opportunity to perform its designed task, even if it wasn't particularly efficient. Wasteful of energy, perhaps, but I found it somehow noble.
So I try not to throw away things that can be fixed. My wife and I are in agreement that, once you fix something, you're emotionally invested in it. My 14-year-old CD player, her tape-based answering machine.... How could we even think of getting rid of them? Romantic, I know, but it's fun, too.
And I dislike "BattleBots"-style contests. It's wasteful, and it doesn't show appropriate respect. I'd rather see people devote their energies toward non-violent robot contests (and, of course, re-use as much of the last robot as is practical).
(Believers in evolution should have fun explaining why traits that are more pro-survival are recessive than those that are not.)
Sounds like a troll, but I feel like stepping on a soapbox...
Traits are "pro-survival" only in context. My awful vision would be an extreme deficit if I couldn't get corrective lenses. In 21st-century America, however, it's pretty well a null issue. Thanks to contact lenses, it isn't even a social issue. I can pass it along to my offspring without fear.
Blight resistance sounds like a marvelous trait, but suppose it always expresses itself in concert with diminished yield? When there's blight, at least some of your crops can produce. Outside of blight, you want this to recede into the background.
That's as close as I can come right now to a "why" explanation. The trouble with asking "why" is that evolution isn't required to have a purpose. It's a process that has produced good results throughout the life of our planet. (Good from our point of view, at any rate. Anaerobic bacteria might beg to differ, but they appear to have found niches of their own.)
I'm gritting away....
The person who does our taxes didn't even ask about this, to my recollection. We filed our return a while ago, with that line at "0", and we have even received our refund.
But I've been thinking about it for the past few weeks, thinking about it hard enough to sift through Quicken, identify most of our out-of-state transactions (I doubt I found them all, but I got the big ones), and figure out how much tax we owe for them. It helps (or hinders, depending on your point of view) that I save just about every receipt I get my hands on.
The total bill is about $130. I pride myself on following the rules. Is my self-respect worth $130? Yes.
(As a Navy sailor, I once had to fill out a report on a part we were sending back for repair. I said the part was broken because I had dropped it on the floor. Both my supervisor and CPO thought I was stupid for telling the truth; they said I could get hauled up in front of the C.O. and ordered to pay for it myself. This would have been about $2000. I said my self-respect was worth at least that much. I never heard anything more about it, but I suspect that's partly because no one ever read the reports.)
Now I'm just trying to figure out if I should tell my wife. I handle the finances, so it's unlikely she'd find out on her own. Does it matter?
One other possibility for your second list: The vandal determined that the SCO server is vulnerable to a SYN flood and made use of that knowledge. I have no direct knowledge on these matters, but I suspect it's easier to set up a SYN flood attack than something more subtle.
Why spend time jimmying the back window if the door is open?
I thought the military was moving away from using your SSN as your ID number. I recall reading about some unknown smarty-pants who obtained several high-ranking officers' SSNs from the Congressional Record. (High-ranking officers are promoted by acts of Congress.)
I was in the Navy (enlisted) for almost six years. The exchange and commissary used to insist that we put our SSNs on checks, fer cryin out loud....
Except a couple of young kids choked on the little plastic pieces, so the toy maker altered them so they wouldn't go anywhere. They'd just go "poot!" and stick out about a quarter of an inch.
I think my brother had the nifty idea to take apart my Deep Space Probe (I think that was the name, but I never saw such a ship in the series). We found that if you filed off some little nubbins, they'd operate the same as the earlier toys.
Were that to happen today, could we be charged with "circumventing a protection device" under the DMCA?
You missed something: The article said the data included records for politicians and judges, too.
Hmm.... I can see some interesting wrinkles here:
I haven't seen anyone mention this, perhaps because I only went down to level 1: Wasn't there a remake of The Time Machine done in the 1970s?
No, I'm not talking about Time After Time. I mean The Time Machine: travel into the far future, Eloi, Morlocks, etc. I saw the first part of the movie on television, but I couldn't see the end because I had to go to bed. (Being seven or eight years old, you're often forced to abide by silly rules.) Here's what I recall:
I bought the book shortly thereafter. Even at that age, I could tell that things didn't quite match up. It didn't matter: I was entranced, particularly by Wells' description of the dying earth. His words painted the picture so well, I could see it:
The last living thing on Earth? That's what I thought, and the image has stayed with me since. (I typed in the above quote from that very book. Its front cover has a picture from the 1960s version, which I didn't see until several years later. Big disapointment; I thought I was going to see the ending I had missed.)
I don't think I'll be seeing this latest remake; some books just can't be translated to the big screen. But could someone please tell me they've seen the 1970s version? I'd like to believe it wasn't just a dream....
Maybe, just maybe....
At work, we use an application called Synchronize. It's a scheduling tool; you have your personal calendar, and you can set up meetings with others, make reminders and "to do" lists, etc. Especially nice for us is its wide range of front ends; we use HP-UX and Windows, and the Web site says they have others.
So we have an X-Windows client (Motif, actually) connecting to a server that must use some type of relational database. Application code is a given. What else do we need?
The date, young one, the date! Hmm.... Well, we weren't using it in 1991, according to one old-timer. However, I submit two data points:
Not conclusive, I admit, but intriguing. Ask the company! It's in their own self-interest to cooperate, since it would appear they're in violation of this patent.
CrossWind Technologies
140 DuBois Street, Suite D
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Tel:(831) 469-1780
http://www.crosswind.com
Hope this proves useful.
Eric Petrich
Part of the problem is that the opt-out isn't forever. I have a cron job running that alerts me when my DoubleClick cookie changes away from OPT_OUT. I think I get at least one hit a week; when I look, the cookie has changed from "OPT_OUT" to "A".
What's happening here? I've heard that client-side Javascript can change cookies, and that some sites use older scripts that don't know about OPT_OUT. Regardless of why it's happening, the important this is that it does happen.
So why "A"? Probably just a bug in the script. I haven't let it sit around to see what happens to it; I just flip it back ASAP.
My solution is slightly kludgy. I have two Perl scripts:
I'd like to run this at least once a day, but I have two problems:
(Okay, these are "problems" only in relation to the issue at hand.)
So right now, I run the scripts when I get warned that my DoubleClick cookie has changed. As I said, that usually means at least once per week. Not ideal, but I can live with it.
Do you know any engineers?
I am an engineer; or, at least, I pretend to be one most of the day. I help design chipsets for high-end systems.
Yes, we provide some margin when we set operating frequencies. But we spend an awful lot of time determining the operating boundaries. The word "estimate" doesn't give the full flavor of what we do.
I'm not going to provide details, because they're probably confidential. But I will say this: We know the voltage/frequency/temperature points at which our chips stop working properly. And it's in our interests to push the frequency as high as it will go.
Call me a wimp. Go ahead. But I don't overclock my system, and I definitely wouldn't overclock anyone else's.