This won't handle all my web site needs, but it might be a good supplement. Thanks. I'll probably go with the Perl version as it seems simple (one file) and doesn't need Tomcat (I'm just running Apache and an HTTP daemon of my own). I don't know Perl programming, but it doesn't seem to need any programmer changes. We'll see if it works until my suexec security setup.
Generating web page output from content description does involve text/string manipulation. That came from the question about whether people still edit by hand or use content management. I do both because I haven't found something suitable to use instead. The content management is simple stuff, though; pages are generated from "meta content". The web server sees them as static, though. They get updated when stuff changes.
C actually is a good way to manipulate strings. It's just not done the way you might think if you didn't learn assembly or C first and spend a lot of time with it. If you don't want to use C, that's your choice. If you know Perl a lot better than C, of course Perl would be the quickest way to be done on your next project, rather than learn C. For me, it's the other way around. I've been doing assembly since 1972 and C since 1982. It works for me.
And it is common for topics to drift further and further from the original as threads go deeper on Slashdot. Live with it or move on to another thread.
I still edit static web pages, if what you mean is the construction of the page layout and design. I even code HTML directly in most cases because I had to learn HTML since various HTML creator programs are still too limited to be able to do everything.
If you mean hand building the navigational layout, how the hell is some CMS program gonna know what I want? So you probably mean whether I actually put the navigational elements in the pages or just specify them somewhere else and let the pages be built for me. So far I haven't seen a CMS system that doesn't suck, so I either do build them by hand (if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself), or in a few cases, I write programs to do it (and usually in C though some now in in Pike).
Show me a CMS system that's easy to use (can be used w/o a GUI, too), generates pages that do NOT have query strings (e.g. the junk after a "?"), uses decent names for URLs (not a bunch of coded numbers), and does not require a database.
But all that is for my own web sites I host on my own web servers. For public home page websites, like GeoCities, MySpace, or GooglePages, some kind of web based creation tool is essential, given the otherwise vast diversity of environments the tools would have to work in. There, of course, a database is needed. But that would be a highly custom CMS. I'm not running a public home page site, and am damned glad I'm not. I wouldn't want to be so limited.
Still, some nice free JavaScript that implements web interfaces might be interesting. Maybe I should go look for some (never have even looked before).
... right here on page 17, section 2, paragraph 5, in the 2nd sentence, of our service agreement contract. You signed it. You opted out. We could only assume that you really wanted to receive pre-screened financial offers from our partners. If you didn't want to agree to this, you shouldn't have signed the agreement.
... I do have this eye condition where my eyes focus differently in different colors. Where normal vision would see a white dot on a black background, when that dot is made up of 3 narrow band colors, what I see are 3 separate dots. They aren't too far apart, although the blue one is out of focus and fuzzy. When reading white text on a black background, I get a mix of colors. I can read it, but it causes eyestrain. Reversing that to black text on white background makes it easier on my eyes. That's how I'm typing on Slashdot right now. Every character I type has fuzzy color edges to it... red on the left and bottom, blue on the top, green on the right, and yellow below the red on the bottom.
I deal with this in a number of ways. Since I do most of my programming, system administration, and network administration via the text mode console in Linux, I just change the colors there to better suit my needs. By making the contrast between foreground color and background color limited to a single color, where the other 2 colors have the same intensity between foreground and background, I can read text easily with no eyestrain for hours. So in that sense I'm taking care of myself, and I'm lucky enough to not be disabled in a way that prevents me from managing to do that from the starting point that's designed specifically for normal vision people.
That said, there are still some troubling issues that people need to be aware of and sensitive to. There are a few programs that operate in a text environment (can run on console, or under xterm, etc) that intentionally alter the color environment, and screw up my color setup. It needs to be possible to disable that. In one program I was trying, which erased all my color maps and substituted the defaults, someone suggested the monochrome option it had. In that mode it still erased all my color maps, and then showed me only white text on black background. That didn't actually help at all. What I need is for programs to either leave my colors alone, or at least provide an option (documented in the man page... yes, I read those) to turn that off. And by "off" I don't mean not to use different color text for highlighting, I mean just don't alter my color maps.
It's worse in X. Not all the colors can be changed in one place. Each application has its own separate configuration for colors. It would help if there was a standardized place for all applications to check for color preferences and at least use them by default. And web pages are a bit worse because each web site, if it can even be changed at all, has to be changed separately. It's getting a tad bit better with more widespread use of style sheets and such.
I also have to be sensitive to the fact that there is a wide range of possible disabilities or just difficulties (what I classify my condition as) and that program developers just can't easily envision, or certainly can't readily test, how their software deals with all the possible needs of different users. I'm sure stuff I've written might be difficult or impossible to use by some others depending on their disability. But the better we can communicate between developers and users, the more we can both improve usability.
This condition I have is only a problem when the light sources are made up of discrete narrowband colors. A broad continuous spectrum doesn't really cause the problem because it just makes things a tiny bit fuzzy in a smooth way that is easy to focus on. Sunlight is almost perfectly continuous. Incandescent light bulbs are also just as good. This condition doesn't affect my ability to actually see; it merely causes stress and eyestrain when the conditions are worse. One of the worst things for me are fluorescent lights. Then everything I look at under that lighting has the problem. White LEDs are no better. Ironically, those orange-peach colored high pressure sodium lamps often used on streets and parking lots don't cause me any problems at all (though they ca
I think he was taking issue with what I said implying that hackers would not be able to crack the software unless the information is posted on slashdot. I could have worded it better. Hackers probably have already cracked it. It's just that we don't have a name of the product, yet, to associate what cracks are available in this particular case. But in the unlikly case it hasn't been cracked, yet, knowing that so many networks will be running it with Domain Administrator access will just make it doubly attractive to crack.
DRM is not for preventing piracy. Piracy is just being used as the whipping boy to try to justify DRM and the DMCA law. They know they can't defeat piracy because it takes a system that is locked absolutely 100% perfectly, and that just can't exist. Instead, the purpose of DRM is to provide the content industry with a means to restrict things in specific ways so you have to pay them more to get what you previously enjoyed for one price before. DRM doesn't do everything the content industry wants, just yet, but they will continue to use the existance of piracy to keep asking for more DRM (Digital Restriction Marketing, or Doubling Revenues Monthly, depending on which side you are on). Eventually you'll have to pay-per-view on the disks you actually buy. And then after that, they'll charge you for even doing things like rewinding to replay an interesting scene. You'll see more advertising that you can't skip, eventually even embedded in the middle of the movie. And later, that advertising will even require you to click "Buy now" or "Not interested" before the movie resumes. A small percentage of people might even find a way to defeat the DRM. But the DMCA storm troopers will be activated enough to maintain just enough terror level to keep that percentage small. But of DRM even fails to get any revenue at all from 10% of the population, it won't matter because it will have quadrupled the revenues from the other 90%.
There is a simple solution to getting the problem fixed. Just post the name of the software package, software company name, and link to their website. Slashdotters will ruin their reputation. And the hackers will find the network exploits that almost certainly exist in that package (and have instant Domain Administrator privilege). The company will either fix the problem or go out of business.
How about one that's not upside when plugged into outlets that are correctly oriented with the ground pin upwards for added safety reasons?
How about one that can handle 240 volts with American (NEMA 6-15) standard plug and outlet for those of us that run their computers (yes, virtually all PC power supplies will handle it fine) more efficiently? OK, I'll use CEE 7/7 if I need to.
FYI to Europeans... yes we do have 240 volts here in North America. And it's safer here because the voltage relative to ground is only 120 volts.
FYI to North Americans... yes we do have 240 volts here in North America. You just need to wire in a special outlet to get it. Just be sure to orient the ground pin upwards for maximum safety since American outlets are not safely recessed the way some European ones (Schuko) are.
Those are the kinds of things I was wanting to avoid. What I'd like to see is something along the lines of what my 16-port Netgear ethernet switch is. While more RAM and mode code space is always useful, I don't need the amount you'd get in a PC-compatible box. 4MB of code space and 16MB of RAM would be plenty. It just needs to be an open architecture (sample drivers for all devices would be a plus), use a CPU for which an embedded linux kernel is available (not the full one), and have enough PROM code to either start the OS from flash, or under a specifically controlled local condition, reload the flash.
The problem with the makers of hardware that could qualify is that they see anyone putting their own code on such hardware as a threat. This might be because their "innovation" is in the code itself, and I'd be their new competition. They probably aren't really making the hardware themselves at all (it being made in some anonymous factory in China or India and they are passing it along at the same dirt cheap price).
I just want to buy the hardware to prototype my software ideas. Maybe one of those ideas might even turn into a marketable product. But I'd also like to see these boxes come in other flavors, too, to encompass a variety of possible ideas many people might have. They should come with a varied selection of ethernet, USB, firewire, eSATA, SCSI, VGA, audio, video (of the TV variety), serial ports, parallel ports, generic ADC/DAC ports, LED lights, speakers, buzzers, etc.
FYI, it doesn't need to be Intel x86 (or compatible) based. In fact, I'd rather it not be such. I'd prefer PPC. But these could be based on any number of CPUs custom designed for the embedded market that an embedded Linux or other even smaller free OS is based on. But I'd definitely like to see hardware in the "complete form" (board, box, wall wart power supply), although board level parts have some value for some ideas, too. But what it really, really needs is someone willing to sell the "naked" (as in no software loaded, besides the PROM that can load it) hardware and provide open documentation on it.
So where is the hardware? The article mentions a black box:
...gathered around a nondescript piece of hardware they all helped build.
...powered up the device, the world's first open-source router.
...by way of the black box,...
What I want is the hardware. I don't want to have to use a big PC to run routing software. Sure, using their software might be cool and all that, though I'm sure I'll want to hack it to make it do something better, or maybe replace some or all of it to do something entirely different.
I see small devices like ethernet switches with 8 to 16 ports, DSL routers, and many other assorted devices these days that have software you can't change, but have hardware that makes a PC even more bulky than normal to get it to do anything close to the same thing. Consider configuring a PC with 16 ethernet ports.
If there was a black box with a CPU that supported an existing Linux embedded kernel (several choices there), some flash RAM to hold the kernel image and some programs to run, and a means to re-load the flash when the flash contents won't run (like holding a button while powering up enters a mode where it enters some PROM code that can reload the flash over a specific ethernet port or other means it might have such as USB, Firewire, serial port, depending on what the overall device is intended to be), and a development kit for a Linux host machine, I think such a thing would sell reasonably well to geeks all over the planet. And you'd end up with hundreds of cool projects for these various little beasts. Being a router is just one possibility.
I did refer to "avoids the wait of sequential chunks in persistent connections". The problem with persistent connections is that the responses to each query in a persistent connection cannot be received until the previous response is entirely complete. Browsers typically open many parallel connections just to get the benefit of concurrent loading. Without that, your images load one by one, in whatever order they were requested (which would probably be the order they are present in the page HTML). You'll have to wait for the ad banner on top to be loaded first, before you can see any more images. With SCTP, everything is in parallel, but under a single association, as long as the requests are going to the same server. Of course the client would have to open a different SCTP association for those requests going to a different server. SCTP associations can also remain persistent even longer since there is a lot less overhead keeping one association up (only one process on the server) compared to half a dozen persistent TCP connections kept open (six processes on the server).
Some of the protocols that could benefit from SCTP include:
IRC... put each channel in its own stream to minimize lost packet retry bottlenecks. This is especially valuable in server to server trunk links.
HTTP... multiple page requests, each in a separate stream, avoids the flood of multiple TCP connections that can use many processes on the server, and avoids the wait of sequential chunks in persistent connections.
SMTP... get your Nigerian business deals, body part enlargement products, replacement ink cartridges, notifications of winning in lotteries you never played, stock investment advise, and those all important sexual drive enhancement drugs, all at the same time.
It's not about whether things like numbers even exist or not. Even a bar code or RFID is just a number, much the same as 666 is a number. What matters is whether than number is turned into a mark, which I believe is a reference to effectively tagging people with a number... in some trackable form (certainly not evisioned by either the writers or original translators of the Bible). We do know this kind of tagging took place in the Nazi concentration camps.
The mark apparently is predicted to be in the form of a number. But generally people did not fear numbers as a result of that. Numbers were used in commerce long before Revelations was written.
What is still puzzling is that what the wording of the Bible seems to suggest is that "The Beast" itself (probably a reference to Satan or an agent of Satan) is numbered (specifically with 666 or 616 depending on which version or translation of the Bible you read, or how it is interpreted).
Maybe someone doesn't want their operating system on the RAM-ified part. Maybe they want swap space there instead. Maybe they want the reserved journal space of a journaling filesystem that is frequently updated to be there. Of course all of these needs could be addressed in some way (at least I know some journaling filesystems let you put the journal in a different partition). You'd have to choose which sectors (don't think in cylinders anymore, it's all fake anyway) would be RAM-ified in a way that would fit various needs in various operating systems, including that one with the largest market.
It would not kill performance at all. It might fail to improve it if the OS is paying no attention to what is going on with the drive. If the OS queues the writes to the RAM-ified sectors, then you get the old performanc as if this was not a hybrid drive. Reads can't get better if the page is already in system RAM anyway. But I could argue that an OS that queues writes for a reason other than the drive being busy or powered down is doing queueing badly, anyway. If the drive is idle and a process writes a page of data, there should be a very small time wait before physically writing that data. That time wait should be about twice the time it takes for that drive to seek from start to end, linearly scaled to the distance between the most recent physical write (e.g. where the head is now) and the new writing just queued. We're talking milliseconds.
The OS can improve, of course, by knowing that the RAM-ified portion of the drive does not need to be taken into account as a time delay. But in the worst case, the OS ignores that and queues/times for a standard drive and you get no worse than standard performance.
As for the EXT2 data loss problem, that's just a design flaw in the filesystem itself by not doing a combination of correctly ordered writes and quick syncronization (e.g. once writing starts, keep the drive busy until everything that needs to be written is written, while writing the meta sectors that support the filesystem structure in the correct relational order). Journaling isn't even needed to get almost all the benefit of journaling. But you can approximate this by mounting the EXT2 filesystem with the sync option, at somewhat of a performance hit.
The simple solution is to just make a specific part of the hybrid drive be RAM based. It would default to being sectors starting at sector 0. Then the method to change it would be to partition the drive with a special partition code for a partition that will change the sector locations to be in RAM to what they are for that partition, up to the end of the partition or the RAM capacity, whichever is first. Then RE-partition it back to what the OS needs, which will not make changes on the hybrid drive (it will just update the RAM location when a partition table is written that includes the special partition type code). Alternatively, bypass the partition program's overlap inhibit and let the specially coded partition overlap whatever is being RAM-ified to avoid ever being in a state where you have an unusable partition table. BSD and Linux users can just use ordinary tools after reading the directions on how to do this. Windows users might have to get a special tool or a modified partitioning program (I'm sure all the commercial ones would pick up on this quickly).
The hybrid drive controller would simply monitor writes to the partition table and check for the special code in a partition entry. If no code, do nothing special (but of course, write the data if partition table writing is not otherwise inhibited). If the code is present, check that partition table entry for sanity, and if valid, perform the steps needed to make the change (lock RAM, store RAM data to platter in old location, fetch new location data to RAM, save new location sector numbers, unlock RAM).
The driver won't need to know because it will still just behave as usual, issuing standard commands for its drive interface type (SCSI, IDE/PATA, SATA) for any sector. So the driver won't need to be changed.
This method won't have to rule out also including other methods that can do the deed by other means. I would suggest a jumper spot on the drive hardware to inhibit changes so you can be sure your changes stay permanent regardless of software upgrades, installs, viruses, trojans, etc.
The situation with the kid creating the parody profile of his school principal, despite how unkind he might have been, does not in any way justify the actions the school did. I'm glad the ACLU stepped in. This is clearly a principal that should not only be fired, but also totally banned from any school related job.
This is just indicative of the mentality of so many school officials and administrators. Many, and probably most (though I certainly met some who are not) school officials and administrators (especially principals and school board members) are what I would term "failed politicians". Like so many politicians in general, they want to be in a position to control other people's lives. But unlike real politicians, they just can't do so well when dealing with adults that can fight back against such attempts to be controlled. Kids, on the other hand, tend to be more naive about such things, and don't have as many means at their disposal to fight back. Thus the kids end up being the satisfaction for the these control freaks who get school jobs. While many of these "failed politicians" do function relatively well in normal school situations, quite many obviously go off on the deep end with unusual situations such as this, like Eric Trosch did. Someone able to handle the situation would have instead initially laughed at the situation, give it a little more fun for the students, and then in a couple days simply ignore it and let it go away. Obviously the severity of the parody indicates many other issues with this man. In a few weeks, the students would have gotten their fill of laughs, and moved on to new sources of entertainment at perhaps someone else's expense. But all the kids would still also be getting a proper full education, the school system would still have some cash to buy a better internet firewall, and some lawyer would have less money. Instead, what he is teaching the kids is how to behave poorly with unfavorable situations, which in a few years one of those kids will end up doing with a gun.
And all of this could happen just as easily on any social website, or even a website on a registered domain, such as maybe "www.bigmrtrosch.com" running anywhere in the world. It has nothing at all to do with any sexual dangers that teens may, or may not, face on MySpace.com.
Now that more practical means exist to convert between AC and DC, and even to convert voltage in DC, high voltage direct current power transmission is more practical where the distances are sufficient to justify the (now lower) costs of handling DC at the transmission line ends. For local distribution, it will likely remain AC for quite a long time.
It's legal in almost all of the United States. Most places use the National Electrical Code. You do have to follow certain rules in installing it, like proper current protection, limits per circuit, etc. But it can be done. Anything 30 volts or less is considered low (utilization) voltage.
Slashdot Mirror
Virgin prisoners are state property. If you rape one, you've destroyed its value. That's why you should get 20 more years for it.
This won't handle all my web site needs, but it might be a good supplement. Thanks. I'll probably go with the Perl version as it seems simple (one file) and doesn't need Tomcat (I'm just running Apache and an HTTP daemon of my own). I don't know Perl programming, but it doesn't seem to need any programmer changes. We'll see if it works until my suexec security setup.
Generating web page output from content description does involve text/string manipulation. That came from the question about whether people still edit by hand or use content management. I do both because I haven't found something suitable to use instead. The content management is simple stuff, though; pages are generated from "meta content". The web server sees them as static, though. They get updated when stuff changes.
C actually is a good way to manipulate strings. It's just not done the way you might think if you didn't learn assembly or C first and spend a lot of time with it. If you don't want to use C, that's your choice. If you know Perl a lot better than C, of course Perl would be the quickest way to be done on your next project, rather than learn C. For me, it's the other way around. I've been doing assembly since 1972 and C since 1982. It works for me.
And it is common for topics to drift further and further from the original as threads go deeper on Slashdot. Live with it or move on to another thread.
I still edit static web pages, if what you mean is the construction of the page layout and design. I even code HTML directly in most cases because I had to learn HTML since various HTML creator programs are still too limited to be able to do everything.
If you mean hand building the navigational layout, how the hell is some CMS program gonna know what I want? So you probably mean whether I actually put the navigational elements in the pages or just specify them somewhere else and let the pages be built for me. So far I haven't seen a CMS system that doesn't suck, so I either do build them by hand (if you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself), or in a few cases, I write programs to do it (and usually in C though some now in in Pike).
Show me a CMS system that's easy to use (can be used w/o a GUI, too), generates pages that do NOT have query strings (e.g. the junk after a "?"), uses decent names for URLs (not a bunch of coded numbers), and does not require a database.
But all that is for my own web sites I host on my own web servers. For public home page websites, like GeoCities, MySpace, or GooglePages, some kind of web based creation tool is essential, given the otherwise vast diversity of environments the tools would have to work in. There, of course, a database is needed. But that would be a highly custom CMS. I'm not running a public home page site, and am damned glad I'm not. I wouldn't want to be so limited.
Still, some nice free JavaScript that implements web interfaces might be interesting. Maybe I should go look for some (never have even looked before).
... right here on page 17, section 2, paragraph 5, in the 2nd sentence, of our service agreement contract. You signed it. You opted out. We could only assume that you really wanted to receive pre-screened financial offers from our partners. If you didn't want to agree to this, you shouldn't have signed the agreement.
... I do have this eye condition where my eyes focus differently in different colors. Where normal vision would see a white dot on a black background, when that dot is made up of 3 narrow band colors, what I see are 3 separate dots. They aren't too far apart, although the blue one is out of focus and fuzzy. When reading white text on a black background, I get a mix of colors. I can read it, but it causes eyestrain. Reversing that to black text on white background makes it easier on my eyes. That's how I'm typing on Slashdot right now. Every character I type has fuzzy color edges to it ... red on the left and bottom, blue on the top, green on the right, and yellow below the red on the bottom.
I deal with this in a number of ways. Since I do most of my programming, system administration, and network administration via the text mode console in Linux, I just change the colors there to better suit my needs. By making the contrast between foreground color and background color limited to a single color, where the other 2 colors have the same intensity between foreground and background, I can read text easily with no eyestrain for hours. So in that sense I'm taking care of myself, and I'm lucky enough to not be disabled in a way that prevents me from managing to do that from the starting point that's designed specifically for normal vision people.
That said, there are still some troubling issues that people need to be aware of and sensitive to. There are a few programs that operate in a text environment (can run on console, or under xterm, etc) that intentionally alter the color environment, and screw up my color setup. It needs to be possible to disable that. In one program I was trying, which erased all my color maps and substituted the defaults, someone suggested the monochrome option it had. In that mode it still erased all my color maps, and then showed me only white text on black background. That didn't actually help at all. What I need is for programs to either leave my colors alone, or at least provide an option (documented in the man page ... yes, I read those) to turn that off. And by "off" I don't mean not to use different color text for highlighting, I mean just don't alter my color maps.
It's worse in X. Not all the colors can be changed in one place. Each application has its own separate configuration for colors. It would help if there was a standardized place for all applications to check for color preferences and at least use them by default. And web pages are a bit worse because each web site, if it can even be changed at all, has to be changed separately. It's getting a tad bit better with more widespread use of style sheets and such.
I also have to be sensitive to the fact that there is a wide range of possible disabilities or just difficulties (what I classify my condition as) and that program developers just can't easily envision, or certainly can't readily test, how their software deals with all the possible needs of different users. I'm sure stuff I've written might be difficult or impossible to use by some others depending on their disability. But the better we can communicate between developers and users, the more we can both improve usability.
This condition I have is only a problem when the light sources are made up of discrete narrowband colors. A broad continuous spectrum doesn't really cause the problem because it just makes things a tiny bit fuzzy in a smooth way that is easy to focus on. Sunlight is almost perfectly continuous. Incandescent light bulbs are also just as good. This condition doesn't affect my ability to actually see; it merely causes stress and eyestrain when the conditions are worse. One of the worst things for me are fluorescent lights. Then everything I look at under that lighting has the problem. White LEDs are no better. Ironically, those orange-peach colored high pressure sodium lamps often used on streets and parking lots don't cause me any problems at all (though they ca
I think he was taking issue with what I said implying that hackers would not be able to crack the software unless the information is posted on slashdot. I could have worded it better. Hackers probably have already cracked it. It's just that we don't have a name of the product, yet, to associate what cracks are available in this particular case. But in the unlikly case it hasn't been cracked, yet, knowing that so many networks will be running it with Domain Administrator access will just make it doubly attractive to crack.
DRM is not for preventing piracy. Piracy is just being used as the whipping boy to try to justify DRM and the DMCA law. They know they can't defeat piracy because it takes a system that is locked absolutely 100% perfectly, and that just can't exist. Instead, the purpose of DRM is to provide the content industry with a means to restrict things in specific ways so you have to pay them more to get what you previously enjoyed for one price before. DRM doesn't do everything the content industry wants, just yet, but they will continue to use the existance of piracy to keep asking for more DRM (Digital Restriction Marketing, or Doubling Revenues Monthly, depending on which side you are on). Eventually you'll have to pay-per-view on the disks you actually buy. And then after that, they'll charge you for even doing things like rewinding to replay an interesting scene. You'll see more advertising that you can't skip, eventually even embedded in the middle of the movie. And later, that advertising will even require you to click "Buy now" or "Not interested" before the movie resumes. A small percentage of people might even find a way to defeat the DRM. But the DMCA storm troopers will be activated enough to maintain just enough terror level to keep that percentage small. But of DRM even fails to get any revenue at all from 10% of the population, it won't matter because it will have quadrupled the revenues from the other 90%.
There is a simple solution to getting the problem fixed. Just post the name of the software package, software company name, and link to their website. Slashdotters will ruin their reputation. And the hackers will find the network exploits that almost certainly exist in that package (and have instant Domain Administrator privilege). The company will either fix the problem or go out of business.
How about one that's not upside when plugged into outlets that are correctly oriented with the ground pin upwards for added safety reasons?
How about one that can handle 240 volts with American (NEMA 6-15) standard plug and outlet for those of us that run their computers (yes, virtually all PC power supplies will handle it fine) more efficiently? OK, I'll use CEE 7/7 if I need to.
FYI to Europeans ... yes we do have 240 volts here in North America. And it's safer here because the voltage relative to ground is only 120 volts.
FYI to North Americans ... yes we do have 240 volts here in North America. You just need to wire in a special outlet to get it. Just be sure to orient the ground pin upwards for maximum safety since American outlets are not safely recessed the way some European ones (Schuko) are.
Those are the kinds of things I was wanting to avoid. What I'd like to see is something along the lines of what my 16-port Netgear ethernet switch is. While more RAM and mode code space is always useful, I don't need the amount you'd get in a PC-compatible box. 4MB of code space and 16MB of RAM would be plenty. It just needs to be an open architecture (sample drivers for all devices would be a plus), use a CPU for which an embedded linux kernel is available (not the full one), and have enough PROM code to either start the OS from flash, or under a specifically controlled local condition, reload the flash.
The problem with the makers of hardware that could qualify is that they see anyone putting their own code on such hardware as a threat. This might be because their "innovation" is in the code itself, and I'd be their new competition. They probably aren't really making the hardware themselves at all (it being made in some anonymous factory in China or India and they are passing it along at the same dirt cheap price).
I just want to buy the hardware to prototype my software ideas. Maybe one of those ideas might even turn into a marketable product. But I'd also like to see these boxes come in other flavors, too, to encompass a variety of possible ideas many people might have. They should come with a varied selection of ethernet, USB, firewire, eSATA, SCSI, VGA, audio, video (of the TV variety), serial ports, parallel ports, generic ADC/DAC ports, LED lights, speakers, buzzers, etc.
FYI, it doesn't need to be Intel x86 (or compatible) based. In fact, I'd rather it not be such. I'd prefer PPC. But these could be based on any number of CPUs custom designed for the embedded market that an embedded Linux or other even smaller free OS is based on. But I'd definitely like to see hardware in the "complete form" (board, box, wall wart power supply), although board level parts have some value for some ideas, too. But what it really, really needs is someone willing to sell the "naked" (as in no software loaded, besides the PROM that can load it) hardware and provide open documentation on it.
So where is the hardware? The article mentions a black box:
What I want is the hardware. I don't want to have to use a big PC to run routing software. Sure, using their software might be cool and all that, though I'm sure I'll want to hack it to make it do something better, or maybe replace some or all of it to do something entirely different.
I see small devices like ethernet switches with 8 to 16 ports, DSL routers, and many other assorted devices these days that have software you can't change, but have hardware that makes a PC even more bulky than normal to get it to do anything close to the same thing. Consider configuring a PC with 16 ethernet ports.
If there was a black box with a CPU that supported an existing Linux embedded kernel (several choices there), some flash RAM to hold the kernel image and some programs to run, and a means to re-load the flash when the flash contents won't run (like holding a button while powering up enters a mode where it enters some PROM code that can reload the flash over a specific ethernet port or other means it might have such as USB, Firewire, serial port, depending on what the overall device is intended to be), and a development kit for a Linux host machine, I think such a thing would sell reasonably well to geeks all over the planet. And you'd end up with hundreds of cool projects for these various little beasts. Being a router is just one possibility.
I did refer to "avoids the wait of sequential chunks in persistent connections". The problem with persistent connections is that the responses to each query in a persistent connection cannot be received until the previous response is entirely complete. Browsers typically open many parallel connections just to get the benefit of concurrent loading. Without that, your images load one by one, in whatever order they were requested (which would probably be the order they are present in the page HTML). You'll have to wait for the ad banner on top to be loaded first, before you can see any more images. With SCTP, everything is in parallel, but under a single association, as long as the requests are going to the same server. Of course the client would have to open a different SCTP association for those requests going to a different server. SCTP associations can also remain persistent even longer since there is a lot less overhead keeping one association up (only one process on the server) compared to half a dozen persistent TCP connections kept open (six processes on the server).
The kids would easily beat me unless we play on my old video game.
Some of the protocols that could benefit from SCTP include:
It's not about whether things like numbers even exist or not. Even a bar code or RFID is just a number, much the same as 666 is a number. What matters is whether than number is turned into a mark, which I believe is a reference to effectively tagging people with a number ... in some trackable form (certainly not evisioned by either the writers or original translators of the Bible). We do know this kind of tagging took place in the Nazi concentration camps.
The mark apparently is predicted to be in the form of a number. But generally people did not fear numbers as a result of that. Numbers were used in commerce long before Revelations was written.
What is still puzzling is that what the wording of the Bible seems to suggest is that "The Beast" itself (probably a reference to Satan or an agent of Satan) is numbered (specifically with 666 or 616 depending on which version or translation of the Bible you read, or how it is interpreted).
Maybe someone doesn't want their operating system on the RAM-ified part. Maybe they want swap space there instead. Maybe they want the reserved journal space of a journaling filesystem that is frequently updated to be there. Of course all of these needs could be addressed in some way (at least I know some journaling filesystems let you put the journal in a different partition). You'd have to choose which sectors (don't think in cylinders anymore, it's all fake anyway) would be RAM-ified in a way that would fit various needs in various operating systems, including that one with the largest market.
It would not kill performance at all. It might fail to improve it if the OS is paying no attention to what is going on with the drive. If the OS queues the writes to the RAM-ified sectors, then you get the old performanc as if this was not a hybrid drive. Reads can't get better if the page is already in system RAM anyway. But I could argue that an OS that queues writes for a reason other than the drive being busy or powered down is doing queueing badly, anyway. If the drive is idle and a process writes a page of data, there should be a very small time wait before physically writing that data. That time wait should be about twice the time it takes for that drive to seek from start to end, linearly scaled to the distance between the most recent physical write (e.g. where the head is now) and the new writing just queued. We're talking milliseconds.
The OS can improve, of course, by knowing that the RAM-ified portion of the drive does not need to be taken into account as a time delay. But in the worst case, the OS ignores that and queues/times for a standard drive and you get no worse than standard performance.
As for the EXT2 data loss problem, that's just a design flaw in the filesystem itself by not doing a combination of correctly ordered writes and quick syncronization (e.g. once writing starts, keep the drive busy until everything that needs to be written is written, while writing the meta sectors that support the filesystem structure in the correct relational order). Journaling isn't even needed to get almost all the benefit of journaling. But you can approximate this by mounting the EXT2 filesystem with the sync option, at somewhat of a performance hit.
The simple solution is to just make a specific part of the hybrid drive be RAM based. It would default to being sectors starting at sector 0. Then the method to change it would be to partition the drive with a special partition code for a partition that will change the sector locations to be in RAM to what they are for that partition, up to the end of the partition or the RAM capacity, whichever is first. Then RE-partition it back to what the OS needs, which will not make changes on the hybrid drive (it will just update the RAM location when a partition table is written that includes the special partition type code). Alternatively, bypass the partition program's overlap inhibit and let the specially coded partition overlap whatever is being RAM-ified to avoid ever being in a state where you have an unusable partition table. BSD and Linux users can just use ordinary tools after reading the directions on how to do this. Windows users might have to get a special tool or a modified partitioning program (I'm sure all the commercial ones would pick up on this quickly).
The hybrid drive controller would simply monitor writes to the partition table and check for the special code in a partition entry. If no code, do nothing special (but of course, write the data if partition table writing is not otherwise inhibited). If the code is present, check that partition table entry for sanity, and if valid, perform the steps needed to make the change (lock RAM, store RAM data to platter in old location, fetch new location data to RAM, save new location sector numbers, unlock RAM).
The driver won't need to know because it will still just behave as usual, issuing standard commands for its drive interface type (SCSI, IDE/PATA, SATA) for any sector. So the driver won't need to be changed.
This method won't have to rule out also including other methods that can do the deed by other means. I would suggest a jumper spot on the drive hardware to inhibit changes so you can be sure your changes stay permanent regardless of software upgrades, installs, viruses, trojans, etc.
And don't forget the cost of having several members of Congress on your side ... lobbying, bribery, overseas travel, etc.
The situation with the kid creating the parody profile of his school principal, despite how unkind he might have been, does not in any way justify the actions the school did. I'm glad the ACLU stepped in. This is clearly a principal that should not only be fired, but also totally banned from any school related job.
This is just indicative of the mentality of so many school officials and administrators. Many, and probably most (though I certainly met some who are not) school officials and administrators (especially principals and school board members) are what I would term "failed politicians". Like so many politicians in general, they want to be in a position to control other people's lives. But unlike real politicians, they just can't do so well when dealing with adults that can fight back against such attempts to be controlled. Kids, on the other hand, tend to be more naive about such things, and don't have as many means at their disposal to fight back. Thus the kids end up being the satisfaction for the these control freaks who get school jobs. While many of these "failed politicians" do function relatively well in normal school situations, quite many obviously go off on the deep end with unusual situations such as this, like Eric Trosch did. Someone able to handle the situation would have instead initially laughed at the situation, give it a little more fun for the students, and then in a couple days simply ignore it and let it go away. Obviously the severity of the parody indicates many other issues with this man. In a few weeks, the students would have gotten their fill of laughs, and moved on to new sources of entertainment at perhaps someone else's expense. But all the kids would still also be getting a proper full education, the school system would still have some cash to buy a better internet firewall, and some lawyer would have less money. Instead, what he is teaching the kids is how to behave poorly with unfavorable situations, which in a few years one of those kids will end up doing with a gun.
And all of this could happen just as easily on any social website, or even a website on a registered domain, such as maybe "www.bigmrtrosch.com" running anywhere in the world. It has nothing at all to do with any sexual dangers that teens may, or may not, face on MySpace.com.
Just take lots of blank CDs with you when you go to pick up your drugs.
Now that more practical means exist to convert between AC and DC, and even to convert voltage in DC, high voltage direct current power transmission is more practical where the distances are sufficient to justify the (now lower) costs of handling DC at the transmission line ends. For local distribution, it will likely remain AC for quite a long time.
It's legal in almost all of the United States. Most places use the National Electrical Code. You do have to follow certain rules in installing it, like proper current protection, limits per circuit, etc. But it can be done. Anything 30 volts or less is considered low (utilization) voltage.
Here is an example of the current waveform of a switching power supply in a computer. Scroll down to diagram 8.