There are no long term studies on the success of these covers due to the relatively short time in which large scale open pit mining has existed. It may take hundreds to thousands of years for some waste dumps to become "acid neutral" and stop leaching to the environment. The dumps are usually fenced off to prevent livestock denuding them of vegetation. The open pit is then surrounded with a fence, to prevent access, and it generally eventually fills up with ground water. In arid areas it may not fill due to deep groundwater levels.
So unfortunately open pit mining has the same issue nuclear does, we don't know all the effects.
If you are talking about SMB / consumer level stuff take a good look at solid state.
The last generation of the OCZ vertex can saturate a couple gigabit links especially since it is saturating the 3Gb SATA link that is connecting it to the PC, it would take a mere 3-4 of these to saturate a 10Gb link. Mind u this is consumer level and last generation at that. Two of the newer generations (running on SATA 3 vs SATA 2) would easily saturate a 10Gb ethernet link
All of this assumes the machine with these beasts can handle that much I/O. The scariest part to me about these drives is all are limited by the type of connection they have not the drive itself.
Last I checked "the west" is not the only player in the game. The "Great firewall of China" seems to be enough proof of that (scarily enough it's feature list probably puts any other similar piece of software to shame).
Creating scarcity will only lead to a black market for the stuff.
I have seen quite a few pieces of web filtering software and most have a user controlled list to compliment the automatic list. The simple reason is that a single list cannot work for everyone, even categories can be too broad.
I don't quite agree with your comment above, while I agree as a whole computer programming & usage has become extremely cross-discipline (if you want to write an accounting package, please go learn some accounts) and that based on which sub-field you are interested in the appropriate skills need to be taught.
If you stop there though what makes you any better than the specialist in the field? What sets computer scientist apart in this respect is a set of math based (hopefully objective) set of eyes looking for how to perform the task at hand in a better way. Computer Science requires math not for its day to day operation (that's why sys admins exist) but to keep that ever constant "make-it-better" wheel turning.
"Computers are important to us because they are the basis of culture and society, because we interact with them for reading, writing, making and hearing music games, and video", as much as I hate it the above statement is true. However you have seriously underestimated the role of math in making the above happen. Text is represented as numbers internally to computers, that affects reading, writing, searching of textual data. Then again why am I limiting the above to textual data, the same applies to music and video as well.
The role of algorithmic optimization in the above is immeasurable, a simple example is data compression. MP3 took off because at the time it's competition was the uncompressed wav file and all most people had at the time was dial-up modems, MP4 / x264 have taken the video world by storm for mostly the same reasons. On the database side knowing that an operation is O(1) and that another is O(x) makes a big difference in which one you will choose, given that all filesystems that underlie most computers today are specialized databases I think the algorithm choices have a big impact on daily life of lots of people. High end graphics and multi-core computers are all the rage these days how to use them efficiently is still an outstanding problem, the heart of which sits in complexity theory.
CS is probably not going anywhere because the targets of CS and math are similar yet different enough to validate the separation (I'd actually invite you to validate the existence of accounting, it is nothing but math as well). Just like there is a separation between theoretical science and practical engineering the differences are enough to validate the existence of the practical CS from the theoretical Math.
Even though the user of the machine may not realize it the tools needed to meet their needs come from math. While allot of the basics are already laid down in libraries of code, libraries of books did not stop Isaac Newton from "standing on the shoulders of giants" to produce the next great idea.
I would love to, however while it exists and courts uphold them it still stands in the way of a competitor duplicating the feature set of a piece of software, irregardless of open / closed status. So unfortunately it is one of the reasons open system will always lag behind closed system unless some cheap / free form of licensing exists (most closed competitors can palm off the licensing fee on their user base).
I think part of the point here is that the systems mentioned are still in the state where the closest OSS competitor hasn't closed the feature / compatibility gap.
2 points that I'm sure make the vendors of the above worry about:
- Feature bloat / features people care about: I'm sure we've all heard the saying "Why should I upgrade? What benefits would I get?" and had to try to convince them that the upgrade brings some obscure new feature and maybe some extra security / speed (this is pretty much the only reasons that most users will respond to). Both MS Office and Windows itself have been victims of this (XP is still holding out strong among windows users). It unfortunately means that the feature set a competitor needs to duplicate is a small subset of the software's full capabilities, all they have to do is make it faster and the closed vendor loses out on a decent chunk of their customer base which will reduce their ability to add new features to stay ahead and I think you can see the cycle that will ensue.
- Do I need the software on my PC even matter? a.k.a. cloud services. Especially in the OS arena this is becoming a bigger threat,the reason for this is more apps are becoming web based, slowly making the client's OS matter even less. As the app makers try to reach the largest possible market they will tend to go with web based solutions (to become OS / device independent, especially true given the capabilities of smartphones) reducing the number of desktop applications the user needs, once again its a cycle that keeps feeding itself.
While I agree the above mentioned software have held on for quite a long time, "long-term" is a relative term. How long it takes to unseat them might actually take years or maybe decades (one of the simpler reasons for such a long wait is patents) but the great-grand parent's comment still holds, "Which means that closed is a state that can only exist prior to an open competitor reaching compatibility and substantial feature parity with the leading closed alternative, at which point customers choose the open alternative."
While I agree with this somewhat, I'm more tempted to think Microsoft's stance is "if you can't beat them, join them" (The Kinect has been used in ways it wasn't intended almost from launch)
While I highly dislike Microsoft for the most part, I applaud this move though I'm not holding my breath that a non-Windows SDK will ever be released.
While wikileaks is not a US company and cannot be threatened / controlled directly by the US government, US companies that do business with them (Amazon) have been dropping support for wikileaks like a hot potato, have they been threatened by their government not to do business with wikileaks? The fact that their DNS provider also dropped them is not helping to dismiss such a question, especially since EveryDNS is run by donations (they don't even remotely have the funds to be able to stand up to a lawsuit, especially one by the US government).
If the above claims are ever proven to be true, it shows that a single government already has too much control over the internet and unlike China which (for now) is content to only censor what it's own citizens see the US government is willing and able to censor what the entire world sees.
I agree with you that other explanations may exist however given that the documents specifically target the US government I seems almost obvious that they would react to the only target they have which is wikileaks. I invite you to propose a alternate explanation, as I said in my earlier comment the rape charges are the only case where I can come up with a somewhat reasonable counter explanation (maybe he actually did rape the woman, I don't know the man and cannot make such a judgment).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20024169-38.html is a decent start, there are public calls from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee to have wikileaks classified as a terrorist organization.
I'll finish with the following, if the US had followed the rules (most of them laid down by the US) what is there to fear from these documents? If they have broken rules and have been covering it up, what would you as a moral human being do if you happen across such information? I'm not American but this is more dangerous to the integrity of democracy in the US than anything an external entity could ever do.
The rape charges might be explainable that way but how do you explain all the various sites (amazon, et al.) dropping support for wikileaks?
Also do you also think a country who's government can take down a domain at will (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/10/11/26/1450257.shtml) would really need to make their dislike for a site such as wikileaks public?
Well google is under investigation for prioritizing its own services in search results.
While the sizes of customer bases and percentage market share are very different, I agree that this is essentially the same thing and should be investigated as such.
From the sounds of it something from QNAP can serve for most of the "servers" you will need.
Relatively easy to use and should save you allot of grief.
I'll leave you with the power / cooling / security aspects.
BTW, I love my laptop but I think you will be better with desktops. Thin clients would be nice but you don't seem to have a user base large enough to make it worthwhile.
They accepted responsibility for a critical piece of internet infrastructure, here is the current list of expectations for said operators http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/bcp/bcp40.html
What is probably annoying / concerning most people is, if you look at almost every major service that provides service to more than say 1 million plus people there is some sort of redundancy so that even if an entire site is taken out of commission no disruption occurs. The fact that DNS is the poster-child of the anycast technique is not helping their cause.
The "shit happens" argument affects everyone equally, so why is no one else site down for such a long run for what appears to be a predictable reason (tropical storm damage to fiber lines). The cynical version of this question is "synchronized backhoes anyone?".
Due to technical limitations within the DNS protocol itself the number of root servers is limited to 13, given that this operator (and supposedly others) seem to not be capable of handling the responsibility of being in the position they are, is it time to give the responsibility to others? From the looks of it, the only reason the research lab is in control of H is that they had facilities during the internet's infancy.
Slashdot Mirror
Does that pay the bills or can you do the stuff you love on weekends when no one is over you to get it done now?
Doing the stuff you loves tends to lose its value when someone else dictates the speed and/or quality of what you do.
I like my job, but it is becoming more difficult every day.
Wikipedia seems to disagree with you on that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-pit_mining#Rehabilitation
There are no long term studies on the success of these covers due to the relatively short time in which large scale open pit mining has existed. It may take hundreds to thousands of years for some waste dumps to become "acid neutral" and stop leaching to the environment. The dumps are usually fenced off to prevent livestock denuding them of vegetation. The open pit is then surrounded with a fence, to prevent access, and it generally eventually fills up with ground water. In arid areas it may not fill due to deep groundwater levels.
So unfortunately open pit mining has the same issue nuclear does, we don't know all the effects.
If you are talking about SMB / consumer level stuff take a good look at solid state.
The last generation of the OCZ vertex can saturate a couple gigabit links especially since it is saturating the 3Gb SATA link that is connecting it to the PC, it would take a mere 3-4 of these to saturate a 10Gb link. Mind u this is consumer level and last generation at that. Two of the newer generations (running on SATA 3 vs SATA 2) would easily saturate a 10Gb ethernet link
All of this assumes the machine with these beasts can handle that much I/O. The scariest part to me about these drives is all are limited by the type of connection they have not the drive itself.
Last I checked "the west" is not the only player in the game. The "Great firewall of China" seems to be enough proof of that (scarily enough it's feature list probably puts any other similar piece of software to shame).
Creating scarcity will only lead to a black market for the stuff.
I have seen quite a few pieces of web filtering software and most have a user controlled list to compliment the automatic list. The simple reason is that a single list cannot work for everyone, even categories can be too broad.
I don't quite agree with your comment above, while I agree as a whole computer programming & usage has become extremely cross-discipline (if you want to write an accounting package, please go learn some accounts) and that based on which sub-field you are interested in the appropriate skills need to be taught.
If you stop there though what makes you any better than the specialist in the field? What sets computer scientist apart in this respect is a set of math based (hopefully objective) set of eyes looking for how to perform the task at hand in a better way. Computer Science requires math not for its day to day operation (that's why sys admins exist) but to keep that ever constant "make-it-better" wheel turning.
"Computers are important to us because they are the basis of culture and society, because we interact with them for reading, writing, making and hearing music games, and video", as much as I hate it the above statement is true. However you have seriously underestimated the role of math in making the above happen. Text is represented as numbers internally to computers, that affects reading, writing, searching of textual data. Then again why am I limiting the above to textual data, the same applies to music and video as well.
The role of algorithmic optimization in the above is immeasurable, a simple example is data compression. MP3 took off because at the time it's competition was the uncompressed wav file and all most people had at the time was dial-up modems, MP4 / x264 have taken the video world by storm for mostly the same reasons. On the database side knowing that an operation is O(1) and that another is O(x) makes a big difference in which one you will choose, given that all filesystems that underlie most computers today are specialized databases I think the algorithm choices have a big impact on daily life of lots of people. High end graphics and multi-core computers are all the rage these days how to use them efficiently is still an outstanding problem, the heart of which sits in complexity theory.
CS is probably not going anywhere because the targets of CS and math are similar yet different enough to validate the separation (I'd actually invite you to validate the existence of accounting, it is nothing but math as well). Just like there is a separation between theoretical science and practical engineering the differences are enough to validate the existence of the practical CS from the theoretical Math.
Even though the user of the machine may not realize it the tools needed to meet their needs come from math. While allot of the basics are already laid down in libraries of code, libraries of books did not stop Isaac Newton from "standing on the shoulders of giants" to produce the next great idea.
I would love to, however while it exists and courts uphold them it still stands in the way of a competitor duplicating the feature set of a piece of software, irregardless of open / closed status. So unfortunately it is one of the reasons open system will always lag behind closed system unless some cheap / free form of licensing exists (most closed competitors can palm off the licensing fee on their user base).
I think part of the point here is that the systems mentioned are still in the state where the closest OSS competitor hasn't closed the feature / compatibility gap.
2 points that I'm sure make the vendors of the above worry about:
- Feature bloat / features people care about: I'm sure we've all heard the saying "Why should I upgrade? What benefits would I get?" and had to try to convince them that the upgrade brings some obscure new feature and maybe some extra security / speed (this is pretty much the only reasons that most users will respond to). Both MS Office and Windows itself have been victims of this (XP is still holding out strong among windows users). It unfortunately means that the feature set a competitor needs to duplicate is a small subset of the software's full capabilities, all they have to do is make it faster and the closed vendor loses out on a decent chunk of their customer base which will reduce their ability to add new features to stay ahead and I think you can see the cycle that will ensue.
- Do I need the software on my PC even matter? a.k.a. cloud services. Especially in the OS arena this is becoming a bigger threat,the reason for this is more apps are becoming web based, slowly making the client's OS matter even less. As the app makers try to reach the largest possible market they will tend to go with web based solutions (to become OS / device independent, especially true given the capabilities of smartphones) reducing the number of desktop applications the user needs, once again its a cycle that keeps feeding itself.
While I agree the above mentioned software have held on for quite a long time, "long-term" is a relative term. How long it takes to unseat them might actually take years or maybe decades (one of the simpler reasons for such a long wait is patents) but the great-grand parent's comment still holds, "Which means that closed is a state that can only exist prior to an open competitor reaching compatibility and substantial feature parity with the leading closed alternative, at which point customers choose the open alternative."
While I agree with this somewhat, I'm more tempted to think Microsoft's stance is "if you can't beat them, join them" (The Kinect has been used in ways it wasn't intended almost from launch)
While I highly dislike Microsoft for the most part, I applaud this move though I'm not holding my breath that a non-Windows SDK will ever be released.
To tell you the truth I haven't reached a decision as to whether wikileaks is good or bad as yet.
However the reaction the US government has to this is leading me to believe they have something to hide, Stories like http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/12/15/0038211/Air-Force-Blocks-NY-Times-WaPo-Other-Media and others make the us government out to look like a bunch of censors.
While wikileaks is not a US company and cannot be threatened / controlled directly by the US government, US companies that do business with them (Amazon) have been dropping support for wikileaks like a hot potato, have they been threatened by their government not to do business with wikileaks? The fact that their DNS provider also dropped them is not helping to dismiss such a question, especially since EveryDNS is run by donations (they don't even remotely have the funds to be able to stand up to a lawsuit, especially one by the US government).
If the above claims are ever proven to be true, it shows that a single government already has too much control over the internet and unlike China which (for now) is content to only censor what it's own citizens see the US government is willing and able to censor what the entire world sees.
I agree with you that other explanations may exist however given that the documents specifically target the US government I seems almost obvious that they would react to the only target they have which is wikileaks. I invite you to propose a alternate explanation, as I said in my earlier comment the rape charges are the only case where I can come up with a somewhat reasonable counter explanation (maybe he actually did rape the woman, I don't know the man and cannot make such a judgment).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20024169-38.html is a decent start, there are public calls from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee to have wikileaks classified as a terrorist organization.
I'll finish with the following, if the US had followed the rules (most of them laid down by the US) what is there to fear from these documents? If they have broken rules and have been covering it up, what would you as a moral human being do if you happen across such information? I'm not American but this is more dangerous to the integrity of democracy in the US than anything an external entity could ever do.
Question, would your mind survive to reach therapy?
The rape charges might be explainable that way but how do you explain all the various sites (amazon, et al.) dropping support for wikileaks?
Also do you also think a country who's government can take down a domain at will (http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/10/11/26/1450257.shtml) would really need to make their dislike for a site such as wikileaks public?
Well google is under investigation for prioritizing its own services in search results.
While the sizes of customer bases and percentage market share are very different, I agree that this is essentially the same thing and should be investigated as such.
Nope, this is them playing dirty.
Real desperation is banning the CNET / GSMArena / Consumer reports apps if one of them posts a negative review. Oh wait, they did... http://www.cultofmac.com/apple-censoring-discussion-forums-ref-consumer-reports/50597
From the sounds of it something from QNAP can serve for most of the "servers" you will need.
Relatively easy to use and should save you allot of grief.
I'll leave you with the power / cooling / security aspects.
BTW, I love my laptop but I think you will be better with desktops. Thin clients would be nice but you don't seem to have a user base large enough to make it worthwhile.
They accepted responsibility for a critical piece of internet infrastructure, here is the current list of expectations for said operators http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/bcp/bcp40.html
What is probably annoying / concerning most people is, if you look at almost every major service that provides service to more than say 1 million plus people there is some sort of redundancy so that even if an entire site is taken out of commission no disruption occurs. The fact that DNS is the poster-child of the anycast technique is not helping their cause.
The "shit happens" argument affects everyone equally, so why is no one else site down for such a long run for what appears to be a predictable reason (tropical storm damage to fiber lines). The cynical version of this question is "synchronized backhoes anyone?".
Due to technical limitations within the DNS protocol itself the number of root servers is limited to 13, given that this operator (and supposedly others) seem to not be capable of handling the responsibility of being in the position they are, is it time to give the responsibility to others? From the looks of it, the only reason the research lab is in control of H is that they had facilities during the internet's infancy.
Now I can overclock my CPU just like the big boys!!! And its cheaper too