No technology takes off until there is a killer app. One never arose in VR. There were several reasons, but all boil down to the concept being ahead of the products available to implement it.
I remember seeing the first cave and talking with the student who came up with it. She was quite interesting, and the ideas pretty solid, but the workstations available at the time were completely insufficient for anything but proof of concept stuff.
I guess Caterpiller bought one (they were near University of Illinois in downstate Illinois), but their needs were quite simple. They were just testing operator visibility in prototype tractors.
Even today, they are expensive to build and operate.
However, now that the triangle counts are up and the displays getting better (check out Emagin for the next generation of oled displays the size of a postage stamp) the technology is ready, but we've many years of practice in mobil computing and still no killer app.
Until now.
Here's a system that can be built today, and, like many technologies hooks on to the one known good selling center in society. Sex.
Take a portable computer, add a headmount. On the headmount add a couple video cameras. You need two in order to do distance mapping. Now you can send the unadulterated video stream to each eye in the HMD and the person is getting real life, but the computer knows what's going on. Distance to object, object identifcation and other messages can be displayed on the HMD as an explanation to the wife/boss as to why the device is valuable.
Of course the real reason it's valuable is because of the 'skins' that will be available on the net. These skins will be used by the PC to replace the normal appearance of that chick walking by with Miss January. And because you're only remapping a portion of the image, the framerates from todays hardware is sufficient to present realtime images.
Add to that suitable audio, and the world becomes a much more interesting place to wander around in.
The cost of admining a Linux network is going to end up being the same as admining a Windows network. There is basically no difference.
Well the handful of clients I've seen (or switched myself) switch to Linux certainly don't bear that out. Windows installs tend to degrade over time. In no small part because they are much more likely to be run wide open in order to allow people to get their jobs done. Once they can install their own software the registery gets polluted and the machine stops working. What next? Field trip to the workstation because the remote admin on Windows is less common and less capable than Linux.
So there you have two reasons why the cost of ownership on Windows is higher. And I haven't even started talking about resurecting infected machines, making site visits only to tell the user that there is nothing that can be done because the issue is in Microsofts ticket system but they haven't done anything with it or any of the other closed source problems.
Yes, I know that solutions exist, but this was a cost discussion and the solutions cost money. With linux they are an intrinsic property of the OS.
FWIW, our data is nearly uncompressable so that doesn't apply to us. In the case of compressable data, the issues of encryption and compression are orthoganal. If you compress the unencrypted data (which of course you must do in either case as encrypted data isn't compressable) then you can frequently save more time in transmission than you spend on the compression step.
If you then choose to encrypt it, your crypto algorythm will at some point not be able to keep up with the pipe available.
If you choose not to encrypt it you will have saved an almost unimaginable number of cycles to use pushing data down the pipe instead.
Remember what started this thread though. I don't disagree that encryption is useful, just that the naked assertion that security is the most important thing isn't nearly always true.
Encrypted data is generally the same size as the original, depending on whether a block or stream cypher is used and how much, if any, header data is attached to the message.
True that the data going down the pipe is the same size, but unless you have multiple machines sending pieces of the same data down different paths to the endpoint, you find that more often than not your CPU cannot encrypt the data quickly enough to keep up with the pipe that is available to it.
So in quick tests we find that SCP takes about twice as long as native FTP. I've never tested SFTP, but imagine similar results. Do you know?
While it may not have ALL the features you were looking for, it has the most important - security.
FYI, security isn't the most important for everyone.
I'm much more concerned these days with bandwidth utilization, which would be kind of hosed by a scheme that encrypts the data stream. I probably want encrypted authentication, but that's it.
I hand't heard of FSP, so I read that doc. Doesn't look to me like it was supposed to be an FTP killer, but an anonymous FTP killer. Different thing. It also doesn't handle any of the important points that the poster asked about.
FSP seems to have died for lack of new or interesting things, rather than because FTP was too entrenched.
Grid computing pushing this issue
on
A Better FTP?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I work in grid computing and we have some needs that push this idea forward. Over at Argonne labs the Globus team has put forward this draft of extensions for some of what you talk about (i.e. it's secure and multi-path). Code exists under yet another open source license the "Globus Toolkit Public License".
I've never seen anything in the strong science category, but here are some (perhaps placeboes) that have helped me from time to time.
1) Phosphatidyl Choline is a precursor to acetyl choline a neurotransmitter associated with memory
2) I've used machines and programs (sadly none of which I can reference right now) that produce sound in stereo such that the left and right ears recieve offset signals and this is supposed to help the different sides of the brain communicate. I don't know what, if any, brain effect this has beyond a white noise that helps me concentrate with fewer distractions, but I find this technique to be so successful that the reason I can't reference a program right now is that I burned some of this noise onto a CD years ago and have been using it as needed ever since. The literature on the subject claims that different frequencies do different things and I find this to be true in my case, suggesting that there is more going on than simply white noise blocking out background. For example, one of the tracks on my CD is supposed to bring you down to a sleep like state. If I use this while trying to work I get very strong headaches. Not something I want to repeat over and over, but I've done it a few times to see if it was reproducable. It was.
3) Pressure. Most people don't think well under pressure. Don't fall into the downward spiral of getting pissed that you can't remember something. It will only make it harder to remember more stuff.
4) Concentration. 2 touches on this, but it's a fact that people who concentrate on one task (instead of reading/. during compiles for example:-)) are better able to remember the details of what they are doing. The brain is pretty crummy at task switching.
Unless Bruce also suggests that we do away with metal detectors and x-ray machines then false positives aren't a problem.
Anyone who has flown any significant number of times has seen a bag search or a person being wanded. Most have probably seen a person taken away to the back rooms for a more thorough going over.
Does Bruce suggest doing away with metal detectors because they are *far* less than 99.99 percent accurate, of course not. So why suggest avoiding better tech?
In both cases the person flagged wouldn't be immediately locked up. In both cases the people running security must be counted on to not become complacent in the face of 'the boy who cried wolf'. In both cases the bar against terrorism is raised.
Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)
So since slashdot is there they should be able to keep the lights on for a long time?
Ah the wonders of English.
On the serious side, can anyone tell me how these places manage to lose so much money? Is it the labor, site or networking costs? It seems like web hosting should be an industry that, once you climb to the scale of Exodus, is really really profitable.
Yup, the EFF is great. Everyone at Poliglut is a member.
I started poliglut to help keep people up to speed on politics. The thing is, there's more to politics than what's covered on slashdot. So poliglut covers a much wider range.
The sad truth, IMHO, is that the tech community seems to be so extremely libertarian that they have almost no hope of being heard. It's just to far out of band for the typical pol.
Anyway, stop by poliglut if you're into politics. We talk this stuff every day.
Right. And worms, virii and other popular afflictions of NT is wrong to. Most of the worms and virii have been infecting outlook and IIS, not Windows. So to on the unix side. And the vast majority of Apache is running on unix flavors.
My comment is a fair one, even if you do have a lower uid than mine.
The only thing stopping it these days is Linux's smaller marketshare.
I thought apache had a majority share of the web server market. One that has been hit by worms, and those worm writers usually choose IIS despite it's smaller market share.
It could be because IIS has more exploits...
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
I have been thinking about feasible ways to prevent such acts of terrorism.
Here's one. Drag Reagan into the streets and kick the shit out of him as an example of what we do when our Presidents circumvent congress and train people like bin Laden. Bin Laden may think it's funny that we trained him, but I can think of about 280M people who find it a lot less amusing these days.
(As always, the latest news is available at Poliglut (see below))
Look, the US is a fine country and all, but WRT to the claim that "No where else on Earth could you find support like this." let me remind you that the Red Cross was founded in Switzerland along with many other great charities.
This is a fine country, but let's not puff our chests too much over this.
(See Poliglut for more late breaking WTC stuff including the just happening further collapse)
"""
You know what, this Pearl Harbor ][ stuff is bull. This is Hiroshima ][, both in terms of bombing innocents and the death toll. The scary part, Dubyas ill conceived Star Wars sequal wouldn't have made a bit of difference in this case. *That's* why the military has all their brass out there talking about Pearl Harbor. Don't let them distract you, this is Hiroshima ][ and it shows what a waste of $60B Star Wars ][ is. Pass it on.
"""
Slashdot Mirror
not non-zero != oscillation as I think you said.
No technology takes off until there is a killer app. One never arose in VR. There were several reasons, but all boil down to the concept being ahead of the products available to implement it.
I remember seeing the first cave and talking with the student who came up with it. She was quite interesting, and the ideas pretty solid, but the workstations available at the time were completely insufficient for anything but proof of concept stuff.
I guess Caterpiller bought one (they were near University of Illinois in downstate Illinois), but their needs were quite simple. They were just testing operator visibility in prototype tractors.
Even today, they are expensive to build and operate.
However, now that the triangle counts are up and the displays getting better (check out Emagin for the next generation of oled displays the size of a postage stamp) the technology is ready, but we've many years of practice in mobil computing and still no killer app.
Until now.
Here's a system that can be built today, and, like many technologies hooks on to the one known good selling center in society. Sex.
Take a portable computer, add a headmount. On the headmount add a couple video cameras. You need two in order to do distance mapping. Now you can send the unadulterated video stream to each eye in the HMD and the person is getting real life, but the computer knows what's going on. Distance to object, object identifcation and other messages can be displayed on the HMD as an explanation to the wife/boss as to why the device is valuable.
Of course the real reason it's valuable is because of the 'skins' that will be available on the net. These skins will be used by the PC to replace the normal appearance of that chick walking by with Miss January. And because you're only remapping a portion of the image, the framerates from todays hardware is sufficient to present realtime images.
Add to that suitable audio, and the world becomes a much more interesting place to wander around in.
The cost of admining a Linux network is going to end up being the same as admining a Windows network. There is basically no difference.
Well the handful of clients I've seen (or switched myself) switch to Linux certainly don't bear that out. Windows installs tend to degrade over time. In no small part because they are much more likely to be run wide open in order to allow people to get their jobs done. Once they can install their own software the registery gets polluted and the machine stops working. What next? Field trip to the workstation because the remote admin on Windows is less common and less capable than Linux.
So there you have two reasons why the cost of ownership on Windows is higher. And I haven't even started talking about resurecting infected machines, making site visits only to tell the user that there is nothing that can be done because the issue is in Microsofts ticket system but they haven't done anything with it or any of the other closed source problems.
Yes, I know that solutions exist, but this was a cost discussion and the solutions cost money. With linux they are an intrinsic property of the OS.
I think I trust winformant to tell me about Linux about as much as I trust slashdot to tell me about Windows... :-)
FWIW, our data is nearly uncompressable so that doesn't apply to us. In the case of compressable data, the issues of encryption and compression are orthoganal. If you compress the unencrypted data (which of course you must do in either case as encrypted data isn't compressable) then you can frequently save more time in transmission than you spend on the compression step.
If you then choose to encrypt it, your crypto algorythm will at some point not be able to keep up with the pipe available.
If you choose not to encrypt it you will have saved an almost unimaginable number of cycles to use pushing data down the pipe instead.
Remember what started this thread though. I don't disagree that encryption is useful, just that the naked assertion that security is the most important thing isn't nearly always true.
Encrypted data is generally the same size as the original, depending on whether a block or stream cypher is used and how much, if any, header data is attached to the message.
True that the data going down the pipe is the same size, but unless you have multiple machines sending pieces of the same data down different paths to the endpoint, you find that more often than not your CPU cannot encrypt the data quickly enough to keep up with the pipe that is available to it.
So in quick tests we find that SCP takes about twice as long as native FTP. I've never tested SFTP, but imagine similar results. Do you know?
While it may not have ALL the features you were looking for, it has the most important - security.
FYI, security isn't the most important for everyone.
I'm much more concerned these days with bandwidth utilization, which would be kind of hosed by a scheme that encrypts the data stream. I probably want encrypted authentication, but that's it.
I hand't heard of FSP, so I read that doc. Doesn't look to me like it was supposed to be an FTP killer, but an anonymous FTP killer. Different thing. It also doesn't handle any of the important points that the poster asked about.
FSP seems to have died for lack of new or interesting things, rather than because FTP was too entrenched.
I work in grid computing and we have some needs that push this idea forward. Over at Argonne labs the Globus team has put forward this draft of extensions for some of what you talk about (i.e. it's secure and multi-path). Code exists under yet another open source license the "Globus Toolkit Public License".
I've never seen anything in the strong science category, but here are some (perhaps placeboes) that have helped me from time to time.
/. during compiles for example :-)) are better able to remember the details of what they are doing. The brain is pretty crummy at task switching.
1) Phosphatidyl Choline is a precursor to acetyl choline a neurotransmitter associated with memory
2) I've used machines and programs (sadly none of which I can reference right now) that produce sound in stereo such that the left and right ears recieve offset signals and this is supposed to help the different sides of the brain communicate. I don't know what, if any, brain effect this has beyond a white noise that helps me concentrate with fewer distractions, but I find this technique to be so successful that the reason I can't reference a program right now is that I burned some of this noise onto a CD years ago and have been using it as needed ever since. The literature on the subject claims that different frequencies do different things and I find this to be true in my case, suggesting that there is more going on than simply white noise blocking out background. For example, one of the tracks on my CD is supposed to bring you down to a sleep like state. If I use this while trying to work I get very strong headaches. Not something I want to repeat over and over, but I've done it a few times to see if it was reproducable. It was.
3) Pressure. Most people don't think well under pressure. Don't fall into the downward spiral of getting pissed that you can't remember something. It will only make it harder to remember more stuff.
4) Concentration. 2 touches on this, but it's a fact that people who concentrate on one task (instead of reading
I suppose boycotts work better if you were actually intending to make a purchase. Damn the man, foiled again!
Unless Bruce also suggests that we do away with metal detectors and x-ray machines then false positives aren't a problem.
Anyone who has flown any significant number of times has seen a bag search or a person being wanded. Most have probably seen a person taken away to the back rooms for a more thorough going over.
Does Bruce suggest doing away with metal detectors because they are *far* less than 99.99 percent accurate, of course not. So why suggest avoiding better tech?
In both cases the person flagged wouldn't be immediately locked up. In both cases the people running security must be counted on to not become complacent in the face of 'the boy who cried wolf'. In both cases the bar against terrorism is raised.
Exodus is still operating, and hopefully will be able to keep the LEDs turned on for a good long while (since Slashdot is hosted there)
So since slashdot is there they should be able to keep the lights on for a long time?
Ah the wonders of English.
On the serious side, can anyone tell me how these places manage to lose so much money? Is it the labor, site or networking costs? It seems like web hosting should be an industry that, once you climb to the scale of Exodus, is really really profitable.
Hate to get all Gammar Nazi on your ass, but bin Laden is bin Laden, not Bin Laden (unless starting a sentence).
Poliglut prints lots of shirts. See the link for this one. Here it is. (See the back)
Yup, the EFF is great. Everyone at Poliglut is a member.
I started poliglut to help keep people up to speed on politics. The thing is, there's more to politics than what's covered on slashdot. So poliglut covers a much wider range.
The sad truth, IMHO, is that the tech community seems to be so extremely libertarian that they have almost no hope of being heard. It's just to far out of band for the typical pol.
Anyway, stop by poliglut if you're into politics. We talk this stuff every day.
Apache != Linux
Right. And worms, virii and other popular afflictions of NT is wrong to. Most of the worms and virii have been infecting outlook and IIS, not Windows. So to on the unix side. And the vast majority of Apache is running on unix flavors.
My comment is a fair one, even if you do have a lower uid than mine.
The only thing stopping it these days is Linux's smaller marketshare.
I thought apache had a majority share of the web server market. One that has been hit by worms, and those worm writers usually choose IIS despite it's smaller market share.
It could be because IIS has more exploits...
I have been thinking about feasible ways to prevent such acts of terrorism.
Here's one. Drag Reagan into the streets and kick the shit out of him as an example of what we do when our Presidents circumvent congress and train people like bin Laden. Bin Laden may think it's funny that we trained him, but I can think of about 280M people who find it a lot less amusing these days.
(As always, the latest news is available at Poliglut (see below))
Look, the US is a fine country and all, but WRT to the claim that "No where else on Earth could you find support like this." let me remind you that the Red Cross was founded in Switzerland along with many other great charities.
This is a fine country, but let's not puff our chests too much over this.
(See Poliglut for more late breaking WTC stuff including the just happening further collapse)
And also the obligatory plug for Poliglut.
.sig
Thanks for all who have sent in news and emailed their thanks during the crush yesterday.
Several stories, a diary of the events and many links available from the
Poliglut we've got a running diary with links of the whole day.
As I said here
"""
You know what, this Pearl Harbor ][ stuff is bull. This is Hiroshima ][, both in terms of bombing innocents and the death toll. The scary part, Dubyas ill conceived Star Wars sequal wouldn't have made a bit of difference in this case. *That's* why the military has all their brass out there talking about Pearl Harbor. Don't let them distract you, this is Hiroshima ][ and it shows what a waste of $60B Star Wars ][ is. Pass it on.
"""
I'm with you on the disgust. MSNBC is running a "Terror Timline" for fucks sake. (It's linked from poliglut if you're interested)
What also disgusts me is the idea that this is Pearl Harbor ][.
Want to talk about sequels, this is more like Hiroshima ][. A death toll of perhaps 50K dwarfs Pearl Harbor but is darn close to Hiroshima.
And there isn't a thing that Bush's Star Wars sequal would have done to save us.
Continual updates on poliglut. And we're still operating without lag.