While I'm capable of setting up a box, and setting up software, configuring the network, and maintaining everything, it is timeconsuming, and can be frustrating and annoying.
It would be nice to be able to just log onto a box and have everything I ever want be setup already, and have someone else worry about security patches.
The obvious reason why the ISPs don't like to offer this anymore is because they don't want to deal with everybody trying to hack the machine, and hack each other, and spawn infinite recursive fork programs and programs that consume all the inodes.
I had a shell account with my ISP. 2 months before it went away somebody hacked the box. Then it took 2 weeks for access to come back. Then 6 weeks later it happened again. That was it. They cancelled the service.
You could argue that it would be bad to put free code on the market and hurt
businesses, that is plausable, (though see my sarcastic response to this assertion in my previous post above). Yet
more plausably you could argue that a government agency can charge or fail to charge for software it comissions
or develops as it sees fit, though I still would have some qualms with that argument, given that the government is
not a business and does not exist for the sole purpose of making money for the government.
I argue neither point you mentioned. My argument is that weapons are costly to implement, and I (USA) don't want to help anyone else build them. I'm willing to foot the entire bill, every cost, and I don't care, because I know I can AFFORD to build BETTER weapons than the next guy ( or country ).
Furthermore, I don't want to comprimise our security by sharing things with people ( or gov'ts ) I don't need to. ( Sure, I know, a bunch of volunteers might help us fix bugs... Sure.. or maybe they will just find the bugs, and not tell us, and use them to exploit us.. )
Sure, some stuff isn't sensative.. And maybe some stuff should be shared.. But I don't think anyone should be off ranting and raving that everything the gov't funds should be open source...
I used to hang up on telemarketers too. I didn't notice it having much of an effect myself. This ploy only works if the telemarketers are actually keeping track of who will or won't listen. I don't think they keep track.
I signed up for NYS no call, and Like others have said, I don't get many calls anymore.
I'm on the NY State Do not call list. A while back I got a call. I took down their information, and filed a compaint with the state.
About 6 months later New York State sent me a letter telling me that the company that had called me had been fined $11,000 for the 11 complaints that had been filed against it!
As others have posted above, the Do not Call law does work.
If you read the actual press release you will get the impression that It's not really a software Development Project at all, its more of an effort to FIGURE OUT the best ways to build Software and Computers for Sustainability.
It will probably end up being a LAB or even a School, at which they work on Sustainability issues. My guess would be that the results/findings will be widely presented and published. I think that resulting SW tools may or may not end up being open-sourced.
The prevailing theme I read in other postings is that people think that anything the Gov't funds, should be open. That idea doesn't hold any water anyplace. Weapons the gov't funds the development of are not open. And I don't want them to be. I don't want the software that runs a weapon to be open either. You can't go buy a missile, and you can't go download the code that runs in a missile, and I like it that way.
Furthermore, the "Open-Source way" kind of breaks down when it comes to obscure problems that only specific groups ( like governments ) need to solve. People need to have something that excites them and interests them about working on some project. At least they need the hardware that it will run on.
The gov't often wants contractors to take over with SW projects even if they funded the initial development efforts. A company can to sell products if possible, and use proceeds to pay for some of the cost of further development and maintanance, even if the gov't funded a lot of the initial project..
The GPS allows them to do some neat stuff not mentioned in the article.
Some systems can keep maps of the paths that equipment took traveling over a feild. This information can be used to guide the operator down the exact same path within an inch, or 2, on the next application. This can minimize crop damage from getting run over, and also reduces soil compaction.
Some systems can be programmed to know how wide of a swath the equipment covers, and can then guide the operator to get very accurate coverage without skips or overlap. This functionality is particularly valuable when making applications that can not be easily seen by the operator, such as sprays.
Better systems can even have a limited auto pilot feature that is integrated into the tractor. Once you are on track you tell the system to take over and it steers.
Last I knew AirSnort couldn't crack Cisco/Aironet stuff.
Also, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some proprietary security solutions such as a RADIUS server for added security on top of WEP. RADIUS can be configured to change the WEP key every so many minutes.
And finally like everyone else said, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some extra encryption for the actual card number.
As Torvolds said in the Cisco interview "software is hard to write."
One of the hardest things about software is that much of the work is abstract.
Since it is abstract managing software projects suffers from special problems.
I like to make use analogies to think about the problem of SW engineering.
If I were building a house I might select a site to build the house, and
have an architect draw up some blueprints. After the blueprints existed,
I would probably find a builder. The builder would look at the scheduling
of his crews, and my blueprints, to come up with an estimate of when the
job would be done.
As actual building progresses it is easy for all involved to get a very
intuitive idea of how things are coming. Has the basement been dug
yet? Is the foundation in? Rough framing been done? Roof?
Wiring? Plumbing? Dry wall? Flooring? finish Molding?
Painting? Siding? A 10 year old could probably tell you
with some reasonable amount of accuracy how the job was coming and how
soon things would be done.
In SW, it is often very hard to get a realistic clue on how well things
are coming. A GUI might exist, with no real computing implemented
behind it. Or the opposite might be true. The software might
handle a small file, or a low rate, but not meet operation requirements.
You have to have very clearly defined requirements, design, and implementation
plan. and then take the time to actually determine how well the implementation
is coming along. This can take a lot of time. Often the developer
is left to report status with nobody double checking. Often the requirements,
design, or implementation plan are poor. This make it even harder
to determine progress.
If my house was 50% complete and I decided that I really wanted a 2
story colonial instead of split level ranch, every one involved would easily
recognize that this was a major revamp, and would probably mean starting
from scratch. It would be intuitively obvious that my foundation
was no longer the right size, and that the framing would need major revamps,
and the first thing to do would be to stop all work and get a new set of
blue prints. Probably the existing work would need to be torn down,
and we would start from scratch.
In software, since the work is so abstract, it is common to hear of
projects where basic requirements and designs are radically changed in
mid stream. The Boss doesn't really understand what software is,
so he doesn't really know what impact the changing the requirements has.
Since writing software doesn't consume raw materials other than time,
people don't' seem to put enough time into requirements, or design.
And since no 2x4's will be lost if I call for a major revamp in the SW,
people are often willing to call for those major changes in mid stream.
Folks who build houses are mostly skilled trades people who keep close
track of their time worked. This gives planners good information
for later estimates.
Most SW folks are salaried staff. Often we don't get paid over
time. Usually the amount of time it requires to do some work is not
well documented. It is often not well documented when people work
a lot of overtime to get a job done. This adds to the estimating
problem. It took 2 man years to do the work. Does that include
over time? Overtime for how many people? A staff of 4 working
6 months on a job probably won't be able to put in as much extra effort
as a staff of 8 all working part time for 3 months.
And even home building suffers delays, and miss deadlines, and even
cancel projects in mid stream. Isn't there a major road/bridge/ramp
project down around NYC that got canceled years ago, resulting in this
unused ramp that just ends in mid-air?
Software is infinitely copy-able. If I write it once, I don't
need to write it again. many SW projects are really new inventions.
It's a new idea. Something that didn't exist before. How long
will it take to do this? Don't know. I've never done it before.
A couple of years ago an acquaintance of mine died of cancer. I got the news on a Friday. Monday morning I found I had a new email from him in my mailbox at work.
Up until that time I had always kind of considered email to be almost like having a conversation. Often people I email with are online, and they reply immediatly and we tend to have a conversation of short reply messages.
It was weird to read that note from him. Basically it contained his dying words to bunch of friends. I have lost that note, but he said stuff like, "it won't be long now.. I hope I brought smile to you life with the jokes I forwarded. Remember to have a pint for me..."
Of course he sent the note before he died on Friday and mailer problems delayed the delivery.
> This was first seriously proposed by Gerald K. > Oneill of Princeton University in 1975! It was > feasable ( and even profitable )
Thats funny! I bet everybody said, "you can't be serious" after reading his proposal.
> proposal had an estimated 20 year pay back time,
> for the first powersat. Subsequent powersats
> would have been much cheaper. If the proposal
> Oneill made had been taken up seriously in 1976,
> and taken say 2 years to get it's political legs
> so that actual work began in 1978, and it took
> ten years to build, we would have had cheap
>abundant energy by 1988.
If it had a 20 year payback time, and it wasn't working until 1988, the power wouldn't be cheap until the system was paid back, in 2008.
If the system was privately owned, the power would never be "cheap" even after the facility was paid for.
If the Gov't ran it, it would never be cheap because 1) gov't has no reason to be anything but a fat expensive pig, and 2) they will want to milk the project for extra money to do other things.
And Finally; Any proposal that requires keeping something up and running in space for 20 years before it's paid for is ludicrus. How many launch exposions will the project be able to endure? How much money does one mission to outerspace cost? Can't see it. No way. No how.
I'm with the twenty other people who said we should just try harder to collect solar power here on earth.
It's true that in 50 years we might have technology good enough to make it possible to do. But technology for wind, water, and solar energy is going to improve too.
I'll swallow supporting NASA for space stations, Mars probes, and X-ray telescopes, but If I had a checkbox for funding this, I wouldn't check it.
Actually the specs for 802.11a and 802.11b where approved at the exact same time.
Not sure why 11b got popular and 11a didn't.
There were products in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz space back long before the 802.11? existed. Maybe
the IEEE folks thought 5 GHz was going to take off first, and they just got it wrong. Or more likely, the 5 GHz working group got started before the 11 MB/S 2.4 GHz group.
Kevin
Embarrasing, Many don't know how to get involved
on
Slashdot in Politics?
·
· Score: 1
My own barriers have included not being confident that I'm sending a letter to the right politician, or at the right time.
A resource that clearly spells out the right politians ( senators and representatives ) for a zip code, their addresses, and that gives advice on when is the right time to send a letter would help.
It might be more valueable, in some cases, to write to a Senator who might be swayed, instead of your own Senator that has already made up his mind.
A political letter writing FAQ!
It may be lame, and embarrasing to admit that people need help with every little thing, but anything that will make it easier for people to get involved is good.
Wrong on both accounts. They are not all bad. But when a bad guy has power, he can be REALLY bad. And the only thing that prevented me from being abused even more was the fact that I don't typically break laws and I know when to keep my mouth shut.
The point is that cops are people. And there some good, some bad, some bigots, some haters, some power-tripers, some do-gooders, some friendly, and some mean. Some will presume you are guilty and plant the evidence to make sure you don't get off. Some while rape you in the bathroom with a mop handle.
If you give the cops more power, you give that power to all the cops. Even the bad ones. I don't wnat anybody, neither the good cops nor the bad cops to have power over me. I think law enforcement agencies have plenty of tools for fighting crime already. I don't want to give them any more power.
Sure, they can't always get somewhere in time to stop someone
from being victimized, but by catching a criminal after one crime, they
protect us from subsequent crimes by the same criminal.
OK. There is some limited protection.
But It is limited. Police and gov't can't guarantee my protection
from badguys, particularly if the badguys work for or in the police or
the Gov't.
Yet, I've never been mugged, robbed or threatened by criminals.
If, as you say, robust self defence is what keeps the crooks away, then
why haven't I been robbed already?
That's what I used to say until my back door was broken down 2 years ago.
A local scumbag stole $1500 of stuff from my home. Probably the reason
why you haven't been robbed yet is just luck of the odds. Police
didn't seem particularly interested in my robbery.
I have nothing but intense disgust for officers who abuse their authority
and power to beat people down.
I have had personal encounters with police:
- pulled over and harrassed for running a yellow light at 4 AM on my
way home from work. I was assumed to be drunk. And was allowed to
procede with a $50 ticket for a marginally loud exhaust.
- pulled over and harrassed for "eratic driving" on my way home from
work at 11:30 pm. Assumed to be drunk. Questioned for 10 minutes.
Finally released after volunteering to take the breath test.
- Obnoxious police officers directing traffic during a parade.
Office refused to let some cars pass even after 10 minutes of waiting.
- Obnoxious police giving me a ticket for a loud muffler when he SAW
the exhaust damage happen right in front of him.
When a cop pulls a car over for running a yellow light, or for not coming
to a comeplete stop at stop sign, in a sleepy rural one light town at 4
AM, when there is no else around, he is doing one thing and one thing
only. He is being obnoxious.
Police are people. Some good and some bad. Most people are
not pure. I don't want anyone to have anymore power over me than
absolutely neccessary. The bad things I hear and see, and have experienced
have soured me.
It's surprising to see how anti-law enforcement the/. crowd
really is. The only thing that's keeping you, your families and your property safe is a robust law enforcement
system. Without law enforcement your precious computers and consoles would be stolen in no time.
NO! NO! NO! The robust law enforcement is not keeping
me, or my family, or my property safe from all the scumbags out there.
All the police can do is swing by after the fact to collect evidence, and
pick up the bodies. It is not their job to protect us, in spite of
how many movie plots that have police guarding people.
They actually spend a lot of time beating us down. Here in NY,
USA we have zero tolerance for seat belt offenders, with police roadblocks
for enforcement. In USA the Federal Gov't has most law enforcement
spending a majority of their time chasing victimless criminals like pot
smokers.
Ask yourself how much you will like the new "law enforcement" tool when
it is used to beat you down? Your kid took a spin on his bike
without a helmet, so you have endangered his welfare and are arrested.
You or someone who looks like you are seen buying wine regularly
so you must be watched closely just in case you happen to drive drunk.
You or someone who looks like you attend a Libertarian conference so you
deserve a little extra harassment just for being different.
You look a lot like a real badguy so you and your family are held at gunpoint
will you get arrested every time you go into a public place.
This link describes
how MOSIX can be best applied.
The best solution for any distributed computing problem depends on that
problem. How CPU intensive is the job? How much data will need
to be distributed to nodes. Do intermediate processing steps require
intermediate answers from other nodes? How fast is the CPU? How fast
is the network?
Basically, if you have a lot of processing that could be manually distributing
to a bunch of hosts, via rsh, or rlogin, then MOSIX can be used to easily
manage/monitor that work with no coding. For harder problems that
couldn't be manually distributed you might need MPI or PVM with special
code in order to do the equivalent of "threaded" distributed computing.
Manual distribution is often easiest when you have network shared filesystems
( NSF, etc.,) and so is MOSIX.
MPI is short for Message Passing Interface. You can use MPI libs
to do interprocess/interhost messaging and I/O on non homogenous networks.
MPI does not require shared filesystems, though your own project might
use them. MPI is certainly easier to manage when you have shared filesystems.
One must be careful to conider the I/O time involved in network read/writes.
Also note that multiple network nodes will clobber each other's data if
they all try to write to the same file over the network.
MPI, or PVM is often used when the problem of breaking the job
into pieces, or putting the results back together is non-trivial.
For instance, if you were doing very processor intensive image processing
on a large file, you may need to break the image into pieces, or tiles,
and then distribute the processing of the tiles, with some processors sharing
intermediate results, then stitch the results back into one file and finally
write that file.
The approach that Unlimited Scale is using only makes sense in limited
cases, i.e.., when computers are " getting bogged down in processing interrupt
requests from peripherals." In general, multithreaded processing,
or even distributed processing, only makes sense when I/O time is dwarfed
by CPU time. SMP machines have an advantage in that they have really
fast, communication between nodes, compared to Ethernet. Beowulf
clusters have relatively slow communication between nodes. Beowulf
clusters can only really be effective in the more CPU bound and less I/O
intensive jobs. But if you have a job that can be run faster on a
Linux cluster, you can save the big bucks on your initial hardware purchase.
The more CPU intesive the processing is, the slower the network you can
put up with. SETI is a good example of this. If it takes 12
hours to process a packet of data, then I/O over a 56K modem is OK.
Also consider that doing kernel builds benchmarks or realtime game benchmarks won't give you what you need to know about compute bound and non I/O bound processing. That slightly faster processor might only give a 1% increase in an I/O intensive job like compiling. But rendering frames for Toy Story, or Final Fantasy is, I will guess, a very much compute bound task, with comparably little I/O. The increase could be much more dramatic.
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I don't think we need white hat worms running around plugging all of the security holes in my honey pot servers.
j
While I'm capable of setting up a box, and setting up software, configuring the network, and maintaining everything, it is timeconsuming, and can be frustrating and annoying.
It would be nice to be able to just log onto a box and have everything I ever want be setup already, and have someone else worry about security patches.
The obvious reason why the ISPs don't like to offer this anymore is because they don't want to deal with everybody trying to hack the machine, and hack each other, and spawn infinite recursive fork programs and programs that consume all the inodes.
I had a shell account with my ISP. 2 months before it went away somebody hacked the box. Then it took 2 weeks for access to come back. Then 6 weeks later it happened again. That was it. They cancelled the service.
Dude;
mozilla ( at least the version I'm running ) doesn't take input from standard in.
Lame..
Furthermore, I don't want to comprimise our security by sharing things with people ( or gov'ts ) I don't need to. ( Sure, I know, a bunch of volunteers might help us fix bugs... Sure.. or maybe they will just find the bugs, and not tell us, and use them to exploit us.. )
Sure, some stuff isn't sensative.. And maybe some stuff should be shared.. But I don't think anyone should be off ranting and raving that everything the gov't funds should be open source...
I used to hang up on telemarketers too. I didn't notice it having much of an effect myself. This ploy only works if the telemarketers are actually keeping track of who will or won't listen. I don't think they keep track.
I signed up for NYS no call, and Like others have said, I don't get many calls anymore.
I'm on the NY State Do not call list. A while back I got a call. I took down their information, and filed a compaint with the state.
About 6 months later New York State sent me a letter telling me that the company that had called me had been fined $11,000 for the 11 complaints that had been filed against it!
As others have posted above, the Do not Call law does work.
If you read the actual press release you will get the impression that It's not really a software Development Project at all, its more of an effort to FIGURE OUT the best ways to build Software and Computers for Sustainability.
It will probably end up being a LAB or even a School, at which they work on Sustainability issues. My guess would be that the results/findings will be widely presented and published. I think that resulting SW tools may or may not end up being open-sourced.
The prevailing theme I read in other postings is that people think that anything the Gov't funds, should be open. That idea doesn't hold any water anyplace. Weapons the gov't funds the development of are not open. And I don't want them to be. I don't want the software that runs a weapon to be open either. You can't go buy a missile, and you can't go download the code that runs in a missile, and I like it that way.
Furthermore, the "Open-Source way" kind of breaks down when it comes to obscure problems that only specific groups ( like governments ) need to solve. People need to have something that excites them and interests them about working on some project. At least they need the hardware that it will run on.
The gov't often wants contractors to take over with SW projects even if they funded the initial development efforts. A company can to sell products if possible, and use proceeds to pay for some of the cost of further development and maintanance, even if the gov't funded a lot of the initial project..
As many have pointed out, precision farming is not a new thing. Check this link for a bunch of companies involved:
e nt /Precision_Farming/
http://www.prairielinks.com/aglinks/Farm_Equipm
The GPS allows them to do some neat stuff not mentioned in the article.
Some systems can keep maps of the paths that equipment took traveling over a feild. This information can be used to guide the operator down the exact same path within an inch, or 2, on the next application. This can minimize crop damage from getting run over, and also reduces soil compaction.
Some systems can be programmed to know how wide of a swath the equipment covers, and can then guide the operator to get very accurate coverage without skips or overlap. This functionality is particularly valuable when making applications that can not be easily seen by the operator, such as sprays.
Better systems can even have a limited auto pilot feature that is integrated into the tractor. Once you are on track you tell the system to take over and it steers.
Cool stuff!
Kevin
Main Entry: oxymoron /-'mOr-&, -'mor-/
Pronunciation: "äk-si-'mOr-"än, -'mor-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural oxymora
Etymology: Late Greek oxymOron, from neuter of oxymOros pointedly
foolish, from Greek oxys sharp, keen + mOros foolish
Date: 1657
: a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (as cruel kindness)
Last I knew AirSnort couldn't crack Cisco/Aironet stuff.
Also, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some proprietary security solutions such as a RADIUS server for added security on top of WEP. RADIUS can be configured to change the WEP key every so many minutes.
And finally like everyone else said, it's not hard to imagine Disney using some extra encryption for the actual card number.
Intermec has the Model 70 Pocket PC.
I believe I saw a somewhat industrialized iPaq recently, but I can't find it now. Probably not announced yet.
I like to make use analogies to think about the problem of SW engineering. If I were building a house I might select a site to build the house, and have an architect draw up some blueprints. After the blueprints existed, I would probably find a builder. The builder would look at the scheduling of his crews, and my blueprints, to come up with an estimate of when the job would be done.
As actual building progresses it is easy for all involved to get a very intuitive idea of how things are coming. Has the basement been dug yet? Is the foundation in? Rough framing been done? Roof? Wiring? Plumbing? Dry wall? Flooring? finish Molding? Painting? Siding? A 10 year old could probably tell you with some reasonable amount of accuracy how the job was coming and how soon things would be done.
In SW, it is often very hard to get a realistic clue on how well things are coming. A GUI might exist, with no real computing implemented behind it. Or the opposite might be true. The software might handle a small file, or a low rate, but not meet operation requirements. You have to have very clearly defined requirements, design, and implementation plan. and then take the time to actually determine how well the implementation is coming along. This can take a lot of time. Often the developer is left to report status with nobody double checking. Often the requirements, design, or implementation plan are poor. This make it even harder to determine progress.
If my house was 50% complete and I decided that I really wanted a 2 story colonial instead of split level ranch, every one involved would easily recognize that this was a major revamp, and would probably mean starting from scratch. It would be intuitively obvious that my foundation was no longer the right size, and that the framing would need major revamps, and the first thing to do would be to stop all work and get a new set of blue prints. Probably the existing work would need to be torn down, and we would start from scratch.
In software, since the work is so abstract, it is common to hear of projects where basic requirements and designs are radically changed in mid stream. The Boss doesn't really understand what software is, so he doesn't really know what impact the changing the requirements has.
Since writing software doesn't consume raw materials other than time, people don't' seem to put enough time into requirements, or design. And since no 2x4's will be lost if I call for a major revamp in the SW, people are often willing to call for those major changes in mid stream.
Folks who build houses are mostly skilled trades people who keep close track of their time worked. This gives planners good information for later estimates.
Most SW folks are salaried staff. Often we don't get paid over time. Usually the amount of time it requires to do some work is not well documented. It is often not well documented when people work a lot of overtime to get a job done. This adds to the estimating problem. It took 2 man years to do the work. Does that include over time? Overtime for how many people? A staff of 4 working 6 months on a job probably won't be able to put in as much extra effort as a staff of 8 all working part time for 3 months.
And even home building suffers delays, and miss deadlines, and even cancel projects in mid stream. Isn't there a major road/bridge/ramp project down around NYC that got canceled years ago, resulting in this unused ramp that just ends in mid-air?
Software is infinitely copy-able. If I write it once, I don't need to write it again. many SW projects are really new inventions. It's a new idea. Something that didn't exist before. How long will it take to do this? Don't know. I've never done it before.
Kevin
A couple of years ago an acquaintance of mine died of cancer. I got the news on a Friday. Monday morning I found I had a new email from him in my mailbox at work.
Up until that time I had always kind of considered email to be almost like having a conversation. Often people I email with are online, and they reply immediatly and we tend to have a conversation of short reply messages.
It was weird to read that note from him. Basically it contained his dying words to bunch of friends. I have lost that note, but he said stuff like, "it won't be long now.. I hope I brought smile to you life with the jokes I forwarded. Remember to have a pint for me..."
Of course he sent the note before he died on Friday and mailer problems delayed the delivery.
It still weird for me to remember that.
Kevin
> This was first seriously proposed by Gerald K. > Oneill of Princeton University in 1975! It was > feasable ( and even profitable )
Thats funny! I bet everybody said, "you can't be serious" after reading his proposal.
> proposal had an estimated 20 year pay back time,
> for the first powersat. Subsequent powersats
> would have been much cheaper. If the proposal
> Oneill made had been taken up seriously in 1976,
> and taken say 2 years to get it's political legs
> so that actual work began in 1978, and it took
> ten years to build, we would have had cheap
>abundant energy by 1988.
If it had a 20 year payback time, and it wasn't working until 1988, the power wouldn't be cheap until the system was paid back, in 2008.
If the system was privately owned, the power would never be "cheap" even after the facility was paid for.
If the Gov't ran it, it would never be cheap because 1) gov't has no reason to be anything but a fat expensive pig, and 2) they will want to milk the project for extra money to do other things.
And Finally; Any proposal that requires keeping something up and running in space for 20 years before it's paid for is ludicrus. How many launch exposions will the project be able to endure? How much money does one mission to outerspace cost? Can't see it. No way. No how.
Kevin
I'm with the twenty other people who said we should just try harder to collect solar power here on earth.
It's true that in 50 years we might have technology good enough to make it possible to do. But technology for wind, water, and solar energy is going to improve too.
I'll swallow supporting NASA for space stations, Mars probes, and X-ray telescopes, but If I had a checkbox for funding this, I wouldn't check it.
Kevin
Actually the specs for 802.11a and 802.11b where approved at the exact same time.
Not sure why 11b got popular and 11a didn't.
There were products in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz space back long before the 802.11? existed. Maybe
the IEEE folks thought 5 GHz was going to take off first, and they just got it wrong. Or more likely, the 5 GHz working group got started before the 11 MB/S 2.4 GHz group.
Kevin
My own barriers have included not being confident that I'm sending a letter to the right politician, or at the right time.
A resource that clearly spells out the right politians ( senators and representatives ) for a zip code, their addresses, and that gives advice on when is the right time to send a letter would help.
It might be more valueable, in some cases, to write to a Senator who might be swayed, instead of your own Senator that has already made up his mind.
A political letter writing FAQ!
It may be lame, and embarrasing to admit that people need help with every little thing, but anything that will make it easier for people to get involved is good.
Wrong on both accounts. They are not all bad. But when a bad guy has power, he can be REALLY bad. And the only thing that prevented me from being abused even more was the fact that I don't typically break laws and I know when to keep my mouth shut.
The point is that cops are people. And there some good, some bad, some bigots, some haters, some power-tripers, some do-gooders, some friendly, and some mean. Some will presume you are guilty and plant the evidence to make sure you don't get off. Some while rape you in the bathroom with a mop handle.
If you give the cops more power, you give that power to all the cops. Even the bad ones. I don't wnat anybody, neither the good cops nor the bad cops to have power over me. I think law enforcement agencies have plenty of tools for fighting crime already. I don't want to give them any more power.
But It is limited. Police and gov't can't guarantee my protection from badguys, particularly if the badguys work for or in the police or the Gov't.
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely.
ready?
and power to beat people down.
I have had personal encounters with police:
- pulled over and harrassed for running a yellow light at 4 AM on my
way home from work. I was assumed to be drunk. And was allowed to
procede with a $50 ticket for a marginally loud exhaust.
- pulled over and harrassed for "eratic driving" on my way home from
work at 11:30 pm. Assumed to be drunk. Questioned for 10 minutes.
Finally released after volunteering to take the breath test.
- Obnoxious police officers directing traffic during a parade.
Office refused to let some cars pass even after 10 minutes of waiting.
- Obnoxious police giving me a ticket for a loud muffler when he SAW
the exhaust damage happen right in front of him.
When a cop pulls a car over for running a yellow light, or for not coming
to a comeplete stop at stop sign, in a sleepy rural one light town at 4
AM, when there is no else around, he is doing one thing and one thing
only. He is being obnoxious.
Police are people. Some good and some bad. Most people are
not pure. I don't want anyone to have anymore power over me than
absolutely neccessary. The bad things I hear and see, and have experienced
have soured me.
Kevin
They actually spend a lot of time beating us down. Here in NY, USA we have zero tolerance for seat belt offenders, with police roadblocks for enforcement. In USA the Federal Gov't has most law enforcement spending a majority of their time chasing victimless criminals like pot smokers.
Ask yourself how much you will like the new "law enforcement" tool when it is used to beat you down? Your kid took a spin on his bike without a helmet, so you have endangered his welfare and are arrested. You or someone who looks like you are seen buying wine regularly so you must be watched closely just in case you happen to drive drunk. You or someone who looks like you attend a Libertarian conference so you deserve a little extra harassment just for being different. You look a lot like a real badguy so you and your family are held at gunpoint will you get arrested every time you go into a public place.
Kevin
The best solution for any distributed computing problem depends on that problem. How CPU intensive is the job? How much data will need to be distributed to nodes. Do intermediate processing steps require intermediate answers from other nodes? How fast is the CPU? How fast is the network?
Basically, if you have a lot of processing that could be manually distributing to a bunch of hosts, via rsh, or rlogin, then MOSIX can be used to easily manage/monitor that work with no coding. For harder problems that couldn't be manually distributed you might need MPI or PVM with special code in order to do the equivalent of "threaded" distributed computing.
Manual distribution is often easiest when you have network shared filesystems ( NSF, etc.,) and so is MOSIX.
MPI is short for Message Passing Interface. You can use MPI libs to do interprocess/interhost messaging and I/O on non homogenous networks. MPI does not require shared filesystems, though your own project might use them. MPI is certainly easier to manage when you have shared filesystems. One must be careful to conider the I/O time involved in network read/writes. Also note that multiple network nodes will clobber each other's data if they all try to write to the same file over the network.
MPI, or PVM is often used when the problem of breaking the job into pieces, or putting the results back together is non-trivial. For instance, if you were doing very processor intensive image processing on a large file, you may need to break the image into pieces, or tiles, and then distribute the processing of the tiles, with some processors sharing intermediate results, then stitch the results back into one file and finally write that file.
The approach that Unlimited Scale is using only makes sense in limited cases, i.e.., when computers are " getting bogged down in processing interrupt requests from peripherals." In general, multithreaded processing, or even distributed processing, only makes sense when I/O time is dwarfed by CPU time. SMP machines have an advantage in that they have really fast, communication between nodes, compared to Ethernet. Beowulf clusters have relatively slow communication between nodes. Beowulf clusters can only really be effective in the more CPU bound and less I/O intensive jobs. But if you have a job that can be run faster on a Linux cluster, you can save the big bucks on your initial hardware purchase. The more CPU intesive the processing is, the slower the network you can put up with. SETI is a good example of this. If it takes 12 hours to process a packet of data, then I/O over a 56K modem is OK.
Also consider that doing kernel builds benchmarks or realtime game benchmarks won't give you what you need to know about compute bound and non I/O bound processing. That slightly faster processor might only give a 1% increase in an I/O intensive job like compiling. But rendering frames for Toy Story, or Final Fantasy is, I will guess, a very much compute bound task, with comparably little I/O. The increase could be much more dramatic.