How many of those new computer sales are being done because the existing computers are so choked with spyware, nagware, and malware and botched A/V that they seem broken?
A computer thats only a few years old is already way more powerfull than most people need...until it gets hijacked. Then the apparent power goes to the floor.
Of course the pretty computer with 2gigs of ram and a core2 duo looks great in the store. It looks great compared to the perfectly operational hardware at home thats been rendered useless by someone in seattle.
Due to website/browser/plugin problems, its often the case that a media file will not play in the window. Now its usually not difficult to determine where on the website the media is located. If you browse that directory using automatic indexing, and download what is there, are you breaking the rules? What about parent and subdirectories?
After all you have not guessed a password or anything, but is it considered "out of bounds"?
On a related note, do web-spiders do this? Do they just follow the links or do they ever try to go to the parent directory to index that.
1. Get the wiring right. After you do that, the wires can only do one thing at a time unlike network cable which automagically multiplexes.
2. If you have a lot of terminals, then you need to get them ALL wired independently to the machine using multiport boards. Or use network-based terminal servers. Both points of failure that have their own problems.
3. If you have sites at remote locations connected via a modem, then you have a whole 'nuther can of worms. How does your application respond to the modem dropping connection. Does the workflow handle going back in and picking up where the customer's order left off.
4. Are you going to write your app to "have an image of the screen in memory" so that the screen can be refreshed when errant characters flip up. Or when that modem connection is lost?
5. If you have a "graphics" terminal, can those graphics be printed to the printer. Are you going to have multiple apps with page flipping via screen or some other tool. And what happens when some of those esc sequences are lost and the screen goes nuts. They need to be able to work on more than one thing at a time.
6. If you are using terminal servers, then they have their own menus and own problems. Some people are going to have PCs. Are you going to use a rs232 terminal emulator with them or are you going to give them a network client. What about the terminal differences between your hard terminals and those software packages.
7. Multiport/tty drivers have been buggy in my experience.
Serial is NOT stable. It is NOT versatile. And by the time he is done with the project, the guys in charge will have realized that the bandwidth they were worried about was a small issue.
They probably have an installed base of dumb terminals, or they have a brain tumor. Or both.
So how many different kinds of serial terminal do they have in their installed base. I hope they are not buying new ones. Do you have keyboards/termcaps to make things more or less similar?
Linux is the server huh? So how many of these terminals are you putting in the field; what is your multiport board solution? How many sites? Are you going to have terminal servers? Are you going to have printers?
If you have multiple sites, are you going to use multiplexing between them? Or are they going to use tcpip to get to the main site? Is your linux box acting as a terminal server for a central TCPIP hosted connection?
Is the application a "fullscreen application"? Is it a database application where the old 4gl languages already do most of your work for you? You could write a simple database app in a day or so.
Are your serial terminals going to have serial printers strung off the back and multiplex the terminal/printer datastream on one serial line? Or to do screenprints? They are going to want screenprints in ANY application.
BTW, going back to serial is someones idea of hell -- mine.
Considering the "brainscan" approach to polygraphs that the future may hold. I am kind of interested in how a 100% accurate polygraph or lie-detector would affect civilization. How it would affect law enforcement and judiciary. How would it affect business agreements and politics. If a really good lie detector were readily available, then what would it do to society, government, economies, education, religion...
Its fun to imagine how the world would reshape itself. Would it be good, or a disaster.
This seems like a small incremental threat increase given that the information is already available to anyone who wants to buy it. Anyone foriegn or domestic regardless of criminal record can buy data right? That TSA got what everyone else can access seems a small thing.
What are the greatest threats? Which of these will most likely get you?
National Debt Trade Inequity Job Exportation Oil Dependence / Oil exaustion Terrorist Attack Government Intrusion False Inprisonment Identity Theft Neocons Pinko Liberals Automated Vote Fraud via Hacked Voting Machines Contaminated Food or Water Dumbed down Education Microsoft World Dominance
I am curious. Which one do you think will actually make your life "suck" first. Or add one that I missed.
Though I loath filenames with embedded spaces, his "good practices" fail to even mention the problem. And I believe his xargs examples will not work with them.
And this:
ls -1 | xargs file December_Report.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
The file command will explode with the long output of ls. WTF.
The count on grep could work though.
Best practices:
Use directories; dont keep too much in one directory. When copying to a directory: cp -av file1 file2 file3 file4 directory/. # the trailing path is a good habit
Use small shell scripts to get work done on the command line:
$ for i in images/* > do > convert -resize 640x480 $i 640/$i > done
If they think they can run two series at the same time, I am all for it.
The series so far have hinged on the gate remaining a secret to the general populace. Perhaps they should jump ahead to a time when the general populace first "gets" space travel and access to the gate and ships. There would be a lot of problems. People often want to do things they arent ready for yet. There would be turf wars as people competed for prime locations on other planets. Clashes with natives. Opening various pandora's boxen. Political tensions as the wave of earthers hits the galaxy. The SG teams could be like rescue rangers getting silly colonists out of problems and dealing with various hostilities.
Your computer will not need much mips,storage, or software on it at all. It will just be a cheap terminal that runs vnc and connects to google to supply all your needs. They will run backups, supply search, your software up-to-date. They will prevent viruses.
A bigger computer will just have some cached local apps that people would use when disconnected from the net.
Oh, and your computer will be shaped just like your phone. With ports for a keyboard, mouse, and large digital display.
I dont have an ipod, so some of this may be wrong but....
Have Apple update their firmware so that a password is needed to upload or download from the device. Store the password in their itunes software. It will be transparent to the user, but hot ipods will be stuck with their current song list.
Then no one will be anxious to buy used Ipods without some proof that the seller has the password.
Even better, the ipods are probably serialized. Send the ipod serial number silently along with the account information in itunes. Then when your ipod gets stolen, you go to the apple store with your "proof of purchase" and tell them that the ipod has been stolen. Apple disables itunes for the device and gives the police the contact information the new itunes user was trying to use.
If the system becomes tiered and bandwidth prices go up, cannot technology rise to adapt to the limit? New protocols similar to bittorrent could be used to spread bandwidth over a variety of networks and compression could help a lot as well. Perhaps the html/browsers could be changed so that image sources could be a "list" of sources and your browser could pick the cheapest quickest route based on a rule. Perhaps browsers could even talk to each other to share images.
Instead of looking at this as the end of the world, why not take the opportunity to do something better. We might end up with a browsing experience that is faster than it is now.
You are correct that existing alternatives do not meet the cost/benefit ratio tipping point for adoption. My post proposed that signficant effort be expended to solve the single-source energy solution we now have.
Part of the solution would have to "democratize" fuel (ie. make it widely available and produceable). With supply source way up, the cost would be pushed down to where the poor would be able to afford it. Not only that, there would come a point where the entire economy would go up levels because the "tax" created by the current energy model would not be in effect.
Since the "energy tax" is a payment we make multiple times (to manufacture, ship, store, remove waste) it is most important to the poor. They literally cannot escape paying it right now. When they dont have to pay the energy tax (so much), they can afford better school, medicine, food, water-purity. This will also lead to stabilization as people become less hopeless.
It is in everyone's best interest to find a new cleaner, cheaper source of energy. But the poor would benefit the most.
Again, I stress that current solutions are evolutionary and do not meet the need. We need to expend serious effort to go way beyond what we can do now. An effort beyond the trip to the moon and the trip to mars efforts.
But the money we spend on such an effort would be small compared with the costs of maintaining the current rising costs of the current energy model and its associated ills.
It would be educational to track the cost of using each fossil fuel from end-to-end. From the point you say: "I want to do something that requires energy" to the actual use of that energy and its after-effects.
Every tool that needed to be designed, smelted, maintained. Every step of the extraction, refinement, and conversion process. Every "helper chemical" like coolants, lubricants, hardeners, ingredients, alloys. Every health effect of the mining, distribution, conversion, and disposal of waste products
I wonder if anyone has done a comprehensive study.
Because, in the end, the fuel just burns and is gone. It is just a transient ingredient for other things we do. Its pure cost.
1. We need to have an energy source that is not based on localized supplies in the middle east (or elsewhere) 2. The air around our population centers is polluted by fossil fuel consumption with serious health consequences 3. Fossil fuels cannot be used for deep space travel or colonization which is necessary for survival of our species (eventually) 4. Fossil fuels are poisonous to mine and refine and harm the workers in those industries and towns. 5. Centralized control of energy sources leads to higher prices and a permanent "tax" on economic development and expansion 6. Fossil fuels are poisonous to transport and have caused enormous damage to the marine ecology during spills 7. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy are complicated and wear out quickly. They are expensive to produce and maintain 8. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy create noise which causes problems in urban environments 9. Fossil fuel "control" implies a loss of personal and national liberty
Note that I am not saying that existing alternatives solve any of these problems.
I am saying that there are significant costs/problems to the current energy systems. We have lived with these costs and written them off, but they are still there and still important.
Its worth significant effort to solve these problems. The research to solve these problems will also likely benefit us in other areas.
It would be far better to solve the problems than to continue to live in an unstable,poisonous,noisy world.
Slashdot Mirror
How many of those new computer sales are being done because the existing computers are so choked with spyware, nagware, and malware and botched A/V that they seem broken?
A computer thats only a few years old is already way more powerfull than most people need...until it gets hijacked. Then the apparent power goes to the floor.
Of course the pretty computer with 2gigs of ram and a core2 duo looks great in the store. It looks great compared to the perfectly operational hardware at home thats been rendered useless by someone in seattle.
Due to website/browser/plugin problems, its often the case that a media file will
not play in the window. Now its usually not difficult to determine where on the
website the media is located. If you browse that directory using automatic indexing,
and download what is there, are you breaking the rules? What about parent and subdirectories?
After all you have not guessed a password or anything, but is it considered "out of bounds"?
On a related note, do web-spiders do this? Do they just follow the links or do they ever
try to go to the parent directory to index that.
If you leave a drive in a closet for 10 years, will it still spin up?
The devil is in the details:
1. Get the wiring right. After you do that, the wires can only do one thing at a time
unlike network cable which automagically multiplexes.
2. If you have a lot of terminals, then you need to get them ALL wired independently to
the machine using multiport boards. Or use network-based terminal servers. Both points
of failure that have their own problems.
3. If you have sites at remote locations connected via a modem, then you have a whole 'nuther
can of worms. How does your application respond to the modem dropping connection. Does the
workflow handle going back in and picking up where the customer's order left off.
4. Are you going to write your app to "have an image of the screen in memory" so that the
screen can be refreshed when errant characters flip up. Or when that modem connection is
lost?
5. If you have a "graphics" terminal, can those graphics be printed to the printer. Are
you going to have multiple apps with page flipping via screen or some other tool. And
what happens when some of those esc sequences are lost and the screen goes nuts. They
need to be able to work on more than one thing at a time.
6. If you are using terminal servers, then they have their own menus and own problems.
Some people are going to have PCs. Are you going to use a rs232 terminal emulator with
them or are you going to give them a network client. What about the terminal differences
between your hard terminals and those software packages.
7. Multiport/tty drivers have been buggy in my experience.
Serial is NOT stable. It is NOT versatile. And by the time he is done with the project,
the guys in charge will have realized that the bandwidth they were worried about was
a small issue.
They probably have an installed base of dumb terminals, or they have a brain tumor. Or both.
We created a lot of serial apps on Informix/4GL. I
guess IBM bought informix. It still exists.
So how many different kinds of serial terminal do they have
in their installed base. I hope they are not buying new ones.
Do you have keyboards/termcaps to make things more or less similar?
Linux is the server huh? So how many of these terminals are you putting
in the field; what is your multiport board solution? How many sites?
Are you going to have terminal servers? Are you going to have printers?
If you have multiple sites, are you going to use multiplexing between them?
Or are they going to use tcpip to get to the main site? Is your linux box
acting as a terminal server for a central TCPIP hosted connection?
Is the application a "fullscreen application"? Is it a database application
where the old 4gl languages already do most of your work for you? You could
write a simple database app in a day or so.
Are your serial terminals going to have serial printers strung off the back
and multiplex the terminal/printer datastream on one serial line? Or to do
screenprints? They are going to want screenprints in ANY application.
BTW, going back to serial is someones idea of hell -- mine.
Thanks!
Considering the "brainscan" approach to polygraphs that the future may hold. I am kind of interested in
how a 100% accurate polygraph or lie-detector would affect civilization. How it would affect law enforcement
and judiciary. How would it affect business agreements and politics. If a really good lie detector were
readily available, then what would it do to society, government, economies, education, religion...
Its fun to imagine how the world would reshape itself. Would it be good, or a disaster.
This seems like a small incremental threat increase given
that the information is already available to anyone who
wants to buy it. Anyone foriegn or domestic regardless
of criminal record can buy data right? That TSA got what
everyone else can access seems a small thing.
What are the greatest threats? Which of these will most likely get you?
National Debt
Trade Inequity
Job Exportation
Oil Dependence / Oil exaustion
Terrorist Attack
Government Intrusion
False Inprisonment
Identity Theft
Neocons
Pinko Liberals
Automated Vote Fraud via Hacked Voting Machines
Contaminated Food or Water
Dumbed down Education
Microsoft World Dominance
I am curious. Which one do you think will actually
make your life "suck" first. Or add one that I
missed.
sigh, well
the 640 directory should have an images directory
in it too.
Though I loath filenames with embedded spaces, his "good practices" fail to even mention the problem.
And I believe his xargs examples will not work with them.
And this:
ls -1 | xargs file
December_Report.pdf: PDF document, version 1.3
The file command will explode with the long output of ls. WTF.
The count on grep could work though.
Best practices:
Use directories; dont keep too much in one directory.
When copying to a directory: cp -av file1 file2 file3 file4 directory/. # the trailing path is a good habit
Use small shell scripts to get work done on the command line:
$ for i in images/*
> do
> convert -resize 640x480 $i 640/$i
> done
If they think they can run two series at the same time, I am all
for it.
The series so far have hinged on the gate remaining a secret to the
general populace. Perhaps they should jump ahead to a time when the
general populace first "gets" space travel and access to the gate and ships.
There would be a lot of problems. People often want to do things
they arent ready for yet. There would be turf wars as people competed
for prime locations on other planets. Clashes with natives. Opening
various pandora's boxen. Political tensions as the wave of earthers
hits the galaxy. The SG teams could be like rescue rangers getting
silly colonists out of problems and dealing with various hostilities.
Just an idea....
What a wonderful book.
Thanks.
Farcry is just beyond pretty and the gameplay is awesome.
The lucas soundtrack, puzzles and gameplay make the Jedi
games comfort games.
Otherwise its going to look like the matrix world outside.
People forget the old stuff, but they were great great games.
prince of persia
combat flight simulators
quake 1 and 2
The Jedi Knight games (1&2)
And the best damn game of all time is FARCRY
The last person they look for is the CFO. After all, he has the money for a bagel
right?
Your computer will not need much mips,storage, or software on it at all. It
will just be a cheap terminal that runs vnc and connects to google to supply
all your needs. They will run backups, supply search, your software up-to-date.
They will prevent viruses.
A bigger computer will just have some cached local apps that people would
use when disconnected from the net.
Oh, and your computer will be shaped just like your phone. With ports
for a keyboard, mouse, and large digital display.
I dont have an ipod, so some of this may be wrong but....
Have Apple update their firmware so that a password is needed to
upload or download from the device. Store the password in their
itunes software. It will be transparent to the user, but hot
ipods will be stuck with their current song list.
Then no one will be anxious to buy used Ipods without some proof
that the seller has the password.
Even better, the ipods are probably serialized. Send the ipod
serial number silently along with the account information in
itunes. Then when your ipod gets stolen, you go to the apple
store with your "proof of purchase" and tell them that the
ipod has been stolen. Apple disables itunes for the device
and gives the police the contact information the new itunes
user was trying to use.
If the system becomes tiered and bandwidth prices go up, cannot technology rise to adapt to the limit?
New protocols similar to bittorrent could be used to spread bandwidth over a variety of networks and
compression could help a lot as well. Perhaps the html/browsers could be changed so that image sources
could be a "list" of sources and your browser could pick the cheapest quickest route based on a rule.
Perhaps browsers could even talk to each other to share images.
Instead of looking at this as the end of the world, why not take the opportunity to do something better.
We might end up with a browsing experience that is faster than it is now.
That means he was already charged/convicted and could not cop to a lesser
charge (the plea-bargin tool) in exchange for information regarding anyone.
I think the massive depression and anxiety would be enough of an explanation
without assuming foul play.
Never assume malice to what can be explained by incompetence (or other human weaknesses).
I once plugged the wrong ram into a IBM RS/6000 40p machine. The
machine bios warned me: "Danger Will Robinson"!
You are correct that existing alternatives do not meet the cost/benefit ratio tipping point for adoption.
My post proposed that signficant effort be expended to solve the single-source energy solution we now have.
Part of the solution would have to "democratize" fuel (ie. make it widely available and produceable). With
supply source way up, the cost would be pushed down to where the poor would be able to afford it. Not only
that, there would come a point where the entire economy would go up levels because the "tax" created by
the current energy model would not be in effect.
Since the "energy tax" is a payment we make multiple times (to manufacture, ship, store, remove waste) it
is most important to the poor. They literally cannot escape paying it right now. When they dont have to
pay the energy tax (so much), they can afford better school, medicine, food, water-purity. This will
also lead to stabilization as people become less hopeless.
It is in everyone's best interest to find a new cleaner, cheaper source of energy. But the poor
would benefit the most.
Again, I stress that current solutions are evolutionary and do not meet the need. We need to
expend serious effort to go way beyond what we can do now. An effort beyond the trip to the moon
and the trip to mars efforts.
But the money we spend on such an effort would be small compared with the costs of maintaining
the current rising costs of the current energy model and its associated ills.
An additional note:
It would be educational to track the cost of using each fossil fuel from
end-to-end. From the point you say: "I want to do something that requires energy" to the actual use of that energy and its after-effects.
Every tool that needed to be designed, smelted, maintained.
Every step of the extraction, refinement, and conversion process.
Every "helper chemical" like coolants, lubricants, hardeners, ingredients, alloys.
Every health effect of the mining, distribution, conversion, and disposal of waste products
I wonder if anyone has done a comprehensive study.
Because, in the end, the fuel just burns and is gone. It is just
a transient ingredient for other things we do. Its pure cost.
1. We need to have an energy source that is not based on localized supplies in the middle east (or elsewhere)
2. The air around our population centers is polluted by fossil fuel consumption with serious health consequences
3. Fossil fuels cannot be used for deep space travel or colonization which is necessary for survival of our species (eventually)
4. Fossil fuels are poisonous to mine and refine and harm the workers in those industries and towns.
5. Centralized control of energy sources leads to higher prices and a permanent "tax" on economic development and expansion
6. Fossil fuels are poisonous to transport and have caused enormous damage to the marine ecology during spills
7. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy are complicated and wear out quickly. They are expensive to produce and maintain
8. Systems used to convert fossil fuels to energy create noise which causes problems in urban environments
9. Fossil fuel "control" implies a loss of personal and national liberty
Note that I am not saying that existing alternatives solve any of these problems.
I am saying that there are significant costs/problems to the current energy systems.
We have lived with these costs and written them off, but they are still there and still important.
Its worth significant effort to solve these problems. The research to solve
these problems will also likely benefit us in other areas.
It would be far better to solve the problems than to continue to live in an
unstable,poisonous,noisy world.