First of all, we know for a fact (just look at the actual budget) that a huge percentage of tax revenue doesn't go to infrastructure, even factoring in state and local government. The actual percentage is way less than half, and probably less than 25% (I would be willing to believe figures as low as 10%). But let's say it's 1/3 for argument's sake. That makes the ratio of value to annual expenditure 150-180. If you take current public spending on infrastructure and extend it indefinitely back in time, taking a reasonable cost of money into account, and counting depreciation, I think it's highly unlikely to get a ratio greater than, perhaps, 20. So we're off by about an order of magnitude (or, if my guess than only 10% goes to infrastructure and the real ratio is more like 10, which I think are outside estimates the other way, we might be off by as much as two orders of magnitude).
Actually, much of this is a form of infrastructure too. For example, our whole legal system is one of the most important infrastructures that we have, but its quite intangible compared to a road.
It is, however, the basis of what really sets the first world from the third world.
If you want unlimited email addresses so that individual humans can use them, then the Google route won't work for you (unless you pay). I think the free version is just up to 25 accounts. There are plenty of hosting places that you can get "unlimited" email accounts if you buy a cheap hosting package (usually web & email hosting are bundled). In reality, you are limited by the amount of disk space and monthly bandwidth you are allocated.
You can get up to 100 accounts in my experience.
But you don't need them - as you can create as many redirections as you want, feeding into one gmail account. The only problem with gmail redirections (aliases) as far as I can see is that they don't allow underscores. However, your real gmail account can redirect all its mail to any email address. Go figure - makes no sense to me why gmail treats an underscore as legal for a redirect all mail filter but won't let you put one into a mail list or alias.
Although I think gmail is sufficiently good to be the main account, so forwarding everything on makes little sense - its too easy compared to running your own mail server and dealing with all that spam. Plus, if you are using a domain for email that is highly spammed, you may well want the full 2GB of storage on that account while you keep your personal one uncluttered...
NeoOffice works just fine on the couple of Macs we have, thank you and should be quite a bit more than what 99.9% of students need
The latest version was enough for me to use it as my default office software. I am truly surprised to see that it supports visual basic - which office 2007 for mac (?office 2008 in the mac version). The decision by microsoft to support applescript and drop visual basic is either stupid or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the mac platform. NeoOffice is now more compatible with office than the upcoming version from microsoft will be.
But this misses a couple of things still - Word processing doesn't have an outline mode for example. This amazes me as I use this mode all the time to set up a document.
And in any case, I stopped using powerpoint a couple of years ago when keynote came out - as it just looks better.
But if you have a mac, and you want to use excel macro's, then microsoft just wrote themselves out of the apple market with their latest "upgrade"
The US bought Hicks off some Afganistan warlords who captured him for $1000 USD.
The charge to which he pleaded guilty to was aiding terrorism. Frankly you could charge several million Iraqi citizens with this offense, if the US had the interest in doing this. You could also charge most foreign intelligence organisations, including the CIA, with this same charge.
The part you're overlooking is that the activity must be a crime in both nations. Iran can't seek the extradition of anyone because Iran and the US don't have an extradition treaty.
Nobody said US law should apply anywhere to anyone.
I'd be inclined to agree with you.
However, the US government has been happy to charge non-US citizens in countries that don't have extradition treaties for crimes against US laws, and retrospective ones at that.
The US extradited this person, held them in custody for 5 years whilst they drafted laws that he then pleaded guilty to - and when they had 5 years to figure out what activity to declare illegal, its no surprise he didn't fight it. The Australian government wasn't exactly innocent in all of this, so I'm not saying that we are on the moral high ground here.
However, our governments would be up in arms if Iran/China/Cuba/Afganistan did the same to one of our citizens.
You have to wonder how we can justify this sort of behaviour to other countries.
If Howard is such a worthless bastard, and lapdog of the Evil Empire, who voted for him? It certainly wasn't the American public. You can blame us for Bush, but don't try to blame us for your own mistakes.
Unfortunately, a few too many Australians. 40% of them voted for him directly, and another 6% for the national party with which they have a formal alliance. Due to the allocation of preferences this allowed them to ultimately win power. But you could not say that the majority of voters directly voted for him at the last election.
It certainly looks like alot less are going to vote for him now for our unconditional support in invading Iraq. The disaster that Iraq has proven to be wasn't so evident in 2004 at the last election, at least to the general public.
Its not like that many Australian companies have even had sweetheart deals with Iraq - so its hard to see even the commercial gain for the venture for Australia.
Whilst I think that most Australians (myself included) would support the US in any war or real threat to US soil, few of us really want to go invading other countries without good reason. One of the major holidays in Australia, ANZAC day, reminds us yearly of the horrors of unnecessary wars. The words we repeat at the end of the dawn service is "Lest we forget". It reflects the Australian ethos that war is a bad thing, and we should remember this. Sadly, it would seem that John Howard did forget the horror of war when he chose to support the invasion of Iraq.
Anyway, for the majority of Australians who didn't actually vote for John Howard at the last election, I think we are entitled to grumble a little.
But I certainly agree with you that we have no right to blame the US for our mistakes. Including John Howard. That was all our own doing.
What if there was an organized crime boss, living in the US, ordering the deaths of Australian citizens? Would you want the US to extradite him to face justice or would you want them to say "Well he wasn't committing any crimes here, and since he's not in Australia you can't have him, sorry.
Ok two questions here.
If the crime boss went to a country that didn't have an extradition treaty, would that make it ok?
If the crime was more than just murder, say organising the overthrow of a government would that make it ok to extradite the persons doing this?
And if you agree to this, then how will you respond to a law passed (for example) in Iran seeking extradition of the President of the USA for planning an invasion of Iran? (Leaving aside Iraq, as the ex-ruler of that country isn't passing any laws anymore).
Now I'm not saying that I support Iraq or Iran, but rather have a degree of respect for their rights as nations. Freedom of religion and all that. Once you start saying that US law should apply anywhere to anyone, its hard to justify why US citizens shouldn't comply with laws from all countries in the world.
You sound like you go through something similar. I have to guide people through typing a colon key every couple of days and 99% don't know what I mean.
"OK, in the host name box, type our domain name followed by a colon, then the number 1"
"Yes, the colon key, hold down your shift key - thats the big key with the up arrows on it - then press the colon key, its the one with with the 2 dots, its next to the "L" key."
Try telling them that its like typing a capital "L", but hit the key one to the right of the "l" key.
Probably easier than explaining how to use a shift key, which most of your users do know as a way of getting capitals.
most home networks are not even 100Mbit, for the average joe user, who has multiple computers, it is much easier to set up an unsecured wireless network (802.11b/g), neither of these is much faster than 6-12mbits (in any situation I have seen)
Good point, however 1) 5-10 Mbit/sec wireless is still typically an order of magnitude faster than the "broadband" link and 2) nearly everybody has four or so wired ports on their wireless router. Once home users get into video and high res photos they quickly discover that wireless is just too painful compared to plugging in a physical wire. Now, home users with enough clue and energy to wire their homes properly will be a small minority for some time to come. But even a small minority of computer-enabled homes these days translates into millions. So I predict that the market for easy-to-use home servers will quickly climb into the millions of units. This has already started.
I think that a high powered base station is the future. Sort of what lots of vendors are moving towards. Being an apple fan, I'm thinking of an airport extreme. Lots of other vendors do similar products - many of which will be cheaper and with more functions but strangely harder to use:)
The current products will do network storage and print servers. We have seen apple put whole computer systems into similar sized boxes, like the apple tv. So how long before they do a "home server" type device, that can do calendaring? How about a web server? Actually, you can pretty much do this now with a mac mini and OS X server edition - but at a bit of a cost, more effort than the home user wants, and putting osx server on a mini would be a bit of overkill.
The reason I think this is the future is that people just don't want what a typical PC is as a home appliance. Its big, ugly, noisy, and sucks power big time. Its not traditionally been reliable enough to leave on 24/7. And really, its trying to be too many things.
Home servers will happen, and people are already getting them without realising. They call them routers or base stations. The functionality that people want will be added on to them as the hardware manufacturers get better and better.
Certain functions which are internet dependent really don't have much need to move to these boxes. For example, email and instant messaging don't work if you don't have an internet connection. If you do have one, you may as well use a central server.
Web servers sit on the border - you could do them either way.
So its really for LAN type activities that a home server shines - file sharing, printing, music & video streaming.
Did anyone notice that this article is nearly 3 weeks old? Really on the ball there, Slashdot.
This is not a grouch, as I'm not particularly upset about this, but my submission on this topic was both timely and held pending for over a day before being rejected. I can never figure what makes the editors tick on this sort of thing.
Anyway, in the bizarro-world that the people who write DRM systems inhabit, I think that this will probably just push them to make the drives harder to "tamper" with; I fully expect that they'll eventually just pot the circuit boards in epoxy or something, to keep you from desoldering the chips.
Normally I'd just tell you to see my.sig
But the last time I said that I was told my.sig was not that accurate
Having said that, I think you should just see my.sig
UT, modern "western" medicine is something called evidence based medicine. You don't get to just try random stuff on people until you've got some evidence it's likely to do more good than harm, and then you have to set it up in such a way that it can be confirmed whether it does more good than harm, with as few subjects as possible.
One interesting editorial based on a couple of studies in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the benefit of low body temperatures after cardiac arrest, where the resusicitation had only been partially successful and the persons had not regained consciousness despite restoring their cardiac function.
The intersting thing about these studies was that the mean time to cooling the person was 4 hours, and in both the studies in that edition of the NEJM this was effective in improving neurological function in the long term.
What has always fascinated me about this study was that even hours after the resucitation, you could prevent brain injury by cooling. Which means that the brain wasn't always a dead as conventional teaching would have you believe - by conventional teaching your brain should start dying after about 4 minutes, and a bit of cold shouldn't bring dead brain back to life.
Logically, you brain doesn't die at 4 minutes, but rather is committed to dying by a process of programmed cell death (apoptosis) Cold disrupts the apoptosis, allowing your brain to not die.
Obviously, if you leave the cells long enough, they die, but its not at 4 minutes. If you think about it, you can reattach a limb many hours after it was severed.
Its mostly hearts and brains that are programmed to die.
Beside that, the only complain I have is your "guess" (I hope it was) that with breeders there is a 100 year supply of Uranium!! Without enrichment there is a 100 year supply of known Uranium. And there was no exploration of Uranium for many decades. Only recently did Uranium get profitable for exploration.
Well, according to wikipedia, worldwide Energy use is about 477 000 Peta Joules per year. Thats about 0.5 Zetta Joules per year.
With breeder reactors, the full amount of Nuclear Fuel in the world is about 2500 Zetta Joules.
An enormous amount, although we may not be able to reclaim all the energy. 100 years would be (very) conservative, although never underestimate the power of the exponential function in describing our increasing needs for energy, which is why I am only suggesting it will b e good for a 100 years or so.
If you look at how much energy would be available for standard (one pass) nuclear fission, from the same article, the figure is a miserly 17 ZetaJoules. Which is 34 years of world energy use, assuming that use stays constant, which it wont (just ask China and India). Obviously not all energy use would come from uranium, but 87% of energy currently comes from fossil fuels in some form.
So depending on how you measure your energy reserves, we have very little or very much energy available from Uranium. If we just build conventional one pass reactors, we aren't going to have much time before it all runs out.
If we go for breeder technology, we have enough for our, and our childrens lifetimes. I'm not so sure about the grandchildren.
But my main argument was cost - and the price of nuclear energy is based on a technology that isn't going to cut it for the whole world. The cost of breeder reactor electricity is not well quantified to me, but is more than conventional nuclear power at the moment.
Its clear that our research dollars should go for breeders where we spend it on nuclear research.
However, we could also meet all our energy needs from 0.02% of solar energy falling on the planet. Which is alot of surface area, but still manageable, especially as some forms of supply tap the sun indirectly (eg wind and hydro) so we don't have to set up solar collectors everywhere.
So my vote still mostly goes for the renewables. If we want to survive as a species, it is where we will most likely end up anyway. No problem with Uranium as a bridging technology, as long as everyone understands its just that.
If Alice wants to send a message to Bob but Bob is also the attacker, he doesn't have to do anything. Unfortunately, the problem description isn't right because if it was, there'd be no need to break DRM, would there? Let us introduce Charlie. . -... EDITED OUT... - . If you've followed me so far, you'll see that you're not Charlie.
Firstly, thanks for the post. Its clear that you know alot more about cryptography than me. I actually have some problems with the use of Alice, Bob and Charlie, it makes it harder for me to understand the real meaning of your discussion.
However, I think that Charlie is not my DRM laden computer, although I believe that any hardware you physically own you can probably compromise.
Leaving aside whether this is true or not, lets just take a really bad alternate explanation and assume that the Alice is an Audio message, Bob is my Brain, and Charlie is a Cassette tape.
I don't think that Alice can a message to Bob without Charlie getting it also if that is what I want.
Perhaps that is too simple for you, but I think it explains my.sig better. I'm not educated enough in cryptography to argue with what you have said, however, so that may be true also.
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
And I totally agree with this.
But the research money should be on breeder reactors and renewables. If we try and do conventional reactors to replace coal fired power stations, by the time we have replaced all the power stations (which will take 20 years if we bring several nuclear stations online each week for a couple of decades), we will have done it just in time to start running out of U235.
If you want to replace worldwide coal with Uranium (which I support totally as an interim measure, even if that interim is longer than our lifetimes) then it does not appear to be rational to me to do this with conventional reactors.
With regard to cost (and cost is secondary to actually having enough material to generate power for the whole world), I'm not so sure that breeders will be as cheap as the price of conventional fission reactors.
But it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. We need cheap power, and lots of it. Coal is a really bad way to get it, and coal is a non renewable resource anyway. It will damage the environment, and emit more carbon dioxide per unit energy released than hydrocarbons fuels. It is hard to see how it is the way forward, when we will ultimately run out of coal anyway, and possibly somewhat sooner than people think. In fact, just as the USA peaked for oil production around 1970, it peaked for coal energy production in 1998.
By this I mean that whilst the USA produces more coal by volume now than in 1998, but because of the decline in grade of coal, the energy produced is falling yearly. And the USA has some of the worlds biggest reserves of coal, so running out of easy coal in the USA actually has similar significance to Saudi Arabia's big oil field (ghawar) moving into depletion phase, which it probably did about a year ago. Both represent enormous reserves, so both the USA and Saudi Arabia will be producing for decades, but it represents a good time to think about where we are going and where we want to be in a few decades.
Bullshit! Ever tried getting a torrent of anything popular (S.T.A.L.K.E.R, C&C3, 300, etc.) the day it's released? Good luck with your HD movie with 1 seeder and 3000 leechers.
In my experience, you get quite a few seeders and it doesn't really matter if you are downloading from a seeder or a leecher.
The bigger issue relates to false torrents getting posted, with the idea of discouraging people who discover that the files they have downloaded are corrupted.
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers. And open battery storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
Did you miss the part where CastrTroy wants a gaming machine? The Mac mini's graphics (mobile Intel GMA 950 with 64MB of memory leeched from system memory), CPU (Merom-based Core Duo), and even hard drive (5400rpm notebook drive) are insufficient for a "gaming machine."
Yes, I did get that. Did you notice that the reason he couldn't have two machines was not due to cost, but due to space requirements?
My point here was that if you can't have two big machines because it takes up too much space, maybe a mac mini is worth considering.
I wasn't suggesting that it replace the windows gaming system. Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the stated issue was space, not cost or number of machines. You can put alot of mini's into the space of one desktop, or alternatively stick it out of sight to do the server things and just get your windows box for desktop use.
A mini takes up about twice the footprint of a microsoft mouse. And it will save you a fortune compared to using a top end gaming system as a server, which is what was suggested was the only option here. Not to mention that its maximum power usage is 110 watts, compared to the gaming systems that now come with 1000 watt power supplies.
Using a high end windows gaming system as a server leads to a)Expense b)Energy consumption c)Exploits. Of all the reasons listed in the post, doing it because you don't have space for a second server is nuts. You wouldn't use a gaming system as a high end server, and if you only want a low end server, well.. there is your mini. Even if you install linux on it, which would be an entirely reasonable thing to do, and would maximise the hardware as a server by not wasting cpu cycles or disk accesses on the GUI if you didn't want it to.
"A carefully crafted executable, under certain conditions may cause a denial of service attack"
Its not that quicktime crashes - that's apples fault. Its that the operating system goes down - definitely Microsoft's fault and problem. Although I presume its at least part hardware driver given the machine specific nature.
After all these years, it shouldn't be that easy to do. Vista was supposed to be the most secure operating system yet. Or so I recall.
I can see the need too. Unfortunately I don't have all that much space at home. So, I have to have one computer that does absolutely everything I need. That means for right now, I'm running Windows. I would love to be able to run a Linux Server, A Windows Gaming machine, and have a Linux Media centre, and well, for office/internet, I don't care, either one is fine, so I'd probably go with Linux.
Perhaps a mac mini or two would meet your space requirement. It works for me. You could even go the full monty and put linux on them, although the make a good (low power) small server for low volume use just fine under mac os x
Yes XP is very similar to 2000 but it's not entirely. Try running IE7, WMP11 and a host of other apps on 2000. XP is 2000 tweaked, and for the better. As for activation well you do it once and that's it.
Yes, I did activation once and that was it. I got a mac.
Some people really, really hate activation. I'm one of them.
This is a great scam for someone who wants to commit fraud on a national scale. Send people letters claiming that they breached copyright law and demand a settlement. Offer an opportunity for settlement for $2000. If they get a lawyer, drop any claim. If they ignore it, write it off. If it costs you a dollar per letter and 0.1% of people accept your "offer", a million letters will net you a million dollars. Maybe this is the new business model for big media.
I'm not sure what the law says in Australia, although vexatious claim comes to mind. In the USA, people seem to use the term racketeering, although I don't know enough about US law to know if this is correct.
1. It doesn't download the whole file from your system. Which means that they can't really show that you have the file, just that you say that you have it. Some anti-piracy systems are known for responding to any search request with a positive result but full of junk or ads.
2. It doesn't really prove it was you, it just logs it to an IP address (even if it was your IP, you are running a wireless network, right?)
3. It currently doesn't do bit torrent, just other P2P systems.
And probably alot of other problems - just did a quick scan of TFA to produce this post.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, much of this is a form of infrastructure too. For example, our whole legal system is one of the most important infrastructures that we have, but its quite intangible compared to a road.
It is, however, the basis of what really sets the first world from the third world.
Michael
You can get up to 100 accounts in my experience.
But you don't need them - as you can create as many redirections as you want, feeding into one gmail account. The only problem with gmail redirections (aliases) as far as I can see is that they don't allow underscores. However, your real gmail account can redirect all its mail to any email address. Go figure - makes no sense to me why gmail treats an underscore as legal for a redirect all mail filter but won't let you put one into a mail list or alias.
Although I think gmail is sufficiently good to be the main account, so forwarding everything on makes little sense - its too easy compared to running your own mail server and dealing with all that spam. Plus, if you are using a domain for email that is highly spammed, you may well want the full 2GB of storage on that account while you keep your personal one uncluttered...
Michael
The latest version was enough for me to use it as my default office software. I am truly surprised to see that it supports visual basic - which office 2007 for mac (?office 2008 in the mac version). The decision by microsoft to support applescript and drop visual basic is either stupid or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the mac platform. NeoOffice is now more compatible with office than the upcoming version from microsoft will be.
But this misses a couple of things still - Word processing doesn't have an outline mode for example. This amazes me as I use this mode all the time to set up a document.
And in any case, I stopped using powerpoint a couple of years ago when keynote came out - as it just looks better.
But if you have a mac, and you want to use excel macro's, then microsoft just wrote themselves out of the apple market with their latest "upgrade"
Michael.
I'm not sure what your problem is, the slashcode seems to work for me.
Just use the [a] tags. And if anyone knows how to put the greater than and less than signs into the text as a literals I'd be appreciative.
http://www.google.com:80/
He never fought against US troops.
At best, he was fighting some coalition forces
The US bought Hicks off some Afganistan warlords who captured him for $1000 USD.
The charge to which he pleaded guilty to was aiding terrorism. Frankly you could charge several million Iraqi citizens with this offense, if the US had the interest in doing this. You could also charge most foreign intelligence organisations, including the CIA, with this same charge.
Michael
I'd be inclined to agree with you.
However, the US government has been happy to charge non-US citizens in countries that don't have extradition treaties for crimes against US laws, and retrospective ones at that.
The US extradited this person, held them in custody for 5 years whilst they drafted laws that he then pleaded guilty to - and when they had 5 years to figure out what activity to declare illegal, its no surprise he didn't fight it. The Australian government wasn't exactly innocent in all of this, so I'm not saying that we are on the moral high ground here.
However, our governments would be up in arms if Iran/China/Cuba/Afganistan did the same to one of our citizens.
You have to wonder how we can justify this sort of behaviour to other countries.
Michael
Unfortunately, a few too many Australians. 40% of them voted for him directly, and another 6% for the national party with which they have a formal alliance. Due to the allocation of preferences this allowed them to ultimately win power. But you could not say that the majority of voters directly voted for him at the last election.
It certainly looks like alot less are going to vote for him now for our unconditional support in invading Iraq. The disaster that Iraq has proven to be wasn't so evident in 2004 at the last election, at least to the general public.
Its not like that many Australian companies have even had sweetheart deals with Iraq - so its hard to see even the commercial gain for the venture for Australia.
Whilst I think that most Australians (myself included) would support the US in any war or real threat to US soil, few of us really want to go invading other countries without good reason. One of the major holidays in Australia, ANZAC day, reminds us yearly of the horrors of unnecessary wars. The words we repeat at the end of the dawn service is "Lest we forget". It reflects the Australian ethos that war is a bad thing, and we should remember this. Sadly, it would seem that John Howard did forget the horror of war when he chose to support the invasion of Iraq.
Anyway, for the majority of Australians who didn't actually vote for John Howard at the last election, I think we are entitled to grumble a little.
But I certainly agree with you that we have no right to blame the US for our mistakes. Including John Howard. That was all our own doing.
Michael
Ok two questions here.
If the crime boss went to a country that didn't have an extradition treaty, would that make it ok?
If the crime was more than just murder, say organising the overthrow of a government would that make it ok to extradite the persons doing this?
And if you agree to this, then how will you respond to a law passed (for example) in Iran seeking extradition of the President of the USA for planning an invasion of Iran? (Leaving aside Iraq, as the ex-ruler of that country isn't passing any laws anymore).
Now I'm not saying that I support Iraq or Iran, but rather have a degree of respect for their rights as nations. Freedom of religion and all that. Once you start saying that US law should apply anywhere to anyone, its hard to justify why US citizens shouldn't comply with laws from all countries in the world.
This is the dilemma that is faced here.
I don't really know the right answer to this one.
Michael
Try telling them that its like typing a capital "L", but hit the key one to the right of the "l" key.
Probably easier than explaining how to use a shift key, which most of your users do know as a way of getting capitals.
Michael
I think that a high powered base station is the future. Sort of what lots of vendors are moving towards. Being an apple fan, I'm thinking of an airport extreme. Lots of other vendors do similar products - many of which will be cheaper and with more functions but strangely harder to use
The current products will do network storage and print servers. We have seen apple put whole computer systems into similar sized boxes, like the apple tv. So how long before they do a "home server" type device, that can do calendaring? How about a web server? Actually, you can pretty much do this now with a mac mini and OS X server edition - but at a bit of a cost, more effort than the home user wants, and putting osx server on a mini would be a bit of overkill.
The reason I think this is the future is that people just don't want what a typical PC is as a home appliance. Its big, ugly, noisy, and sucks power big time. Its not traditionally been reliable enough to leave on 24/7. And really, its trying to be too many things.
Home servers will happen, and people are already getting them without realising. They call them routers or base stations. The functionality that people want will be added on to them as the hardware manufacturers get better and better.
Certain functions which are internet dependent really don't have much need to move to these boxes. For example, email and instant messaging don't work if you don't have an internet connection. If you do have one, you may as well use a central server.
Web servers sit on the border - you could do them either way.
So its really for LAN type activities that a home server shines - file sharing, printing, music & video streaming.
And we are half way there already.
My 2c worth.
Michael
Did anyone notice that this article is nearly 3 weeks old? Really on the ball there, Slashdot.
This is not a grouch, as I'm not particularly upset about this, but my submission on this topic was both timely and held pending for over a day before being rejected. I can never figure what makes the editors tick on this sort of thing.
I guess there is no news like old news.
Michael
Normally I'd just tell you to see my
But the last time I said that I was told my
Having said that, I think you should just see my
One interesting editorial based on a couple of studies in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at the benefit of low body temperatures after cardiac arrest, where the resusicitation had only been partially successful and the persons had not regained consciousness despite restoring their cardiac function.
The intersting thing about these studies was that the mean time to cooling the person was 4 hours, and in both the studies in that edition of the NEJM this was effective in improving neurological function in the long term.
What has always fascinated me about this study was that even hours after the resucitation, you could prevent brain injury by cooling. Which means that the brain wasn't always a dead as conventional teaching would have you believe - by conventional teaching your brain should start dying after about 4 minutes, and a bit of cold shouldn't bring dead brain back to life.
Logically, you brain doesn't die at 4 minutes, but rather is committed to dying by a process of programmed cell death (apoptosis) Cold disrupts the apoptosis, allowing your brain to not die.
Obviously, if you leave the cells long enough, they die, but its not at 4 minutes. If you think about it, you can reattach a limb many hours after it was severed.
Its mostly hearts and brains that are programmed to die.
Just a bit of food for thought on the matter,
Michael
Well, according to wikipedia, worldwide Energy use is about 477 000 Peta Joules per year. Thats about 0.5 Zetta Joules per year.
With breeder reactors, the full amount of Nuclear Fuel in the world is about 2500 Zetta Joules.
An enormous amount, although we may not be able to reclaim all the energy. 100 years would be (very) conservative, although never underestimate the power of the exponential function in describing our increasing needs for energy, which is why I am only suggesting it will b e good for a 100 years or so.
If you look at how much energy would be available for standard (one pass) nuclear fission, from the same article, the figure is a miserly 17 ZetaJoules. Which is 34 years of world energy use, assuming that use stays constant, which it wont (just ask China and India). Obviously not all energy use would come from uranium, but 87% of energy currently comes from fossil fuels in some form.
So depending on how you measure your energy reserves, we have very little or very much energy available from Uranium. If we just build conventional one pass reactors, we aren't going to have much time before it all runs out.
If we go for breeder technology, we have enough for our, and our childrens lifetimes. I'm not so sure about the grandchildren.
But my main argument was cost - and the price of nuclear energy is based on a technology that isn't going to cut it for the whole world. The cost of breeder reactor electricity is not well quantified to me, but is more than conventional nuclear power at the moment.
Its clear that our research dollars should go for breeders where we spend it on nuclear research.
However, we could also meet all our energy needs from 0.02% of solar energy falling on the planet. Which is alot of surface area, but still manageable, especially as some forms of supply tap the sun indirectly (eg wind and hydro) so we don't have to set up solar collectors everywhere.
So my vote still mostly goes for the renewables. If we want to survive as a species, it is where we will most likely end up anyway. No problem with Uranium as a bridging technology, as long as everyone understands its just that.
Michael
Firstly, thanks for the post. Its clear that you know alot more about cryptography than me. I actually have some problems with the use of Alice, Bob and Charlie, it makes it harder for me to understand the real meaning of your discussion.
However, I think that Charlie is not my DRM laden computer, although I believe that any hardware you physically own you can probably compromise.
Leaving aside whether this is true or not, lets just take a really bad alternate explanation and assume that the Alice is an Audio message, Bob is my Brain, and Charlie is a Cassette tape.
I don't think that Alice can a message to Bob without Charlie getting it also if that is what I want.
Perhaps that is too simple for you, but I think it explains my
Michael
Solar can't provide enough power right now. So if we don't take on fission, we're going to end up burning coal. I think it's obvious which is worse in that equation.
And I totally agree with this.
But the research money should be on breeder reactors and renewables. If we try and do conventional reactors to replace coal fired power stations, by the time we have replaced all the power stations (which will take 20 years if we bring several nuclear stations online each week for a couple of decades), we will have done it just in time to start running out of U235.
If you want to replace worldwide coal with Uranium (which I support totally as an interim measure, even if that interim is longer than our lifetimes) then it does not appear to be rational to me to do this with conventional reactors.
With regard to cost (and cost is secondary to actually having enough material to generate power for the whole world), I'm not so sure that breeders will be as cheap as the price of conventional fission reactors.
But it doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. We need cheap power, and lots of it. Coal is a really bad way to get it, and coal is a non renewable resource anyway. It will damage the environment, and emit more carbon dioxide per unit energy released than hydrocarbons fuels. It is hard to see how it is the way forward, when we will ultimately run out of coal anyway, and possibly somewhat sooner than people think. In fact, just as the USA peaked for oil production around 1970, it peaked for coal energy production in 1998.
By this I mean that whilst the USA produces more coal by volume now than in 1998, but because of the decline in grade of coal, the energy produced is falling yearly. And the USA has some of the worlds biggest reserves of coal, so running out of easy coal in the USA actually has similar significance to Saudi Arabia's big oil field (ghawar) moving into depletion phase, which it probably did about a year ago. Both represent enormous reserves, so both the USA and Saudi Arabia will be producing for decades, but it represents a good time to think about where we are going and where we want to be in a few decades.
Hope this clarifies my position.
Michael
It's revolutionary because this time the DRM is going to work.
.sig
See my
Michael
Bullshit! Ever tried getting a torrent of anything popular (S.T.A.L.K.E.R, C&C3, 300, etc.) the day it's released? Good luck with your HD movie with 1 seeder and 3000 leechers.
In my experience, you get quite a few seeders and it doesn't really matter if you are downloading from a seeder or a leecher.
The bigger issue relates to false torrents getting posted, with the idea of discouraging people who discover that the files they have downloaded are corrupted.
Michael
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers. And open battery storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
My 2c worth.
Michael
Did you miss the part where CastrTroy wants a gaming machine? The Mac mini's graphics (mobile Intel GMA 950 with 64MB of memory leeched from system memory), CPU (Merom-based Core Duo), and even hard drive (5400rpm notebook drive) are insufficient for a "gaming machine."
Yes, I did get that. Did you notice that the reason he couldn't have two machines was not due to cost, but due to space requirements?
My point here was that if you can't have two big machines because it takes up too much space, maybe a mac mini is worth considering.
I wasn't suggesting that it replace the windows gaming system. Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but the stated issue was space, not cost or number of machines. You can put alot of mini's into the space of one desktop, or alternatively stick it out of sight to do the server things and just get your windows box for desktop use.
A mini takes up about twice the footprint of a microsoft mouse. And it will save you a fortune compared to using a top end gaming system as a server, which is what was suggested was the only option here. Not to mention that its maximum power usage is 110 watts, compared to the gaming systems that now come with 1000 watt power supplies.
Using a high end windows gaming system as a server leads to a)Expense b)Energy consumption c)Exploits. Of all the reasons listed in the post, doing it because you don't have space for a second server is nuts. You wouldn't use a gaming system as a high end server, and if you only want a low end server, well.. there is your mini. Even if you install linux on it, which would be an entirely reasonable thing to do, and would maximise the hardware as a server by not wasting cpu cycles or disk accesses on the GUI if you didn't want it to.
Michael
Would it not read more like:
"A carefully crafted executable, under certain conditions may cause a denial of service attack"
Its not that quicktime crashes - that's apples fault. Its that the operating system goes down - definitely Microsoft's fault and problem. Although I presume its at least part hardware driver given the machine specific nature.
After all these years, it shouldn't be that easy to do. Vista was supposed to be the most secure operating system yet. Or so I recall.
Michael
I can see the need too. Unfortunately I don't have all that much space at home. So, I have to have one computer that does absolutely everything I need. That means for right now, I'm running Windows. I would love to be able to run a Linux Server, A Windows Gaming machine, and have a Linux Media centre, and well, for office/internet, I don't care, either one is fine, so I'd probably go with Linux.
Perhaps a mac mini or two would meet your space requirement. It works for me. You could even go the full monty and put linux on them, although the make a good (low power) small server for low volume use just fine under mac os x
Michael
Yes XP is very similar to 2000 but it's not entirely. Try running IE7, WMP11 and a host of other apps on 2000. XP is 2000 tweaked, and for the better. As for activation well you do it once and that's it.
Yes, I did activation once and that was it. I got a mac.
Some people really, really hate activation. I'm one of them.
Michael
This is a great scam for someone who wants to commit fraud on a national scale. Send people letters claiming that they breached copyright law and demand a settlement. Offer an opportunity for settlement for $2000. If they get a lawyer, drop any claim. If they ignore it, write it off. If it costs you a dollar per letter and 0.1% of people accept your "offer", a million letters will net you a million dollars. Maybe this is the new business model for big media.
I'm not sure what the law says in Australia, although vexatious claim comes to mind. In the USA, people seem to use the term racketeering, although I don't know enough about US law to know if this is correct.
Michael
Couple of problems with their system:
1. It doesn't download the whole file from your system. Which means that they can't really show that you have the file, just that you say that you have it. Some anti-piracy systems are known for responding to any search request with a positive result but full of junk or ads.
2. It doesn't really prove it was you, it just logs it to an IP address (even if it was your IP, you are running a wireless network, right?)
3. It currently doesn't do bit torrent, just other P2P systems.
And probably alot of other problems - just did a quick scan of TFA to produce this post.
Michael