Seems smart. Why am I paying for (and paying to power) this Intel floating point unit when I'm only serving web pages?
But, Google's growth has been perpetuated by use of cheap commodity hardware, ie: profiting off the fact that the rest of us drive the price down by buying lots. A switch to specialized chips would mean a new direction for the company.
I mean, they could have done this from the beginning with fancy IBM or SUN or Unisys mainframe stuff, which typically allow you to configure IO subsystems (which is the main bottleneck of web serving). Likewise if they are doing database stuff you'd want a lot of RAM and wide I/O bandwidth, 128 bits or more. All standard for a long time on IBM stuff. But it's expensive, not commodity. Even Google's 100-300K servers (or maybe it's a million now, who knows) is not going to bring the scale of the whole worldwide market for Intel chips (100M plus annually).
So I don't see how this could benefit them long-term. Sure, power savings might add up to a lot so it's a good investment. And since they want to be the entire Internet (including your desktop), it's really a matter of energy over all else. But they are definitely going to need to keep adding hardware to keep growing, so that means higher chip expenses upfront. But, if they can spin the same processor into a little home or mobile computer to connect to their services, they might be able to start leveraging this scale thing again. But it seems to be a big risk to get into the manufacturing business.
Ugh, the worst I encountered recently where I needed to run sed over an ssh connection from the script. So there's the usual multiple levels of quotes and escaping. I'm still not fully up to speed on what order it does the quotes, especially with sed involved, so I just scp the script to the host and run it remotely then delete it. Not the best but what can you do. I guess I could redirect the script into the ssh... oh well, what's done is done.
I sort of agree. I'm a proponent of source control, versioning, etc. of legal documents. I think hypertext could take a lot of the drudgery out of codes that are generally annotated rather than rewritten. I think that would help us apply the moral code more completely and transparently. The more expert you have to be to read a code, the less transparent. There could be standards that use UML however, which is better suited to modeling social-logical flows versus a programming language which is good at modelling...math.
These kids today who act like there's some art to programming that's instinctual, that they should be comfortable programming when they don't know shit about the language they're using. Guess what, C is the most comfortable language ever invented. Perl is one of the fastest to write.
Of course, perl is designed for text. HTML, while a subset of "text", is a pretty complex markup language. To generate such code using another language is not trivial. Then you're dealing with networking, web servers, the internet, unknowns like browser type and user screen resolution. Then you have various databases on the back end. It's a very complicated problem yet kids think somehow the computer (or someone else) should just solve it.
The problem is that frameworks are generic and your app is specific. Yeah, the basic types are always there, CRUD, forms, lists and datagrids. But the amount of variance between two "lists" can be huge. A styled list that may work great for a list of books might be horrible for a list of people.
There's no way a framework is going to define base types for every possible thing you could have in a list. The frameworks and object-relational mapping engines are just tools to assist you. You still have to classify everything and their interactions. You still have to define a logical flow for every feature. You still have to test everything. That's what a programmer's job is! So, kids, you're never going to have something that will abstract away the programming. As much as you'd just like to point at the computer and magically create an "app" like you paint a picture, it's not possible, has never been and never will be. "Fustiness and lack of expressivity"--shut the fuck up and get off my lawn.
Check out back issues of Electronics Now and Popular Electronics magazines. The articles are detailed and fun. Unfortunately they went out of business. However, there are still a few mags out there, such as Everyday Practical Electronics.
A good way to get some chops is to build some kits. By far the best is Ramsey Electronics. I also like Information Unlimited; they have a lot of high-voltage and other stuff. Quite an amusing website if you dig around.
Set up an area, because most anything you do will take time and if you want to get serious about the hobby you'll need a workshop away from wifes (oops, slashdot, not applicable) and kids, pets, etc. You might want some smoke removal for the solder as well.
Plus non-competes are typically very focused on directly competing with the business of the company. Also, they by definition must be limited in duration (reasonable usually tops out at 12 months) and physical scope (25 mile radius). So say you work for Company A that sells insurance, you can't sell insurance next door for X amount of time.
Annual Report 2009
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Apple's 2009 Annual Report shows that it sold $13B in Macs, $8B in iPods, $~7B in software, music and accessories, and $13B in iPhones and related services. I think they get a nice commission from AT&T for the 2 year contract. So, yes, they do indeed sell more peripherals and phones and "other stuff" than they do "computers". Not surprising since the iPhone is significantly lower priced than a Macbook, and the iPod as well. Both have mass market appeal. But computers are their core business--this is a nice bump but if you average it over many years you'll see that the computers are what's kept the company alive. They have $6B in annual expense around their retail stores. I think they need to be real careful about those because that could eat up their $33B in cash pretty quickly in the event of a downturn. "Looking" better than ever and that's why I'm short on Apple. Their share price is based on continued growth like they have had, possibly on a global basis, and I just don't see that's possible with what products they have. It's a classic bubble, get off the titanic, it won't get over $275...
"Publishing" is making some content available to the public. The question is really is advertising a public location for a given piece of content "publishing" that content. Further questions could also be asked, such as: Is owning the server that the content on make you the publisher? In this latter case, I think we need to draw parallels with the printing industry, because they have a lot of precedent that we wouldn't want to just throw away.
1. Owning the server and network connection is like owning a printing press. 2. Links are advertisements. 3. Publishing is the act of making it available. In the case of public (free) publishing, that would be uploading the content to the web server.
Yeah but the earnings that flow through to the shareholders are taxed. So at least they're taxed once. Most corps are subject to double taxation, where the earnings are taxed as income and then the dividends that flow to the shareholders are also taxed. If I were the shareholders, I would definitely question why they money is being invested overseas instead of being returned to my pocket as a dividend.
Yeah, and considering we've just left the solar minima, everything made in the past 5 years (really the dawn of drive-by-wire) hasn't been in an environment where there is a lot of solar radiation. The next peak is 9-14 years so that'll be between 2012 and 2016. From now until then it'll be on the increase. Those of you sysadmins who have been enjoying longer than normal equipment life over the past 5 years (especially hard drives) might want to check that you have good backups in place;)
The article raises a lot of stuff that people take for granted, such as that cosmic rays affect electronics in unpredicatable ways. Likewise, it has been observed that they also are detected and "amplified" in the human brain. Whatever that means, I don't know, but I do believe that these act as a sort of random number generator in the brain and function therefore as a "sixth sense".
You don't have to autoconf anyway, just make up an IP. Also, ISPs should be giving everyone at least a/48 which is a staggering amount of addresses. Each/48 is 2^16/64 subnets. Each/64 can have 18,446,744,073,709,552,000 addresses, which yes, might be based on MAC address to save time for the administrator or it could be anything (sequential, etc). It works the same as IPv4 only more;) I've heard lots of clever stuff like using subnets for each virtual machine host, so all the virtual machines on the host are on the same small subnet, etc. The possibilities are endless. I'm getting a/48 in the next few months from a university and I'm quite excited. IPv6 is going to change everything. 64+ bits of multicast addressing, that's going to change media delivery as we know it.
What Google is doing is business intelligence--learning stuff about people, relationships, web pages and then using that information to sell products, in the current case, Advertising. Walmart does the same thing but they collect data about products and people and sell merchandise. There are dozens of other examples. But what they are doing in parallel is forming huge databases of anonymous (hopefully) people data.
For an agency like the NSA, and what they are tasked to do, this is a huge goldmine of info. Information is everything, always has been. In any given market the person making the profit is the one with the best information on the conditions of the market so they can make the best choice. It's the hidden side of economics which has always assumed everyone makes the best possible decision. It turns out it's possible to make better decisions if you have a more perfect model.
Then, and taking it a step further, it's even easier to make a decision if you force the situation by doing something or faking information that the other side wrongly uses. This is done every day in the media to get the masses believing the wrong thing so they do what they will predictably do and the rich people profit on it. Not to say they aren't involved in their own games at the top, but that's the general gist that keeps wealth and power flowing up and out of the masses' hands.
If you're dealing with a hostile enemy (which still exists but probably won't for much longer as the elites move up beyond mere country borders), the same situation is true. The more information you have, the better your decisions will be. And even better to feed misinformation to the enemy so they make an even more wrong decision.
At the end of the day, this is the natural order of things, of civilization. The people at the NSA are people just like anyone else. I would assume that eventually people blow the whistle. And don't forget that there's other NSA agencies in other countries. China, Japan, Russia, England, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Turkey; The thing that's most interesting about NOW is that something like Google, or Walmart, or other global conglomerations is that they trancend countries, borders, political systems. This is only the beginning, I don't think Google is really so much the end-all as the harbringer of things to come. I'd be really surprised if the people at the NSA aren't aware of this and want to hitch a ride up and out of "america" as it is and into what might be termed the "New World Order", in which there is a higher governmental power that goes beyond nations to those concerns that affect the world. Beyond the global warming and pollution stuff, you have very real and important problems around currencies, information exchange and security, etc. It does seem scary because it's so different, but it really is enevitable and for the best of humanity.
The UN is supposed to be that, somewhat, but I think it's not political enough. I think we should elect our UN representatives like we elect our presidents. The big corporations are really trying to get a leg up on traditional democracies by pushing global agendas and there's really no clear leadership helping the people's voice be heard. In fact, it seems our governments are doing their best to insulate us from the world affairs (at least it's felt like that in the U.S. for the past decade or two). But I think now more than ever a world democracy is possible, probable, and probably not that far away. But it may take wresting it away from the corporations, who would love more than anything to have a fascist world government. But that leads to corruption very quickly, as we've seen in history, and that will lead to conflict and hopefully resolution. Hopefully we won't have to go through it, but really we stand on the doorstep to opportunity to really build the future system of the world that will last until the sun burns out.
Best way to overcome the smell of shit is to take a deep breath. Your olfactory senses are trained to filter it out. Just grit your teeth and take a big nose whiff, then exhale. No more poop. I don't understand what the problem is with people fearing their natural odors. If it smells that bad, you should probably look at your health, diet, etc..
Look at Verisign. They are a fairly global corporation, but yes, the root certs are in the U.S. Of course, there were rumors that they were a branch of the NSA for a while. Almost all of the original members of the Internet were government contractors or universities, so it's going to be hard to get away from that.
If you believe their website, they have a seven layer chain of trust with the root certificates locked in a tamper proof envelope in a locked box in a vault in a secure location somewhere.
For the decentralized approach, you have to actually communicate with people, and transport certs with a known secure means. See Web of trust. Personally, I see this as more possible today than ever. You could visit your bank's local branch and pick up a trusted cert with your cell phone or something, then bring it home and import it into your browser. You could visit another branch and validate the two. A compromise at one branch won't compromise all users because they extend the trust from the central bank.
All of this is possible and recommended. SSL is not a privacy protocol, it's meant to prevent casual eavesdropping only. If someone "pwns" Verisign, they can read all SSL traffic based on their root certs. I would not be surprised at ALL to learn that NSA has them, if not the FBI. But, if you can't trust your own government, who can you trust? So, who cares, I'm glad they know so they can catch crooks.
We do this with our VPN: the VPN client is installed on a laptop on-site, and the group cert is copied to the laptop. That is the trust layer. You have to have a trusted cert on the device you wish to use. If you get it from the internet, it could be the wrong one. If you install it from the lan, you have more control over it being the correct one. Then, as you mentioned, you can also verify the fingerprint manually using other means (phone, postcard, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to be happy for the rest of your life...
Seems smart. Why am I paying for (and paying to power) this Intel floating point unit when I'm only serving web pages?
But, Google's growth has been perpetuated by use of cheap commodity hardware, ie: profiting off the fact that the rest of us drive the price down by buying lots. A switch to specialized chips would mean a new direction for the company.
I mean, they could have done this from the beginning with fancy IBM or SUN or Unisys mainframe stuff, which typically allow you to configure IO subsystems (which is the main bottleneck of web serving). Likewise if they are doing database stuff you'd want a lot of RAM and wide I/O bandwidth, 128 bits or more. All standard for a long time on IBM stuff. But it's expensive, not commodity. Even Google's 100-300K servers (or maybe it's a million now, who knows) is not going to bring the scale of the whole worldwide market for Intel chips (100M plus annually).
So I don't see how this could benefit them long-term. Sure, power savings might add up to a lot so it's a good investment. And since they want to be the entire Internet (including your desktop), it's really a matter of energy over all else. But they are definitely going to need to keep adding hardware to keep growing, so that means higher chip expenses upfront. But, if they can spin the same processor into a little home or mobile computer to connect to their services, they might be able to start leveraging this scale thing again. But it seems to be a big risk to get into the manufacturing business.
Ugh, the worst I encountered recently where I needed to run sed over an ssh connection from the script. So there's the usual multiple levels of quotes and escaping. I'm still not fully up to speed on what order it does the quotes, especially with sed involved, so I just scp the script to the host and run it remotely then delete it. Not the best but what can you do. I guess I could redirect the script into the ssh... oh well, what's done is done.
I sort of agree. I'm a proponent of source control, versioning, etc. of legal documents. I think hypertext could take a lot of the drudgery out of codes that are generally annotated rather than rewritten. I think that would help us apply the moral code more completely and transparently. The more expert you have to be to read a code, the less transparent. There could be standards that use UML however, which is better suited to modeling social-logical flows versus a programming language which is good at modelling...math.
These kids today who act like there's some art to programming that's instinctual, that they should be comfortable programming when they don't know shit about the language they're using. Guess what, C is the most comfortable language ever invented. Perl is one of the fastest to write.
Of course, perl is designed for text. HTML, while a subset of "text", is a pretty complex markup language. To generate such code using another language is not trivial. Then you're dealing with networking, web servers, the internet, unknowns like browser type and user screen resolution. Then you have various databases on the back end. It's a very complicated problem yet kids think somehow the computer (or someone else) should just solve it.
The problem is that frameworks are generic and your app is specific. Yeah, the basic types are always there, CRUD, forms, lists and datagrids. But the amount of variance between two "lists" can be huge. A styled list that may work great for a list of books might be horrible for a list of people.
There's no way a framework is going to define base types for every possible thing you could have in a list. The frameworks and object-relational mapping engines are just tools to assist you. You still have to classify everything and their interactions. You still have to define a logical flow for every feature. You still have to test everything. That's what a programmer's job is! So, kids, you're never going to have something that will abstract away the programming. As much as you'd just like to point at the computer and magically create an "app" like you paint a picture, it's not possible, has never been and never will be. "Fustiness and lack of expressivity"--shut the fuck up and get off my lawn.
Check out back issues of Electronics Now and Popular Electronics magazines. The articles are detailed and fun. Unfortunately they went out of business. However, there are still a few mags out there, such as Everyday Practical Electronics.
A good way to get some chops is to build some kits. By far the best is Ramsey Electronics. I also like Information Unlimited; they have a lot of high-voltage and other stuff. Quite an amusing website if you dig around.
Set up an area, because most anything you do will take time and if you want to get serious about the hobby you'll need a workshop away from wifes (oops, slashdot, not applicable) and kids, pets, etc. You might want some smoke removal for the solder as well.
Yep, or use a USB wireless adapter to connect to the neighbors.
Humans learn through mistakes; OP parent must not be very involved with their kids if they don't know that after 15 years of parenthood..
Plus non-competes are typically very focused on directly competing with the business of the company. Also, they by definition must be limited in duration (reasonable usually tops out at 12 months) and physical scope (25 mile radius). So say you work for Company A that sells insurance, you can't sell insurance next door for X amount of time.
Also, try the coffee party as well.
Apple's 2009 Annual Report shows that it sold $13B in Macs, $8B in iPods, $~7B in software, music and accessories, and $13B in iPhones and related services. I think they get a nice commission from AT&T for the 2 year contract. So, yes, they do indeed sell more peripherals and phones and "other stuff" than they do "computers". Not surprising since the iPhone is significantly lower priced than a Macbook, and the iPod as well. Both have mass market appeal. But computers are their core business--this is a nice bump but if you average it over many years you'll see that the computers are what's kept the company alive. They have $6B in annual expense around their retail stores. I think they need to be real careful about those because that could eat up their $33B in cash pretty quickly in the event of a downturn. "Looking" better than ever and that's why I'm short on Apple. Their share price is based on continued growth like they have had, possibly on a global basis, and I just don't see that's possible with what products they have. It's a classic bubble, get off the titanic, it won't get over $275...
"Publishing" is making some content available to the public. The question is really is advertising a public location for a given piece of content "publishing" that content. Further questions could also be asked, such as: Is owning the server that the content on make you the publisher? In this latter case, I think we need to draw parallels with the printing industry, because they have a lot of precedent that we wouldn't want to just throw away.
1. Owning the server and network connection is like owning a printing press.
2. Links are advertisements.
3. Publishing is the act of making it available. In the case of public (free) publishing, that would be uploading the content to the web server.
Yeah but the earnings that flow through to the shareholders are taxed. So at least they're taxed once. Most corps are subject to double taxation, where the earnings are taxed as income and then the dividends that flow to the shareholders are also taxed. If I were the shareholders, I would definitely question why they money is being invested overseas instead of being returned to my pocket as a dividend.
It's only a matter of time that you'll get hit on the road. So, minimize the amount of time you spend on the road--drive as fast as possible.
This isn't anything new. We've been able to do this for years! ;)
Yeah, and considering we've just left the solar minima, everything made in the past 5 years (really the dawn of drive-by-wire) hasn't been in an environment where there is a lot of solar radiation. The next peak is 9-14 years so that'll be between 2012 and 2016. From now until then it'll be on the increase. Those of you sysadmins who have been enjoying longer than normal equipment life over the past 5 years (especially hard drives) might want to check that you have good backups in place ;)
The article raises a lot of stuff that people take for granted, such as that cosmic rays affect electronics in unpredicatable ways. Likewise, it has been observed that they also are detected and "amplified" in the human brain. Whatever that means, I don't know, but I do believe that these act as a sort of random number generator in the brain and function therefore as a "sixth sense".
Sorry, I meant 120 bits of multicast.
You don't have to autoconf anyway, just make up an IP. Also, ISPs should be giving everyone at least a /48 which is a staggering amount of addresses. Each /48 is 2^16 /64 subnets. Each /64 can have 18,446,744,073,709,552,000 addresses, which yes, might be based on MAC address to save time for the administrator or it could be anything (sequential, etc). It works the same as IPv4 only more ;) I've heard lots of clever stuff like using subnets for each virtual machine host, so all the virtual machines on the host are on the same small subnet, etc. The possibilities are endless. I'm getting a /48 in the next few months from a university and I'm quite excited. IPv6 is going to change everything. 64+ bits of multicast addressing, that's going to change media delivery as we know it.
What about the 64-bits of multicast address space? Surely that would change some things................
What Google is doing is business intelligence--learning stuff about people, relationships, web pages and then using that information to sell products, in the current case, Advertising. Walmart does the same thing but they collect data about products and people and sell merchandise. There are dozens of other examples. But what they are doing in parallel is forming huge databases of anonymous (hopefully) people data.
For an agency like the NSA, and what they are tasked to do, this is a huge goldmine of info. Information is everything, always has been. In any given market the person making the profit is the one with the best information on the conditions of the market so they can make the best choice. It's the hidden side of economics which has always assumed everyone makes the best possible decision. It turns out it's possible to make better decisions if you have a more perfect model.
Then, and taking it a step further, it's even easier to make a decision if you force the situation by doing something or faking information that the other side wrongly uses. This is done every day in the media to get the masses believing the wrong thing so they do what they will predictably do and the rich people profit on it. Not to say they aren't involved in their own games at the top, but that's the general gist that keeps wealth and power flowing up and out of the masses' hands.
If you're dealing with a hostile enemy (which still exists but probably won't for much longer as the elites move up beyond mere country borders), the same situation is true. The more information you have, the better your decisions will be. And even better to feed misinformation to the enemy so they make an even more wrong decision.
At the end of the day, this is the natural order of things, of civilization. The people at the NSA are people just like anyone else. I would assume that eventually people blow the whistle. And don't forget that there's other NSA agencies in other countries. China, Japan, Russia, England, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Turkey; The thing that's most interesting about NOW is that something like Google, or Walmart, or other global conglomerations is that they trancend countries, borders, political systems. This is only the beginning, I don't think Google is really so much the end-all as the harbringer of things to come. I'd be really surprised if the people at the NSA aren't aware of this and want to hitch a ride up and out of "america" as it is and into what might be termed the "New World Order", in which there is a higher governmental power that goes beyond nations to those concerns that affect the world. Beyond the global warming and pollution stuff, you have very real and important problems around currencies, information exchange and security, etc. It does seem scary because it's so different, but it really is enevitable and for the best of humanity.
The UN is supposed to be that, somewhat, but I think it's not political enough. I think we should elect our UN representatives like we elect our presidents. The big corporations are really trying to get a leg up on traditional democracies by pushing global agendas and there's really no clear leadership helping the people's voice be heard. In fact, it seems our governments are doing their best to insulate us from the world affairs (at least it's felt like that in the U.S. for the past decade or two). But I think now more than ever a world democracy is possible, probable, and probably not that far away. But it may take wresting it away from the corporations, who would love more than anything to have a fascist world government. But that leads to corruption very quickly, as we've seen in history, and that will lead to conflict and hopefully resolution. Hopefully we won't have to go through it, but really we stand on the doorstep to opportunity to really build the future system of the world that will last until the sun burns out.
Best way to overcome the smell of shit is to take a deep breath. Your olfactory senses are trained to filter it out. Just grit your teeth and take a big nose whiff, then exhale. No more poop. I don't understand what the problem is with people fearing their natural odors. If it smells that bad, you should probably look at your health, diet, etc..
Ubuntu, now with 2.4% more disk space.
having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
Oh, they're not incompetent. They're on a gravy train with biscuit wheels.
Look at Verisign. They are a fairly global corporation, but yes, the root certs are in the U.S. Of course, there were rumors that they were a branch of the NSA for a while. Almost all of the original members of the Internet were government contractors or universities, so it's going to be hard to get away from that.
If you believe their website, they have a seven layer chain of trust with the root certificates locked in a tamper proof envelope in a locked box in a vault in a secure location somewhere.
For the decentralized approach, you have to actually communicate with people, and transport certs with a known secure means. See Web of trust. Personally, I see this as more possible today than ever. You could visit your bank's local branch and pick up a trusted cert with your cell phone or something, then bring it home and import it into your browser. You could visit another branch and validate the two. A compromise at one branch won't compromise all users because they extend the trust from the central bank.
All of this is possible and recommended. SSL is not a privacy protocol, it's meant to prevent casual eavesdropping only. If someone "pwns" Verisign, they can read all SSL traffic based on their root certs. I would not be surprised at ALL to learn that NSA has them, if not the FBI. But, if you can't trust your own government, who can you trust? So, who cares, I'm glad they know so they can catch crooks.
We do this with our VPN: the VPN client is installed on a laptop on-site, and the group cert is copied to the laptop. That is the trust layer. You have to have a trusted cert on the device you wish to use. If you get it from the internet, it could be the wrong one. If you install it from the lan, you have more control over it being the correct one. Then, as you mentioned, you can also verify the fingerprint manually using other means (phone, postcard, etc.)