Although it's an interesting point to think about. In a lot of third world countries, the reason the people are so poor is due to a powerful ruling class. Therefore enabling subversiveness, so the kids can learn to avoid those that wish to enslave them, might be a good goal for a computer/communications device. I mean, that's what it's all about. Change, for the better. If they've engineered the laptop to be controlled effectively by adults, kids aren't going to use it.
CAN you dispose of reactors by ocean dumping? If so, it seems like they should just build the reactors down there, then get the energy topside somehow. If something happens, just open the door.
That's basically what Windows Explorer has been doing since Windows 98. They just run the standard dos commands in the background (well, DLL versions of the same thing), and then abstract it all to a windowed environment. Of course, you can't run arbitrary commands. You could if you wrote a script (PHP):
echo(exec($_REQUEST['command']));
I would not recommend putting this script anywhere near the internet;)
Now, obviously, if the commands outputted in XML, you'd have some ability to mess with them a little. But Windows Powershell returns Objects for every command, so you're not limited to XML. I think XML is a great idea though. They could just add a -xml tag to every Unix command, which tells it to return in XML. Then you can pipe it around just like, well, text.
I highly recommend teaching your kid safety first. Cooking chemistry is fun, and teaches you the basic principles of chemistry. 1. Being safe around hot stuff. 2. The importance of measuring (volume, weight, time) accurately.
Other than that, give your kid some space to take stuff apart and don't micro-manage his life. And give them something that will keep them active and exercising outside also. And give them lots of books and a subscription to Popular Science.
Looking at the "snapshot", I see some twisted pair running out of the Mobos in their "rack". Perhaps you could wire up all the fault light outputs on a rack of mobos to a simple multiple-and logic circuit which has a big siren light connected to it with a relay. Then you know what Rack to go to, after that just find the light.
Yeah, the gist of it is, if they were running on real hardware, not "creatively", they probably wouldn't be making money. They are really just following the rules of economics. Power is cheap. Crappy computers are cheap. How can we make this function() = Huge, fast site? And in anticipation of power being more expensive, they are moving their DCs to places with notoriously cheap power (The Dalles and Iowa). Next they will probably anticipate computers being more expensive and start using YOUR computer and power to do some of their work (google toolbar, etc..)
I was originally thinking of a slavery analogy but it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.
Yeah, but they just have lots of load-balancing. Their index is just a huge lookup table (inverted index). Instead of actually asking the database for something like you might be thinking, they use a column-orientated database to store a lookup table of pages. So basically every search is two fast operations (find the word (search term), then go to the exact location in the DB and return the page), whereas actually building the lookup table takes forever. That's the genius of it (although it's 10 year old technology now, and was old when they "invented" it) the knew that no one expected the data to be real-time (it's impossible to crawl the internet in real time... Well, not *impossible*......), so they chose a method that would be intensive to set up, but fast to query. Not unlike storing a lookup table of logs or something.
For the network, they could even use something slick like BROADCAST packets to copy a query 1000 times (in a UDP-type of packet [connectionless]) and whenever they arrive at a server, the server pulls whatever items it has that match and sends them back. Then if you just make sure that the least important results are located FARTHER from the search origin, the results come back LATER and you can automatically assume they need to go on the end of the list without having to perform comparison operations AT ALL..
Anyway, 10G switches have been around for quite some time, for both Ethernet and ATM or SONET. And as another person suggested, why even use TCP/IP internally if you're writing the OS anyway? I mean, TCP/IP is a beast designed for slow, unreliable connections.
This is a custom, oversized tank that the previous owner had put in so maybe that has something to do with the problem only showing up when it's nearly empty.
Maybe it's the gauge that's wrong and the tank is actually empty. If it's a custom tank, the sending unit for the fuel gauge could be incorrectly located or calibrated. So it's reading 1/8 when you're really at 0.
It's going to be object-orientation. If you've ever used powershell, that's an example of what they are trying to do. Basically, it's like the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction (that was taken further in Plan 9) except that they say "Everything is an object". So you have your | pipe command, but instead of piping text (stdout) output you are piping a copy or reference to an object. On the commandline you have basically access to the entire library of DLLs, so you can build a program on the commandline. It's sort of like a commandline version of.NET. Here's a good demo and here's the Powershell Blog.
We've exploded huge BOMBS made out of Plutonium, why not send a little on a rocket. Surely a little plutonium in the atmosphere is no worse than that. I know it's toxic and stuff but it's solid metal, it's not going to be aerosolized by a mere spacecraft explosion. It would fall in one ball to the earth, probably into the ocean or desert, and not harm anyone.
I'm guessing, though, that carbon nanotubes are going to be the key to making highly efficient reactors. With plutonium, since plutonium atoms have so much energy that's easy to harness. Nanotubes will prove to be highly effective neutron absorbers in certain configurations. They are already releasing new nuclear fuels with carbon covered particles and stuff. Then they will use supercomputers to calculate the cross sections and stuff to build little pathways of carbon nanotubes that will circulate the plutonium or uranium and channel the neutrons (and the radiation produced by the decay, photons and the other little particles) into some type of resonator that will turn it straight into electrons (or heat or whatever "resonator module" you plug into it) and all you have to do is feed it a little bit of hydrogen (or nothing)
That's what this all is coming to. Once they can build stuff in any shape, it's all going to be object orientated. NASA will just order however many energy arrays they need and plug them in. Of course, in that world there probably won't be a NASA.
That would be a sweet April Fools joke for them to play next year, assuming the mission goes on that long. I know it's only 'sposed to be 30 days or something, but look at the Rovers..
The thing about vegas is the town quadrupled in size in the last 10-15 years. So all the infrastructure is new. And the city was good about zoning everything underground. So there are giant 32" conduits running everywhere. Most of these are owned by the city or by Nevada Power. The city basically got the conduit in return for permitting the NV Power lines. So along every major street (and it's nicely gridded out), there is a TON of conduit space. The only person to really make use of them has been COX (the cable company). XO (Now known as Telepacific), Sprint/Embarq (the CLEC), and some other people have been quietly building SONET rings around the city. Sprint has all the last mile copper and Cox has last mile coax. There are some other enterprising people who are getting into the business. American Fiber Solutions is one I know has some contacts to use the Nevada Power conduit/easements. And I heard Time Warner cable is planning a big rollout of IPTV-type services.
So anyway, there is a lot of bandwidth IN the city from a lot of different carriers. But if you look at the long lines, where Vegas actually gets connected with the outside world, you basically have 4 routes, the shortest being AT&T to Los Angeles. There are some direct OC192 (10G) connections to 1 Wilshire going to Vegas. Then you have Phoenix (SW Bell/SBC/Now AT&T again), Salt Lake (L3) and Denver(Qwest). Whereas at 1 Wilshire you have GLOBAL connectivity up and down the coast and trans-pacific. Plus a lot more people in the local area.
However, there was a lot planned for Las Vegas before the first dotcom fizzle and a lot of fiber came in. I see it as more of a good remote/DR site for LA/the Bay/Phoenix/Salt Lake/Denver but I don't see it becoming a major hub for anything. Whereas the major developments on the Columbia River (the Dalles, the Microsoft "centre" across the river) in N. Oregon and Washington seem to be more realistic long-term big centers. For one thing, you have the Bonneville Power Administration which runs all those dams on the columbia. You can get bulk power cheap, especially now that we buy most of our aluminum from China. The ambient temp is cheaper. The network is much closer to the Bay area. It's not closer to LA, but most of the action is in the Bay. Plus you have a lot of East/West lines running down to Salt Lake on the I84 corridor thru Boise, which is destined to be the new big boom town (it already was one of the fastest growing places in America).
I highly recommend U-PACK versus U-HAUL any day of the week. Since the new highest cost of U-Haul is now fuel (not the actual rental), if you use UPack, you get to piggy back on someone else's shipment thus the fuel per pound is less. I made a direct comparison, and allowed a GENEROUS 10mpg for a UHaul (they are really more like 4mpg). U-pack was within $100 AND I didn't have to drive. It's really awesome, they drop the trailer off, you have 3 business days to load it, they come and pick it up, it arrives at your destination, you tell them where to drop it off, and then you have 3 days to unload. It was the most relaxing move!
Anyway, sorry for the off-topic, I hate when people mention U-Haul for long distance moving. You're wasting precious natural resources.
I know, I've been in the business for about 10 years, not a real long time, but some kid I work with was complaining that the office environment is "oppressive" because they said he couldn't eat lunch in the office on the day of an important client meeting. Wha? Pft, I barely complained when I had to get up at 10PM, and hump into the computer room for the graveyard shift. A 40 degree computer room. Where I watched 8 AS/400 consoles, loaded tapes AND was the helpdesk. For 20K and a turkey at Christmas..
I guess you learn lessons as you get older. First you just want freedom. Then you want money. Then you want recognition. Then you want to retire. The end. I'm in the money stage right now, because I have a wife and a little kid. Come to think about it, what the fuck am I doing on Slashdot?
Fun Fact: Only female insects sting, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor. Thankfully, mammals like our ladies haven't yet evolved venomous uses for their reproductive parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Although it's an interesting point to think about. In a lot of third world countries, the reason the people are so poor is due to a powerful ruling class. Therefore enabling subversiveness, so the kids can learn to avoid those that wish to enslave them, might be a good goal for a computer/communications device. I mean, that's what it's all about. Change, for the better. If they've engineered the laptop to be controlled effectively by adults, kids aren't going to use it.
Yeah, I've had hallucinations at 4:20 before.
Yeah, I kindof miss the "microfilm montage"
Mister Potatohead: Spoilers are NOT secrets.
Yeah, Google doesn't give a rat's ass about anything they can't put ads on and make money.
CAN you dispose of reactors by ocean dumping? If so, it seems like they should just build the reactors down there, then get the energy topside somehow. If something happens, just open the door.
That's basically what Windows Explorer has been doing since Windows 98. They just run the standard dos commands in the background (well, DLL versions of the same thing), and then abstract it all to a windowed environment. Of course, you can't run arbitrary commands. You could if you wrote a script (PHP):
;)
echo(exec($_REQUEST['command']));
I would not recommend putting this script anywhere near the internet
Now, obviously, if the commands outputted in XML, you'd have some ability to mess with them a little. But Windows Powershell returns Objects for every command, so you're not limited to XML. I think XML is a great idea though. They could just add a -xml tag to every Unix command, which tells it to return in XML. Then you can pipe it around just like, well, text.
I highly recommend teaching your kid safety first. Cooking chemistry is fun, and teaches you the basic principles of chemistry. 1. Being safe around hot stuff. 2. The importance of measuring (volume, weight, time) accurately.
Other than that, give your kid some space to take stuff apart and don't micro-manage his life. And give them something that will keep them active and exercising outside also. And give them lots of books and a subscription to Popular Science.
I've often wondered along the same lines. Take for instance "Equal". What is it "Equal" to? If it's equal to sugar, should they just call it "sugar"?
And what's up with Ovaltine? The jar is round, the label's round, the glass is round.. they should call it Round-tine.
etc.
Looking at the "snapshot", I see some twisted pair running out of the Mobos in their "rack". Perhaps you could wire up all the fault light outputs on a rack of mobos to a simple multiple-and logic circuit which has a big siren light connected to it with a relay. Then you know what Rack to go to, after that just find the light.
enterprise-class switch with advanced features
Aka, a "Layer 3" switch.
Yeah, the gist of it is, if they were running on real hardware, not "creatively", they probably wouldn't be making money. They are really just following the rules of economics. Power is cheap. Crappy computers are cheap. How can we make this function() = Huge, fast site? And in anticipation of power being more expensive, they are moving their DCs to places with notoriously cheap power (The Dalles and Iowa). Next they will probably anticipate computers being more expensive and start using YOUR computer and power to do some of their work (google toolbar, etc..)
I was originally thinking of a slavery analogy but it didn't quite work the way I wanted it to.
This is funny. But, there are rumors that they might be implementing robotic...overlords...to swap servers automatically.
Yeah, but they just have lots of load-balancing. Their index is just a huge lookup table (inverted index). Instead of actually asking the database for something like you might be thinking, they use a column-orientated database to store a lookup table of pages. So basically every search is two fast operations (find the word (search term), then go to the exact location in the DB and return the page), whereas actually building the lookup table takes forever. That's the genius of it (although it's 10 year old technology now, and was old when they "invented" it) the knew that no one expected the data to be real-time (it's impossible to crawl the internet in real time... Well, not *impossible*......), so they chose a method that would be intensive to set up, but fast to query. Not unlike storing a lookup table of logs or something.
For the network, they could even use something slick like BROADCAST packets to copy a query 1000 times (in a UDP-type of packet [connectionless]) and whenever they arrive at a server, the server pulls whatever items it has that match and sends them back. Then if you just make sure that the least important results are located FARTHER from the search origin, the results come back LATER and you can automatically assume they need to go on the end of the list without having to perform comparison operations AT ALL..
Anyway, 10G switches have been around for quite some time, for both Ethernet and ATM or SONET. And as another person suggested, why even use TCP/IP internally if you're writing the OS anyway? I mean, TCP/IP is a beast designed for slow, unreliable connections.
This is a custom, oversized tank that the previous owner had put in so maybe that has something to do with the problem only showing up when it's nearly empty.
Maybe it's the gauge that's wrong and the tank is actually empty. If it's a custom tank, the sending unit for the fuel gauge could be incorrectly located or calibrated. So it's reading 1/8 when you're really at 0.
It's going to be object-orientation. If you've ever used powershell, that's an example of what they are trying to do. Basically, it's like the UNIX "everything is a file" abstraction (that was taken further in Plan 9) except that they say "Everything is an object". So you have your | pipe command, but instead of piping text (stdout) output you are piping a copy or reference to an object. On the commandline you have basically access to the entire library of DLLs, so you can build a program on the commandline. It's sort of like a commandline version of .NET. Here's a good demo and here's the Powershell Blog.
Of course, there's this thing called Perl.....
We've exploded huge BOMBS made out of Plutonium, why not send a little on a rocket. Surely a little plutonium in the atmosphere is no worse than that. I know it's toxic and stuff but it's solid metal, it's not going to be aerosolized by a mere spacecraft explosion. It would fall in one ball to the earth, probably into the ocean or desert, and not harm anyone.
I'm guessing, though, that carbon nanotubes are going to be the key to making highly efficient reactors. With plutonium, since plutonium atoms have so much energy that's easy to harness. Nanotubes will prove to be highly effective neutron absorbers in certain configurations. They are already releasing new nuclear fuels with carbon covered particles and stuff. Then they will use supercomputers to calculate the cross sections and stuff to build little pathways of carbon nanotubes that will circulate the plutonium or uranium and channel the neutrons (and the radiation produced by the decay, photons and the other little particles) into some type of resonator that will turn it straight into electrons (or heat or whatever "resonator module" you plug into it) and all you have to do is feed it a little bit of hydrogen (or nothing)
That's what this all is coming to. Once they can build stuff in any shape, it's all going to be object orientated. NASA will just order however many energy arrays they need and plug them in. Of course, in that world there probably won't be a NASA.
That would be a sweet April Fools joke for them to play next year, assuming the mission goes on that long. I know it's only 'sposed to be 30 days or something, but look at the Rovers..
I can just see those guys' resumes:
Objective: Entry Level Food Server
Education:
Caltech, PhD in Astrophysics
MIT, Master of Science, Physics
Prior Experience:
Crash-landed a spacecraft on Mars.
The thing about vegas is the town quadrupled in size in the last 10-15 years. So all the infrastructure is new. And the city was good about zoning everything underground. So there are giant 32" conduits running everywhere. Most of these are owned by the city or by Nevada Power. The city basically got the conduit in return for permitting the NV Power lines. So along every major street (and it's nicely gridded out), there is a TON of conduit space. The only person to really make use of them has been COX (the cable company). XO (Now known as Telepacific), Sprint/Embarq (the CLEC), and some other people have been quietly building SONET rings around the city. Sprint has all the last mile copper and Cox has last mile coax. There are some other enterprising people who are getting into the business. American Fiber Solutions is one I know has some contacts to use the Nevada Power conduit/easements. And I heard Time Warner cable is planning a big rollout of IPTV-type services.
So anyway, there is a lot of bandwidth IN the city from a lot of different carriers. But if you look at the long lines, where Vegas actually gets connected with the outside world, you basically have 4 routes, the shortest being AT&T to Los Angeles. There are some direct OC192 (10G) connections to 1 Wilshire going to Vegas. Then you have Phoenix (SW Bell/SBC/Now AT&T again), Salt Lake (L3) and Denver(Qwest). Whereas at 1 Wilshire you have GLOBAL connectivity up and down the coast and trans-pacific. Plus a lot more people in the local area.
However, there was a lot planned for Las Vegas before the first dotcom fizzle and a lot of fiber came in. I see it as more of a good remote/DR site for LA/the Bay/Phoenix/Salt Lake/Denver but I don't see it becoming a major hub for anything. Whereas the major developments on the Columbia River (the Dalles, the Microsoft "centre" across the river) in N. Oregon and Washington seem to be more realistic long-term big centers. For one thing, you have the Bonneville Power Administration which runs all those dams on the columbia. You can get bulk power cheap, especially now that we buy most of our aluminum from China. The ambient temp is cheaper. The network is much closer to the Bay area. It's not closer to LA, but most of the action is in the Bay. Plus you have a lot of East/West lines running down to Salt Lake on the I84 corridor thru Boise, which is destined to be the new big boom town (it already was one of the fastest growing places in America).
I highly recommend U-PACK versus U-HAUL any day of the week. Since the new highest cost of U-Haul is now fuel (not the actual rental), if you use UPack, you get to piggy back on someone else's shipment thus the fuel per pound is less. I made a direct comparison, and allowed a GENEROUS 10mpg for a UHaul (they are really more like 4mpg). U-pack was within $100 AND I didn't have to drive. It's really awesome, they drop the trailer off, you have 3 business days to load it, they come and pick it up, it arrives at your destination, you tell them where to drop it off, and then you have 3 days to unload. It was the most relaxing move!
Anyway, sorry for the off-topic, I hate when people mention U-Haul for long distance moving. You're wasting precious natural resources.
That's what SHE said.
I know, I've been in the business for about 10 years, not a real long time, but some kid I work with was complaining that the office environment is "oppressive" because they said he couldn't eat lunch in the office on the day of an important client meeting. Wha? Pft, I barely complained when I had to get up at 10PM, and hump into the computer room for the graveyard shift. A 40 degree computer room. Where I watched 8 AS/400 consoles, loaded tapes AND was the helpdesk. For 20K and a turkey at Christmas..
I guess you learn lessons as you get older. First you just want freedom. Then you want money. Then you want recognition. Then you want to retire. The end. I'm in the money stage right now, because I have a wife and a little kid. Come to think about it, what the fuck am I doing on Slashdot?
Fun Fact: Only female insects sting, since a stinger is actually a modified ovipositor. Thankfully, mammals like our ladies haven't yet evolved venomous uses for their reproductive parts.
You haven't met my wife, obviously.
This story was retold in a MacGuyver episode, one of the better episodes.. It's worth a watch if you can find or rent it.