"For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation."
No, a self driving car shouldn't get into that situation in the first place. The right thing to do here is to anticipate events and slow down. Self driving cars have a huge advantage here, in that they don't get tired or lose attention over time.
SSDs are slow in that they rely on old school disk protocols like sata. Sure, you'll get better performance than spinning disk. But if you want screaming fast performance, you should look at flash devices connected through the PCIe bus.
Products from Fusion IO would be an example of this. Apple Mac Pro would be another: "Up to 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA-based solid-state drive".
I wired my house with cat5E cables, thinking it would future proof the house. In hind sight, I would have chosen cat5.
10G may not work, even if you've chosen the right type of cable, as 10G is much pickier about the terminations. So you can always try and if it doesn't work well, go for prefabricated cables for the 10G connections.
If you want to play with fast (10G+) networking at home, the smart way is to buy infiniband gear on ebay. There's quite a supply from compute clusters being torn down. Older SDR (10G) cards run $30-50. DDR (20G) a bit more and QDR (40G) for a few hundred per card. Buy a cheap copper cable for cross connect and you're done. Or preterminated fiber cables if you need distance, the cards usually handle that too. Some cards also handle 10G and 40G ethernet as well. Need a switch? 36 port QDR switches typically go for $1000. That's 1.4 Tbps worth of bandwidth.
I bought a couple of Mellanox cards that do both 40G ethernet and FDR (56G) infiniband. Between my two linux servers, I get about 37Gbps when using 2+ tcp connections. While bandwidth is about the same, infiniband latency is about half that of ethernet, so I run IP over infiniband.
Apart from being fun (this is slashdot after all), why would you want this? Because it remove the network as a bottleneck and changes the way I think about resources. File transfers are limited by disk performance, there's never network congestion, etc. The only thing that could saturate the link would be memory to memory copying (think VM migrations). Either way, it will be a long time before I worry about network performance again...
It's hardly surprising that Skype isn't mentioned. It's widely believed that there are already backdoors in Skype. Skype has "declined to confirm" that there are no backdoors.
Security researchers Biondi and Desclaux have speculated that Skype may have a back door, since Skype sends traffic even when it is turned off and because Skype has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program.[26] Several media sources have reported that at a meeting about the "Lawful interception of IP based services" held on 25 June 2008, high-ranking but not named officials at the Austrian interior ministry said that they could listen in on Skype conversations without problems. Austrian public broadcasting service ORF, citing minutes from the meeting, have reported that "the Austrian police are able to listen in on Skype connections".[27][28] Skype declined to comment on the reports.[29]
This is exactly what I have and it's a great solution.
In a small 4U network cabinet, you can fit a patch panel and a 24 port switch. That leaves you an extra 2U for other things. I also have a PoE enabled switch and a network server: The SuperMicro 1U Atom servers are small, cheap, energy efficient and quiet. For the switch(es), go for quiet (fanless if possible) and energy efficient. Most switches are made in the same factory in China and from the same components, so it doesn't really matter which brand you choose.
I recently downsized from a 42U to a 21U rack. A 42U rack is was inconvenient and too heavy to handle. Having a smaller rack on wheels is more convenient and 21U is probably more space than you'll need in a home environment if your main purpose is "just for fun". I've got a separate switch in the rack and an uplink connecting the two switches.
I recently set up my own VPN network and wanted a generic solution with access to a number of countries, mainly the US, Canada and the UK. I wanted something that would work naturally with all the devices on my home network, including the Wii, Playstation, etc. The problem with a regular VPN services is that they only give you one country at a time, plus you will probably tunnel more traffic than you want. Your ISP is usually the best route for traffic that doesn't have to originate inside a specific country.
So I've got a number of VPS instances in different countries, all running OpenBSD. These routers are connected with IPsec tunnels. That's not really necessary (ip encapsulation would work just fine) but gets me around national packet sniffing (Australia, I'm looking at you). Then I use OpenBGPD to dynamically announce routes between the routers. Finding out the routes for a provider is easy: just lookup the whois information for an IP number and you get the corresponding CIDR. Add that route to BGP and it's visible across the network in seconds. You also need to forward the appropriate DNS traffic, to get around the load balancing based on originating IP used by some CDNs.
This solution may seem too complicated and overkill, but it works incredibly well. You could of course achieve the same thing by having multiple VPN connections from a single router and add a bunch of static routes. But where's the fun in that?
As an added bonus, it's trivial to set up redundant gateways to the US and load balance traffic between them. This is a natural feature of BGP: if a router goes down, the BGP connection dies and traffic is routed through another path. Since OpenBSD is very light, I only pay for the smallest VPS instances, usually 128MB ram and a tiny bit of cpu for a few $/month per instance.
And it's not a very good idea: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/automobiles/02POWER.html "The V2G potential of Honda’s full hybrid vehicles is unexplored, but the company is doubtful of using them to power homes. “We would not like to see stresses on the battery pack caused by putting it through cycles it wasn’t designed for,” said Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman. “Instead, they should buy a Honda generator that was made for that purpose.”
It all depends on what you look like and where you are. Technically, you're probably supposed to carry your passport as a foreigner in a ton of countries. But if you stay out of trouble and look like you're there for a reason, you've got nothing to worry about. Countries with lots of tourists don't want to annoy tourists for no reason.
I've travelled and lived in a large number a few countries over the last 15 years, including the US. Let's take the US as an example. If you speak good English, you'll never have a problem, except maybe getting into bars. If you don't speak good English and look like you're from somewhere else, carrying your passport would probably be a good idea.
As someone else pointed out, bringing your foreign driver's license is usually fine. As long as you've got some kind of ID, they can give you the benefit of the doubt.
Google is working on a translation system that's based on the massive information they've gathered off the internet. To get an idea of how this works, have a look at the 2009 Google Wave developer presentation. Fast forward to about 1h 12min http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
In another demo (which I can't find right now) they show how the translation engine understands the context of the conversation.
It's easy to see how this could be applied to a phone call using the right voice recognition software.
I've been using 1.1.1.1/8 at home for years. It's by far the quickest to type and remember.
I'll probably keep using it for a while, until I need to reach any of those officially allocated addresses in 1/8. Hearing they got allocated in Africa and Latina America is really good news, since I rarely go to African and Latin American websites.
My Linux server is in our basement too. Even in our warm climate (Australia) there's more than enough cool air without some fancy cooling solution. I don't see why the guy needs extra cooling. Isn't his basement not cold enough for a few computers ?
I just did the opposite. I got a number of wireless access points and connected everything in a WDS setup, thinking that would cover all my network needs.
Last weekend, I wired the whole house with gigabit ethernet. For some things, like streaming large files and IP based phone systems, wireless just doesn't cut it. Laptops and phones connect to the wireless network and everything else use plain reliable ethernet.
I've been to Siggraph a number of times. There are always a lot of creative display devices, virtual reality setups, 3D displays, etc, so that doesn't surprise me. But the scratchable input device is actually really cool: I wish I could get ahold of the source code for that one. Just imagine what you could do to automate your house:
1) Put one in your favorite TV chair and get rid of the remotes 2) Get rid of locks and door handles. Only the correct tap or gesture on the wall opens the door. When you've got friends over, you can semi-quote Back to the Future: "Door handles ? Where we're going, you don't need door handles..."
Technically, I don't think mail order is a loop hole as much as it is a tool of free trade. I think the origin to this "loop hole" is a free trade agreement between states established by the federal govt. Not having taxes between states benefits competition in the market place.
In CA, the state charges a tax on everything that is sold. This tax is paid by the business for the privilege of operating in CA and of course passed on to the consumer. If I live in CA and buy something from another state, I'm technically supposed to declare "use tax" for the goods bought elsewhere, but used in California. Of course, no one does that, but that's another problem.
Within the European Union, there is a similar free trade agreement. Countries are no longer allowed to tax goods and services coming from other country. The difference to the US is that EU countries are better at collecting the "use tax".
When I bought a prepaid sim card in Switzerland last year, they wouldn't give it to me unless they got my passport information etc.
In Australia, you need to call to activate your prepaid sim card. When you do, they ask for your name and address under the pretext that they need it for emergency services.
I can't be bothered making up any in Soviet Russia jokes, but I'm sure someone else will:)
Looking at the youtube videos, there's a different iPhone application for each device (TiVo, Sonos, TV,...)
So instead of having N remotes on my coffee table to choose from, I only need to download and install N different applications on my iPhone ? How modern and convenient.
Wake me up when there's a UNIVERSAL remote application for a smart phone.
I am writing this from my 8 core Intel box running Linux with 8GB of memory. This is the FASTEST computer I've ever had and the first time I've noticed a big leap forward. I normally don't care about cpu speeds, graphics cards, etc. Hardware tends to be fast enough for the current generation of software (I run Linux) and that's usually all you need. But this 8 core thing is different.
I develop and run very heavy graphics applications, where cpu tends to be the bottleneck. In my world, you used to rely on extra cpu from render farms or clusters to get the job done.
This world is changing. Shorter kind of jobs that require a quick turnaround, can now be done locally instead of sending jobs to the render farm. This is massive. As people start doing more jobs locally, it also frees up space for the longer running batch jobs, so they get done faster too.
When I first got the machine, it had Windows installed and it felt just as slow as a regular (single or double cpu/core) box. That should be of no surprise to anyone around here. But Linux sure knows how to use the multi core magic.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's how we explained to our 5 year old how Santa cannot bring any toy.
Santa makes toys in his workshop. But he's only allowed to make toys that isn't under copyright. So he cannot make ... because of copyright.
"For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation."
No, a self driving car shouldn't get into that situation in the first place. The right thing to do here is to anticipate events and slow down. Self driving cars have a huge advantage here, in that they don't get tired or lose attention over time.
Google already answers questions. Try for yourself:
how tall is the eiffel tower
who is america's president
what date was terminator released
etc.
It's already September 27 in Australia. Problem solved.
SSDs are slow in that they rely on old school disk protocols like sata. Sure, you'll get better performance than spinning disk. But if you want screaming fast performance, you should look at flash devices connected through the PCIe bus.
Products from Fusion IO would be an example of this. Apple Mac Pro would be another: "Up to 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA-based solid-state drive".
I wired my house with cat5E cables, thinking it would future proof the house. In hind sight, I would have chosen cat5.
10G may not work, even if you've chosen the right type of cable, as 10G is much pickier about the terminations. So you can always try and if it doesn't work well, go for prefabricated cables for the 10G connections.
If you want to play with fast (10G+) networking at home, the smart way is to buy infiniband gear on ebay. There's quite a supply from compute clusters being torn down. Older SDR (10G) cards run $30-50. DDR (20G) a bit more and QDR (40G) for a few hundred per card. Buy a cheap copper cable for cross connect and you're done. Or preterminated fiber cables if you need distance, the cards usually handle that too. Some cards also handle 10G and 40G ethernet as well. Need a switch? 36 port QDR switches typically go for $1000. That's 1.4 Tbps worth of bandwidth.
I bought a couple of Mellanox cards that do both 40G ethernet and FDR (56G) infiniband. Between my two linux servers, I get about 37Gbps when using 2+ tcp connections. While bandwidth is about the same, infiniband latency is about half that of ethernet, so I run IP over infiniband.
Apart from being fun (this is slashdot after all), why would you want this? Because it remove the network as a bottleneck and changes the way I think about resources. File transfers are limited by disk performance, there's never network congestion, etc. The only thing that could saturate the link would be memory to memory copying (think VM migrations). Either way, it will be a long time before I worry about network performance again...
It's hardly surprising that Skype isn't mentioned. It's widely believed that there are already backdoors in Skype. Skype has "declined to confirm" that there are no backdoors.
From the Wikipedia Skype Security article
Security researchers Biondi and Desclaux have speculated that Skype may have a back door, since Skype sends traffic even when it is turned off and because Skype has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program.[26] Several media sources have reported that at a meeting about the "Lawful interception of IP based services" held on 25 June 2008, high-ranking but not named officials at the Austrian interior ministry said that they could listen in on Skype conversations without problems. Austrian public broadcasting service ORF, citing minutes from the meeting, have reported that "the Austrian police are able to listen in on Skype connections".[27][28] Skype declined to comment on the reports.[29]
Keeping track of that many webservers have to be very time consuming tasks.
This book teaches you to think like an experienced programmer.
It's a great way of refreshing your algorithm skills and an easy ready compared to other (heavier) algorithm books.
This is exactly what I have and it's a great solution.
In a small 4U network cabinet, you can fit a patch panel and a 24 port switch. That leaves you an extra 2U for other things. I also have a PoE enabled switch and a network server: The SuperMicro 1U Atom servers are small, cheap, energy efficient and quiet. For the switch(es), go for quiet (fanless if possible) and energy efficient. Most switches are made in the same factory in China and from the same components, so it doesn't really matter which brand you choose.
I recently downsized from a 42U to a 21U rack. A 42U rack is was inconvenient and too heavy to handle. Having a smaller rack on wheels is more convenient and 21U is probably more space than you'll need in a home environment if your main purpose is "just for fun". I've got a separate switch in the rack and an uplink connecting the two switches.
I recently set up my own VPN network and wanted a generic solution with access to a number of countries, mainly the US, Canada and the UK. I wanted something that would work naturally with all the devices on my home network, including the Wii, Playstation, etc. The problem with a regular VPN services is that they only give you one country at a time, plus you will probably tunnel more traffic than you want. Your ISP is usually the best route for traffic that doesn't have to originate inside a specific country.
So I've got a number of VPS instances in different countries, all running OpenBSD. These routers are connected with IPsec tunnels. That's not really necessary (ip encapsulation would work just fine) but gets me around national packet sniffing (Australia, I'm looking at you). Then I use OpenBGPD to dynamically announce routes between the routers. Finding out the routes for a provider is easy: just lookup the whois information for an IP number and you get the corresponding CIDR. Add that route to BGP and it's visible across the network in seconds. You also need to forward the appropriate DNS traffic, to get around the load balancing based on originating IP used by some CDNs.
This solution may seem too complicated and overkill, but it works incredibly well. You could of course achieve the same thing by having multiple VPN connections from a single router and add a bunch of static routes. But where's the fun in that?
As an added bonus, it's trivial to set up redundant gateways to the US and load balance traffic between them. This is a natural feature of BGP: if a router goes down, the BGP connection dies and traffic is routed through another path. Since OpenBSD is very light, I only pay for the smallest VPS instances, usually 128MB ram and a tiny bit of cpu for a few $/month per instance.
This was discussed on slashdot in 2007:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/07/07/27/2312257/toyota-unveils-plug-in-hybrid-prius#comments
And it's not a very good idea:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/02/automobiles/02POWER.html
"The V2G potential of Honda’s full hybrid vehicles is unexplored, but the company is doubtful of using them to power homes. “We would not like to see stresses on the battery pack caused by putting it through cycles it wasn’t designed for,” said Chris Naughton, a Honda spokesman. “Instead, they should buy a Honda generator that was made for that purpose.”
I'm glad to see some positive news coming from Oracle. Solaris is a great OS and I'm thankful that I can keep using it for free on my servers at home.
Now if we could also get full ZFS support for Linux, that would be great.
I remember AT&T slapping on $10 of "government fees and taxes" to my $60 plan, without specifying what those fees and taxes were.
I really hope they get to pay for that one day...
It all depends on what you look like and where you are. Technically, you're probably supposed to carry your passport as a foreigner in a ton of countries. But if you stay out of trouble and look like you're there for a reason, you've got nothing to worry about. Countries with lots of tourists don't want to annoy tourists for no reason.
I've travelled and lived in a large number a few countries over the last 15 years, including the US. Let's take the US as an example. If you speak good English, you'll never have a problem, except maybe getting into bars. If you don't speak good English and look like you're from somewhere else, carrying your passport would probably be a good idea.
As someone else pointed out, bringing your foreign driver's license is usually fine. As long as you've got some kind of ID, they can give you the benefit of the doubt.
Google is working on a translation system that's based on the massive information they've gathered off the internet. To get an idea of how this works, have a look at the 2009 Google Wave developer presentation. Fast forward to about 1h 12min
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ
In another demo (which I can't find right now) they show how the translation engine understands the context of the conversation.
It's easy to see how this could be applied to a phone call using the right voice recognition software.
I've been using 1.1.1.1/8 at home for years. It's by far the quickest to type and remember.
I'll probably keep using it for a while, until I need to reach any of those officially allocated addresses in 1/8. Hearing they got allocated in Africa and Latina America is really good news, since I rarely go to African and Latin American websites.
My Linux server is in our basement too. Even in our warm climate (Australia) there's more than enough cool air without some fancy cooling solution. I don't see why the guy needs extra cooling. Isn't his basement not cold enough for a few computers ?
I just did the opposite. I got a number of wireless access points and connected everything in a WDS setup, thinking that would cover all my network needs.
Last weekend, I wired the whole house with gigabit ethernet. For some things, like streaming large files and IP based phone systems, wireless just doesn't cut it. Laptops and phones connect to the wireless network and everything else use plain reliable ethernet.
I've been to Siggraph a number of times. There are always a lot of creative display devices, virtual reality setups, 3D displays, etc, so that doesn't surprise me. But the scratchable input device is actually really cool: I wish I could get ahold of the source code for that one. Just imagine what you could do to automate your house:
1) Put one in your favorite TV chair and get rid of the remotes
2) Get rid of locks and door handles. Only the correct tap or gesture on the wall opens the door. When you've got friends over, you can semi-quote Back to the Future: "Door handles ? Where we're going, you don't need door handles..."
Technically, I don't think mail order is a loop hole as much as it is a tool of free trade. I think the origin to this "loop hole" is a free trade agreement between states established by the federal govt. Not having taxes between states benefits competition in the market place.
In CA, the state charges a tax on everything that is sold. This tax is paid by the business for the privilege of operating in CA and of course passed on to the consumer. If I live in CA and buy something from another state, I'm technically supposed to declare "use tax" for the goods bought elsewhere, but used in California. Of course, no one does that, but that's another problem.
Within the European Union, there is a similar free trade agreement. Countries are no longer allowed to tax goods and services coming from other country. The difference to the US is that EU countries are better at collecting the "use tax".
When I bought a prepaid sim card in Switzerland last year, they wouldn't give it to me unless they got my passport information etc.
In Australia, you need to call to activate your prepaid sim card. When you do, they ask for your name and address under the pretext that they need it for emergency services.
I can't be bothered making up any in Soviet Russia jokes, but I'm sure someone else will :)
Looking at the youtube videos, there's a different iPhone application for each device (TiVo, Sonos, TV, ...)
So instead of having N remotes on my coffee table to choose from, I only need to download and install N different applications on my iPhone ? How modern and convenient.
Wake me up when there's a UNIVERSAL remote application for a smart phone.
I am writing this from my 8 core Intel box running Linux with 8GB of memory. This is the FASTEST computer I've ever had and the first time I've noticed a big leap forward. I normally don't care about cpu speeds, graphics cards, etc. Hardware tends to be fast enough for the current generation of software (I run Linux) and that's usually all you need. But this 8 core thing is different.
I develop and run very heavy graphics applications, where cpu tends to be the bottleneck. In my world, you used to rely on extra cpu from render farms or clusters to get the job done.
This world is changing. Shorter kind of jobs that require a quick turnaround, can now be done locally instead of sending jobs to the render farm. This is massive. As people start doing more jobs locally, it also frees up space for the longer running batch jobs, so they get done faster too.
When I first got the machine, it had Windows installed and it felt just as slow as a regular (single or double cpu/core) box. That should be of no surprise to anyone around here. But Linux sure knows how to use the multi core magic.