Yes, what a great idea. I'm going to make such a system and I'll call it the Database Naming System, or dns for short.
I'll have a lightweight software daemon that runs and uses flat files for configuration information. I think I'll call this one the Bodacious Interconnected Naming Database, or bind for short...
The ONLY negative I have towards the movie is that the lead character drops the F-Bomb well over 200 times throughout the course of the movie. The last 20 minutes was a constant barrage of "Fuck...fuuuuck! Oh Shit, oh shit, Ahhh! FUCK!" It got to the point where it was almost laughable for how many times he cursed and made me question the intelligence of the lead character.
I think that is part of what they were after. The lead character wasn't supposed to be an all-american, square-jawed ridgy-didge action hero. He's a middle-management screw-up who leads a boring life, is bigoted against the aliens, is quite happy to treat them as less than human and then he has the events of the movie thrust upon him. He's an unwilling participant in the whole affair, and he's quite typical South African. The swearing wasn't over the top, I hardly noticed it as it fitted in quite well with the rest of the plot.
I saw this movie last night and I quite enjoyed it. It was good, hard SF. There were aliens and space ships and exotic technology/weapons. But, despite the apartheid references and the incredible special effects, it - like good sci fi does - ultimately tells us more about ourselves.
Wilkus is a bit of an anti-hero, not in the sense that he's a reluctant hero, but he's not really a very good person yet he comes through in the end. Despite superficially losing his humanity, he becomes more human as his condition advances.
There are those that are picking up on perceived plot holes, such as why the government allowed the Nigerians so much power in the District, and why didn't the aliens use their advanced weapons to revolt - to the first point I'd say that the government generally didn't care what on earth went on in the District slums. If the Nigerians were rising to power, so be it, they had power over the aliens, but the area was pretty tightly controlled, so there was very little chance of spillover of this power into the outside world.
As for why the aliens didn't revolt - by and large they were all workers. You only see a couple of more intelligent aliens, the pilots or scientists, most of them were more like drones. In addition, the aliens wouldn't have gained much by revolting against humans - they were effectively trapped on earth and couldn't afford to fight an ultimately losing battle against the whole of earth to carve out their niche. They may have been able to win some temporary concessions, but ultimately any resistance would have been futile. They just wanted to get their shit together and get home and none of the corporations or government entities tasked with overseeing their wellbeing were in the slightest bit interested in helping them leave when there was advanced technology to plunder.
In the end however, the thing that really got to me was the handheld, documentary style camera movement. Even documentary producers these days can use simple yet effective steadycam mounts and whilst in parts it may have added a bit to the realism, overall it was very distracting and motion-sickness inducing.
This is potentially a good thing. How many different charging devices do you have at the moment? I've got one for AAA and AA batteries, one for my phone, one for my iPod, one for my wife's phone, one for my DSLR, one for my camcorder, one for my...
I don't need long-range wireless power, like some developments are working on -- whilst this would be quite cool, it's very inefficient at this stage. Wireless charging of all these devices would however be a great benefit to reduce clutter and waste. If all the devices are compatible with the one spec of charger, then should I lose my phone charger, it doesn't matter as it's compatible with the charger I've got. I've had to replace one of the phone chargers not that long ago too as SonyEricsson have quite a delicate clip on the plug -- if this clip breaks, then the plug won't stay attached and the device doesn't charge.
I already enjoy the benefits of wireless charging with my electric toothbrush - it sits in a base that charges it back up. There are no electrical contacts or plugs to get wet and gunky with toothpaste residue, it's just a smooth plastic ring that the toothbrush sits in and away it goes.
To have a pad that I could place any of my devices on to recharge would be incredibly convenient. I truly hope that enough manufactures adopt this standard to make it a possibility. Unfortunately with standards, the great thing about them is that there are so many to chose from.
You've rebuilt the windows machines? So, now you can not at all be sure if they were part of a botnet or not. Chances are they were, and you've done the right thing by rebuilding them.
I think the details about the router with it's default password an no wireless security is a red herring - I've not heard of a botnet that tries to get in to your network by guessing standard admin passwords for common wireless routers. More likely it was a drive-by download from a dodgy web page, or a trojan in some downloaded software that put the malware on the machines.
How is this even a bullet point. Who stands (or sits there) thinking "Damn, I wish this machine would shut down faster"?
No seriously... I own desktop and laptop computers. None of them are shut down on anything like a regular basis. They both are put to sleep quite frequently, the desktop with a keystroke command (that could also be a menu-driven command) and the laptop by just shutting the lid.
I seriously can't remember the last time I actually shut my computer down. Put it to sleep yes, even rebooted it every now and then, but actually shut down? I dunno!
For my part, all I can say is that I wouldn't use a doctor if I knew they used Google Apps. There's too much risk that an employee at Google might let loose the secret of my debilitating suppurative penile encrustations.
Yes, and just think of the "targeted advertising" you'd be receiving for this problem...
SMIME could be the answer. With free personal email certificates available from places like Thawte, it's trivial to enable end-to-end encryption with mail clients like Apple Mail.
I use Google Apps for my business and anything that's sensitive, I will encrypt. In Apple Mail, once you have imported your freemail certificates into your keychain, a couple of buttons appear in the Compose Mail window - one to sign and one - provided you have the recepient's public certificate in your keychain too - to encrypt. In order to get someone's public certificate in your keychain, all you need to to is send them a signed email, to which they can reply with a signed email and you will have each other's public certificates.
Since moving to Google Apps, I've saved power (by not needing a machine on 24/7 just to handle incoming and outgoing email) I've got email syncronised between my laptop, my desktop and my iPhone by using IMAP, I've got a great webmail interface that's powerful and easy to use and I don't need to worry about administering my own email server.
Reliability has been very good so far and I've moved a couple of my clients over to Google Apps as it makes sense for them to outsource their email hosting rather than handle it themselves, or pay per email address through their ISP and have very limited storage space and POP access.
Security is the least of my concerns - and I would consider myself a security conscious person. With email, even sent from your own server, it travels over so many insecure links from it leaving my server to arriving at it's destination that I don't believe outsourcing my email to a 3rd party like Google is any less secure.
As I mentioned initially, if security is a concern, and this applies even if you're running your own email server, use encryption.
wipEout was one of the first major games to feature in-game advertising of real-world products. The ads were very well targeted at the game's demographic, specifically Red Bull ads claiming that it improves reaction time.
These ads didn't adversely impact on the gameplay, in fact I'd say they enhanced it, as they added an element of realism to the game. Products that were aimed at the people playing the game, advertised on trackside billboards, just like they would be in real life.
Also, the idea of paying for ads isn't anything new. How many ads do you see on Pay TV? Ads at the beginning of movies?
Where this latest scheme seems to fall down is that ads unrelated to the target market are being inserted before you play a game, and they are increasing the load time of the levels in order to show the ad for a longer period of time. This is unacceptable.
I'm all for ads in games, especially if it keeps the price down (WipeoutHD isn't exactly and expensive game to begin with) but if it adversely impacts on the gameplay - if it takes longer to load a level, or I get popups that obscure important gameplay, I'm completely against it.
In summary, have ads on billboards or on the sides of vehicles, have them on loading screens, but don't download streaming media to use up my precious bandwidth, or don't increase the time the loading screens are displayed just to fit an ad in there. Also, if the game is subsidised by advertising, reduce the sticker price that I have to pay.
This Cash for Clunkers isn't really about getting old cars off the road, it's about getting new cars out of the showrooms, where they've been sitting unsold for quite some time. It's about stimulating the auto industry, and getting sales moving along. Note that you can't trade in your old clunker on a perfectly good 2-4 year old second-hand car, it has to be new.
Here in Australia, the Government had a similar scheme, although it worked differently, the end result is the same. It was called the Small Business Investment Allowance. If you purchased a capital asset for your business, you could depreciate an extra 50% of that asset in the first year you own it. This applies to motor vehicles, but only if they're brand-new. Not even an ex-demo car that a salesman has driven home in a couple of times, it has to be new.
I took advantage of the situation and got a turbo-diesel VW Golf, and I've halved my fuel bills.
Ummm, if you read the linked article, you'd see it has things that the ext family lack - such as advanced storage pool management, full checksumming on all data, efficient b-tree style database structure, copy on write, atomic commits (so no need to fsck, ever) more efficient use of disk space, better handling of lots of small files, extensible metadata, cleaner modern design... Need I continue?
Yes, absolutely, there is nothing wrong at all with selling GPL'd software. How much does, say, RedHat charge for RHEL? How about all those hardware devices with GPL'd code in them.
Sure, you have make the source available to anyone who purchases your software (so, technically, you don't need to make it available to everyone) but there's nothing wrong with charging for the compiled software.
It would be very interesting to see if this class of algorithm ports easily to OpenCL - the GPGPU technology built into the upcoming 10.6 version of Mac OS X: http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#opencl
If so, this kind of attack suddenly becomes very easy to gather the compute power for and a lot easier to code as you don't need to do the low-level stuff yourself.
Yes, exactly. I'll happily use ZFS wherever it's supported to do so. Btrfs is looking like a promising alternative and looks to be happening on Linux long before ZFS will be.
What you do know is that when you read a block of data back from the disk, that block is what was supposed to be written to the disk.
If a file that is never read is corrupted somehow, then you will only discover that corruption when you read the file.
Having checksums is very good if you have a RAID-1 mirror. With full block checksums, you can read each half of the mirror and if there is an error, you know which one is correct, and which one isn't. At present, if a RAID-1 mirror has a soft error like this, due to corruption, you don't know which half of the mirror is actually correct.
With ZFS, for instance, you can create a 2-disk RAID-1 mirror and then use dd to write zeroes to one half of the mirror, at the raw device level (ie, bypassing the filesystem layer) and when you go to read that data back from the mirror, ZFS knows that it's invalid and instead uses the other side of the mirror. It then has an option to resilver the mirror and write the valid data back to the broken half, if you so want.
Aside from Copy on Write, one other feature that this filesystem has that I would consider essential in a modern filesystem is full checksumming. As drives get larger and larger, the chance of a random undetected error on write increases and having full checksums on every block of data that gets written to the drive means that when something is written, I know it's written. It also means that when I read something back from the disk, I know that it was the data that was put there and didn't get silently corrupted by the [sata controller | dodgy cable | cosmic rays] on the way to the disk and back.
This looks like a promising filesystem - as ZFS on linux is, at present, doomed to die an ugly death, btrfs looks to address a lot of the shortcomings of other filesystems and bring a clean, modern fs to linux. It goes beyond ZFS in some areas too, such as being able to efficiently shrink a filesystem, and keeps a lot of the cool things that ZFS made popular, such as Copy-On-Write.
It looks like Btrfs also addresses some decisions that were made with the direction that ZFS would be going in, or how it would handle certain problems that now with hindsight behind the developers, they possibly would have done things differently.
Apple are really struggling with ZFS, with it being announced as a feature in early betas of both Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6), as well as being there in a very limited form in Tiger (10.4) - maybe development on Btrfs will leapfrog ZFS for consumer-grade hardware and Apple can finally look at deprecating HFS.
Slashdot Mirror
My favourite, regarding the announcement of the iPod:
What, you mean like the Philips Sensual Massagers? I do believe they use wireless charging as well ;-)
Yes, what a great idea. I'm going to make such a system and I'll call it the Database Naming System, or dns for short.
I'll have a lightweight software daemon that runs and uses flat files for configuration information. I think I'll call this one the Bodacious Interconnected Naming Database, or bind for short...
The ONLY negative I have towards the movie is that the lead character drops the F-Bomb well over 200 times throughout the course of the movie. The last 20 minutes was a constant barrage of "Fuck...fuuuuck! Oh Shit, oh shit, Ahhh! FUCK!" It got to the point where it was almost laughable for how many times he cursed and made me question the intelligence of the lead character.
I think that is part of what they were after. The lead character wasn't supposed to be an all-american, square-jawed ridgy-didge action hero. He's a middle-management screw-up who leads a boring life, is bigoted against the aliens, is quite happy to treat them as less than human and then he has the events of the movie thrust upon him. He's an unwilling participant in the whole affair, and he's quite typical South African. The swearing wasn't over the top, I hardly noticed it as it fitted in quite well with the rest of the plot.
I saw this movie last night and I quite enjoyed it. It was good, hard SF. There were aliens and space ships and exotic technology/weapons. But, despite the apartheid references and the incredible special effects, it - like good sci fi does - ultimately tells us more about ourselves.
Wilkus is a bit of an anti-hero, not in the sense that he's a reluctant hero, but he's not really a very good person yet he comes through in the end. Despite superficially losing his humanity, he becomes more human as his condition advances.
There are those that are picking up on perceived plot holes, such as why the government allowed the Nigerians so much power in the District, and why didn't the aliens use their advanced weapons to revolt - to the first point I'd say that the government generally didn't care what on earth went on in the District slums. If the Nigerians were rising to power, so be it, they had power over the aliens, but the area was pretty tightly controlled, so there was very little chance of spillover of this power into the outside world.
As for why the aliens didn't revolt - by and large they were all workers. You only see a couple of more intelligent aliens, the pilots or scientists, most of them were more like drones. In addition, the aliens wouldn't have gained much by revolting against humans - they were effectively trapped on earth and couldn't afford to fight an ultimately losing battle against the whole of earth to carve out their niche. They may have been able to win some temporary concessions, but ultimately any resistance would have been futile. They just wanted to get their shit together and get home and none of the corporations or government entities tasked with overseeing their wellbeing were in the slightest bit interested in helping them leave when there was advanced technology to plunder.
In the end however, the thing that really got to me was the handheld, documentary style camera movement. Even documentary producers these days can use simple yet effective steadycam mounts and whilst in parts it may have added a bit to the realism, overall it was very distracting and motion-sickness inducing.
This is potentially a good thing. How many different charging devices do you have at the moment? I've got one for AAA and AA batteries, one for my phone, one for my iPod, one for my wife's phone, one for my DSLR, one for my camcorder, one for my...
I don't need long-range wireless power, like some developments are working on -- whilst this would be quite cool, it's very inefficient at this stage. Wireless charging of all these devices would however be a great benefit to reduce clutter and waste. If all the devices are compatible with the one spec of charger, then should I lose my phone charger, it doesn't matter as it's compatible with the charger I've got. I've had to replace one of the phone chargers not that long ago too as SonyEricsson have quite a delicate clip on the plug -- if this clip breaks, then the plug won't stay attached and the device doesn't charge.
I already enjoy the benefits of wireless charging with my electric toothbrush - it sits in a base that charges it back up. There are no electrical contacts or plugs to get wet and gunky with toothpaste residue, it's just a smooth plastic ring that the toothbrush sits in and away it goes.
To have a pad that I could place any of my devices on to recharge would be incredibly convenient. I truly hope that enough manufactures adopt this standard to make it a possibility. Unfortunately with standards, the great thing about them is that there are so many to chose from.
You've rebuilt the windows machines? So, now you can not at all be sure if they were part of a botnet or not.
Chances are they were, and you've done the right thing by rebuilding them.
I think the details about the router with it's default password an no wireless security is a red herring - I've not heard of a botnet that tries to get in to your network by guessing standard admin passwords for common wireless routers. More likely it was a drive-by download from a dodgy web page, or a trojan in some downloaded software that put the malware on the machines.
s/sport/Wow/g
s/beauty salon/library/g
etc...
How is this even a bullet point. Who stands (or sits there) thinking "Damn, I wish this machine would shut down faster"?
No seriously... I own desktop and laptop computers. None of them are shut down on anything like a regular basis. They both are put to sleep quite frequently, the desktop with a keystroke command (that could also be a menu-driven command) and the laptop by just shutting the lid.
I seriously can't remember the last time I actually shut my computer down. Put it to sleep yes, even rebooted it every now and then, but actually shut down? I dunno!
Acceptance is the first step in overcoming a problem...
So, let me get this straight - the Linux netbook just set itself up with no operator intervention?
Yes, and just think of the "targeted advertising" you'd be receiving for this problem...
SMIME could be the answer. With free personal email certificates available from places like Thawte, it's trivial to enable end-to-end encryption with mail clients like Apple Mail.
I use Google Apps for my business and anything that's sensitive, I will encrypt. In Apple Mail, once you have imported your freemail certificates into your keychain, a couple of buttons appear in the Compose Mail window - one to sign and one - provided you have the recepient's public certificate in your keychain too - to encrypt. In order to get someone's public certificate in your keychain, all you need to to is send them a signed email, to which they can reply with a signed email and you will have each other's public certificates.
Since moving to Google Apps, I've saved power (by not needing a machine on 24/7 just to handle incoming and outgoing email) I've got email syncronised between my laptop, my desktop and my iPhone by using IMAP, I've got a great webmail interface that's powerful and easy to use and I don't need to worry about administering my own email server.
Reliability has been very good so far and I've moved a couple of my clients over to Google Apps as it makes sense for them to outsource their email hosting rather than handle it themselves, or pay per email address through their ISP and have very limited storage space and POP access.
Security is the least of my concerns - and I would consider myself a security conscious person. With email, even sent from your own server, it travels over so many insecure links from it leaving my server to arriving at it's destination that I don't believe outsourcing my email to a 3rd party like Google is any less secure.
As I mentioned initially, if security is a concern, and this applies even if you're running your own email server, use encryption.
This is a rather interesting turn of events.
wipEout was one of the first major games to feature in-game advertising of real-world products. The ads were very well targeted at the game's demographic, specifically Red Bull ads claiming that it improves reaction time.
These ads didn't adversely impact on the gameplay, in fact I'd say they enhanced it, as they added an element of realism to the game. Products that were aimed at the people playing the game, advertised on trackside billboards, just like they would be in real life.
Also, the idea of paying for ads isn't anything new. How many ads do you see on Pay TV? Ads at the beginning of movies?
Where this latest scheme seems to fall down is that ads unrelated to the target market are being inserted before you play a game, and they are increasing the load time of the levels in order to show the ad for a longer period of time. This is unacceptable.
I'm all for ads in games, especially if it keeps the price down (WipeoutHD isn't exactly and expensive game to begin with) but if it adversely impacts on the gameplay - if it takes longer to load a level, or I get popups that obscure important gameplay, I'm completely against it.
In summary, have ads on billboards or on the sides of vehicles, have them on loading screens, but don't download streaming media to use up my precious bandwidth, or don't increase the time the loading screens are displayed just to fit an ad in there. Also, if the game is subsidised by advertising, reduce the sticker price that I have to pay.
This Cash for Clunkers isn't really about getting old cars off the road, it's about getting new cars out of the showrooms, where they've been sitting unsold for quite some time. It's about stimulating the auto industry, and getting sales moving along. Note that you can't trade in your old clunker on a perfectly good 2-4 year old second-hand car, it has to be new.
Here in Australia, the Government had a similar scheme, although it worked differently, the end result is the same. It was called the Small Business Investment Allowance. If you purchased a capital asset for your business, you could depreciate an extra 50% of that asset in the first year you own it. This applies to motor vehicles, but only if they're brand-new. Not even an ex-demo car that a salesman has driven home in a couple of times, it has to be new.
I took advantage of the situation and got a turbo-diesel VW Golf, and I've halved my fuel bills.
Ummm, if you read the linked article, you'd see it has things that the ext family lack - such as advanced storage pool management, full checksumming on all data, efficient b-tree style database structure, copy on write, atomic commits (so no need to fsck, ever) more efficient use of disk space, better handling of lots of small files, extensible metadata, cleaner modern design... Need I continue?
No, the NDA has been lifted.
Yes, absolutely, there is nothing wrong at all with selling GPL'd software. How much does, say, RedHat charge for RHEL? How about all those hardware devices with GPL'd code in them.
Sure, you have make the source available to anyone who purchases your software (so, technically, you don't need to make it available to everyone) but there's nothing wrong with charging for the compiled software.
It would be very interesting to see if this class of algorithm ports easily to OpenCL - the GPGPU technology built into the upcoming 10.6 version of Mac OS X:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technology/#opencl
If so, this kind of attack suddenly becomes very easy to gather the compute power for and a lot easier to code as you don't need to do the low-level stuff yourself.
Yes, exactly. I'll happily use ZFS wherever it's supported to do so. Btrfs is looking like a promising alternative and looks to be happening on Linux long before ZFS will be.
Damn! That sucks then...
What you do know is that when you read a block of data back from the disk, that block is what was supposed to be written to the disk.
If a file that is never read is corrupted somehow, then you will only discover that corruption when you read the file.
Having checksums is very good if you have a RAID-1 mirror. With full block checksums, you can read each half of the mirror and if there is an error, you know which one is correct, and which one isn't. At present, if a RAID-1 mirror has a soft error like this, due to corruption, you don't know which half of the mirror is actually correct.
With ZFS, for instance, you can create a 2-disk RAID-1 mirror and then use dd to write zeroes to one half of the mirror, at the raw device level (ie, bypassing the filesystem layer) and when you go to read that data back from the mirror, ZFS knows that it's invalid and instead uses the other side of the mirror. It then has an option to resilver the mirror and write the valid data back to the broken half, if you so want.
Apple has, and does, use GPL'd code and complies with the terms of the license.
Take, for example, WebKit, which is a fork of KHTML. It's now released as LGPL:
http://webkit.org/coding/lgpl-license.html
This code powers the browser that Apple ship with Mac OS X, Safari - which is arguably one of the most important pieces of code in the whole OS.
As a result of it's quality, speed and standards adherence, it's now used by companies like Nokia and Adobe...
Aside from Copy on Write, one other feature that this filesystem has that I would consider essential in a modern filesystem is full checksumming. As drives get larger and larger, the chance of a random undetected error on write increases and having full checksums on every block of data that gets written to the drive means that when something is written, I know it's written. It also means that when I read something back from the disk, I know that it was the data that was put there and didn't get silently corrupted by the [sata controller | dodgy cable | cosmic rays] on the way to the disk and back.
This looks like a promising filesystem - as ZFS on linux is, at present, doomed to die an ugly death, btrfs looks to address a lot of the shortcomings of other filesystems and bring a clean, modern fs to linux. It goes beyond ZFS in some areas too, such as being able to efficiently shrink a filesystem, and keeps a lot of the cool things that ZFS made popular, such as Copy-On-Write.
It looks like Btrfs also addresses some decisions that were made with the direction that ZFS would be going in, or how it would handle certain problems that now with hindsight behind the developers, they possibly would have done things differently.
Apple are really struggling with ZFS, with it being announced as a feature in early betas of both Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6), as well as being there in a very limited form in Tiger (10.4) - maybe development on Btrfs will leapfrog ZFS for consumer-grade hardware and Apple can finally look at deprecating HFS.