This'll be like DiVX and TurboTax. Oh, and Windows XP.
Face it: people without longhorn won't suffer, people with it will, all previous generations of appliance-level devices won't work with the item, and we'll still be able to make perfect copies of an almost-perfect first-generation analog copy. No upside, a zillion downsides.
Oh, and it's a last-minute design, which (together with being closed-source) gives me confidence it'll get cracked.
This'll be like DiVX and TurboTax. Oh, and Windows XP.
Face it: people without longhorn won't suffer, people with it will, all previous generations of appliance-level devices won't work with the item, and we'll still be able to make perfect copies of an almost-perfect first-generation analog copy. No upside, a zillion downsides.
Great. I can't count how many (abovenamedcountry)-made tools I've had fall apart or break under pressure. And you think we should let them take over building reactors.
Seriously. You're proposing that, because of safety costs, we should export NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION duties?
Man, I just can't wait for a big radioactive cloud to start this way over the pacific. You've just given me a view of the future that scares the shit out of me -- more than anything I've *ever* read.
Yeah, it's not like Alex doesn't congratulate Ken on his N-game winning streak 3 or 4 times per episode! And I'd be shocked if the gameshow didn't give their studio audience the date the show would air. Once you have either of those, bob's your uncle.
By the way, what the heck is the origin of bob's your uncle?
Or shift to audiobooks. Eyes out the window, minds on harry potter or whatever they like most. The kilometers just fly by. And the kids never seem to get tired of listening to the same book over and over, either. Make your car stereo an mp3-capable cd player and you've got 6 hours or more of audio per cd.
The gizmo geek in me keeps glancing hungrily at these things, but then I remember how much I *like* my kids staring out the window rather than at a screen while we're driving.
Actually, a kludge becomes unmaintainable beyond a certain point. Elegance and refactoring are the cure. Apple knows this. It remains to be seen if Microsoft can refactor their stuff well.
-- I've got a fever, and the prescription is more cowbells.
A century ago, dictatorships would collect and destroy unauthorized presses. Then it was typewriters and mimeograph machines. Some have tried to do the same with copiers and faxes, but the genie was starting to get out of the bottle at that point. By the time China had trouble at Tianamen, I remember reading how the insurrection depended heavily on faxes.
So, blogging can help. So does encryption, memory sticks, cd-based OS's (reboot and incriminating forensic data is *gone!*), wireless data, cellphones, etc. This isn't the only tool, but they all can help. And even the most-limited access could be enough to give or get news in a troubled place.
Besides, how many civilian flying cars did you see in Blade Runner ?
Yeah, I *always* base my guesses on life in the future on Phillip K Dick's SF. He was *such* an even-keel, pragmatic, realistic guy. (falls off chair, laughing).
Everything I google on Firecracker says it is 'X10 Firecracker Automation'...
X10!!! Oh.... my... hell. Slashdot recommending a project that uses *THEM*.
What next, a story on a project that uses SCO software?! Personal firewalls using XP SP2? A softball interview with Jack Valenti or Orin Hatch?
I know, it's not pico/x10/whoever's fault entirely, but after years of X10 popups, I feel tricked/annoyed/dirtied and I haven't even clicked past the google results.
A couple years ago, we were revising a website, with an eye toward better google placement. My tech lead forwarded a spam for a related utility, and I had to read him the riot act on why we'd *never* buy anything from a spammer.
(yeah, I know... I'm goin' to modpoints hell for criticizing the editors.)
There are more than a few reasons to suspect the company's principals came under scrutiny because they started using their billions for political activism. Against Putin. Suddenly, it was audit time.
The information I get here in Nowhere, USA is damn sketchy, but as I understand they froze Khodorkofsky's assets, then demanded a huge back-taxes payment, then threw him in jail for nonpayment. Nice. Very orwellian, or kafkaesque. Whichever.
(flying way off topic, now:) As with China, I do suspect that by embracing capitalism, Putin has a tiger by the tail. As much as old-guard socialists/communists in Russia and China would like to recentralize (return to the good old days), at some point (already past?) they risk economic catastrophe by nationalizing assets held by international investors.
See, it isn't that capitalism is good/bad... it's literally got no soul. The relentless, dogged pursuit of profit is all it knows. So, we lose jobs overseas to countries that can use the revenue, and Russia faces becoming... McRussia?
Making collaboration faster, easier and more efficient
Yeah, because those are the very words I always think of to
describe web services. I use webmail for convenience. I use
web-based tools other times in emergencies. There's even one or
two tools (remote nslookups and security scans) I'll use in a
moment of desperation. Never for speed and efficiency...
There's nothing profound about 4c water at the bottom of a lake. It's just dense. Every winter, northern climates create a whole slew of new 4c molecules that all sprint for the bottom. Once the whole lake is pretty churned up and largely at 4c, then nature goes to work making ice.
That's mostly right, except the 4c molecules don't sprint for the bottom since cold is the absence of heat, not the other way around.
Beg pardon?
4Celsius, not 4Kelvin. Thermally, that's a variation of a few percent, a long way from absolute zero.
We're talking density-based motion, which means gravity is the dominant force, not molecular vibrations / brownian motion. This is not ideal-gas or near-absolute-zero physics, and water's viscosity doesn't do wierd tricks just before freezing. And the motion involved is significant.
The migration currents during these fall/spring turnovers is so intense, I'm told it creates rip-tides. Burlington VT has to overchlorinate their drinking water for a week to sterilize all the dissolved, decaying organic material on the lake floor being stirred up and sucked in via their lake-bottom freshwater intake. (puts on other hat): as a homebrewer that once went on a brewing binge that week, nothin' sucks like spending lots of hours brewing, then dumping all 27 gallons of DMS-rich beer. My apartment *stank* of creamed corn for weeks afterward. Hint to other homebrewers: boiling all water for each batch helps vent off the sulfury compounds responsible for DMS that are a byproduct of dissolved organics and chlorination.
Sprint was a euphemism, obviously. I really doubt all them molecules have itsy-bitsy reeboks and h2o-jordans... let alone feet.
IANA Weatherman/Climatologist. That said, there are plenty of places around the world with warm water adjacent to cold climates. Anchorage, the whole SE alaskan coast, Ireland, Great Britain, etc. You don't get 120' of snow. You can get 30" of rain or more, though.
If the winter temp >32, lake effect is to warm stuff up and you get rain. The warm currents could be why the above list of places are all foggy, rainy spots.
Once temps reach 32, the lake freezes, then temps tend to plummet.
I've only been to Buffalo a few times, and Toronto once. I'd always assumed that being north of the lake spared Toronto from eastward and southward storms that'd pick up moisture and dump it on 'em. Meanwhile, Buffalo's not so well-positioned.
Anyone else know for sure?
Incidentally, I've heard of places where nuke power cooling discharge has so altered the *local* water temp that 1 - people swim there in cold weather, 2 - tropical fish thrive, etc. That'd be another strong example of why the thermal impact of this Toronto project are probably trivial.
There's nothing profound about 4c water at the bottom of a lake. It's just dense. Every winter, northern climates create a whole slew of new 4c molecules that all sprint for the bottom. Once the whole lake is pretty churned up and largely at 4c, then nature goes to work making ice.
Man, I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this moronic, paranoiac debate.
1 - Lake Ontario doesn't freeze over, but it does have some surface ice in midwinter. Ice implies a surface temp at or below 0 degrees c. Right?
2 - Having lived next to another sizeable lake (Lake Champlain, which typically does freeze over), and as an EXPERT in hydrodynamic modelling, I can assure you that that niggling little physics detail about water having maximum density at... (drum roll) 4 degrees C is accurate. However, twice a year, lakes like Ontario have all their water churned about as ambient average temp falls below 4 degrees C, then as ambient temp rises above 4 c. Wierd, but true. Frankly, seiche's are wierder.
3 - So, as winter gets cold enough, any water not AT 4 degrees C rolls to the surface, where it is... say it with me... chilled by the Toronto winters. Before any ice is made, everything in the lake chills to 4 degrees C (this is my biggest oversimplification here, since inversion layers can exist in large water bodies. It doesn't matter in the overall calcs to follow, since all I was interested in showing is the mechanics for recharge of the cold zone).
4 - The thermal mass of Lake Ontario (one site says 86 m average depth, x 19,000 km^2 in area... 19,000,000,000 x 86 x 100 ^3 cm^3 per meter x 1 degree c x 0.0039683 btu's per calorie x.000000293 btu's per megawatt hour = 2* 10 ^9th Megawatt hours needed.
The Fact Sheet on Enwave's site says they're gonna free up 59 megawatts. Now, I should be able to disregard a part of this as an efficiency improvement (electricity for cooling is gawdawfully inefficient, compared to non-compressive heat exchangers like this'll use), but I'll eat the inefficiency because that's the nice guy I am. 59 x 24 x 365 (megawatt-years to megawatt-hours) gets us *finally* to matching units. If I haven't completely bolluxed the calculation, we're looking at a capability of handling 3673 of these facilities. Or, the temp of Lake O going up 1/3673 of a degree.
Oh. Yay. The little fishies aren't even going to notice this. In fact, there's room for exporting this capability and if we're willing to warm Lake O by a few degrees I think it'd take care of the AC demands of most of North America, if them clever Canadians can just figure out a way to export this.
When she's working hard, the sun 'wastes' enough energy warming up dirt and water around the world to fuel our needs a thousandfold over. When she's not paying attention (at the poles, nights and winters), earth's radiating it off like gangbusters.
The risk of us boogering up our surroundings when we do BIG things is a valid one. But not here, not yet.
We've reached the point where we're influencing the world in several spots: cfc's, pesticides, acid rain, particulate emissions, garbage, animal populations, etc. etc. etc.
But this isn't one of them. As a side joke, I bet there are a few million Toronto residents that'd be more than happy to let the thermal average temp of Lake O go up 30 degrees, just for the lake-effect warmth it'd impart on their town each winter and the ability to swim without turning blue in midsummer. Back during a nasty winter ('93), a favorite bumper sticker of mine was 'Another Vermonter *for* global warming'.
These solar sails are pretty useless...It would take solar sail 100 years to get to alpha centauri...
As opposed to our current ETA for Proxima Centauri: A big whoopin' Never?
I'll take 100 years, thanks.
Seriously, between costs, technological limitations, and the 20 years of creeping along that it took our first probes to leave the solar system... and don't even get me started on the POLITICS... I'm doubtful we'll get to Mars in 30 years, let alone to Proxima in 100. So, in my book, the X-prize, Chinese attempts, Japanese sails... any alternative is great.
This isn't scary, it's the coolest thing imaginable.
I've spent a chunk of time lately playing with a Sun/Hitachi 9980. Imagine a fiber channel array of hard drives the size of a nice, hefty subzero 2-door refrigerator (2m x 2m x 1m, roughly, for 1 control module and 1 array module).
It hooks up to a dozen computers, has room for over 100TB of drivespace (raid-5), has an configuration console beyond the OS that allows some slick on-the-fly tricks, is compatible with virtually ANY OS, lets you slice the array a zillion ways, gives you a data pipe of Gigs per second, and costs a million dollars. Now that's some serious power: you could capture the entire speex-quality audio of 400 people's entire 80-year lives on it (400 x 80 x 365.25 x 24 x 3600 x 1k/s = 1.0098 x 10^15 bytes, or 100TB).
But... one day I was trying to find words for how cool this thing is, and I realized: I can remember paying a buck a byte for memory, and wincing at HD prices. I also still have a ST225, for nostalgia or whatever reason. And a 250gig drive is down around $100 now, so I'm just 2^9 away from 100TB. A conservative pseudo-Moore's law rate for HD's gets me there in 20 years: my ST225 (20Meg) is about 20 yrs. old, or 2^13 in 20 yrs).
Given the exponential rate of storage growth, I am less than 20 years from being able to buy one of these puppies at commodity prices. And by 2030 it'll fit on my wrist.
If you believe that we, the non-corporate non-copyright-holders, don't own intellectual property by default (in the absence of patent/copyright laws), you're perhaps misreading commons law and copyright law's background. Everything I've ever read says that ideas are legally/historically a commons: once we've shared it, we can't own an idea. Copyright was a law to let the creator temporarily restrict the flow of some kinds of ideas, to give the creator income and inspire the creator to create more good ideas.
So, we do own mickey, or we would have if it weren't for extensions. We own most christmas carols, nursery rhymes, fables, and folk songs, but it's a universal shared ownership, or public domain. We own '1+1=2', we own the fulcrum and lever, we all own the wheel. Strangely, we own the Jungle Book, if memory serves (it was published right near America's transition into having stronger copyright law), but Disney doesn't have to pay us for it, while we all have to pay to use his adaptation of it.
That last one's worthy of a side note. In supporting the copyright extension law named after Sonny Bono, his widow made an oft-quoted remark in favor of making copyrights last forever. That's ironic as hell* in my book because it'd allow descendants of Kipling, Grimm, Plato, Shakespeare, etc. to all come stomping around in court demanding back royalties for use of their properties.
Evidence that copyright extension is an affront to fundamental judicial blindness and fairness is right in front of us: copyright extends in ten to twenty year increments because copyright holders like Disney can't afford to ever see them extended enough to put Kipling (in particular) or other prior works that they've gotten free 'public domain' use of, to fall back out of the public domain.
That's the perversion of law that I dislike the most about repeated copyright extensions: it would be revealing to turn the tables and demand a longer copyright term on behalf of Kipling's estate... imagine disney's reaction.
*Ignoring the irony that this quote is the only time she's ever made a measurable mark on civilization at large and that she has a vested interest in getting perpetual royalties for anything of his (what's that worth... $50 a year?!).
Walmart will have just one 64-bit number across all product lines
Walmart will have a special chain-of-custody crew trusted with the 64-bit numbers
Walmart will have to allow wide access to the database of 64-bit numbers so that staff and vendors can properly code them.
Oh, and there's the risk of used tags falling into hackers' hands and reverse-engineering or brute force (or parallel brute-forcing) being used
to rediscover the 64-bit number.
Is any of these a hackable design?! All of them? Wow, I guess security
really IS hard to do right.
Barcodes are not much more secure (just print out barcode labels and reprice items throughout a store), but at least one can be seen/videotaped altering the label. With RFID, one could make changes without touching the merchandise. And what'll be the countermeasure? Teaching sales clerks how to use an RF or protocol sniffer? Ri-ight.
...after installing a new CD-ROM, that involved removing the IDE controller board, I fired the thing back up, to be met with a few beeps and 'IO Controller Failure Error', and a waft of Magic Smoke. Turned it off and looked around inside. I found that I hadn't pushed the IDE board all the way back in, so some pins where where they should be, some were crossing a couple of mobo pins, and the remainder were in free space...
...Slide a screwdriver under and twist. *pop*, one end of the battery comes off the mobo. Turns out that the contact is part of the battery, and it is soldered on the board. Luckily, the join broke cleanly and didn't take a chunk out of the mobo...
Do you work for Dell hardware support by any chance?! I think I've seen your work. And so has Joe the Peacock (a damn funny Dell support story).
(Standard disclaimers: no business interest in Dell or any competitor. Just a spectator as friends and coworkers learn to regret buying a Dell.)
Slashdot Mirror
... and the solution is called bootstrapping.
Cool.
This'll be like DiVX and TurboTax. Oh, and Windows XP.
Face it: people without longhorn won't suffer, people with it will, all previous generations of appliance-level devices won't work with the item, and we'll still be able to make perfect copies of an almost-perfect first-generation analog copy. No upside, a zillion downsides.
Oh, and it's a last-minute design, which (together with being closed-source) gives me confidence it'll get cracked.
I can't wait for this show...
This'll be like DiVX and TurboTax. Oh, and Windows XP.
Face it: people without longhorn won't suffer, people with it will, all previous generations of appliance-level devices won't work with the item, and we'll still be able to make perfect copies of an almost-perfect first-generation analog copy. No upside, a zillion downsides.
I can't wait for this show...
Seriously. You're proposing that, because of safety costs, we should export NUCLEAR POWER GENERATION duties?
Man, I just can't wait for a big radioactive cloud to start this way over the pacific. You've just given me a view of the future that scares the shit out of me -- more than anything I've *ever* read.
Yeah, it's not like Alex doesn't congratulate Ken on his N-game winning streak 3 or 4 times per episode! And I'd be shocked if the gameshow didn't give their studio audience the date the show would air. Once you have either of those, bob's your uncle.
By the way, what the heck is the origin of bob's your uncle?
Or shift to audiobooks. Eyes out the window, minds on harry potter or whatever they like most. The kilometers just fly by. And the kids never seem to get tired of listening to the same book over and over, either. Make your car stereo an mp3-capable cd player and you've got 6 hours or more of audio per cd.
The gizmo geek in me keeps glancing hungrily at these things, but then I remember how much I *like* my kids staring out the window rather than at a screen while we're driving.
Actually, a kludge becomes unmaintainable beyond a certain point. Elegance and refactoring are the cure. Apple knows this. It remains to be seen if Microsoft can refactor their stuff well.
-- I've got a fever, and the prescription is more cowbells.
A century ago, dictatorships would collect and destroy unauthorized presses.
Then it was typewriters and mimeograph machines.
Some have tried to do the same with copiers and faxes, but the genie was starting to get out of the bottle at that point. By the time China had trouble at Tianamen, I remember reading how the insurrection depended heavily on faxes.
So, blogging can help. So does encryption, memory sticks, cd-based OS's (reboot and incriminating forensic data is *gone!*), wireless data, cellphones, etc. This isn't the only tool, but they all can help. And even the most-limited access could be enough to give or get news in a troubled place.
Everything I google on Firecracker says it is 'X10 Firecracker Automation'...
X10!!! Oh.... my... hell. Slashdot recommending a project that uses *THEM*.
What next, a story on a project that uses SCO software?! Personal firewalls using XP SP2? A softball interview with Jack Valenti or Orin Hatch?
I know, it's not pico/x10/whoever's fault entirely, but after years of X10 popups, I feel tricked/annoyed/dirtied and I haven't even clicked past the google results.
A couple years ago, we were revising a website, with an eye toward better google placement. My tech lead forwarded a spam for a related utility, and I had to read him the riot act on why we'd *never* buy anything from a spammer.
(yeah, I know... I'm goin' to modpoints hell for criticizing the editors.)
Tell that Yukos (Russian oil firm).
There are more than a few reasons to suspect the company's principals came under scrutiny because they started using their billions for political activism. Against Putin. Suddenly, it was audit time.
The information I get here in Nowhere, USA is damn sketchy, but as I understand they froze Khodorkofsky's assets, then demanded a huge back-taxes payment, then threw him in jail for nonpayment. Nice. Very orwellian, or kafkaesque. Whichever.
(flying way off topic, now:)
As with China, I do suspect that by embracing capitalism, Putin has a tiger by the tail. As much as old-guard socialists/communists in Russia and China would like to recentralize (return to the good old days), at some point (already past?) they risk economic catastrophe by nationalizing assets held by international investors.
See, it isn't that capitalism is good/bad... it's literally got no soul. The relentless, dogged pursuit of profit is all it knows. So, we lose jobs overseas to countries that can use the revenue, and Russia faces becoming... McRussia?
Beg pardon?
4Celsius, not 4Kelvin. Thermally, that's a variation of a few percent, a long way from absolute zero.
We're talking density-based motion, which means gravity is the dominant force, not molecular vibrations / brownian motion. This is not ideal-gas or near-absolute-zero physics, and water's viscosity doesn't do wierd tricks just before freezing. And the motion involved is significant.
The migration currents during these fall/spring turnovers is so intense, I'm told it creates rip-tides. Burlington VT has to overchlorinate their drinking water for a week to sterilize all the dissolved, decaying organic material on the lake floor being stirred up and sucked in via their lake-bottom freshwater intake. (puts on other hat): as a homebrewer that once went on a brewing binge that week, nothin' sucks like spending lots of hours brewing, then dumping all 27 gallons of DMS-rich beer. My apartment *stank* of creamed corn for weeks afterward. Hint to other homebrewers: boiling all water for each batch helps vent off the sulfury compounds responsible for DMS that are a byproduct of dissolved organics and chlorination.
Sprint was a euphemism, obviously. I really doubt all them molecules have itsy-bitsy reeboks and h2o-jordans... let alone feet.
Dammit Jim, I'm a hydrologist, not a weatherman!
IANA Weatherman/Climatologist. That said, there are plenty of places around the world with warm water adjacent to cold climates. Anchorage, the whole SE alaskan coast, Ireland, Great Britain, etc. You don't get 120' of snow. You can get 30" of rain or more, though.
If the winter temp >32, lake effect is to warm stuff up and you get rain. The warm currents could be why the above list of places are all foggy, rainy spots.
Once temps reach 32, the lake freezes, then temps tend to plummet.
I've only been to Buffalo a few times, and Toronto once. I'd always assumed that being north of the lake spared Toronto from eastward and southward storms that'd pick up moisture and dump it on 'em. Meanwhile, Buffalo's not so well-positioned.
Anyone else know for sure?
Incidentally, I've heard of places where nuke power cooling discharge has so altered the *local* water temp that 1 - people swim there in cold weather, 2 - tropical fish thrive, etc. That'd be another strong example of why the thermal impact of this Toronto project are probably trivial.
There's nothing profound about 4c water at the bottom of a lake. It's just dense. Every winter, northern climates create a whole slew of new 4c molecules that all sprint for the bottom. Once the whole lake is pretty churned up and largely at 4c, then nature goes to work making ice.
Buy's got it for $71 if you use a $5 off coupon. Nobody /. 'em until I finish my order, though... thanks!
Man, I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this moronic, paranoiac debate.
.000000293 btu's per megawatt hour = 2* 10 ^9th Megawatt hours needed.
1 - Lake Ontario doesn't freeze over, but it does have some surface ice in midwinter. Ice implies a surface temp at or below 0 degrees c. Right?
2 - Having lived next to another sizeable lake (Lake Champlain, which typically does freeze over), and as an EXPERT in hydrodynamic modelling, I can assure you that that niggling little physics detail about water having maximum density at... (drum roll) 4 degrees C is accurate. However, twice a year, lakes like Ontario have all their water churned about as ambient average temp falls below 4 degrees C, then as ambient temp rises above 4 c. Wierd, but true. Frankly, seiche's are wierder.
3 - So, as winter gets cold enough, any water not AT 4 degrees C rolls to the surface, where it is... say it with me... chilled by the Toronto winters. Before any ice is made, everything in the lake chills to 4 degrees C (this is my biggest oversimplification here, since inversion layers can exist in large water bodies. It doesn't matter in the overall calcs to follow, since all I was interested in showing is the mechanics for recharge of the cold zone).
4 - The thermal mass of Lake Ontario (one site says 86 m average depth, x 19,000 km^2 in area... 19,000,000,000 x 86 x 100 ^3 cm^3 per meter x 1 degree c x 0.0039683 btu's per calorie x
The Fact Sheet on Enwave's site says they're gonna free up 59 megawatts. Now, I should be able to disregard a part of this as an efficiency improvement (electricity for cooling is gawdawfully inefficient, compared to non-compressive heat exchangers like this'll use), but I'll eat the inefficiency because that's the nice guy I am. 59 x 24 x 365 (megawatt-years to megawatt-hours) gets us *finally* to matching units. If I haven't completely bolluxed the calculation, we're looking at a capability of handling 3673 of these facilities. Or, the temp of Lake O going up 1/3673 of a degree.
Oh. Yay. The little fishies aren't even going to notice this. In fact, there's room for exporting this capability and if we're willing to warm Lake O by a few degrees I think it'd take care of the AC demands of most of North America, if them clever Canadians can just figure out a way to export this.
When she's working hard, the sun 'wastes' enough energy warming up dirt and water around the world to fuel our needs a thousandfold over. When she's not paying attention (at the poles, nights and winters), earth's radiating it off like gangbusters.
The risk of us boogering up our surroundings when we do BIG things is a valid one. But not here, not yet.
We've reached the point where we're influencing the world in several spots: cfc's, pesticides, acid rain, particulate emissions, garbage, animal populations, etc. etc. etc.
But this isn't one of them. As a side joke, I bet there are a few million Toronto residents that'd be more than happy to let the thermal average temp of Lake O go up 30 degrees, just for the lake-effect warmth it'd impart on their town each winter and the ability to swim without turning blue in midsummer. Back during a nasty winter ('93), a favorite bumper sticker of mine was 'Another Vermonter *for* global warming'.
Rock on Toronto & Enwave.com
As opposed to our current ETA for Proxima Centauri: A big whoopin' Never?
I'll take 100 years, thanks.
Seriously, between costs, technological limitations, and the 20 years of creeping along that it took our first probes to leave the solar system... and don't even get me started on the POLITICS... I'm doubtful we'll get to Mars in 30 years, let alone to Proxima in 100. So, in my book, the X-prize, Chinese attempts, Japanese sails... any alternative is great.
Of course, if the device you make is as dumb as a dog, I'll bet a couple raw steaks that I can get it to like me, too.
Mine in reverse chronological order... 30g (laptop), 120g, 80g, 80g, 40g, 30g, 27g (laptop), 20g, 20g, 15g...
I've spent a chunk of time lately playing with a Sun/Hitachi 9980. Imagine a fiber channel array of hard drives the size of a nice, hefty subzero 2-door refrigerator (2m x 2m x 1m, roughly, for 1 control module and 1 array module).
It hooks up to a dozen computers, has room for over 100TB of drivespace (raid-5), has an configuration console beyond the OS that allows some slick on-the-fly tricks, is compatible with virtually ANY OS, lets you slice the array a zillion ways, gives you a data pipe of Gigs per second, and costs a million dollars. Now that's some serious power: you could capture the entire speex-quality audio of 400 people's entire 80-year lives on it (400 x 80 x 365.25 x 24 x 3600 x 1k/s = 1.0098 x 10^15 bytes, or 100TB).
But... one day I was trying to find words for how cool this thing is, and I realized: I can remember paying a buck a byte for memory, and wincing at HD prices. I also still have a ST225, for nostalgia or whatever reason. And a 250gig drive is down around $100 now, so I'm just 2^9 away from 100TB. A conservative pseudo-Moore's law rate for HD's gets me there in 20 years: my ST225 (20Meg) is about 20 yrs. old, or 2^13 in 20 yrs).
Given the exponential rate of storage growth, I am less than 20 years from being able to buy one of these puppies at commodity prices. And by 2030 it'll fit on my wrist.
EX-cellent...
So, we do own mickey, or we would have if it weren't for extensions. We own most christmas carols, nursery rhymes, fables, and folk songs, but it's a universal shared ownership, or public domain. We own '1+1=2', we own the fulcrum and lever, we all own the wheel. Strangely, we own the Jungle Book, if memory serves (it was published right near America's transition into having stronger copyright law), but Disney doesn't have to pay us for it, while we all have to pay to use his adaptation of it.
That last one's worthy of a side note. In supporting the copyright extension law named after Sonny Bono, his widow made an oft-quoted remark in favor of making copyrights last forever. That's ironic as hell* in my book because it'd allow descendants of Kipling, Grimm, Plato, Shakespeare, etc. to all come stomping around in court demanding back royalties for use of their properties.
Evidence that copyright extension is an affront to fundamental judicial blindness and fairness is right in front of us: copyright extends in ten to twenty year increments because copyright holders like Disney can't afford to ever see them extended enough to put Kipling (in particular) or other prior works that they've gotten free 'public domain' use of, to fall back out of the public domain.
That's the perversion of law that I dislike the most about repeated copyright extensions: it would be revealing to turn the tables and demand a longer copyright term on behalf of Kipling's estate... imagine disney's reaction.
*Ignoring the irony that this quote is the only time she's ever made a measurable mark on civilization at large and that she has a vested interest in getting perpetual royalties for anything of his (what's that worth... $50 a year?!).
- Walmart will have just one 64-bit number across all product lines
- Walmart will have a special chain-of-custody crew trusted with the 64-bit numbers
- Walmart will have to allow wide access to the database of 64-bit numbers so that staff and vendors can properly code them.
Oh, and there's the risk of used tags falling into hackers' hands and reverse-engineering or brute force (or parallel brute-forcing) being used to rediscover the 64-bit number.Is any of these a hackable design?! All of them? Wow, I guess security really IS hard to do right.
Barcodes are not much more secure (just print out barcode labels and reprice items throughout a store), but at least one can be seen/videotaped altering the label. With RFID, one could make changes without touching the merchandise. And what'll be the countermeasure? Teaching sales clerks how to use an RF or protocol sniffer? Ri-ight.
(Standard disclaimers: no business interest in Dell or any competitor. Just a spectator as friends and coworkers learn to regret buying a Dell.)