you find yourself making cheap imitations of national treasures. There are lots of uses for the scans (e.g. maintenance), but using monument scans for "disaster recovery" reminds me of Solomon's son Rehoboam in I Kings 14:
25 And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem:
26 And he took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.
27 And king Rehoboam made in their stead brasen shields, and committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard, which kept the door of the king's house.
Since I'm Indian, I'll take the liberty of saying that there are cultural factors at work here as well. Indians LOVE free stuff. We'll waste gobs and gobs of time with useless junk trying to make it work as long as it's free.
While the time may be "wasted" from a time and materials billing perspective, it is hardly wasted. Trying to make things work exercises creative problem solving, and gains a deeper understanding of how things work. The employee who expends a reasonable amount of time making junk work, even if unsuccessful, will be much better prepared for a real crunch. A wise company will encourage a balanced amount of this.
Not only that, but every person who has ever drunk water has eventually died. The vast majority of people who have died have eaten bread shortly before their death.
My biggest challenge is teaching my techno-indifferent wife to use the Linux box.
This comment is also addressed to the disparaging comments about the intelligence of Wal-Mart shoppers. My wife shops at Wal-Mart.
Our marriage was revolutionized when she read The Joy of Linux.
The tech stuff still doesn't mean anything to her, but now she is acutely aware of the political and social issues, and calls herself a "Linux Chick". She can't tell you what a "bit" is, but she can explain why software freedom is so much more important than free software and the difference between GPL and BSD licenses. She now regards acquaintances that work for Micro$oft as "black sheep", where before she didn't see what all the fuss what about. She still gets confused trying to use the computer, but now she sees that Linux is no more confusing than Windows - plus, we have been able to customize her applications from the many choices available to select those she finds most intuitive. Her web browser is Mozilla. (Go figure.) Her word processor is Open Office. (Does fancy fonts out of the box.)
Now we have many stimulating discussions concerning intellectual property and which open source business models work the best. Take note geeks, it is possible to be really smart and not understand what a bit is.
From what I've seen, hardware IDE raid requires matched drives (at least, the capacity is based on the smaller drive). If I'm wrong, I'll be happy to hear about it.
In any case, we use software RAID-1 so that the system can survive a drive crash. We started using RAID-1 on SCSI with the AIX Logical Volume Manager, and began using Linux RAID-1 on IDE when the Promise PCI controllers were supported in RH72.
We have lots of AIX and Linux systems, and have had a dozen drive crashes over the years.
The first problem is not noticing that the drive is dead until two weeks later.:-) Preventing this requires good monitoring software.
The next problem is that when your 1G drive fails, the smallest drives available are 4G. When your 4G drive fails, the smallest available are 18G. With hardware RAID requiring equal size dirves, you have to replace the whole array. With software RAID, you just pop in the new drive, remove the old drive, remove the old mirrors, add new mirrors. On AIX, volumes are divided into equal sized "logical partitions" which are mirrored independently - so this is super easy. With the Linux "md" driver, partitions are mirrored independently - which is more cumbersome, but still lets you do something with the extra space on the new drive.
One argument fueling the project is that a smart home equipped with sensing networks could help avert the crisis looming over America's overworked health-care system.
the heart of House-n is a chassis with an "infill" of cheap sensing devices like LEDs, speakers, displays, automatic lighting, heat sensors, and miniature cameras that can be plugged in at any point and upgraded on the fly.
You place a videoconference call that follows you up the stairs (projected on the walls) and then decide to exercise: a table retracts, a wall panel moves, and a life-size image of your favorite aerobics instructor appears.
... All integrated with the Total Information Awareness system for the utmost in security.
The most important thing I look for in Sci-Fi or Fantasy is the moral dimension. I'm not talking about Pollyanna characters, or lists of rules. I'm talking about the choices characters make, and how this affects themselves and others.
In the real world, people are molded by the choices they make. Every evil choice, even if it is minor, and even if it is "for a good cause", makes it a tiny bit easier to make an evil choice the next time.
Good Fantasy/Sci-Fi has a realistic moral universe to complement the counterfactual/extrapolated physical universe. This does not mean that the protagonist always or even usually makes good choices. (A realistic dark protagonist is instructive, if depressing.) It does mean that logical consequences ensue. Too many stories show the protagonist making lots of minor evil choices (lying to friends, stealing from or killing the innocent, etc) in order to accomplish a Great Good (saving the world). Instead of these choices making them more like the enemy they are vanquishing, the effect is portrayed as neutral - an implementation detail for the Great Good that is accomplished.
As an example of a realistic moral universe, it is clear in Tolkien that in using the one ring to defeat Sauron, the user will become (as evil as) Sauron.
While real world examples are rarely as dramatic as in Tolkien, it does happen. Suppose a proposed plan to defeat Hitler involves infiltrating his inner circle, and then assasinating him. To gain his confidence, the assassin must participate in many horribly evil activities: torture, extermination of innocent people, etc. In fact, many of the activities prescribed for the inner circle are in fact rituals of evil designed to reduce the participant to the same level of moral decay as the others.
My company has been on the other side of just such an arrangement. We purchased EDX/MAX (a unix virtual machine implementation of the EDX operating system used on IBM Series/1 minicomputers) with a source license many years ago.
I can't find the license at the moment, but it let us modify the source (but they would only support their versions), and even sell systems based on our modified source - provided we did not sell on any platforms that H&A supported. We had to pay H&A a one time fee for each system we sold based on our modified source.
The motivation for H&A was that our first modification was porting their system to our platform (Motorola SysV88). Thus, each system we sold was gravy for them. We also shared enhancements for a few years, then H&A went out of business (due to the market for Series/1 conversions drying up). Boy, were we glad we had a source license!
That source is still running. Our systems run the EDX VM as a subsystem under a Java VM, and the EDX "screens" display on a Java widget. The EDX code gets gradually rewritten, although I wish it would disappear faster . . .
If somehow in a distance future man builds on this knowledge and creates an intelligent life form, from scratch, would man be it's "Creator"?
We already do this. We don't fully understand the technology, but my wife and I have created four intelligent life forms. Initially, they were completely dependent on us, and looked to us as "god". As they matured, they became more independent. In fact, the oldest one is 13 years old, and figures she could do much better without us.
Our life forms soon became aware that we were also created, and our parents as well, and so on back in time. They have therefore transferred their ultimate allegience to the Ultimate Creator - while still giving us the respect and temporary allegience due to our role in their creation.
You'll notice I did mention developed countries using hybrid seed. The point is that developing coutries might not be able to afford hybrid seed. I am aware that reasonable efforts are being made to contain the Bt corn.
I am also aware that one of the reasons corn was chosen is that is normally has difficulty reproducing in the wild, having become dependent on human help. However, I am not the only one worried that these measures may fail. The Bt may give it enough of an advantage to survive in the wild.
You are wrong about the potential for adverse human reaction to Bt. People in the US have already become very sick from eating Bt contaminated tacos. Granted, they were accidentally made from the wrong kind of Bt Corn (with the toxin expressed in the grain), and the varieties approved for human consumption shouldn't have toxin in the grain. However, this is exactly the kind of mistake that will happen. (And only a few people had allergic reactions to the Bt.)
My point is, that third world farmers won't have any way of knowing which, if any, varieties of Bt corn they are planting. If the wrong kind of seed can get made into tacos, what's to prevent the wrong kind of seed from getting shipped to poor farmers?
I have given some thought to distinguishing ethical vs. not so ethical applications of genetic engineering. While not perfect, I have proposed the following:
Lab experiments are allowed with strict containment procedures.
Field experiments and production are allowed provided the modified organism is easily distinguished without any special technology.
For instance, the Spider Goats experiment meets these requirements. If the spider goats become wild, a third world farmer can easily notice and not breed goats that excrete stringly stuff with their milk (if I understand the results correctly). He might even find that after rinsing and drying, that stringy stuff can be woven into really strong cloth - and breed more of them.
Bt Corn does not meet this test. Bt Corn looks just like normal corn, but can kill you or make you sick if you eat it and do not tolerate the Bt toxin. It has a survival advantage in the wild to boot. While North American farmers plant from high tech hybrid seeds, South American farmers may soon find their major food crop contaminated. Eventually, a Bt tolerant human population will emerge via natural selection, but only after much human suffering.
Using corn to grow drugs does not meet this test either.
Human electromagnetic activity is overwhelming the Earth's magnetic field, and will soon result in its extinction, or even reversal. We have to drastically cut back on our use of electric current, or the Earth could be permanently damaged, say an internation team of scientists. They have drafted an emergency resolution calling for a 75% reduction in ampere usage over 5 years.
Western industrialized countries are complaining that this is unfair, since most of the magnetic field produced from Human activity comes from the developing world, due to the wide spread use of crude coils and inefficient motors.
Advocates for the poor point out that developing countries need refrigeration to combat disease, and refrigerators require current with present day technology.
"We have no choice", says a spokesperson for the scientists. "We either cut way back on our use of electricity now, or doom our grandchildren to be roasted by the sun."
My aunt had problems in rural Texas near Dallas when the phone company was hacked (GTE was using factory passwords on the switches) and the phreaks used her phone number to rack up $1000s of 900 porn calls. She refused to pay, and cancelled her phone service (getting wireless from SWB).
GTE insisted that they couldn't possibly have been hacked, but next month, her phone number was *still* racking up $1000s in 900 porn. They claimed her teenage son was the hacker, so she told them to physically cut all phone wires to the house at the connecting point, which in the rural area was several miles away.
Next month, the 900 porn continued to rack up $1000s. So then, GTE took her to court. They actually claimed, in court, I kid you not, that her teenage son was hacking the phone company using mental telepathy! The whole small town believed it too, and started treating her son like a space alien. Fortunately, the judge was not a country yokel, and threw the case out of court.
The real hackers were eventually caught when they got tired of 900 porn, and hacked the White House phone system so they could eavesdrop on Clinton's phone calls. This was noticed, and brought the FBI down on their case. The story of their capture was on Slashdot, but I can't find it at the moment.
Windows versions prior to XP limit you to one processor unless you paid extra for licenses. Whith hyperthreading enabled, you split your CPU into two logical processors. Windows 2000 (or whatever you have) uses only one processor - so you are effectively running on half a CPU.
When I signed up for Cox cable, they had a choice of "Full Service" install and "Self Install". For the full service option, the technician installs all the spyware and adware for you, and configures your PC for the cable modem - with no firewall protection. The full service install is available for Windows only.
Since I run Linux, I picked self install. It is $75 cheaper than full install, and the technician came out, refurbished all the cable connectors, turned me on at the hub, and checked the signal level at the cable modem. He then let me configure Linux and check that I could ping various places.
You really can't argue with this policy. Some customers (most?) need the full service install. My only complaint with Cox is that they keep increasing the price (from $40/mo to $50/mo) and decreasing the upload cap (from 500Kbits to 200Kbits). The download cap is 1.4Mbits - T1 performance for a fraction of the cost.
A friend let me use their digital studio to record my own music. The studio was very nice except that it used Windows to burn CDs. I had to download a bunch of cracking tools to make an unprotected copy of my own recording of moi!
I have no relation to IBM except that my company uses their OS (on Motorola and Bull hardware).
Drives that die every year or so are not a problem provided that replacements are cheap (which they are), and RAID is cheap and easy for home and small business.
Simple controller based hardware RAID is not ideal, because all drives must be the same size. When one drive fails, you have to replace all of them. This is because the 40G drives you initially built the RAID with are no longer available, and your only choice is to buy a new set of 160G drives.
RAID subsystems are way too expensive for home and small business.
I use Linux software RAID (mirroring), and AIX software RAID (mirroring). AIX divides all drives into a set of drives (volume group) into equal sized extents called physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does a similar thing. Each logical volume (what you build a filesystem on) is built from multiple logical partitions the same size as physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does the same. This lets your logical volumes cover multiple drives, and lets you expand and shrink logical volumes without reorganizing the disk, rebooting, or stopping any running processes. AIX even supports expanding a filesystem while it is mounted and running. (There are Linux products to do this also - but they are not widely supported.)
AIX goes further and stores each logical partition on up to 3 physical partitions. This provides mirroring that easily handles disk expansion. The 3rd copy makes it easy to migrate logical volumes to different physical drives (make a 3rd copy in the new location, then delete one of the other copies).
For instance, our inhouse AIX system started with 2 512M drives. We expanded with an additional 1G. We migrated all volumes on 1 512M drive to the 1G (with the system running applications). Thereafter, all volume allocation and expansion was automatically mirrored. Next, we added a 1.2G, then a 2G, then a 4G, and we removed the 512M drives which were slow. New drives are simply added to the volume group. All migrations are done with the system running applications. When all logical volumes have been migrated elsewhere, old drives are simply removed from the volume group.
The Linux software RAID can accomplish similar results if you use 2 layers of the md driver. One layer mirrors identically sized partitions. The other layer glues multiple partitions together into one logical drive. (Or you can use Linux LVM for the second layer.)
However, it is not clear when/whether partitions can be safely allocated and removed with Linux running applications. There are no simple commands like
mkmdrive -r 1 md5 hd5a hd6b
(make md5 a raid level 1 mirror from paritions hd5a and hd6b, report errors such as md5 already exists, hd5a already used for another md or filesystem, etc.) Instead, everything is done by editing config files, and you're never sure when your changes take efect, or whether adding a new md to the config will affect operations on existing mds. (Does the driver stop servicing active mds while it loads the new config?) The Linux LVM does not support integrated mirroring. (You can run LVM on top of md mirrors.)
The point of all this is that cheap 1 year drives are not a big problem if RedHat and other distros supported AIX style or better software RAID out of the box.
I did a simpler version of this many years ago. We had a 68K unix system from Motorola. The pcc compiler was really really bad, so we installed gcc. (I've heard a lot of complaints about how gcc optimizer is no good, but it beat the pants off of pcc.)
Later, we upgraded to Motorola 88k. The new system came with a GreenHills compiler - which was so buggy it was unusable. The bugs were acknowleged, but never fixed. It was too buggy to compile gcc - I wasted many days simplifying expressions by hand to no avail.
My solution was to build a cross compiler on the 68k, and run it with a stub on the 88k for cc1 that fed the preprocessed source to the compiler on the 68k, and got back the assembler source. (There was no 88k support yet in gcc, so I had to write my own machine model. It was incompatible with Greenhills in passing and returning structs.) The preprocessor, assembler, and linker would run on the 88k - only the actual compiler pass ran on the 68k. This worked beautifully to build gcc on the 88k! And our 33Mhz 88k was so much faster, that I built a 68k cross compiler for the 88k and speeded up compiles on the 68k a great deal.
Next we upgraded to Power PC. AIX comes with no compiler at all! (IBM's compiler is very good - but expensive.) Fortunately, it comes with an assembler and linker. By dint of copying headers from AIX, and hand preprocessing and compiling to assembler, I got the preprocessor running on AIX. Then it was simple to run the cc1 stub again to compile up a native gcc for AIX. The new PowerPC was so much faster than the old 88k, that a cross compiler to speed up 88k compiles was in order also. (I contributed AIX shared lib support for gcc.)
Recently, I fired up a PowerPC cross compiler on our 600Mhz PII running Linux to speed up compiles on our old 100Mhz PowerPC AIX using the same simple technique. By using the -pipe option to gcc, the compiler on Linux runs in parallel with the preprocessor and assembler on AIX - truly efficient.
In conclusion, I want to thank Richard Stallman and the FSF for making it possible to rise above the stupid problems caused by closed source. Before the 68k, we had SCO Xenix. Basic utilities like tar and cpio were broken, reported, and never fixed - but GNU software was there with solid and reliable replacements. (Yes, I made donations and even ordered a tape.)
For end users of binary RPMs, RedCarpet (and I presume competing tools like apt-get) automatically check signatures.
Yes, it is more difficult for tarballs. But I think the theory is that people packaging tarballs have a clue. It really is not that difficult to check sendmail tarballs. Just download that ascii signature file also, and run pgpv. It even runs md5 for you. The only wrinkle is that you have to gunzip the tarball first:
$ pkg=sendmail.8.12.6.tar $ gunzip <$pkg.gz >$pkg $ pgpv -v $pkg.sig This signature applies to another message File to check signature against [sendmail.8.12.6.tar]: Good signature made 2002-04-05 19:37 GMT by key: 1024 bits, Key ID 678C0A03, Created 2001-12-18 "Sendmail Signing Key/2002 <sendmail@Sendmail.ORG>"
The article mentioned that Xeon can run in 1 or 2 logical processor mode. If switching between modes is fast enough, the OS could switch to 1 logical processor mode when only single thread processes are runnable, switching to 2 logical processor when multiple threads from the same process are executing.
BTW, does posting in Slashdot prevent some Bozo for filing for patents on these ideas?
The "hog" problem, as mentioned in the article, is where competing threads thrash the cache, or other shared resource. To get good performance, the threads sharing the processor must "cooperate" to some degree.
A good solution to this is to only allow threads from the same process to share a physical CPU via "hyper-threading".
This makes it possible for the programmer to provide explicitly for their "cooperation", and even without programmer support, threads from the same process are more likely to use similar TLB and cache data. Traditional time-slicing will still get competing processes in and out of the CPU.
Assymetric encryption is vulnerable to number-factoring - a problem which is currently difficult, but is threatened by quantum computers and the possible development of exponentially faster conventional computers.
Only RSA and related assymetric algorithms are so threatened. Elliptic curve algorithms, for instance, have no known quantum algorithm to solve them. They also require more conventional horsepower per bit to brute force.
The International Criminal Court will get you. I couldn't find a website critical of the ICC, so I'll voice my objections. Any government can accuse you. There is no Jury. A 3 judge panel decides your fate. Basically, if someone in any government anywhere in the world doesn't like you, you're history. For an idea of how fair the 3 judge panel will be - look at the UN Human Rights Commitee. (Members consist of such salutory champions of Human rights as China and Sudan.)
I was trying to convince the boss that SCO Xenix was superior to DOS. In particular, files had permissions, and ordinary users couldn't delete the system files. To demonstrate, I logged in as an ordinary user, and typed "rm -rf/". Presto, (or rather, chug, chug, chug - this was a 286 with ST506), the entire system was deleted. After reinstalling, and enduring endless scorn and ridicule, I discovered why. SCO Xenix installed out of the box with absolutely every file and directory set to 666 or 777.
That was a learning experience. (Some distributions are more trustworthy than others.) We finally ditched SCO when we couldn't format our new ESDI disks because the driver would crash the system when it encountered a bad sector. (Remember ESDI?) We called the $1200/yr tech support, and they insisted that they couldn't help us unless we "reformat the disk and reinstall Xenix". After three attempts to explain that that was precisely what we were trying to do, (and them responding that "I can't help you if you won't follow instructions"), I lost my temper and told them they were blithering idiots and they'd never hear from us again.
We limped along replacing broken SCO utilities with GNU software, and finally switched to Motorola.
Re:Dynamic optimization in software
on
Itanium Problems
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Dynamic optimization is not restricted to hardware. Java Hotspot will do well with Itanium (if Sun survives), and I believe Smalltalk and LISP have dynamic optimization as well. The way I see it, Virtual Machines are the future of high performance computing. And yes,.NET is important for Microsoft to prosper in the non-IA32 world. (Although I hate it when the wicked prosper.)
Slashdot Mirror
25 And it came to pass in the fifth year of king Rehoboam, that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem:
26 And he took away the treasures of the house of the LORD, and the treasures of the king's house; he even took away all: and he took away all the shields of gold which Solomon had made.
27 And king Rehoboam made in their stead brasen shields, and committed them unto the hands of the chief of the guard, which kept the door of the king's house.
While the time may be "wasted" from a time and materials billing perspective, it is hardly wasted. Trying to make things work exercises creative problem solving, and gains a deeper understanding of how things work. The employee who expends a reasonable amount of time making junk work, even if unsuccessful, will be much better prepared for a real crunch. A wise company will encourage a balanced amount of this.
Not only that, but every person who has ever drunk water has eventually died. The vast majority of people who have died have eaten bread shortly before their death.
This comment is also addressed to the disparaging comments about the intelligence of Wal-Mart shoppers. My wife shops at Wal-Mart. Our marriage was revolutionized when she read The Joy of Linux .
The tech stuff still doesn't mean anything to her, but now she is acutely aware of the political and social issues, and calls herself a "Linux Chick". She can't tell you what a "bit" is, but she can explain why software freedom is so much more important than free software and the difference between GPL and BSD licenses. She now regards acquaintances that work for Micro$oft as "black sheep", where before she didn't see what all the fuss what about. She still gets confused trying to use the computer, but now she sees that Linux is no more confusing than Windows - plus, we have been able to customize her applications from the many choices available to select those she finds most intuitive. Her web browser is Mozilla. (Go figure.) Her word processor is Open Office. (Does fancy fonts out of the box.)
Now we have many stimulating discussions concerning intellectual property and which open source business models work the best. Take note geeks, it is possible to be really smart and not understand what a bit is.
In any case, we use software RAID-1 so that the system can survive a drive crash. We started using RAID-1 on SCSI with the AIX Logical Volume Manager, and began using Linux RAID-1 on IDE when the Promise PCI controllers were supported in RH72.
We have lots of AIX and Linux systems, and have had a dozen drive crashes over the years.
the heart of House-n is a chassis with an "infill" of cheap sensing devices like LEDs, speakers, displays, automatic lighting, heat sensors, and miniature cameras that can be plugged in at any point and upgraded on the fly.
You place a videoconference call that follows you up the stairs (projected on the walls) and then decide to exercise: a table retracts, a wall panel moves, and a life-size image of your favorite aerobics instructor appears.
In the real world, people are molded by the choices they make. Every evil choice, even if it is minor, and even if it is "for a good cause", makes it a tiny bit easier to make an evil choice the next time.
Good Fantasy/Sci-Fi has a realistic moral universe to complement the counterfactual/extrapolated physical universe. This does not mean that the protagonist always or even usually makes good choices. (A realistic dark protagonist is instructive, if depressing.) It does mean that logical consequences ensue. Too many stories show the protagonist making lots of minor evil choices (lying to friends, stealing from or killing the innocent, etc) in order to accomplish a Great Good (saving the world). Instead of these choices making them more like the enemy they are vanquishing, the effect is portrayed as neutral - an implementation detail for the Great Good that is accomplished.
As an example of a realistic moral universe, it is clear in Tolkien that in using the one ring to defeat Sauron, the user will become (as evil as) Sauron.
While real world examples are rarely as dramatic as in Tolkien, it does happen. Suppose a proposed plan to defeat Hitler involves infiltrating his inner circle, and then assasinating him. To gain his confidence, the assassin must participate in many horribly evil activities: torture, extermination of innocent people, etc. In fact, many of the activities prescribed for the inner circle are in fact rituals of evil designed to reduce the participant to the same level of moral decay as the others.
I can't find the license at the moment, but it let us modify the source (but they would only support their versions), and even sell systems based on our modified source - provided we did not sell on any platforms that H&A supported. We had to pay H&A a one time fee for each system we sold based on our modified source.
The motivation for H&A was that our first modification was porting their system to our platform (Motorola SysV88). Thus, each system we sold was gravy for them. We also shared enhancements for a few years, then H&A went out of business (due to the market for Series/1 conversions drying up). Boy, were we glad we had a source license!
That source is still running. Our systems run the EDX VM as a subsystem under a Java VM, and the EDX "screens" display on a Java widget. The EDX code gets gradually rewritten, although I wish it would disappear faster . . .
We already do this. We don't fully understand the technology, but my wife and I have created four intelligent life forms. Initially, they were completely dependent on us, and looked to us as "god". As they matured, they became more independent. In fact, the oldest one is 13 years old, and figures she could do much better without us.
Our life forms soon became aware that we were also created, and our parents as well, and so on back in time. They have therefore transferred their ultimate allegience to the Ultimate Creator - while still giving us the respect and temporary allegience due to our role in their creation.
I am also aware that one of the reasons corn was chosen is that is normally has difficulty reproducing in the wild, having become dependent on human help. However, I am not the only one worried that these measures may fail. The Bt may give it enough of an advantage to survive in the wild.
You are wrong about the potential for adverse human reaction to Bt. People in the US have already become very sick from eating Bt contaminated tacos. Granted, they were accidentally made from the wrong kind of Bt Corn (with the toxin expressed in the grain), and the varieties approved for human consumption shouldn't have toxin in the grain. However, this is exactly the kind of mistake that will happen. (And only a few people had allergic reactions to the Bt.)
My point is, that third world farmers won't have any way of knowing which, if any, varieties of Bt corn they are planting. If the wrong kind of seed can get made into tacos, what's to prevent the wrong kind of seed from getting shipped to poor farmers?
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Lab experiments are allowed with strict containment procedures.
-
Field experiments and production are allowed provided the modified organism is easily distinguished without any special technology.
For instance, the Spider Goats experiment meets these requirements. If the spider goats become wild, a third world farmer can easily notice and not breed goats that excrete stringly stuff with their milk (if I understand the results correctly). He might even find that after rinsing and drying, that stringy stuff can be woven into really strong cloth - and breed more of them.Bt Corn does not meet this test. Bt Corn looks just like normal corn, but can kill you or make you sick if you eat it and do not tolerate the Bt toxin. It has a survival advantage in the wild to boot. While North American farmers plant from high tech hybrid seeds, South American farmers may soon find their major food crop contaminated. Eventually, a Bt tolerant human population will emerge via natural selection, but only after much human suffering.
Using corn to grow drugs does not meet this test either.
Western industrialized countries are complaining that this is unfair, since most of the magnetic field produced from Human activity comes from the developing world, due to the wide spread use of crude coils and inefficient motors.
Advocates for the poor point out that developing countries need refrigeration to combat disease, and refrigerators require current with present day technology.
"We have no choice", says a spokesperson for the scientists. "We either cut way back on our use of electricity now, or doom our grandchildren to be roasted by the sun."
GTE insisted that they couldn't possibly have been hacked, but next month, her phone number was *still* racking up $1000s in 900 porn. They claimed her teenage son was the hacker, so she told them to physically cut all phone wires to the house at the connecting point, which in the rural area was several miles away.
Next month, the 900 porn continued to rack up $1000s. So then, GTE took her to court. They actually claimed, in court, I kid you not, that her teenage son was hacking the phone company using mental telepathy! The whole small town believed it too, and started treating her son like a space alien. Fortunately, the judge was not a country yokel, and threw the case out of court.
The real hackers were eventually caught when they got tired of 900 porn, and hacked the White House phone system so they could eavesdrop on Clinton's phone calls. This was noticed, and brought the FBI down on their case. The story of their capture was on Slashdot, but I can't find it at the moment.
Windows versions prior to XP limit you to one processor unless you paid extra for licenses. Whith hyperthreading enabled, you split your CPU into two logical processors. Windows 2000 (or whatever you have) uses only one processor - so you are effectively running on half a CPU.
Since I run Linux, I picked self install. It is $75 cheaper than full install, and the technician came out, refurbished all the cable connectors, turned me on at the hub, and checked the signal level at the cable modem. He then let me configure Linux and check that I could ping various places.
You really can't argue with this policy. Some customers (most?) need the full service install. My only complaint with Cox is that they keep increasing the price (from $40/mo to $50/mo) and decreasing the upload cap (from 500Kbits to 200Kbits). The download cap is 1.4Mbits - T1 performance for a fraction of the cost.
A friend let me use their digital studio to record my own music. The studio was very nice except that it used Windows to burn CDs. I had to download a bunch of cracking tools to make an unprotected copy of my own recording of moi!
Drives that die every year or so are not a problem provided that replacements are cheap (which they are), and RAID is cheap and easy for home and small business.
Simple controller based hardware RAID is not ideal, because all drives must be the same size. When one drive fails, you have to replace all of them. This is because the 40G drives you initially built the RAID with are no longer available, and your only choice is to buy a new set of 160G drives.
RAID subsystems are way too expensive for home and small business.
I use Linux software RAID (mirroring), and AIX software RAID (mirroring). AIX divides all drives into a set of drives (volume group) into equal sized extents called physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does a similar thing. Each logical volume (what you build a filesystem on) is built from multiple logical partitions the same size as physical partitions. The LVM for Linux does the same. This lets your logical volumes cover multiple drives, and lets you expand and shrink logical volumes without reorganizing the disk, rebooting, or stopping any running processes. AIX even supports expanding a filesystem while it is mounted and running. (There are Linux products to do this also - but they are not widely supported.)
AIX goes further and stores each logical partition on up to 3 physical partitions. This provides mirroring that easily handles disk expansion. The 3rd copy makes it easy to migrate logical volumes to different physical drives (make a 3rd copy in the new location, then delete one of the other copies).
For instance, our inhouse AIX system started with 2 512M drives. We expanded with an additional 1G. We migrated all volumes on 1 512M drive to the 1G (with the system running applications). Thereafter, all volume allocation and expansion was automatically mirrored. Next, we added a 1.2G, then a 2G, then a 4G, and we removed the 512M drives which were slow. New drives are simply added to the volume group. All migrations are done with the system running applications. When all logical volumes have been migrated elsewhere, old drives are simply removed from the volume group.
The Linux software RAID can accomplish similar results if you use 2 layers of the md driver. One layer mirrors identically sized partitions. The other layer glues multiple partitions together into one logical drive. (Or you can use Linux LVM for the second layer.)
However, it is not clear when/whether partitions can be safely allocated and removed with Linux running applications. There are no simple commands like
(make md5 a raid level 1 mirror from paritions hd5a and hd6b, report errors such as md5 already exists, hd5a already used for another md or filesystem, etc.) Instead, everything is done by editing config files, and you're never sure when your changes take efect, or whether adding a new md to the config will affect operations on existing mds. (Does the driver stop servicing active mds while it loads the new config?) The Linux LVM does not support integrated mirroring. (You can run LVM on top of md mirrors.)The point of all this is that cheap 1 year drives are not a big problem if RedHat and other distros supported AIX style or better software RAID out of the box.
Later, we upgraded to Motorola 88k. The new system came with a GreenHills compiler - which was so buggy it was unusable. The bugs were acknowleged, but never fixed. It was too buggy to compile gcc - I wasted many days simplifying expressions by hand to no avail.
My solution was to build a cross compiler on the 68k, and run it with a stub on the 88k for cc1 that fed the preprocessed source to the compiler on the 68k, and got back the assembler source. (There was no 88k support yet in gcc, so I had to write my own machine model. It was incompatible with Greenhills in passing and returning structs.) The preprocessor, assembler, and linker would run on the 88k - only the actual compiler pass ran on the 68k. This worked beautifully to build gcc on the 88k! And our 33Mhz 88k was so much faster, that I built a 68k cross compiler for the 88k and speeded up compiles on the 68k a great deal.
Next we upgraded to Power PC. AIX comes with no compiler at all! (IBM's compiler is very good - but expensive.) Fortunately, it comes with an assembler and linker. By dint of copying headers from AIX, and hand preprocessing and compiling to assembler, I got the preprocessor running on AIX. Then it was simple to run the cc1 stub again to compile up a native gcc for AIX. The new PowerPC was so much faster than the old 88k, that a cross compiler to speed up 88k compiles was in order also. (I contributed AIX shared lib support for gcc.)
Recently, I fired up a PowerPC cross compiler on our 600Mhz PII running Linux to speed up compiles on our old 100Mhz PowerPC AIX using the same simple technique. By using the -pipe option to gcc, the compiler on Linux runs in parallel with the preprocessor and assembler on AIX - truly efficient.
In conclusion, I want to thank Richard Stallman and the FSF for making it possible to rise above the stupid problems caused by closed source. Before the 68k, we had SCO Xenix. Basic utilities like tar and cpio were broken, reported, and never fixed - but GNU software was there with solid and reliable replacements. (Yes, I made donations and even ordered a tape.)
For end users of binary RPMs, RedCarpet (and I presume competing tools like apt-get) automatically check signatures.
Yes, it is more difficult for tarballs. But I think the theory is that people packaging tarballs have a clue. It really is not that difficult to check sendmail tarballs. Just download that ascii signature file also, and run pgpv. It even runs md5 for you. The only wrinkle is that you have to gunzip the tarball first:
BTW, does posting in Slashdot prevent some Bozo for filing for patents on these ideas?
A good solution to this is to only allow threads from the same process to share a physical CPU via "hyper-threading". This makes it possible for the programmer to provide explicitly for their "cooperation", and even without programmer support, threads from the same process are more likely to use similar TLB and cache data. Traditional time-slicing will still get competing processes in and out of the CPU.
Only RSA and related assymetric algorithms are so threatened. Elliptic curve algorithms, for instance, have no known quantum algorithm to solve them. They also require more conventional horsepower per bit to brute force.
The International Criminal Court will get you. I couldn't find a website critical of the ICC, so I'll voice my objections. Any government can accuse you. There is no Jury. A 3 judge panel decides your fate. Basically, if someone in any government anywhere in the world doesn't like you, you're history. For an idea of how fair the 3 judge panel will be - look at the UN Human Rights Commitee. (Members consist of such salutory champions of Human rights as China and Sudan.)
That was a learning experience. (Some distributions are more trustworthy than others.) We finally ditched SCO when we couldn't format our new ESDI disks because the driver would crash the system when it encountered a bad sector. (Remember ESDI?) We called the $1200/yr tech support, and they insisted that they couldn't help us unless we "reformat the disk and reinstall Xenix". After three attempts to explain that that was precisely what we were trying to do, (and them responding that "I can't help you if you won't follow instructions"), I lost my temper and told them they were blithering idiots and they'd never hear from us again.
We limped along replacing broken SCO utilities with GNU software, and finally switched to Motorola.
Dynamic optimization is not restricted to hardware. Java Hotspot will do well with Itanium (if Sun survives), and I believe Smalltalk and LISP have dynamic optimization as well. The way I see it, Virtual Machines are the future of high performance computing. And yes, .NET is important for Microsoft to prosper in the non-IA32 world. (Although I hate it when the wicked prosper.)