If you are planning on having a few minutes' worth of UPS backup then why would you need to write to the hard drive continuously? Keep the hard drive spun down (saving power). If the system is being shut down, or AC power fails, then spin up the drive and make a backup of your ramdisk, thus being ready to restore when the power comes back up.
Next step beyond that: stop using a filesystem at runtime. Just assume your data can all fit in memory (why not, if you have a terabyte of it?) This simplifies the code and prevents a lot of duplication (why copy from RAM to RAM, just to make the distinction that one part of RAM is a filesystem and another part is the working copy?) But you will need a simple way to serialize the data to disk in case of power-down, and a simple way to restore it. This does not need to be a multi-threaded, online operation: when the system is going down you can cease all operations and just concentrate on doing the archival.
This assumption changes software design pretty fundamentally. Relational databases for example have historically been all about leaving the data on the disk and yet still fetching query results efficiently, with as little RAM as necessary.
Next step beyond that: system RAM will become non-volatile, and the disk can go away. The serialization code is now used only for making backups across the network.
Now think about how that could obsolete the old Unix paradigm that everything is a file.
A van drives down the streets once and takes pictures. Maybe in a few years they'll do that again. Now if you happened to be in one of them maybe you'd have some feelings about that, but one snapshot of you every few years hardly amounts to a surveillance society.
Why aren't people more optimistic? This is a sort of poor telepresence: you can get a small part of the experience of traveling to some cities without actually going there.
It's a physical key rather than something to remember; set up the machine so if you insert it you are logged on without further ado at the gdm screen or whatever.
It's been said that soon people will stop looking for their 15 minutes of fame... instead they'll be looking for their 15 minutes of privacy. I.e. in the future it will be a much bigger issue than it is now. But at the present time I'm glad the future is still as wide-open as it is, and I say let's cross that bridge when we come to it; there are so many far more interesting problems to work on, and the outcome of the privacy thing is predictable anyway (people are people... you already know who is going to do what.)
I agree, when you post data on Facebook it's a public disclosure. That's to be expected; there's no point in being paranoid about it... just don't post information you don't want the world to see. Same thing with YouTube or Slashdot postings. I can still google and find stupid postings I made to usenet, myself, like 15 years ago. But it's only slightly embarrassing, hardly a tragedy.
Bank security is another matter, but what can you do about it? Just pick a bank that takes it seriously, or if you are a billionaire maybe you can go start your own bank. At the very least, I wonder if there is some web site that ranks them on this basis so you can find the best one. Maybe start a site like that, if not?
All in all though we're just going to have to adapt. Usability is just as important, and security wonks often seem to screw it up; that's what pisses me off. My bank's web site is a good example of that. I wish they were using smart cards instead of labyrinthine login procedures. And I'm not convinced that what they did is actually so much more secure anyway.
In the government of, by, and for the people, the requirements for the laws should start with the people. The main reason we have a republic instead (we elect representatives to Congress) is a historical one... not enough communication bandwidth when the only choice was a mounted courier. Nowadays we ought to follow Estonia's example and get the people more involved. But now we have too much mass of existing governmental bodies, so it cannot easily happen.
Anyway it's too bad that the summary doesn't even mention user feedback. This is the same mistake a lot of cathedral software companies make: maybe they get some user input for the requirements, maybe they take user feedback after the project is released, but the rest of the design work and implementation are done in a vacuum.
I think it will be done after the singularity, after technology has subsumed biological evolution. After that, it will not be so important because virtual reality and actual reality will have merged and people will be able to send themselves (in the form of software) anywhere that the network extends. But if it's possible, it still will remain an interesting academic challenge.
I read about the switchgrass-for-ethanol thing a while back. Sounds like a win-win: it restores the prairie to its natural state, we humans get something directly useful out of it, and you could probably graze cattle on the same land after the harvest. But of course in practice they will screw it up by fertilizing heavily with chemical fertilizers. Cow shit would be better.
Of course it would be better not to be in the same room with all those noisy fans, but I'm assuming they are insisting on that, so you can monitor everything? Well maybe you can at least install some sliding glass doors so you can see everything without having to hear everything. And leave space behind the racks to walk behind them, obviously. So basically take away 5 or 6 feet of depth from the office, put some doors across there, the racks go behind them, and everything else is yours. Failing that, maybe you can get racks that are "sealed" to some extent with smoked plexi doors. (I have one like that at home.)
As for the rest... nice chair, nice desk, couple of 30" monitors, a projector (or several) to keep a bunch of status screens on the wall, track lighting so you can spot-light areas you need while keeping the rest dark... make it into a "war room". Install a sound system and use that network monitoring app that translates server events into sounds... I forget what it's called but there is a tropical forest theme, where each little sound (bird calls of various kinds, drips, splashes etc.) means something, and you can tell by the overall "vibe" when everything is normal or when something is a little "off".
You rock! Funniest thing I've read in a month. And I can tell you've read the Bible too because most people screw up the Olde English grammar, and you didn't. Way to go!
In 1985 it would have been hard to envision the 'net as we know it now. It was nearly 10 years before the general public would discover the web. Why were these companies bothering? Mostly just for professional collaboration via telnet or ftp, right?
So if it's all about regenerative braking, why not just push the freshly-generated power back into the power bus for other trams that are running at the same time to use? (Yes assuming it's AC power there are synchronization issues. Worst case the tram might need a CVT to keep the "generator" (motor) running at a constant speed while the tram slows down.)
So they compress the sound on CDs too much... maybe just don't compress it so much. For the label to propose going back to vinyl to limit its own freedom to do that compression, is like admitting that one really needs a straitjacket.
16 bits is enough range to express sounds that are too quiet too hear, all the way up to the threshold of pain. At least that's what they told us when CD technology was new...
Vinyl wears out with use, so maybe they could sell more records because of that. And maybe they are realizing that the "analog hole" has high enough barriers to entry that less casual copying would occur, whereas ripping CDs is just too easy.
Personally I don't plan to stop buying CDs (at least really iconic ones of lasting value, once in a while) until they sell uncompressed, un-DRM'd digital formats (like FLAC). If they'd sell 24-bit recordings, also uncompressed, that would be a real reason to consider CDs obsolete. I think the 99-cent tracks should be "premium," and they should offer lower-quality MP3's for much less... then they could sell several times as much music as they do today. And hey if they want to keep making vinyl to satisfy the DJs that's fine too... but this pretense that it's "better" just because they have been making the CDs with too much compression is ridiculous.
I once integrated Swish++ as a document search system for a MediaWiki installation, to handle uploaded documents. I liked the results so then I started using it to build an index on a large codebase so I could quickly find all usages of a particular symbol (in source files, libraries and executables too). The catch is you have to define how to translate each type of file into plain text so it can be indexed. There are plenty of tools available for Word docs, PDFs, nm for libraries, etc. Compared to some others I think Swish++ has the advantage of speed. I haven't tried Lucene but my feeling is I'd rather not use Java for that unless the whole system is in Java.
HyperEstraier has an excellent reputation but I haven't tried it yet. It's harder to get going with it.
Too bad Beagle is written in.net; sounded like a well-integrated solution otherwise...
The thieves would have a harder time wiping that, and if it looks "normal" enough they might not suspect that the machine is reporting itself. But there are not many choices of machines on which it's possible...
If the app does something useful with extra memory but still can scale down, it's a good example. But there is a lot of software that just seems to require way too many resources, and will not run without them, to get very simple tasks done.
Agreed. IANAL, but my understanding is this will get you legally documented proof that it's your idea, and can be used as prior art in any future IP dispute that may arise, even though you don't have an actual patent. And provisional patents aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny that real patents are (must be original, must be useful etc.) because the idea is that you do it in a hurry, and then go back and file a real patent app when you get all your ducks in a row. If you don't get around to that, and it expires, well, you have still created a kind of legal protection against future patents that cover the same idea.
I think this technique ought to be used much more widely in the free software world.
How can this organism be confined? Can it be restricted to a certain kind of growing condition that doesn't occur in nature? Otherwise it will definitely upset some kind of balance; maybe dead plants will decompose in a different way than usual under the influence of these organisms in the wild.
I'd take a wild guess that greater than 90% of Linux embedded systems use some kind of ARM processor. Since that design has been licensed far and wide, you can probably find a customized one with just the peripherals you are looking for, from some company or other (e.g. Phillips, Atmel, Freescale, etc. etc. - just search digikey or mouser for some ideas). It uses a 32-bit instruction set (good for Linux, and good for porting code in general), typically has an LCD driver on the chip, and you might even be able to find one with a DAC. For high-quality audio output, you can use a Wolfson DAC (again there are many choices depending on whether you need a headphone amp, ADC, line-in, mic pre-amp, mixer, how many channels etc.) The ipods tend to use these chips (the 2-channel kind with a headphone amp) so some of them are really cheap because of the economies of scale. For even better quality, the best is probably Burr-Brown (as used in the SlimDevices Squeezebox).
As another poster suggested, you can do prototyping with a Gumstix. Just the display may be a pain with those because they use that teeny-weeny surface-mount Hosiden connector for most of the I/O lines, and you will probably need to build your own display adapter board. But they do have an audio daughterboard already. For something more expensive but a little more ready-to-go (as a prototype), check out the offerings from Arcom; I've used those as well. Or look for some other SBC (linuxdevices.com is a good place to search). You can develop software that way, make sure you know how to use all the hardware you're going to need, and in parallel be working on your final board design (suitably miniaturized if necessary, all on one board, and leaving off the features that you don't need).
What I hate the most is the way every site requires a profile, and they all have different, conflicting rules about user names / customer IDs / passwords. Sometimes it's a number, sometimes it's some combination of initials and name, sometimes I can pick but my favorite ID is already taken, sometimes it's an email - but I have switched emails a few times. Sure Firefox can remember some of them for me, but for some sites it doesn't remember them, for whatever reason. (Never prompts me to save this login/password.) And its memory is not very portable - what am I supposed to do, manually sync up the passwords file between all the instances of Firefox that I use on different machines? (I regularly use about 4 PCs at work, 2 of which dual-boot Linux and Windows, plus one at home, plus several more that I don't use too often.) Frequent flyer programs are some of the worst this way. Also Mouser and Digikey (they don't always mail invoices for orders, and Digikey requires you to have a customer number plus an account number rather than a nice friendly user-chosen username.) Then there are all the intranet sites we have at work. All this is enough to make me scream, and I really do sometimes. Some sites, I just have to use the "forgot user name/ forgot password" features every time I access them. With others, even that is too hard (they insist on snail-mailing the password, or making you talk to a person on the phone). My bank web site just replaced the nice simple username/password system they had with one that sometimes lets you enter the password on a separate page, and other times makes you click it out on a virtual keyboard that moves around, to attempt to defeat keyloggers; and sometimes even supplements one of these methods with additional questions like your mother's maiden name, birth town, first car, etc. I'm sick and tired of typing out my billing and mailing addresses on every e-commerce site, too.
It's more clear than ever that we need a universal ID/login system, and it's going to require some hardware; a USB fob, a smart card, a cell phone with NFC, or some such. And people need to apply huge amounts of pressure on every web site that requires a login, to adopt such a system. You plug in your dongle and you are in the site - no extra shit to type, whatsoever! It's plenty adequate security as long as you guard the dongle like you would your keys and wallet.
REBOL is cool but it's not free software. So that's the end of the story for general use (as opposed to the vertical markets they seem to be going after). Lots of technologies wither away in vertical markets, unfortunately.
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If you are planning on having a few minutes' worth of UPS backup then why would you need to write to the hard drive continuously? Keep the hard drive spun down (saving power). If the system is being shut down, or AC power fails, then spin up the drive and make a backup of your ramdisk, thus being ready to restore when the power comes back up.
Next step beyond that: stop using a filesystem at runtime. Just assume your data can all fit in memory (why not, if you have a terabyte of it?) This simplifies the code and prevents a lot of duplication (why copy from RAM to RAM, just to make the distinction that one part of RAM is a filesystem and another part is the working copy?) But you will need a simple way to serialize the data to disk in case of power-down, and a simple way to restore it. This does not need to be a multi-threaded, online operation: when the system is going down you can cease all operations and just concentrate on doing the archival.
This assumption changes software design pretty fundamentally. Relational databases for example have historically been all about leaving the data on the disk and yet still fetching query results efficiently, with as little RAM as necessary.
Next step beyond that: system RAM will become non-volatile, and the disk can go away. The serialization code is now used only for making backups across the network.
Now think about how that could obsolete the old Unix paradigm that everything is a file.
A van drives down the streets once and takes pictures. Maybe in a few years they'll do that again. Now if you happened to be in one of them maybe you'd have some feelings about that, but one snapshot of you every few years hardly amounts to a surveillance society.
Why aren't people more optimistic? This is a sort of poor telepresence: you can get a small part of the experience of traveling to some cities without actually going there.
It's a physical key rather than something to remember; set up the machine so if you insert it you are logged on without further ado at the gdm screen or whatever.
It's been said that soon people will stop looking for their 15 minutes of fame... instead they'll be looking for their 15 minutes of privacy. I.e. in the future it will be a much bigger issue than it is now. But at the present time I'm glad the future is still as wide-open as it is, and I say let's cross that bridge when we come to it; there are so many far more interesting problems to work on, and the outcome of the privacy thing is predictable anyway (people are people... you already know who is going to do what.)
I agree, when you post data on Facebook it's a public disclosure. That's to be expected; there's no point in being paranoid about it... just don't post information you don't want the world to see. Same thing with YouTube or Slashdot postings. I can still google and find stupid postings I made to usenet, myself, like 15 years ago. But it's only slightly embarrassing, hardly a tragedy.
Bank security is another matter, but what can you do about it? Just pick a bank that takes it seriously, or if you are a billionaire maybe you can go start your own bank. At the very least, I wonder if there is some web site that ranks them on this basis so you can find the best one. Maybe start a site like that, if not?
All in all though we're just going to have to adapt. Usability is just as important, and security wonks often seem to screw it up; that's what pisses me off. My bank's web site is a good example of that. I wish they were using smart cards instead of labyrinthine login procedures. And I'm not convinced that what they did is actually so much more secure anyway.
In the government of, by, and for the people, the requirements for the laws should start with the people. The main reason we have a republic instead (we elect representatives to Congress) is a historical one... not enough communication bandwidth when the only choice was a mounted courier. Nowadays we ought to follow Estonia's example and get the people more involved. But now we have too much mass of existing governmental bodies, so it cannot easily happen.
Anyway it's too bad that the summary doesn't even mention user feedback. This is the same mistake a lot of cathedral software companies make: maybe they get some user input for the requirements, maybe they take user feedback after the project is released, but the rest of the design work and implementation are done in a vacuum.
Na na na na na na, na na na na na na na, na na na na na na na na na...
(apologies to the Bangles, and to the Egyptians too... this is really a tragedy, but a temporary one we hope)
I think it will be done after the singularity, after technology has subsumed biological evolution. After that, it will not be so important because virtual reality and actual reality will have merged and people will be able to send themselves (in the form of software) anywhere that the network extends. But if it's possible, it still will remain an interesting academic challenge.
I read about the switchgrass-for-ethanol thing a while back. Sounds like a win-win: it restores the prairie to its natural state, we humans get something directly useful out of it, and you could probably graze cattle on the same land after the harvest. But of course in practice they will screw it up by fertilizing heavily with chemical fertilizers. Cow shit would be better.
Of course it would be better not to be in the same room with all those noisy fans, but I'm assuming they are insisting on that, so you can monitor everything? Well maybe you can at least install some sliding glass doors so you can see everything without having to hear everything. And leave space behind the racks to walk behind them, obviously. So basically take away 5 or 6 feet of depth from the office, put some doors across there, the racks go behind them, and everything else is yours. Failing that, maybe you can get racks that are "sealed" to some extent with smoked plexi doors. (I have one like that at home.)
As for the rest... nice chair, nice desk, couple of 30" monitors, a projector (or several) to keep a bunch of status screens on the wall, track lighting so you can spot-light areas you need while keeping the rest dark... make it into a "war room". Install a sound system and use that network monitoring app that translates server events into sounds... I forget what it's called but there is a tropical forest theme, where each little sound (bird calls of various kinds, drips, splashes etc.) means something, and you can tell by the overall "vibe" when everything is normal or when something is a little "off".
You rock! Funniest thing I've read in a month. And I can tell you've read the Bible too because most people screw up the Olde English grammar, and you didn't. Way to go!
In 1985 it would have been hard to envision the 'net as we know it now. It was nearly 10 years before the general public would discover the web. Why were these companies bothering? Mostly just for professional collaboration via telnet or ftp, right?
So if it's all about regenerative braking, why not just push the freshly-generated power back into the power bus for other trams that are running at the same time to use? (Yes assuming it's AC power there are synchronization issues. Worst case the tram might need a CVT to keep the "generator" (motor) running at a constant speed while the tram slows down.)
So they compress the sound on CDs too much... maybe just don't compress it so much. For the label to propose going back to vinyl to limit its own freedom to do that compression, is like admitting that one really needs a straitjacket.
16 bits is enough range to express sounds that are too quiet too hear, all the way up to the threshold of pain. At least that's what they told us when CD technology was new...
Vinyl wears out with use, so maybe they could sell more records because of that. And maybe they are realizing that the "analog hole" has high enough barriers to entry that less casual copying would occur, whereas ripping CDs is just too easy.
Personally I don't plan to stop buying CDs (at least really iconic ones of lasting value, once in a while) until they sell uncompressed, un-DRM'd digital formats (like FLAC). If they'd sell 24-bit recordings, also uncompressed, that would be a real reason to consider CDs obsolete. I think the 99-cent tracks should be "premium," and they should offer lower-quality MP3's for much less... then they could sell several times as much music as they do today. And hey if they want to keep making vinyl to satisfy the DJs that's fine too... but this pretense that it's "better" just because they have been making the CDs with too much compression is ridiculous.
I once integrated Swish++ as a document search system for a MediaWiki installation, to handle uploaded documents. I liked the results so then I started using it to build an index on a large codebase so I could quickly find all usages of a particular symbol (in source files, libraries and executables too). The catch is you have to define how to translate each type of file into plain text so it can be indexed. There are plenty of tools available for Word docs, PDFs, nm for libraries, etc. Compared to some others I think Swish++ has the advantage of speed. I haven't tried Lucene but my feeling is I'd rather not use Java for that unless the whole system is in Java.
.net; sounded like a well-integrated solution otherwise...
HyperEstraier has an excellent reputation but I haven't tried it yet. It's harder to get going with it.
Too bad Beagle is written in
I remember NT 2.0... hardly any existing Windows programs ran on it.
The thieves would have a harder time wiping that, and if it looks "normal" enough they might not suspect that the machine is reporting itself. But there are not many choices of machines on which it's possible...
If only the ISPs wouldn't block it...
Every machine in the world connecting via TCP to ask "what time is it?" sure doesn't sound very efficient does it?
If the app does something useful with extra memory but still can scale down, it's a good example. But there is a lot of software that just seems to require way too many resources, and will not run without them, to get very simple tasks done.
You can do everything you need with dd.
Agreed. IANAL, but my understanding is this will get you legally documented proof that it's your idea, and can be used as prior art in any future IP dispute that may arise, even though you don't have an actual patent. And provisional patents aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny that real patents are (must be original, must be useful etc.) because the idea is that you do it in a hurry, and then go back and file a real patent app when you get all your ducks in a row. If you don't get around to that, and it expires, well, you have still created a kind of legal protection against future patents that cover the same idea.
I think this technique ought to be used much more widely in the free software world.
But I have not yet tried it myself.
How can this organism be confined? Can it be restricted to a certain kind of growing condition that doesn't occur in nature? Otherwise it will definitely upset some kind of balance; maybe dead plants will decompose in a different way than usual under the influence of these organisms in the wild.
Err, that's a Hirose connector I think, not Hosiden.
I'd take a wild guess that greater than 90% of Linux embedded systems use some kind of ARM processor. Since that design has been licensed far and wide, you can probably find a customized one with just the peripherals you are looking for, from some company or other (e.g. Phillips, Atmel, Freescale, etc. etc. - just search digikey or mouser for some ideas). It uses a 32-bit instruction set (good for Linux, and good for porting code in general), typically has an LCD driver on the chip, and you might even be able to find one with a DAC. For high-quality audio output, you can use a Wolfson DAC (again there are many choices depending on whether you need a headphone amp, ADC, line-in, mic pre-amp, mixer, how many channels etc.) The ipods tend to use these chips (the 2-channel kind with a headphone amp) so some of them are really cheap because of the economies of scale. For even better quality, the best is probably Burr-Brown (as used in the SlimDevices Squeezebox).
As another poster suggested, you can do prototyping with a Gumstix. Just the display may be a pain with those because they use that teeny-weeny surface-mount Hosiden connector for most of the I/O lines, and you will probably need to build your own display adapter board. But they do have an audio daughterboard already. For something more expensive but a little more ready-to-go (as a prototype), check out the offerings from Arcom; I've used those as well. Or look for some other SBC (linuxdevices.com is a good place to search). You can develop software that way, make sure you know how to use all the hardware you're going to need, and in parallel be working on your final board design (suitably miniaturized if necessary, all on one board, and leaving off the features that you don't need).
What I hate the most is the way every site requires a profile, and they all have different, conflicting rules about user names / customer IDs / passwords. Sometimes it's a number, sometimes it's some combination of initials and name, sometimes I can pick but my favorite ID is already taken, sometimes it's an email - but I have switched emails a few times. Sure Firefox can remember some of them for me, but for some sites it doesn't remember them, for whatever reason. (Never prompts me to save this login/password.) And its memory is not very portable - what am I supposed to do, manually sync up the passwords file between all the instances of Firefox that I use on different machines? (I regularly use about 4 PCs at work, 2 of which dual-boot Linux and Windows, plus one at home, plus several more that I don't use too often.) Frequent flyer programs are some of the worst this way. Also Mouser and Digikey (they don't always mail invoices for orders, and Digikey requires you to have a customer number plus an account number rather than a nice friendly user-chosen username.) Then there are all the intranet sites we have at work. All this is enough to make me scream, and I really do sometimes. Some sites, I just have to use the "forgot user name/ forgot password" features every time I access them. With others, even that is too hard (they insist on snail-mailing the password, or making you talk to a person on the phone). My bank web site just replaced the nice simple username/password system they had with one that sometimes lets you enter the password on a separate page, and other times makes you click it out on a virtual keyboard that moves around, to attempt to defeat keyloggers; and sometimes even supplements one of these methods with additional questions like your mother's maiden name, birth town, first car, etc. I'm sick and tired of typing out my billing and mailing addresses on every e-commerce site, too.
It's more clear than ever that we need a universal ID/login system, and it's going to require some hardware; a USB fob, a smart card, a cell phone with NFC, or some such. And people need to apply huge amounts of pressure on every web site that requires a login, to adopt such a system. You plug in your dongle and you are in the site - no extra shit to type, whatsoever! It's plenty adequate security as long as you guard the dongle like you would your keys and wallet.
REBOL is cool but it's not free software. So that's the end of the story for general use (as opposed to the vertical markets they seem to be going after). Lots of technologies wither away in vertical markets, unfortunately.