Money is just the most marketable commodity. There's nothing magical about this. It can be seashells, it could be cow patties. It is whatever commodity is most commonly accepted by the population in question. It grows out of the barter system; instead of trading two pairs of sandals for a hog, I might be willing to trade them for beautiful seashells, because I know I can trade those for the hog I want.
Past a certain point, you get the 'network effect', where everyone accepts something because everyone ELSE accepts it. Gold happened to be what we settled on historically, because it's beautiful, malleable, fungible, and carries a high value in a small space. (ie, it's quite difficult to mine). It's a good choice, but another most-marketable commodity could certainly arise.
I've argued with gold bugs who just insist fervently that gold IS MONEY and there's no other money and yadeyadeya. That's not true, all there are is commodities. Gold is unique in that it has value in and of itself; all other currencies are someone else's promise to pay. I think that is why they get all frothy about the gold=money bit... they don't see the larger truth.....but they DO see the inherent fraud in a paper-backed system.
The whole point of government-issued fiat money is control over the economy and the ability to extract more value without the citizens noticing or complaing. The money supply doesn't need regulation any more than the soap supply does; if there's not enough, prices will adjust. If there's too much, prices will adjust.
Real money is simply the most marketable commodity. Fiat money is a tax system.
Heh, it's interesting that this was posted now. I just changed my.sig a few days ago to touch on this topic. I'll repeat it here in case I someday change it:
"US Dollar, n: A politician's promise to pay nothing on demand."
This is one of the few government promises you can be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN will be kept.
What the article is talking about is, indirectly, that the paper money you use every day has no inherent value, so why on earth would anyone accept it as money? A currency that is unbacked by anything, but is decreed by law to be a medium of exchange, is called a 'fiat currency', because it obtains its value from executive fiat (decree). Basically, the government is forcing you to accept the US Dollar at gunpoint. If you do not, they can arrest you. (seriously, they can!)
At one time, money was mostly gold, and to a lesser degree, silver. The way it basically worked was this: you, the gold miner (or perhaps, trader with foreign gold currencies), brought your gold to the government mint. In exchange, they gave you a certain number of gold coins, less some percentage to cover the costs of coinage. Gold must be alloyed with other metals, generally copper, to have enough hardness to last through day-to-day wear, and coins were rated based on their 'fineness', or how much actual gold they had in them. Offhand, I think an 8% copper mix was fairly common, and I believe it was often the case that a 1:1 trade was executed; for every ounce of gold you brought in, you received.92 of an ounce, plus.08 ounce of copper, in the form of a coin. The.08 was, in essence, the coinage fee.
Well, over time, monarchs and governments figured out that they could increase that percentage a very great deal; for every one ounce of gold they took in, they only had to give out, say, half that much gold, if they mixed in enough copper. Historically, this has been a major sign of economic distress, sometimes presaging the complete failure of the government. Henry VIII is often cited as an egregious example; his 'silver' coins were actually copper with a very thin coat of silver. The high points would often wear off, leading to his nickname of 'Old Copper-Nose'. He did terrible damage to England's economy through this practice. There is a specific word for this form of taxation, but I cannot remember it or find it with Google right now. But it is very, very lucrative; the more you debase your currency, the more of the real value in the economy you can extract through deceit. Over the long haul, the strongest economies were always the ones with the strongest currencies, likely due to the fact that more of the money stayed in the hands of the population. A hidden tax is still tax, and taxes are bad, on the whole, for an economy.
Now, consider what we have now. Instead of anyone doing (a great deal of!) work to mine gold or some other metal out of the ground, instead, the governments of the world can simply wave their hands and create new currency at will. This is absolutely wonderful for the governments in question, because it allows them to extract, at zero cost, value from their own, and other economies. By printing up bills marked '100', they can extract 10 times as much value as from bills marked '10', at zero extra cost. The US is taking huge advantage of this; we are importing vast quantities of goods from all over the globe, and in exchange we're shipping back worthless green paper, to the tune of over a billion dollars a day. This is great for us, but foreign readers... you and your countries are being RAPED. If you think the US is hated now, wait until the world figures out out just how bad it's been rooked.
As a quick aside, I got my very first 'flamebait' mod awhile back for observing, in a discussion about using ink-jet printers to print money, that of COURSE the government hates that! They don't want anyone muscling in on their turf. Printing fifties on your inkjet and spending them
Your argument is quite persuasive, but I think it's at a bit of a tangent. You are arguing that, in essence, unsolicited email is trespass, much like standing on your front lawn with a sign would be.
In the cases you cite where people are compromising servers -- obviously that's not acceptable, and can be attacked via the standard hacking laws. But I don't think you argument entirely applies in the case where I am paying for my bandwidth and using my own PC... not doing anything illegal, no forgery -- just sending standard email.
When you put up a mail server, you are providing a public access. It is, in essence, a mailbox. Now, like your mailbox, you have the right to tell someone to not use it anymore, but the nature of a public service is that anyone can use it once. Further use can be handled like other variations of trespass.
There is a real danger, however, in having the government putting prior restraints on the kinds of communication that can be attempted, *particularly* political speech. In our zealous hatred of spam (and I hate it too!), I fear we are rushing into bad solutions. Laws are very hard to deal with, and are easily misused by those in power. Laws designed explicitly to silence people are scary. Spam is a problem, but it's one with technical solutions.... legalized prior restraint on speech (censorship) strikes me as a much greater problem. To get rid of an annoyance, we're accepting a DANGER instead... that's not very good thinking.
Returning to my original argument, I think the exception for political speech is important and necessary. If someone persists in sending you mail you don't want, you have every right to tell them to bug off, and to go after them for trespass if they do not. But, since there isn't yet any way for you to specify what kinds of mail you will accept, I believe that freedom is best served by making the first message non-punishable.
Yes, I realize that telling, individually, all five billion people on the planet not to bother you is not workable. We DO need a technical solution to this, some method of specifying the kinds of mail you want. But we don't yet have the electronic equivalent of a No Solicitation sign. Rushing into bad laws, to make up for that lack, somewhat reduces an annoyance, but sets a dangerous precedent.
I think it's important that there's an exception for political speech. Saying 'you can't send unsolicited email' is much like saying 'you cannot speak in public'. I have little problem with restrictions on COMMERCIAL email, since that's rarely (never?) important to guarding anyone's rights. (And no, you don't have any inherent right to make money by annoying people.)
You DO, however, have the right to tell people your opinion, and if you happen to tell many millions of people at once, well... that's technology now. Social pressure will be enough to contain this problem: Howard has probably gotten a lot more negative backlash from his spam campaign than positive. There really aren't any other alternatives... unless, of course, you want the government to get in the business of determining what kinds of political email are acceptable.
Surely, Comrade, you'd have no argument with the Party ensuring your email is safe? Think of the children.
What the article doesn't really cover is that Vinge's concept of the Singularity is not so much AI (artificial intelligence) as it is IA, Intelligence Amplification.
Vinge argues, quite persuasively, that once we gain the ability to make ourselves smarter, humanity will transform into something that pre-Singularity humans cannot understand.... he assumes that smarter people will be able to make themselves smarter still, and that each new wave of IA will take less and less time to develop, until something happens that ordinary humans simply cannot grasp.
But that's making a lot of asusmptions... that we can indeed amplify our own intelligence, and that we can do it better and better as we get smarter and smarter. It's possible that we may hit diminishing returns before transforming into something that unamplified humanity doesn't understand.
It also strikes me as highly likely that we may all simply blow ourselves to hell. The Singularity could end up going in reverse -- us bombing ourselves back into the Dark Ages.
There are any number of possible ways to blow ourselves to kingdom come, and only a few where we keep everyone sane and only give the right people power. Hell, we might have some segment of our population evolve into the Next Humanity while the old style blows itself to hell.
One of Vinge's observations is that as technology advances, ordinary people get more and more power. Eventually, we will all routinely control technology with equivalent power to the atom bomb. It won't BE atom bombs, but something similar. And learning how to live on a planet where any individual citizen can vaporize large chunks of it -- is going to be difficult.
What's weird is that, while I think a big slaughter, a massive die-off, is not just possible, but likely -- I do suspect that some portion of humanity will indeed transcend to something new. There is more going on than we realize, and there's plenty of evolution yet to be done.
Yes, it IS possible to be both a pessimist and an optimist at the same time.:-)
You are correct in pretty much everything you say -- these things did cross my mind while I was posting (mostly that management is expensive), but it depends on what they want. If the idea is to just archive everything and then pull back specific records on people with a search warrant, that's simpler than trying to truly process and search all that data.
What prompted my post was the great(-great?) grandparent post about tinfoil hats. This wasn't meant as an exhaustive study, just an observation that it's quite doable, although expensive, with today's technology, and it's only going to get cheaper. And the raw storage would be substantially less than I was claiming... I had misremembered the data rate for compressed voice streams. 8Kbytes is uncompressed, raw data -- with a good, lossless codec, it could be at least shrunk in half. And if we're willing to accept lossy compression, cut by 90%.
10/1 compression would let Vonage archive 100,000 calls a day for 10 days and comfortably fit it on a hard drive... hell, with the newest 400gb drives, they could probably put a whole month on one drive. Yes, it's going to cost them more than the raw $300 or so for the drive. There are many other costs than just the storage medium. But what I'm trying to point out is that it's not just doable, it's even pretty cheap from a individual provider's standpoint.
With the budgets that projects like Echelon have, I believe that archiving all voice communication anywhere on the planet will be an achievable goal within five years. Expensive, but doable.
Well, assuming a 3 minute call... you can store voice data in about 8k/second. 3 * 60 * 8 = 1440... meaning the 'average' telephone call is going to take almost exactly one floppy disk to store.
Storage is somewhere around a buck a gig, so that means I could store a thousand average calls for about a buck.
Let's say that everyone in the country makes five 'average' calls a day. That's 250 million people, or about 1.25 billion calls a day.
In terms of just storage, archiving every one of those calls would probably cost about 1.25 million/day, or about 500 million a year. We spend that much in Iraq every couple of DAYS.
Now, there are going to be scaling problems with addressing this much data, and it wouldn't be this cheap, but if our government really wanted to do this, they *could*. It's feasible, although costly, to do TODAY... and in five years, it'll be a lot cheaper.
And look at it from a smaller perspective... if Vonage is handling a hundred thousand calls a day, they could easily archive an entire day onto ONE HARD DRIVE.
It's not nearly as tinfoil-hattish as you seem to think.
Like it or not, people didn't want to buy Macs. Whether or not Word was on the Mac first was entirely irrelevant; people had IBM-compatibles, and they wanted what would run on what they knew... and would be cheap. Macs have always been tremendously expensive. When people could buy a $1500 machine to do good word processing, and then spend another $450 on their office suite, that beat the pants off $3500 for the hardware + $450 for the software + $X to replace all their existing software, with some large number for X.
The transition to a GUI environment was a key inflection point. Microsoft's victory was far from inevitable. Windows 3.0 was terrible, and shouldn't have succeeded... but it ran Word, and for a long time it was the only GUI on the PC that did.
And that, ultimately, is why Windows rules the desktop.
One thing that most people forget is that Windows didn't start as a monopoly, and probably wouldn't have gotten there on its own (lack of) merit. Microsoft's monopoly is built on Word, not Windows.
In the DOS days, Microsoft had tremendous mindshare, but they still faced real competition. IBM had PC-DOS (which may have just been licensed MS-DOS... it's been too many years and I'm not sure anymore.) And Digital Research had DR-DOS. Now, neither of these were BIG competitors, but the barrier to entry in the DOS market wasn't that high.
There came a time when the world was ready to start transitioning to GUIs. The Mac had shown it was possible, and PC hardware eventually got fast enough to do something similar. Microsoft had their Windows product, but its early incarnations were absolutely terrible and nobody bought them. IBM partnered with Microsoft on OS/2, and for a long time, it looked very much like that was the way the world was headed. The expectation in all the magazines at the time was that OS/2 was everyone's future. (and, for the record, it was an excellent operating system, one which I liked very much.... with some of the worst documentation and error/help messages ever done. IBM was used to mainframes, not Joe Computer User. No big surprise that it failed, in retrospect.)
When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.
Word for DOS was a good product, but was always an also-ran next to WordPerfect. WP was arcane and difficult, but it was tremendously powerful. Word for DOS was easy, but not very powerful, and wasn't taken seriously by very many.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done. When people saw how easy it was to, for instance, lay out a table -- they switched from WP 5.1 for DOS in droves. EVERYONE wanted Word: it was THE program. This was the 'killer app' that drove Windows to monopoly status. For a long time, the only real competitor on the Windows platform was Ami Pro, which was a neat program, but more of a page-layout tool than a true word processor. Word kicked its butt for most tasks. WordPerfect took years to come out with a really good Windows version, and by the time it arrived, the market had shifted and they were dead.
THIS is the key to Microsoft's dominance... a single program that was so good, everyone had to have it. They sold mountains of copies, tens of millions (into a much smaller market). And then they really started using the dirty tricks they learned in the DOS days to lock their competitors out. They dropped OS/2 like a hot potato, and made damn sure that it was never preloaded on ANYTHING.
All those billions really come down to two things: a single, insanely great program, and absolute ruthlessness. It is very unlikely that Apple could have survived that environment. Had they come out with MacOS for Intel, then Microsoft would have flexed their TRUE monopoly, that of Word... and stopped development for MacOS. Without Word, MacOS was dead. And Apple has certainly shit on their users many times, but they have very rarely been genuinely ruthless toward their competitors. It's not in their nature; they're trying to excel. Microsoft wants everyone else dead and buried.
I do think that Apple should have licensed their software onto other manufacturer's machines. Power Computing moved the Mac faster than it has moved before or since. But they had NO chance at becoming the new Microsoft without Word... and a sharp knife for their competitors' backs.
Probably, unless he signed a non-compete, about all Seagate can do is is cost him a bundle in legal fees. (Hopefully WD will cover those fees.)
However, that could depend on the state laws. I was surprised by how different things were between California, my home state, and Georgia, where I am now. Interestingly, both states call themselves "Right To Work" states. In California, that means that an employer can't prevent you from working for another employer later; non-competes in that state are not binding. In California, you do indeed have the right to work, and no prior employer can restrict that right.
In Georgia, on the other hand, things are quite different. Here, from what I learned through the grapevine, the employer seems to hold most of the cards, and has most of the rights. You can be terminated at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all, and you have no recourse. Even so, you can still be held to a noncompete. This, apparently, is supposed to encourage employment, and thus they call this the "Right to Work". I think that's an AMAZING display of spin. In English, this Southern euphemism translates to "Right to Bend Over".
Moral: if you don't want to be held to a noncompete, make sure to sign it in California and make sure that your next job is also in California. Unless something has changed in the last two or three years, all they can do to you there is rattle their sabers a bit.
The people with most of the money in the world don't like this idea, because it threatens their power, and they are likely to do more than just spread rumors to derail any such thing.
There are a multitude of ways to depress a stock price. As Warren Buffett has said, in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine, and in the long term, it's a weighing machine. The Guys with the Money have a LOT of "voting" power.
Over the long haul, this won't work -- you can't artificially hold a stock worth X amount of money very far below X forever. But they don't NEED forever. If they sell short, bigtime, and can hold the price down for a year or so, then they win... everyone thinks Dutch Auctions are a losing proposition.
The guys doing this could very well take a serious bath (short sales and derivatives are dangerous), but they may figure this as a cost of doing business.... if this idea takes hold, it could cost them a lot more than the few hundred million dollars they might lose on this manipulation.
Because of this, I fully expect that the Google IPO shares will drop fairly dramatically once they go on public sale. Personally, I'll be looking to buy in the aftermarket.
I spent a great deal of time on this problem too, although with a desktop machine.
If you are into retrogaming, you do not want an AMD chip, from what I can see. It appears that none of the XP processors will provide expanded memory under Windows XP. I believe the A64 is even worse in this regard... in 64-bit mode, a lot of the old addressing modes just go away. Windows XP 64-bit version won't run old games well at all.
You can kind of limp along with DOSBOX, but that's slow. I was hoping VMWare might work, but the sound emulation in VMWare sucks rocks.
Basically, if you're a retrogamer, you're better off with Intel chips.
Vinge is a great(!) SF author. Many of his novels deal with an idea he calls the Singularity; the concept that technology will keep accelerating until we gain the ability to increase our own intelligence, at which point the changes will come so fast that we we will become unrecognizable to pre-Singularity humans.
One of his fundamental ideas is that the growth of technology will give individuals more and more power. I'm not sure if he explicitly says this himself, but one of his themes is that individual people will have the power of atom bombs. It won't BE atom bombs, it will be something else... like the ability to write viruses.
In terms of direct harm, it would appear that Sasser may have done more damage than slamming planes into the WTC. Indirect damage, everyone overreacting and doing stupid things, was tremendously greater with the WTC, of course. But in terms of direct, measurable damage... perhaps Sasser and Netsky were worse?
Speaking, again, purely in economic terms, I wonder how Sasser and Netsky rate against the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs? I realise that the viruses probably didn't kill anyone, and they didn't start or end any wars. We don't feel it as much because everyone paid a little bit, instead of a few people paying a whole lot... but in terms of actual dollars/yen/economic value, I wonder how they compare?
However that comparison comes out, being singlehandledly responsible for 70% of all virus activity over the last year is *a lot* of power. Vinge's Singularity may not be that far off... assuming we don't virus ourselves to death first, anyway.
Properly done, an ACL system will give you a MORE secure system, not a less secure one, because there are fewer chances for mistakes.
In the NT 4.0 days, one of the better ways to handle permissions was the 'AGLP' standard. User A)ccounts go in G)lobal groups, G)lobal groups go in L)ocal groups, and local groups get P)ermissions.
This allows a nice level of indirection. I implemented this standard by specifying that Global groups described groups of people, and that Local groups specified access privileges. I built Local groups on each server describing the kind of access privileges they offered. Generally, I would make four groups for each of my intended shares: Share NA (no access), Share RO, Share RW, and Share Admin. I would assign the appropriate ACLs in the filesystem, and then put Global groups from the domain into the proper Local groups. The Accounting group, for instance, might get RW on the Accounting share. Management might get RO, and the head of Accounting and the network admins would go into the Share Admin group.
What this meant was that, once I set up a server, I *never again* had to touch filesystem permissions. Not ever. All I had to do was manipulate group membership with User Manager... with the caveat, of course, that affected users had to log off and on again for permissions to take effect. But this is also true with Unix, in many cases. (when group membership changes).
Note that Windows 2K and XP have more advanced ways to handle this, so don't use this design in a Win2K+ network.... this is the beginnings of the right idea, but 2K added some new group concepts. Under Active Directory, this idea isn't quite right. (I'd be more specific but I have forgotten the details... I don't work much with Windows anymore.)
ACLs are key to this setup, because I can arbitrarily specify permissions and assign those permissions to arbitrary groups.
By comparison, User, Group, and Other are exceedingly coarse permissions, and it is very easy to make a mistake. What if someone from Human Resources needs access to a specific Accounting share, but nothing else? Under Unix, I can't just put them in the Accounting group, because that will give them access to everything under that Group permission. I'd probably have to make a new group, and put everyone from Accounting and the one person from HR into that, and then put the special shared files into a specific directory, and make sure the directory is set group suid. That is a lot of steps. Everything is always done in a hurry in IT, and lots of steps are a great way to make mistakes. Messing up just one can result in security compromise.
In my group-based ACL system, I'd still have to make a custom group, perhaps "HR People With Access to Accounting Share". But I'd only have to touch one user account, the HR person's, and wouldn't have to disrupt Accounting's normal workflow at all, or touch any filesystem permissions.
Instead of a whole series of steps, any one of which can be done wrong, I have only three: Create new Global group, put HR person in new Global group, put Global group in the correct Local group. All done. Hard to screw this up too badly.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that a badly-implemented ACL setup is a complete nightmare. But a clean, well-thought-out ACL system, in a complex environment, is virtually always superior to standard Unix permissions.
I can barely hear my 2HD. In the low-lamp mode, I think the rated noise level is 20db. If the room is absolutely silent, I can just barely tell it's on.
It's a little louder in high lamp mode, but even then it's still reasonable. (30db??)
If you have good light control, which *most* folks either have or can arrange, a front projector is an extremely good way to go. You get a gigantic screen and great picture quality. And no, they don't have speakers, but most folks I know have a stereo in the front room anyway, and just hook up through that.
The biggest decision point on projectors is what you want to display. If you just want to do Standard Definition(SD) stuff, then even the cheapo projectors are fine. The Infocus X1 (and, apparently, the replacement X2) are very well-regarded. These are DLP projectors that do 800x600, which is just fine for SD material, including DVDs. (which are not very high resolution).
In general, DLP technology at a given resolution is better than LCD at the same resolution; the contrast ratio is better and the pixels are larger, resulting in less screendoor. However, because of how the image is generated, it is important to do a test viewing before buying. About 10% of the population sees rainbows with DLP. The technology basically consists of a spinning color wheel in front of a bright light, with thousands of tiny mirrors. The mirrors rotate so that a certain amount of each color gets through while the wheel is showing. During the (short) interval between colors, the mirrors realign. So you are seeing red/green/blue/white, red/green/blue/white. Most people can't see this, but some do, and it shows up as rainbows.
If you are sensitive to rainbows, or if you want to do HDTV, then LCD projectors are the only reasonable alternative at this point. Both the Panaonic AE500 and L500 (same unit, different distribution channels) and the Sanyo PLV-Z2 are excellent projectors that do 1280x720 resolution for around $2000. The contrast ratio isn't as good as DLP (1300:1 instead of 2000:1). To get a true 1280x720 DLP projector, you are talking $5000+: if you can afford that, it will look better, but I doubt it's 2.5x better.
LCD is more susceptible to misalignment and stuck/dead pixels than the DLPs. Misalignment mostly manifests as vertical banding. In watching posts on avsforum.com, nearly everyone who starts out with a problem will find an adjustment that will make them happy, but the chances of starting out unhappy are higher with LCD.
Of the Panasonic and Z2, the Panny is considered to have a little nicer screen quality (and is a shade cheaper), and the Z2 is much more flexible about mounting, due to a nice feature called 'lens shift', which will let you move the projected image an amazing distance on your wall.
I have a Studio Experience 2HD, which is a rebadged Z2 with a better warranty, at a little higher price. I am EXTREMELY happy with this unit. I have a HTPC hooked up to it, using PowerStrip to run a true native 1280x720 out the DVI port, and it looks *awesome*. I'm throwing a 100" 16:9 screen..... playing Ninja Gaiden on a screen 7.5 FEET wide is pretty darn impressive. "You still measure your screen size in inches? How quaint!":-) And they're tiny, easily fitting under one arm. At 9lbs, I know you could carry it comfortably with two fingers, and probably with one.
If you have good light control, you want true HDTV, and you want it BIG.... these projectors are a fantastic way to go. There are many, many tweaks available, but right out of the box, either unit is likely to knock your socks off.
Both units are more than you need, however, for SD material. For that, you're fine with the $1K projectors.
Oh, one final note: you also have a runtime expense with front projectors. The Z2's bulb, for example, is rated as lasting about 3000 hours, and replacements cost about $300, so the run cost is about 10 cents/hour. Make sure to find out the expected bulb life and cost before buying a projector.
($300 for a bulb, you gasp? Yep... you gotta realize that these things are putting out an AMAZING amount of light in a very small space. That's not easy to do, and they cost plenty.)
What a truly amazing display of stereotyping and straw-manning.
I find the last line particularly telling... the implication is that one must always be in favor of war, or be a hypocrite. Apparently, we're not supposed to use our brains for ourselves and determine whether a given conflict is justified.
Orwell really understood part of human behavior, the desire for power; 1984 and Animal Farm are great classics. But I don't think he understood how to fight it, because the mindless jingoism he seems to be advocating will lead straight into those same scenarios. "My country, right or wrong" is a very dangerous attitude. If you'll support those in power no matter what, then eventually you will be used to do things that are wrong, because in the BEST case, leaders are still human and make mistakes. Most of the time, their competence is at least somewhat questionable, and occasionally they shade into outright incompetence. In the worst case, they are actively malignant.
Bush and team are, at least, rather fumbling and inept. What I fear is someone who is both highly competent and highly malignant. The mindless patriots that Orwell seems to be advocating here are exactly the tools this kind (his kind!) of despot needs.
"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction were our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
The designs I've seen for the space elevators all have a large counterweight in orbit. The centripetal force from that counterweight is what suspends the cable.
If the cable is severed at the bottom, where terrorist attacks can hit it, then it will simply shoot off into space. This would, obviously, be very bad for people ON the cable at the time, but it wouldn't have any other significant effect.
If the cable were severed at the TOP, out in space, then yes, it would come curving down and slam into the earth at hypersonic velocity..... unless they cut it loose from the ground.
They absolutely will have some kind of failsafe release like this. It would take many hours for the cable to fall, and they would know about the problem within minutes. As long as they cut the bottom portion within the safety margin (likely several hours), the cable will still just go spinning off into space. Still sucks terribly for anyone ON the cable, but there wouldn't be much danger to anyone else.
Finally, the cable could be severed somewhere in the middle. The worst possible spot for a cut would be just below the orbital ejection point....the spot at which the remaining cable cannot be thrown out of the Earth's gravitational field by cutting the bottom tie. However, the cable will be thickest at this point, because it will be the area of maximum strain; I've seen estimates that suggest it could be a mile in diameter. It would be exceptionally difficult to cut. But even if they managed it, if they build the cable so that the maximum cable length that can still fall, will fall on nothing but ocean, no big deal.
The ONLY way I can see it being a possible danger would be if they managed two or more simultaneous, complete cuts, which could result in pieces of the cable being flung into inhabited areas, but the number of things that would have to go wrong at the same time would make it exceptionally difficult to do even deliberately. It would be essentially impossible for it to happen spontaneously.
We had a similar television, though I have no idea what brand/make it was. We found out that the lights in the room could change the channel.
The lights were floorstanders with a lampshade. The lampshade connected via two prongs that fit into receptables on the base. There were little metal dome covers to sort of lock it into place. We discovered, by accident, that flipping the little metal cover up would change the channel when it hit the base again.
The light ended up completely replacing the remote for us. It worked 99% of the time, so it was actually more convenient than trying to find that stupid remote. (you have to realize, at the time there were only 13 channels, and we changed round-robin.... 2 to 3 to 4, and then back to 2 after 13. We couldn't go directly to channel 8, we had to flip through everything in between.) And back then, changing channels was 99% of what we did with a remote... we'd turn the TV on when we walked into the room, and once the volume was adjusted, we hardly ever touched it. All we did was change channels, and we never spent any time finding the lamp. Although I bet we looked pretty weird reaching up and flinging that little cover over and over and over (12 or 13 times) when we wanted to change from channel 5 to channel 4.:-)
I was thinking about suggesting a modern version of this... a remote-control lamp would be kind of neat. Unfortunately, you do so much more with a remote now that it's probably not practical. Bummer. Changing the channels with the light was cool.:-)
Alternative browsers such as Mozilla or Netscape may not protect users, the agency warned, if those browsers invoke ActiveX control or HTML rendering engines.
Phew, thank goodness the open source coders are smart enough to leave those nasty HTML rendering engines out of web browsers!
The body is a very complex beast, and has evolved to work in ways we simply don't understand yet. Adding our own signals to the body's natural electromagnetic field may be completely harmless, but it could also have strange, unpleasant side effects over time.
Personally, I don't plan to carry any such device until they've been on the market, and in fairly wide uptake, for at least 10 years. I'm generally an early adopter of almost anything, but this technology worries me a little.
RAID-5 is, in general, one of the slower RAID options for writing. Because of its slow writes, in fact, it's often not a very good choice for databases. Serious hardware acceleration will mitigate much, but not all, of the penalty.
With RAID in general, you're trading off between speed, cost, size, and reliability.
RAID-0 is the fastest, as it is a stripe; alternate blocks are written on two devices, so it doubles both read and write speed, but doubles the chance of failure. (if EITHER drive fails, you're toast.)
RAID-1 is a mirror, which halves your chance of total failure (both drives must fail), but generally is no faster than one drive. It's usually a little slower on writes. Sometimes, depending on the controller/software, it may be faster on reads, although it most likely won't be 2x as fast. In general, if you assume RAID-1 is the same speed as a single drive, you won't be too far off.
RAID 0+1 is a mirror of two stripe sets. You stripe drives 1-3 and 4-6, for instance, and then mirror them. You get speed this way, but the reliability isn't as good as it should be. If you lose one drive from each side, you're dead.
RAID 10 is a stripe of mirror sets. You mirror drives 1+2, 3+4, and 5+6, and then run a stripe across the mirrors. This is much more reliable, and almost identical speed. (with only four drives, however, there's no practical difference between 10 and 0+1.) In this instance, you're only dead if you lose both drives in a single mirror. (ie, in a six-drive RAID-10, you can absolutely lose one drive, and you have an 80% chance of surviving the loss of two.)
RAID-4 isn't used often; it stripes data across several drives, and uses another dedicated drive to write parity info. Network Appliance NetFilers use this system, because it allows you to expand a RAID fairly painlessly. However, very few systems do RAID-4, because the parity drive gets beaten to death.
RAID-5 is the same as 4, except that the parity data is striped across the drives. In the first cylinder, drive 1 may have the parity stripe; in the second cylinder, it may be drive 2, then drive 3... whatever strategy your particular controller uses. By distributing the parity, the load is also distributed. Small writes are very slow in this system, as the existing data has to be read from all the drives, the new data added, parity recomputed, and the data written back. Big block-mode transfers also suffer somewhat, but a clever controller will realize that all the data is being replaced, so the existing data doesn't matter, and can just be overwritten. Reads tend to be very fast on raid 5.
OK, all that said.... anyone out there know a good SCSI RAID-5 controller for Linux? I want one that has pretty good muscle to write quickly. I'm experimenting right now with a Compaq SmartArray 3200, which is terrible... even reads are dismally slow. Was looking at the Adaptec 3400 series, but I can't find any hard data on whether it will work well with Linux; Adaptec only supports up to Redhat 7.2 with the dumb thing, and nobody seems to be talking about them on Usenet. The LSI Logic cards are supposedly all supported, but it's hard to tell how much muscle they actually have. I'm going to be RAIDING 6 10K SCSI drives, and want strong database write performance. Is this even possible on current controller hardware?
Boy, this guy is really not thinking too clearly. His argument, in essence, is "you should adapt to the computer, the computer shouldn't adapt to you". He even goes so far as to say that the computer should work like real objects do.
If I wanted the computer ro work just like real objects, I'd use those objects instead... they're cheaper! I want the computer to be BETTER.
He talks about how multiple levels of directory are bad, and that you should, in essence, dump all your files into a single folder. I don't know what crack this guy is smoking, but there's no WAY I could find anything that way. I don't remember what all the files on my filesystem are called! Say I want a program I downloaded last month sometime. In his system, I'd have to go to my Downloads directory and try to figure out which, of THOUSANDS OF FILES, is the one I want. I'm not supposed to sort by category, like Games, or even, heaven forfend, an English name for the file? And in his system, I can have only ONE program called SETUP.EXE. Earth to author, that's not how things WORK around here.
This kind of spatial metaphor for data is a blind alley. It's poor thinking. It makes good sense when you are talking about 1980s computers, because 1980s computers emulated the paper devices of that era pretty well. You can fit about as many papers on a floppy disk as you can fit in one folder, so it makes sense for floppies act like folders. But the computers of the 21st century are a whole different beast. There's a reason we usually call them 'directories' now instead of 'folders'... we're storing vastly more in them. We don't have desk drawers on modern machines, we have LIBRARIES.
Even a file cabinet metaphor doesn't work very well when you're dealing with the vast amounts of data we have now. My data partition, for example, has 63,596 files on it, divided up into 3,703 folders. Using a normal interface, I can navigate that huge amount of data very quickly and extract what I need. The biggest limitation, at this point, is my memory... folders and subfolders help me to remember what I have and where to find it. Per the author, apparently I'm supposed to dump SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND FILES into the SAME DIRECTORY. Showing all these files in ONE WINDOW is somehow inherently 'better' because it's 'more like a desk drawer'.
The spatial metaphor people are lost in nostalgia for a simpler time, and are letting that nostalgia replace analysis. There's no WAY I could fit sixty five thousand pieces of paper in a desk drawer, and expecting a modern hard disk to react like one is poor thinking.... it's nostalgia. Computers don't work like that anymore, and people are very resistant to being shoehorned into that interface. Reasonable people would be asking why, not telling 95% of the entire computing population that they are brain-damaged.
GNOME devs, this is a blind alley. You have gone the wrong way, and the sooner you realize that and back off, the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Money is just the most marketable commodity. There's nothing magical about this. It can be seashells, it could be cow patties. It is whatever commodity is most commonly accepted by the population in question. It grows out of the barter system; instead of trading two pairs of sandals for a hog, I might be willing to trade them for beautiful seashells, because I know I can trade those for the hog I want.
Past a certain point, you get the 'network effect', where everyone accepts something because everyone ELSE accepts it. Gold happened to be what we settled on historically, because it's beautiful, malleable, fungible, and carries a high value in a small space. (ie, it's quite difficult to mine). It's a good choice, but another most-marketable commodity could certainly arise.
I've argued with gold bugs who just insist fervently that gold IS MONEY and there's no other money and yadeyadeya. That's not true, all there are is commodities. Gold is unique in that it has value in and of itself; all other currencies are someone else's promise to pay. I think that is why they get all frothy about the gold=money bit... they don't see the larger truth.....but they DO see the inherent fraud in a paper-backed system.
The whole point of government-issued fiat money is control over the economy and the ability to extract more value without the citizens noticing or complaing. The money supply doesn't need regulation any more than the soap supply does; if there's not enough, prices will adjust. If there's too much, prices will adjust.
Real money is simply the most marketable commodity. Fiat money is a tax system.
Heh, it's interesting that this was posted now. I just changed my .sig a few days ago to touch on this topic. I'll repeat it here in case I someday change it:
.92 of an ounce, plus .08 ounce of copper, in the form of a coin. The .08 was, in essence, the coinage fee.
"US Dollar, n: A politician's promise to pay nothing on demand."
This is one of the few government promises you can be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN will be kept.
What the article is talking about is, indirectly, that the paper money you use every day has no inherent value, so why on earth would anyone accept it as money? A currency that is unbacked by anything, but is decreed by law to be a medium of exchange, is called a 'fiat currency', because it obtains its value from executive fiat (decree). Basically, the government is forcing you to accept the US Dollar at gunpoint. If you do not, they can arrest you. (seriously, they can!)
At one time, money was mostly gold, and to a lesser degree, silver. The way it basically worked was this: you, the gold miner (or perhaps, trader with foreign gold currencies), brought your gold to the government mint. In exchange, they gave you a certain number of gold coins, less some percentage to cover the costs of coinage. Gold must be alloyed with other metals, generally copper, to have enough hardness to last through day-to-day wear, and coins were rated based on their 'fineness', or how much actual gold they had in them. Offhand, I think an 8% copper mix was fairly common, and I believe it was often the case that a 1:1 trade was executed; for every ounce of gold you brought in, you received
Well, over time, monarchs and governments figured out that they could increase that percentage a very great deal; for every one ounce of gold they took in, they only had to give out, say, half that much gold, if they mixed in enough copper. Historically, this has been a major sign of economic distress, sometimes presaging the complete failure of the government. Henry VIII is often cited as an egregious example; his 'silver' coins were actually copper with a very thin coat of silver. The high points would often wear off, leading to his nickname of 'Old Copper-Nose'. He did terrible damage to England's economy through this practice. There is a specific word for this form of taxation, but I cannot remember it or find it with Google right now. But it is very, very lucrative; the more you debase your currency, the more of the real value in the economy you can extract through deceit. Over the long haul, the strongest economies were always the ones with the strongest currencies, likely due to the fact that more of the money stayed in the hands of the population. A hidden tax is still tax, and taxes are bad, on the whole, for an economy.
Now, consider what we have now. Instead of anyone doing (a great deal of!) work to mine gold or some other metal out of the ground, instead, the governments of the world can simply wave their hands and create new currency at will. This is absolutely wonderful for the governments in question, because it allows them to extract, at zero cost, value from their own, and other economies. By printing up bills marked '100', they can extract 10 times as much value as from bills marked '10', at zero extra cost. The US is taking huge advantage of this; we are importing vast quantities of goods from all over the globe, and in exchange we're shipping back worthless green paper, to the tune of over a billion dollars a day. This is great for us, but foreign readers... you and your countries are being RAPED. If you think the US is hated now, wait until the world figures out out just how bad it's been rooked.
As a quick aside, I got my very first 'flamebait' mod awhile back for observing, in a discussion about using ink-jet printers to print money, that of COURSE the government hates that! They don't want anyone muscling in on their turf. Printing fifties on your inkjet and spending them
Your argument is quite persuasive, but I think it's at a bit of a tangent. You are arguing that, in essence, unsolicited email is trespass, much like standing on your front lawn with a sign would be.
In the cases you cite where people are compromising servers -- obviously that's not acceptable, and can be attacked via the standard hacking laws. But I don't think you argument entirely applies in the case where I am paying for my bandwidth and using my own PC... not doing anything illegal, no forgery -- just sending standard email.
When you put up a mail server, you are providing a public access. It is, in essence, a mailbox. Now, like your mailbox, you have the right to tell someone to not use it anymore, but the nature of a public service is that anyone can use it once. Further use can be handled like other variations of trespass.
There is a real danger, however, in having the government putting prior restraints on the kinds of communication that can be attempted, *particularly* political speech. In our zealous hatred of spam (and I hate it too!), I fear we are rushing into bad solutions. Laws are very hard to deal with, and are easily misused by those in power. Laws designed explicitly to silence people are scary. Spam is a problem, but it's one with technical solutions.... legalized prior restraint on speech (censorship) strikes me as a much greater problem. To get rid of an annoyance, we're accepting a DANGER instead... that's not very good thinking.
Returning to my original argument, I think the exception for political speech is important and necessary. If someone persists in sending you mail you don't want, you have every right to tell them to bug off, and to go after them for trespass if they do not. But, since there isn't yet any way for you to specify what kinds of mail you will accept, I believe that freedom is best served by making the first message non-punishable.
Yes, I realize that telling, individually, all five billion people on the planet not to bother you is not workable. We DO need a technical solution to this, some method of specifying the kinds of mail you want. But we don't yet have the electronic equivalent of a No Solicitation sign. Rushing into bad laws, to make up for that lack, somewhat reduces an annoyance, but sets a dangerous precedent.
Doesn't seem like a good trade to me.
I think it's important that there's an exception for political speech. Saying 'you can't send unsolicited email' is much like saying 'you cannot speak in public'. I have little problem with restrictions on COMMERCIAL email, since that's rarely (never?) important to guarding anyone's rights. (And no, you don't have any inherent right to make money by annoying people.)
You DO, however, have the right to tell people your opinion, and if you happen to tell many millions of people at once, well... that's technology now. Social pressure will be enough to contain this problem: Howard has probably gotten a lot more negative backlash from his spam campaign than positive. There really aren't any other alternatives... unless, of course, you want the government to get in the business of determining what kinds of political email are acceptable.
Surely, Comrade, you'd have no argument with the Party ensuring your email is safe? Think of the children.
What the article doesn't really cover is that Vinge's concept of the Singularity is not so much AI (artificial intelligence) as it is IA, Intelligence Amplification.
... that we can indeed amplify our own intelligence, and that we can do it better and better as we get smarter and smarter. It's possible that we may hit diminishing returns before transforming into something that unamplified humanity doesn't understand.
:-)
Vinge argues, quite persuasively, that once we gain the ability to make ourselves smarter, humanity will transform into something that pre-Singularity humans cannot understand.... he assumes that smarter people will be able to make themselves smarter still, and that each new wave of IA will take less and less time to develop, until something happens that ordinary humans simply cannot grasp.
But that's making a lot of asusmptions
It also strikes me as highly likely that we may all simply blow ourselves to hell. The Singularity could end up going in reverse -- us bombing ourselves back into the Dark Ages.
There are any number of possible ways to blow ourselves to kingdom come, and only a few where we keep everyone sane and only give the right people power. Hell, we might have some segment of our population evolve into the Next Humanity while the old style blows itself to hell.
One of Vinge's observations is that as technology advances, ordinary people get more and more power. Eventually, we will all routinely control technology with equivalent power to the atom bomb. It won't BE atom bombs, but something similar. And learning how to live on a planet where any individual citizen can vaporize large chunks of it -- is going to be difficult.
What's weird is that, while I think a big slaughter, a massive die-off, is not just possible, but likely -- I do suspect that some portion of humanity will indeed transcend to something new. There is more going on than we realize, and there's plenty of evolution yet to be done.
Yes, it IS possible to be both a pessimist and an optimist at the same time.
You are correct in pretty much everything you say -- these things did cross my mind while I was posting (mostly that management is expensive), but it depends on what they want. If the idea is to just archive everything and then pull back specific records on people with a search warrant, that's simpler than trying to truly process and search all that data.
What prompted my post was the great(-great?) grandparent post about tinfoil hats. This wasn't meant as an exhaustive study, just an observation that it's quite doable, although expensive, with today's technology, and it's only going to get cheaper. And the raw storage would be substantially less than I was claiming... I had misremembered the data rate for compressed voice streams. 8Kbytes is uncompressed, raw data -- with a good, lossless codec, it could be at least shrunk in half. And if we're willing to accept lossy compression, cut by 90%.
10/1 compression would let Vonage archive 100,000 calls a day for 10 days and comfortably fit it on a hard drive... hell, with the newest 400gb drives, they could probably put a whole month on one drive. Yes, it's going to cost them more than the raw $300 or so for the drive. There are many other costs than just the storage medium. But what I'm trying to point out is that it's not just doable, it's even pretty cheap from a individual provider's standpoint.
With the budgets that projects like Echelon have, I believe that archiving all voice communication anywhere on the planet will be an achievable goal within five years. Expensive, but doable.
Worth thinking about.
Well, assuming a 3 minute call... you can store voice data in about 8k/second. 3 * 60 * 8 = 1440... meaning the 'average' telephone call is going to take almost exactly one floppy disk to store.
Storage is somewhere around a buck a gig, so that means I could store a thousand average calls for about a buck.
Let's say that everyone in the country makes five 'average' calls a day. That's 250 million people, or about 1.25 billion calls a day.
In terms of just storage, archiving every one of those calls would probably cost about 1.25 million/day, or about 500 million a year. We spend that much in Iraq every couple of DAYS.
Now, there are going to be scaling problems with addressing this much data, and it wouldn't be this cheap, but if our government really wanted to do this, they *could*. It's feasible, although costly, to do TODAY... and in five years, it'll be a lot cheaper.
And look at it from a smaller perspective... if Vonage is handling a hundred thousand calls a day, they could easily archive an entire day onto ONE HARD DRIVE.
It's not nearly as tinfoil-hattish as you seem to think.
Like it or not, people didn't want to buy Macs. Whether or not Word was on the Mac first was entirely irrelevant; people had IBM-compatibles, and they wanted what would run on what they knew... and would be cheap. Macs have always been tremendously expensive. When people could buy a $1500 machine to do good word processing, and then spend another $450 on their office suite, that beat the pants off $3500 for the hardware + $450 for the software + $X to replace all their existing software, with some large number for X.
The transition to a GUI environment was a key inflection point. Microsoft's victory was far from inevitable. Windows 3.0 was terrible, and shouldn't have succeeded... but it ran Word, and for a long time it was the only GUI on the PC that did.
And that, ultimately, is why Windows rules the desktop.
One thing that most people forget is that Windows didn't start as a monopoly, and probably wouldn't have gotten there on its own (lack of) merit. Microsoft's monopoly is built on Word, not Windows.
In the DOS days, Microsoft had tremendous mindshare, but they still faced real competition. IBM had PC-DOS (which may have just been licensed MS-DOS... it's been too many years and I'm not sure anymore.) And Digital Research had DR-DOS. Now, neither of these were BIG competitors, but the barrier to entry in the DOS market wasn't that high.
There came a time when the world was ready to start transitioning to GUIs. The Mac had shown it was possible, and PC hardware eventually got fast enough to do something similar. Microsoft had their Windows product, but its early incarnations were absolutely terrible and nobody bought them. IBM partnered with Microsoft on OS/2, and for a long time, it looked very much like that was the way the world was headed. The expectation in all the magazines at the time was that OS/2 was everyone's future. (and, for the record, it was an excellent operating system, one which I liked very much.... with some of the worst documentation and error/help messages ever done. IBM was used to mainframes, not Joe Computer User. No big surprise that it failed, in retrospect.)
When Windows 3.0 came out, it started selling reasonably well. But what REALLY made it take off... was Word.
Word for DOS was a good product, but was always an also-ran next to WordPerfect. WP was arcane and difficult, but it was tremendously powerful. Word for DOS was easy, but not very powerful, and wasn't taken seriously by very many.
Word for Windows completely changed everything. It was powerful, AND easy... and visual! You could SEE what you were laying out. It was absolutely brilliant, probably the single best word processor ever done. When people saw how easy it was to, for instance, lay out a table -- they switched from WP 5.1 for DOS in droves. EVERYONE wanted Word: it was THE program. This was the 'killer app' that drove Windows to monopoly status. For a long time, the only real competitor on the Windows platform was Ami Pro, which was a neat program, but more of a page-layout tool than a true word processor. Word kicked its butt for most tasks. WordPerfect took years to come out with a really good Windows version, and by the time it arrived, the market had shifted and they were dead.
THIS is the key to Microsoft's dominance... a single program that was so good, everyone had to have it. They sold mountains of copies, tens of millions (into a much smaller market). And then they really started using the dirty tricks they learned in the DOS days to lock their competitors out. They dropped OS/2 like a hot potato, and made damn sure that it was never preloaded on ANYTHING.
All those billions really come down to two things: a single, insanely great program, and absolute ruthlessness. It is very unlikely that Apple could have survived that environment. Had they come out with MacOS for Intel, then Microsoft would have flexed their TRUE monopoly, that of Word... and stopped development for MacOS. Without Word, MacOS was dead. And Apple has certainly shit on their users many times, but they have very rarely been genuinely ruthless toward their competitors. It's not in their nature; they're trying to excel. Microsoft wants everyone else dead and buried.
I do think that Apple should have licensed their software onto other manufacturer's machines. Power Computing moved the Mac faster than it has moved before or since. But they had NO chance at becoming the new Microsoft without Word... and a sharp knife for their competitors' backs.
Probably, unless he signed a non-compete, about all Seagate can do is is cost him a bundle in legal fees. (Hopefully WD will cover those fees.)
However, that could depend on the state laws. I was surprised by how different things were between California, my home state, and Georgia, where I am now. Interestingly, both states call themselves "Right To Work" states. In California, that means that an employer can't prevent you from working for another employer later; non-competes in that state are not binding. In California, you do indeed have the right to work, and no prior employer can restrict that right.
In Georgia, on the other hand, things are quite different. Here, from what I learned through the grapevine, the employer seems to hold most of the cards, and has most of the rights. You can be terminated at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all, and you have no recourse. Even so, you can still be held to a noncompete. This, apparently, is supposed to encourage employment, and thus they call this the "Right to Work". I think that's an AMAZING display of spin. In English, this Southern euphemism translates to "Right to Bend Over".
Moral: if you don't want to be held to a noncompete, make sure to sign it in California and make sure that your next job is also in California. Unless something has changed in the last two or three years, all they can do to you there is rattle their sabers a bit.
The people with most of the money in the world don't like this idea, because it threatens their power, and they are likely to do more than just spread rumors to derail any such thing.
There are a multitude of ways to depress a stock price. As Warren Buffett has said, in the short term, the stock market is a voting machine, and in the long term, it's a weighing machine. The Guys with the Money have a LOT of "voting" power.
Over the long haul, this won't work -- you can't artificially hold a stock worth X amount of money very far below X forever. But they don't NEED forever. If they sell short, bigtime, and can hold the price down for a year or so, then they win... everyone thinks Dutch Auctions are a losing proposition.
The guys doing this could very well take a serious bath (short sales and derivatives are dangerous), but they may figure this as a cost of doing business.... if this idea takes hold, it could cost them a lot more than the few hundred million dollars they might lose on this manipulation.
Because of this, I fully expect that the Google IPO shares will drop fairly dramatically once they go on public sale. Personally, I'll be looking to buy in the aftermarket.
I spent a great deal of time on this problem too, although with a desktop machine.
If you are into retrogaming, you do not want an AMD chip, from what I can see. It appears that none of the XP processors will provide expanded memory under Windows XP. I believe the A64 is even worse in this regard... in 64-bit mode, a lot of the old addressing modes just go away. Windows XP 64-bit version won't run old games well at all.
You can kind of limp along with DOSBOX, but that's slow. I was hoping VMWare might work, but the sound emulation in VMWare sucks rocks.
Basically, if you're a retrogamer, you're better off with Intel chips.
Vinge is a great(!) SF author. Many of his novels deal with an idea he calls the Singularity; the concept that technology will keep accelerating until we gain the ability to increase our own intelligence, at which point the changes will come so fast that we we will become unrecognizable to pre-Singularity humans.
... perhaps Sasser and Netsky were worse?
One of his fundamental ideas is that the growth of technology will give individuals more and more power. I'm not sure if he explicitly says this himself, but one of his themes is that individual people will have the power of atom bombs. It won't BE atom bombs, it will be something else... like the ability to write viruses.
In terms of direct harm, it would appear that Sasser may have done more damage than slamming planes into the WTC. Indirect damage, everyone overreacting and doing stupid things, was tremendously greater with the WTC, of course. But in terms of direct, measurable damage
Speaking, again, purely in economic terms, I wonder how Sasser and Netsky rate against the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs? I realise that the viruses probably didn't kill anyone, and they didn't start or end any wars. We don't feel it as much because everyone paid a little bit, instead of a few people paying a whole lot... but in terms of actual dollars/yen/economic value, I wonder how they compare?
However that comparison comes out, being singlehandledly responsible for 70% of all virus activity over the last year is *a lot* of power. Vinge's Singularity may not be that far off... assuming we don't virus ourselves to death first, anyway.
Properly done, an ACL system will give you a MORE secure system, not a less secure one, because there are fewer chances for mistakes.
In the NT 4.0 days, one of the better ways to handle permissions was the 'AGLP' standard. User A)ccounts go in G)lobal groups, G)lobal groups go in L)ocal groups, and local groups get P)ermissions.
This allows a nice level of indirection. I implemented this standard by specifying that Global groups described groups of people, and that Local groups specified access privileges. I built Local groups on each server describing the kind of access privileges they offered. Generally, I would make four groups for each of my intended shares: Share NA (no access), Share RO, Share RW, and Share Admin. I would assign the appropriate ACLs in the filesystem, and then put Global groups from the domain into the proper Local groups. The Accounting group, for instance, might get RW on the Accounting share. Management might get RO, and the head of Accounting and the network admins would go into the Share Admin group.
What this meant was that, once I set up a server, I *never again* had to touch filesystem permissions. Not ever. All I had to do was manipulate group membership with User Manager... with the caveat, of course, that affected users had to log off and on again for permissions to take effect. But this is also true with Unix, in many cases. (when group membership changes).
Note that Windows 2K and XP have more advanced ways to handle this, so don't use this design in a Win2K+ network.... this is the beginnings of the right idea, but 2K added some new group concepts. Under Active Directory, this idea isn't quite right. (I'd be more specific but I have forgotten the details... I don't work much with Windows anymore.)
ACLs are key to this setup, because I can arbitrarily specify permissions and assign those permissions to arbitrary groups.
By comparison, User, Group, and Other are exceedingly coarse permissions, and it is very easy to make a mistake. What if someone from Human Resources needs access to a specific Accounting share, but nothing else? Under Unix, I can't just put them in the Accounting group, because that will give them access to everything under that Group permission. I'd probably have to make a new group, and put everyone from Accounting and the one person from HR into that, and then put the special shared files into a specific directory, and make sure the directory is set group suid. That is a lot of steps. Everything is always done in a hurry in IT, and lots of steps are a great way to make mistakes. Messing up just one can result in security compromise.
In my group-based ACL system, I'd still have to make a custom group, perhaps "HR People With Access to Accounting Share". But I'd only have to touch one user account, the HR person's, and wouldn't have to disrupt Accounting's normal workflow at all, or touch any filesystem permissions.
Instead of a whole series of steps, any one of which can be done wrong, I have only three: Create new Global group, put HR person in new Global group, put Global group in the correct Local group. All done. Hard to screw this up too badly.
Now, I'll be the first to admit that a badly-implemented ACL setup is a complete nightmare. But a clean, well-thought-out ACL system, in a complex environment, is virtually always superior to standard Unix permissions.
I can barely hear my 2HD. In the low-lamp mode, I think the rated noise level is 20db. If the room is absolutely silent, I can just barely tell it's on.
It's a little louder in high lamp mode, but even then it's still reasonable. (30db??)
If you have good light control, which *most* folks either have or can arrange, a front projector is an extremely good way to go. You get a gigantic screen and great picture quality. And no, they don't have speakers, but most folks I know have a stereo in the front room anyway, and just hook up through that.
:-) And they're tiny, easily fitting under one arm. At 9lbs, I know you could carry it comfortably with two fingers, and probably with one.
The biggest decision point on projectors is what you want to display. If you just want to do Standard Definition(SD) stuff, then even the cheapo projectors are fine. The Infocus X1 (and, apparently, the replacement X2) are very well-regarded. These are DLP projectors that do 800x600, which is just fine for SD material, including DVDs. (which are not very high resolution).
In general, DLP technology at a given resolution is better than LCD at the same resolution; the contrast ratio is better and the pixels are larger, resulting in less screendoor. However, because of how the image is generated, it is important to do a test viewing before buying. About 10% of the population sees rainbows with DLP. The technology basically consists of a spinning color wheel in front of a bright light, with thousands of tiny mirrors. The mirrors rotate so that a certain amount of each color gets through while the wheel is showing. During the (short) interval between colors, the mirrors realign. So you are seeing red/green/blue/white, red/green/blue/white. Most people can't see this, but some do, and it shows up as rainbows.
If you are sensitive to rainbows, or if you want to do HDTV, then LCD projectors are the only reasonable alternative at this point. Both the Panaonic AE500 and L500 (same unit, different distribution channels) and the Sanyo PLV-Z2 are excellent projectors that do 1280x720 resolution for around $2000. The contrast ratio isn't as good as DLP (1300:1 instead of 2000:1). To get a true 1280x720 DLP projector, you are talking $5000+: if you can afford that, it will look better, but I doubt it's 2.5x better.
LCD is more susceptible to misalignment and stuck/dead pixels than the DLPs. Misalignment mostly manifests as vertical banding. In watching posts on avsforum.com, nearly everyone who starts out with a problem will find an adjustment that will make them happy, but the chances of starting out unhappy are higher with LCD.
Of the Panasonic and Z2, the Panny is considered to have a little nicer screen quality (and is a shade cheaper), and the Z2 is much more flexible about mounting, due to a nice feature called 'lens shift', which will let you move the projected image an amazing distance on your wall.
I have a Studio Experience 2HD, which is a rebadged Z2 with a better warranty, at a little higher price. I am EXTREMELY happy with this unit. I have a HTPC hooked up to it, using PowerStrip to run a true native 1280x720 out the DVI port, and it looks *awesome*. I'm throwing a 100" 16:9 screen..... playing Ninja Gaiden on a screen 7.5 FEET wide is pretty darn impressive. "You still measure your screen size in inches? How quaint!"
If you have good light control, you want true HDTV, and you want it BIG.... these projectors are a fantastic way to go. There are many, many tweaks available, but right out of the box, either unit is likely to knock your socks off.
Both units are more than you need, however, for SD material. For that, you're fine with the $1K projectors.
Oh, one final note: you also have a runtime expense with front projectors. The Z2's bulb, for example, is rated as lasting about 3000 hours, and replacements cost about $300, so the run cost is about 10 cents/hour. Make sure to find out the expected bulb life and cost before buying a projector.
($300 for a bulb, you gasp? Yep... you gotta realize that these things are putting out an AMAZING amount of light in a very small space. That's not easy to do, and they cost plenty.)
What a truly amazing display of stereotyping and straw-manning.
I find the last line particularly telling... the implication is that one must always be in favor of war, or be a hypocrite. Apparently, we're not supposed to use our brains for ourselves and determine whether a given conflict is justified.
Orwell really understood part of human behavior, the desire for power; 1984 and Animal Farm are great classics. But I don't think he understood how to fight it, because the mindless jingoism he seems to be advocating will lead straight into those same scenarios. "My country, right or wrong" is a very dangerous attitude. If you'll support those in power no matter what, then eventually you will be used to do things that are wrong, because in the BEST case, leaders are still human and make mistakes. Most of the time, their competence is at least somewhat questionable, and occasionally they shade into outright incompetence. In the worst case, they are actively malignant.
Bush and team are, at least, rather fumbling and inept. What I fear is someone who is both highly competent and highly malignant. The mindless patriots that Orwell seems to be advocating here are exactly the tools this kind (his kind!) of despot needs.
The designs I've seen for the space elevators all have a large counterweight in orbit. The centripetal force from that counterweight is what suspends the cable.
If the cable is severed at the bottom, where terrorist attacks can hit it, then it will simply shoot off into space. This would, obviously, be very bad for people ON the cable at the time, but it wouldn't have any other significant effect.
If the cable were severed at the TOP, out in space, then yes, it would come curving down and slam into the earth at hypersonic velocity..... unless they cut it loose from the ground.
They absolutely will have some kind of failsafe release like this. It would take many hours for the cable to fall, and they would know about the problem within minutes. As long as they cut the bottom portion within the safety margin (likely several hours), the cable will still just go spinning off into space. Still sucks terribly for anyone ON the cable, but there wouldn't be much danger to anyone else.
Finally, the cable could be severed somewhere in the middle. The worst possible spot for a cut would be just below the orbital ejection point....the spot at which the remaining cable cannot be thrown out of the Earth's gravitational field by cutting the bottom tie. However, the cable will be thickest at this point, because it will be the area of maximum strain; I've seen estimates that suggest it could be a mile in diameter. It would be exceptionally difficult to cut. But even if they managed it, if they build the cable so that the maximum cable length that can still fall, will fall on nothing but ocean, no big deal.
The ONLY way I can see it being a possible danger would be if they managed two or more simultaneous, complete cuts, which could result in pieces of the cable being flung into inhabited areas, but the number of things that would have to go wrong at the same time would make it exceptionally difficult to do even deliberately. It would be essentially impossible for it to happen spontaneously.
We had a similar television, though I have no idea what brand/make it was. We found out that the lights in the room could change the channel.
:-)
:-)
The lights were floorstanders with a lampshade. The lampshade connected via two prongs that fit into receptables on the base. There were little metal dome covers to sort of lock it into place. We discovered, by accident, that flipping the little metal cover up would change the channel when it hit the base again.
The light ended up completely replacing the remote for us. It worked 99% of the time, so it was actually more convenient than trying to find that stupid remote. (you have to realize, at the time there were only 13 channels, and we changed round-robin.... 2 to 3 to 4, and then back to 2 after 13. We couldn't go directly to channel 8, we had to flip through everything in between.) And back then, changing channels was 99% of what we did with a remote... we'd turn the TV on when we walked into the room, and once the volume was adjusted, we hardly ever touched it. All we did was change channels, and we never spent any time finding the lamp. Although I bet we looked pretty weird reaching up and flinging that little cover over and over and over (12 or 13 times) when we wanted to change from channel 5 to channel 4.
I was thinking about suggesting a modern version of this... a remote-control lamp would be kind of neat. Unfortunately, you do so much more with a remote now that it's probably not practical. Bummer. Changing the channels with the light was cool.
I'm really not sure this is a very good idea.
The body is a very complex beast, and has evolved to work in ways we simply don't understand yet. Adding our own signals to the body's natural electromagnetic field may be completely harmless, but it could also have strange, unpleasant side effects over time.
Personally, I don't plan to carry any such device until they've been on the market, and in fairly wide uptake, for at least 10 years. I'm generally an early adopter of almost anything, but this technology worries me a little.
You are utterly wrong about RAID 5.
RAID-5 is, in general, one of the slower RAID options for writing. Because of its slow writes, in fact, it's often not a very good choice for databases. Serious hardware acceleration will mitigate much, but not all, of the penalty.
With RAID in general, you're trading off between speed, cost, size, and reliability.
RAID-0 is the fastest, as it is a stripe; alternate blocks are written on two devices, so it doubles both read and write speed, but doubles the chance of failure. (if EITHER drive fails, you're toast.)
RAID-1 is a mirror, which halves your chance of total failure (both drives must fail), but generally is no faster than one drive. It's usually a little slower on writes. Sometimes, depending on the controller/software, it may be faster on reads, although it most likely won't be 2x as fast. In general, if you assume RAID-1 is the same speed as a single drive, you won't be too far off.
RAID 0+1 is a mirror of two stripe sets. You stripe drives 1-3 and 4-6, for instance, and then mirror them. You get speed this way, but the reliability isn't as good as it should be. If you lose one drive from each side, you're dead.
RAID 10 is a stripe of mirror sets. You mirror drives 1+2, 3+4, and 5+6, and then run a stripe across the mirrors. This is much more reliable, and almost identical speed. (with only four drives, however, there's no practical difference between 10 and 0+1.) In this instance, you're only dead if you lose both drives in a single mirror. (ie, in a six-drive RAID-10, you can absolutely lose one drive, and you have an 80% chance of surviving the loss of two.)
RAID-4 isn't used often; it stripes data across several drives, and uses another dedicated drive to write parity info. Network Appliance NetFilers use this system, because it allows you to expand a RAID fairly painlessly. However, very few systems do RAID-4, because the parity drive gets beaten to death.
RAID-5 is the same as 4, except that the parity data is striped across the drives. In the first cylinder, drive 1 may have the parity stripe; in the second cylinder, it may be drive 2, then drive 3... whatever strategy your particular controller uses. By distributing the parity, the load is also distributed. Small writes are very slow in this system, as the existing data has to be read from all the drives, the new data added, parity recomputed, and the data written back. Big block-mode transfers also suffer somewhat, but a clever controller will realize that all the data is being replaced, so the existing data doesn't matter, and can just be overwritten. Reads tend to be very fast on raid 5.
OK, all that said.... anyone out there know a good SCSI RAID-5 controller for Linux? I want one that has pretty good muscle to write quickly. I'm experimenting right now with a Compaq SmartArray 3200, which is terrible... even reads are dismally slow. Was looking at the Adaptec 3400 series, but I can't find any hard data on whether it will work well with Linux; Adaptec only supports up to Redhat 7.2 with the dumb thing, and nobody seems to be talking about them on Usenet. The LSI Logic cards are supposedly all supported, but it's hard to tell how much muscle they actually have. I'm going to be RAIDING 6 10K SCSI drives, and want strong database write performance. Is this even possible on current controller hardware?
Boy, this guy is really not thinking too clearly. His argument, in essence, is "you should adapt to the computer, the computer shouldn't adapt to you". He even goes so far as to say that the computer should work like real objects do.
If I wanted the computer ro work just like real objects, I'd use those objects instead... they're cheaper! I want the computer to be BETTER.
He talks about how multiple levels of directory are bad, and that you should, in essence, dump all your files into a single folder. I don't know what crack this guy is smoking, but there's no WAY I could find anything that way. I don't remember what all the files on my filesystem are called! Say I want a program I downloaded last month sometime. In his system, I'd have to go to my Downloads directory and try to figure out which, of THOUSANDS OF FILES, is the one I want. I'm not supposed to sort by category, like Games, or even, heaven forfend, an English name for the file? And in his system, I can have only ONE program called SETUP.EXE. Earth to author, that's not how things WORK around here.
This kind of spatial metaphor for data is a blind alley. It's poor thinking. It makes good sense when you are talking about 1980s computers, because 1980s computers emulated the paper devices of that era pretty well. You can fit about as many papers on a floppy disk as you can fit in one folder, so it makes sense for floppies act like folders. But the computers of the 21st century are a whole different beast. There's a reason we usually call them 'directories' now instead of 'folders'... we're storing vastly more in them. We don't have desk drawers on modern machines, we have LIBRARIES.
Even a file cabinet metaphor doesn't work very well when you're dealing with the vast amounts of data we have now. My data partition, for example, has 63,596 files on it, divided up into 3,703 folders. Using a normal interface, I can navigate that huge amount of data very quickly and extract what I need. The biggest limitation, at this point, is my memory... folders and subfolders help me to remember what I have and where to find it. Per the author, apparently I'm supposed to dump SIXTY FOUR THOUSAND FILES into the SAME DIRECTORY. Showing all these files in ONE WINDOW is somehow inherently 'better' because it's 'more like a desk drawer'.
The spatial metaphor people are lost in nostalgia for a simpler time, and are letting that nostalgia replace analysis. There's no WAY I could fit sixty five thousand pieces of paper in a desk drawer, and expecting a modern hard disk to react like one is poor thinking.... it's nostalgia. Computers don't work like that anymore, and people are very resistant to being shoehorned into that interface. Reasonable people would be asking why, not telling 95% of the entire computing population that they are brain-damaged.
GNOME devs, this is a blind alley. You have gone the wrong way, and the sooner you realize that and back off, the better.