I always thought that BBC had Multicast-BGP arrangement with the participant ISPs? Isn't this perfect application for multicast? It would be nice if bandwidth would only be consumed once, and duplicated at branching points, not unicast from BBC's network to all customers individually.
Skimming the article I couldn't find info on whether this is archived-videos type service like Youtube, or for streaming the same over-the-air broadcast that you could pick on normal TV - assuming the latter since the charts talk about "BBCW_1", (assuming these are channels).
Sometimes I catch myself wondering about all the things I can't even imagine today that will come along after my death and I'll never experience. Then I think about modern day issues such as this ludicrous copyright legislation, in my home nation (UK) no less, and I wonder if in ten years time if the Internet will even be recognizable as a free
Cat is out of the bag with this one - the old quote about censorship as damage and routing around it applies. Even great firewall of China leaks. (And don't get me started on the Finnish "Childporn" filter..).
Over the coming years, if the various regulators tighten their grip somehow (lobbying, technology (Palladium on every device)), what follows is just massive shift not only to encryption, but Tor-like anonymizer-networks. Unless the entire TCP/IP framework is recreated, somebody will find a way to transmit "unauthorized" stuff over covert channels.
Heck, I remember back in '94 or so when connections were expensive. A local high-school had a pipe - that supposedly allowed only web-access via proxy and nothing else. Basically your worst possible scenario.
Well, what happened is that somebody coded up an IP over ICMP tool. And when they blocked ICMP, switch to IP over DNS...And these were high-school kids.
Add things like "bunch of consumer-grade wireless basestations forming up mesh networks" and similar approaches in completely unregulated fashion if all else fails.
So in worst-case scenario you have to go towards William Gibson-esque "undernets" that exist as outlaws, but if everybody does it, who are they going to prosecute? Eventually when enough people have it, these guys will be voted out of the office. Sweden is probably a good indication on things to come, considering how legalising P2P is starting to get popular even in mainstream political parties.
If I need a short break from work, I'll just wander to our cafeteria and do a round of bowling on the Wii at the corner, and after 10 mins go back.
If there is no work available, such as projects on hold due to waiting for somebody else (tech support, delivery, steering board decision, project member on vacation, whatever), I'll check if there's some low-priority stuff that I might do. Usually there isn't.
Otherwise, I'll just head home. My contract says I must 7,5 hours per day - on average. Not that I must stay at office 7,5h pretending to be working when there's nothing to do. Of course, it also means that I occasionally do the 10-12 hours/day crunch through weekends when stuff finally gets moving - but you didn't ask what I do on "uptime", did you?-). (And yes, I keep tab on the hours - if I get more than +40 hours on my flextime account I either get paid the 200% overtime bonus (has never happened, they haven't needed me THAT much) or stop right there).
(Yes, our project management could use refinement - usual situation that there are 5 projects on hold and the next week all five of them start up simultaneously - but that's another issue. Personally I'm comfortable with this - once you get into the "rhythm", it's much easier to just go on with the flow and do an "all-nighter"-style session - and once stuff is done, you can again have a few 2-hour workdays which consists of lunch, checking e-mails and do nothing more than say "hi" to buddies...)
Now, this model works for me. For someone with a family a more stable 9-5 mode might be more preferable. For me with my 15 minute commute it's just about perfect (means that if there's a meeting from 9-10 am and another at 3-4 pm and nothing else to do, I can stop by at home). Also my employer trusts me and my coworkers - on my first day at job, my then-manager said "we have a trusting environment in here - if you want to punch in or out for tracking the hours, go ahead, but we don't require it.".
My comment is focused on the downtime, as stated in the question. There's plenty of uptime to go around:)
That's funny, I left FreeBSD for Gentoo for exactly the same reasons (this was around time of FreeBSD 5.0, so I probably had the worst possible FreeBSD experience). And Linux kernel had better hardware support, especially for laptops.
With FreeBSD, packages tended to break with almost every upgrade. With Gentoo, they still break after every upgrade, but at least there is revdep-rebuild to fix things. Portupgrade -L didn't really work...
Huh, I have no idea that the "West" counts as "The US". What about Australia with STV? European countries with d'Hont or other similar systems? Even if you take "West" as geographically "western hemisphere", it still...
Oh. I just RTFA. No mention of "The West" in the article. So I guess it was just the summary. Meh.
Ok, I am not a professional astronomer, but here's my take on it.
Problem is that stars that blow up as supernovas are big. Very big. Especially since this one hints that it was so big to collapse into a black hole (based on the gamma ray burst).
Big stars don't live long. Only millions of years, instead of billions like our sun (or tens of billions like red dwarfs..).
Nearest galaxy was about 100000 light-years away. You don't get a star from there to the current location in just a few million years.
So, the star must have *formed*, burned, and blown up in intergalactic space.
Lots of advocates for solar/wind/other renewables oppose using nuclear power to help against global warming because "They come in only one size: Extra large". This one pretty much mitigates that argument. Of course, Toshiba has done this before, with the Galena project...looks like they are really pushing miniaturization of nukes.
If you have nanotech at that point, why would you need big spaceships at all? Alastair Reynolds has the concept of "travel cauls" in Pushing Ice, where nano (well, he calls it "femtotech" since it's beyond nanotech) thingies basically just grab your body, disassemble it, and then you just travel as a particle stream where ever you like, to be reassembled.
It has happened in Finland, with Niko Nirvi - and per capita the magazine he's writing for is one of the most popular gaming magazines in the world. In his op-eds he has sometimes mentioned a few people he recognizes as similar to himself, one of them being Martin Cirulis (who at least at some time was working for OGR).
So, they will be reading through your documents so they can put up some ads when you are browsing your files online. Putting your home finance excel sheet to gDrive? Be prepared to see TaxPlanner ads on the sidebar. Putting your holiday photos to gDrive for backup purposes? They'll probably go through the EXIF data and send you ads about latest Canon products (or whatever your camera model is).
When someone posts your address online over an alleged crime or slight, and you're the one whose tires are slashed or who has to confront a crazed gunman breaking down your door, you'll understand.
Has this happened to you or anyone you know? If not, stop the fearmongering.
There were several cases in Britain where The Sun or other quality magazines started to publish pictures of pedophiles. Too bad if you happened to look like the guy. Chances were you were soon hurting.
I meant "exclusive" in a sense that other fork is a superset of the other. Suppose that Sun-version gets MS Works import and Go-OOO gets VBA support and I'd like both. However, now go-ooo just seems to have a superset so it's easy to choose which to install.
So, I guess it's back to the Openoffice 1.x-days, when I routinely emerged ooo-ximian for my Gentoo workstations (better integration with KDE using native dialogs et al).
As long as they don't get "exclusive" features that are only in one version and not the other, this probably won't be a problem.
For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote the way that he wants he will fire you....and in Estonia, this is solved by allowing you to change your vote as many times as you wish until the election day, and on that day you can still drop traditional ballot which overrides the e-vote.
Voyager 1 command operations consisted of the uplink of a command loss timer reset on 08/04 [DOY 216/0135z] and CCSL A064 on 08/06 [DOY 218/0236z]. The spacecraft received all commands sent and the CCSL was verified.
Voyager 2 command operations consisted of the uplink of a TLMPRG and a command loss timer reset on 08/06 [DOY 218/1329z]. The spacecraft received all commands sent and the Telemetry Purge proceeded nominally per predicts.
So yeah, they are still uplinking stuff - mostly just command loss timer resets.
What happens if they don't send the timer reset? Well, see
If the timer reaches zero, as a result of a command not being received by the spacecraft within the programmed six week duration, the command loss timer will have expired and the Command Loss (CMDLOS) routine will be activated which leads to the initiation of the BML.
The implementation of BML-7 (the seventh BML to be loaded on-board Voyager 2), in conjunction with the baseline sequence, provides this automated protection against loss of command capability. BML-7, with some differences in implementation for the two spacecraft, is loaded on-board both Voyager 1 and 2.
So yeah, if receiver on V-ger gets broken, or the transmitter down here on earth, the ship can continue to still send data down here in a completely autonomous fashion. However, a remote capability is probably a good idea to have if something interesting comes up.
(The link has more details what the "BML" entails).
Imagine we noticed something artificial flying by. We needn't even be able to catch and examine it, just imagine the Hubble telescope picks up some item that is without a doubt artificial. Even after millenia of interstellar travel, a probe is still not an asteroid. It will be heavily damaged and probably look barely like the probe that was launched, but it will no less be clearly evident that some intelligence shaped it
May I recommend Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds. Deals with exactly such a scenario happening in near-future. Just finished reading it a month ago and thought it was great (as are other AR's books).
Anyway, basically what I know about this is that stellarator designs avoids lots of the problems that are present in Tokamak - namely, degrading of the reaction chamber due to escaped neutrons. A fusion reactor using stellarator instead of Tokamak would, in effect, last forever since the material does not become radioactive.
Especially the Germans have been researching this stuff a lot, however, most of the big money is currently in Tokamak designs, including ITER. Which is kinda a shame - since we're not in the Manhattan Project-type "if you have 3 designs and think one of them might work, build all three, here's the money"-situation..so these nice ideas may only be developed further if Tokamak fails to become viable..
Actually...Back in old days, when it was MS Works 2.0 (DOS version!). Early 90's. I really liked the darn thing.
The target segment for Works, I suppose, is to use it for "home accounting". For that purpose the 2.0 worked very well due to one nice fact:
It came with it's own teaching program! No annoying clippy. No gazillion menus, and indexed helps where you cannot find anything. Basically a self-running tutorial for elementary word processing and doing some spreadsheets - some basic formulas (doing sums, etc). And it worked. Even my somewhat-of-a-luddite parents changed their home accounting from pen&paper to Works. It would nicely show off some examples, allow you to try it yourself, checked your input, and really taught how to do things.
These days they are using Openoffice. So am I.
What went wrong?
Well, basically, at around version 4.0 Works became bloatware. So, might as well go for Excel/OOO. And the teaching functionality is no longer there in the basic package so it's no longer even useful as a "my first spreadsheet". (Ok, I don't know about the absolute latest versions).
What I don't understand is why the IPv4 address space isn't mapped conveniently into the IPv6 address space (the first set of addresses... ie 000.000.000..... then you can run both "internets" side by side.
Hmmh, apparently the presentation about auth cited in the Agenda slide is not online yet. Sorry - apparently exactly the on-topic presentation is still pending publication:)
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought that BBC had Multicast-BGP arrangement with the participant ISPs? Isn't this perfect application for multicast? It would be nice if bandwidth would only be consumed once, and duplicated at branching points, not unicast from BBC's network to all customers individually.
Skimming the article I couldn't find info on whether this is archived-videos type service like Youtube, or for streaming the same over-the-air broadcast that you could pick on normal TV - assuming the latter since the charts talk about "BBCW_1", (assuming these are channels).
Sometimes I catch myself wondering about all the things I can't even imagine today that will come along after my death and I'll never experience. Then I think about modern day issues such as this ludicrous copyright legislation, in my home nation (UK) no less, and I wonder if in ten years time if the Internet will even be recognizable as a free
Cat is out of the bag with this one - the old quote about censorship as damage and routing around it applies. Even great firewall of China leaks. (And don't get me started on the Finnish "Childporn" filter..).
Over the coming years, if the various regulators tighten their grip somehow (lobbying, technology (Palladium on every device)), what follows is just massive shift not only to encryption, but Tor-like anonymizer-networks. Unless the entire TCP/IP framework is recreated, somebody will find a way to transmit "unauthorized" stuff over covert channels.
Heck, I remember back in '94 or so when connections were expensive. A local high-school had a pipe - that supposedly allowed only web-access via proxy and nothing else. Basically your worst possible scenario.
Well, what happened is that somebody coded up an IP over ICMP tool. And when they blocked ICMP, switch to IP over DNS...And these were high-school kids.
Add things like "bunch of consumer-grade wireless basestations forming up mesh networks" and similar approaches in completely unregulated fashion if all else fails.
So in worst-case scenario you have to go towards William Gibson-esque "undernets" that exist as outlaws, but if everybody does it, who are they going to prosecute? Eventually when enough people have it, these guys will be voted out of the office. Sweden is probably a good indication on things to come, considering how legalising P2P is starting to get popular even in mainstream political parties.
Why does every computer "historian" ALWAYS forgets Commodore 64?
Ultimas all the way to Ultima VI was available on C-64.
If I need a short break from work, I'll just wander to our cafeteria and do a round of bowling on the Wii at the corner, and after 10 mins go back.
:)
If there is no work available, such as projects on hold due to waiting for somebody else (tech support, delivery, steering board decision, project member on vacation, whatever), I'll check if there's some low-priority stuff that I might do. Usually there isn't.
Otherwise, I'll just head home. My contract says I must 7,5 hours per day - on average. Not that I must stay at office 7,5h pretending to be working when there's nothing to do. Of course, it also means that I occasionally do the 10-12 hours/day crunch through weekends when stuff finally gets moving - but you didn't ask what I do on "uptime", did you?-). (And yes, I keep tab on the hours - if I get more than +40 hours on my flextime account I either get paid the 200% overtime bonus (has never happened, they haven't needed me THAT much) or stop right there).
(Yes, our project management could use refinement - usual situation that there are 5 projects on hold and the next week all five of them start up simultaneously - but that's another issue. Personally I'm comfortable with this - once you get into the "rhythm", it's much easier to just go on with the flow and do an "all-nighter"-style session - and once stuff is done, you can again have a few 2-hour workdays which consists of lunch, checking e-mails and do nothing more than say "hi" to buddies...)
Now, this model works for me. For someone with a family a more stable 9-5 mode might be more preferable. For me with my 15 minute commute it's just about perfect (means that if there's a meeting from 9-10 am and another at 3-4 pm and nothing else to do, I can stop by at home). Also my employer trusts me and my coworkers - on my first day at job, my then-manager said "we have a trusting environment in here - if you want to punch in or out for tracking the hours, go ahead, but we don't require it.".
My comment is focused on the downtime, as stated in the question. There's plenty of uptime to go around
Dear John,
Your talent dwarfs your competition.
Not if he's playing Gimli, really.
That's funny, I left FreeBSD for Gentoo for exactly the same reasons (this was around time of FreeBSD 5.0, so I probably had the worst possible FreeBSD experience). And Linux kernel had better hardware support, especially for laptops.
With FreeBSD, packages tended to break with almost every upgrade. With Gentoo, they still break after every upgrade, but at least there is revdep-rebuild to fix things. Portupgrade -L didn't really work...
Huh, I have no idea that the "West" counts as "The US". What about Australia with STV? European countries with d'Hont or other similar systems? Even if you take "West" as geographically "western hemisphere", it still...
Oh. I just RTFA. No mention of "The West" in the article. So I guess it was just the summary. Meh.
Ok, I am not a professional astronomer, but here's my take on it.
Problem is that stars that blow up as supernovas are big. Very big. Especially since this one hints that it was so big to collapse into a black hole (based on the gamma ray burst).
Big stars don't live long. Only millions of years, instead of billions like our sun (or tens of billions like red dwarfs..).
Nearest galaxy was about 100000 light-years away. You don't get a star from there to the current location in just a few million years.
So, the star must have *formed*, burned, and blown up in intergalactic space.
A little google searching found one rather prominent global warming figure using the size argument: Al Gore.
Lots of advocates for solar/wind/other renewables oppose using nuclear power to help against global warming because "They come in only one size: Extra large". This one pretty much mitigates that argument. Of course, Toshiba has done this before, with the Galena project...looks like they are really pushing miniaturization of nukes.
If you have nanotech at that point, why would you need big spaceships at all? Alastair Reynolds has the concept of "travel cauls" in Pushing Ice, where nano (well, he calls it "femtotech" since it's beyond nanotech) thingies basically just grab your body, disassemble it, and then you just travel as a particle stream where ever you like, to be reassembled.
It has happened in Finland, with Niko Nirvi - and per capita the magazine he's writing for is one of the most popular gaming magazines in the world. In his op-eds he has sometimes mentioned a few people he recognizes as similar to himself, one of them being Martin Cirulis (who at least at some time was working for OGR).
Not gonna happen.
Their business is advertising.
So, they will be reading through your documents so they can put up some ads when you are browsing your files online. Putting your home finance excel sheet to gDrive? Be prepared to see TaxPlanner ads on the sidebar. Putting your holiday photos to gDrive for backup purposes? They'll probably go through the EXIF data and send you ads about latest Canon products (or whatever your camera model is).
When someone posts your address online over an alleged crime or slight, and you're the one whose tires are slashed or who has to confront a crazed gunman breaking down your door, you'll understand.
Has this happened to you or anyone you know? If not, stop the fearmongering.
There were several cases in Britain where The Sun or other quality magazines started to publish pictures of pedophiles. Too bad if you happened to look like the guy. Chances were you were soon hurting.
But of course, the lynch mob can also be just a tad stupid - but what can you do if you're the one running from it: British vigilantes mistake a pediatrician for a pedophile.
"There's been a new venture in home video market - instant DVDs. They are out in stores before the movie is finished!"
I meant "exclusive" in a sense that other fork is a superset of the other. Suppose that Sun-version gets MS Works import and Go-OOO gets VBA support and I'd like both. However, now go-ooo just seems to have a superset so it's easy to choose which to install.
So, I guess it's back to the Openoffice 1.x-days, when I routinely emerged ooo-ximian for my Gentoo workstations (better integration with KDE using native dialogs et al).
As long as they don't get "exclusive" features that are only in one version and not the other, this probably won't be a problem.
For example, your boss can tell you to vote while he is watching. If you don't vote the way that he wants he will fire you. ...and in Estonia, this is solved by allowing you to change your vote as many times as you wish until the election day, and on that day you can still drop traditional ballot which overrides the e-vote.
http://www.vvk.ee/elektr/docs/Yldkirjeldus-eng.pdf has description of their system. Considering the confidentiality aspects, read especially pages 9 and 13.
Anyone know if the Voyagers rely on a heartbeat or something? If it's just a receiver I can't see why building a modern backup isn't worthwhile.
s /index.htm
They do. First, take a look at
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-report
Namely (of the latest one):
Voyager 1 command operations consisted of the uplink of a command loss timer reset on 08/04 [DOY 216/0135z] and CCSL A064 on 08/06 [DOY 218/0236z]. The spacecraft received all commands sent and the CCSL was verified.
Voyager 2 command operations consisted of the uplink of a TLMPRG and a command loss timer reset on 08/06 [DOY 218/1329z]. The spacecraft received all commands sent and the Telemetry Purge proceeded nominally per predicts.
So yeah, they are still uplinking stuff - mostly just command loss timer resets.
What happens if they don't send the timer reset? Well, see
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/science/thirty.html
If the timer reaches zero, as a result of a command not being received by the spacecraft within the programmed six week duration, the command loss timer will have expired and the Command Loss (CMDLOS) routine will be activated which leads to the initiation of the BML.
The implementation of BML-7 (the seventh BML to be loaded on-board Voyager 2), in conjunction with the baseline sequence, provides this automated protection against loss of command capability. BML-7, with some differences in implementation for the two spacecraft, is loaded on-board both Voyager 1 and 2.
So yeah, if receiver on V-ger gets broken, or the transmitter down here on earth, the ship can continue to still send data down here in a completely autonomous fashion. However, a remote capability is probably a good idea to have if something interesting comes up.
(The link has more details what the "BML" entails).
Imagine we noticed something artificial flying by. We needn't even be able to catch and examine it, just imagine the Hubble telescope picks up some item that is without a doubt artificial. Even after millenia of interstellar travel, a probe is still not an asteroid. It will be heavily damaged and probably look barely like the probe that was launched, but it will no less be clearly evident that some intelligence shaped it
May I recommend Pushing Ice, by Alastair Reynolds. Deals with exactly such a scenario happening in near-future. Just finished reading it a month ago and thought it was great (as are other AR's books).
...and as prototypes too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator
Anyway, basically what I know about this is that stellarator designs avoids lots of the problems that are present in Tokamak - namely, degrading of the reaction chamber due to escaped neutrons. A fusion reactor using stellarator instead of Tokamak would, in effect, last forever since the material does not become radioactive.
Especially the Germans have been researching this stuff a lot, however, most of the big money is currently in Tokamak designs, including ITER. Which is kinda a shame - since we're not in the Manhattan Project-type "if you have 3 designs and think one of them might work, build all three, here's the money"-situation..so these nice ideas may only be developed further if Tokamak fails to become viable..
Actually...Back in old days, when it was MS Works 2.0 (DOS version!). Early 90's. I really liked the darn thing.
The target segment for Works, I suppose, is to use it for "home accounting". For that purpose the 2.0 worked very well due to one nice fact:
It came with it's own teaching program! No annoying clippy. No gazillion menus, and indexed helps where you cannot find anything. Basically a self-running tutorial for elementary word processing and doing some spreadsheets - some basic formulas (doing sums, etc). And it worked. Even my somewhat-of-a-luddite parents changed their home accounting from pen&paper to Works. It would nicely show off some examples, allow you to try it yourself, checked your input, and really taught how to do things.
These days they are using Openoffice. So am I.
What went wrong?
Well, basically, at around version 4.0 Works became bloatware. So, might as well go for Excel/OOO. And the teaching functionality is no longer there in the basic package so it's no longer even useful as a "my first spreadsheet". (Ok, I don't know about the absolute latest versions).
What I don't understand is why the IPv4 address space isn't mapped conveniently into the IPv6 address space (the first set of addresses ... ie 000.000.000.. ... then you can run both "internets" side by side.
a nslation_algorithm
It is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_mapped_address
There are even ways for reaching IPv4 hosts from IPv6.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_IP/ICMP_Tr
Yes - it's a real thing, so the timetable is pretty good.
a rea-7.ppt
http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/07jul/slides/int
(For some reason openoffice churns through that for like an eternity and they haven't yet converted it to a PDF). Anyway, the analysis is pretty good.
Hmmh, apparently the presentation about auth cited in the Agenda slide is not online yet. Sorry - apparently exactly the on-topic presentation is still pending publication :)