Simply have human operators responsible for "monitoring" the robots. They take all the liability if something goes wrong.
After all, that's why (largely autonomous) light rail / subway trains pay college students / poor people / etc. to sit in the cab and hold the "door open" button for the train.
Probably also why we'll never have fully automated cars and passenger aircraft as well. Easiest to just blame the driver / pilot / etc. for failing to handle the situation appropriately. Or at least they're their to cast doubt on the court cases, as in how Toyota insists that drivers are just confusing the brake and the gas pedals with the runaway throttle problem.
Simply doesn't make sense for any company to allow themselves to be held fully liable for any fully automated product they sell, when they can shift / share the blame with some kind of operator.
Hmm, well, what I meant is that we're getting more energy from the sun because we're not radiating as much of it back into space. That is how greenhouse gases are supposed to work, right?:P
It would be neat to see some sort of measurement of atmospheric energy, though of course that is harder to come by. But even lacking historical data at altitude and at sea, we'd be looking for regional wind patterns, particularly those that balance warm areas with cold areas. We've seen the polar regions heat up tremendously over the past few decades to compensate for what's going on, which kinda attributes a lot to Earth's ability to self-regulate and buffer changes. But if you remember the way buffer solutions act in Chemistry, once they tip out of equilibrium, they make a pretty rapid adjustment to the temperature / pH they would have been at had there been no buffering effect.
Sure, so we're getting more energy from the sun. Which means more heat, which makes air rise, and suck in cold air from the polar regions.
Thus, we have the polar regions rapidly heating up in not-so-statistically-insignificant terms of 5 - 10 degrees. And record unseasonably cold and hot flashes in the temperate regions in between.
There must be some measure other than an averaged thermometer readings that is actually meaningful in this context. Insert joke about hospital with a bunch of people with fevers and a bunch of dead people with an average temperature of 96.6F
Yeah, been reading about it at http://arstechnica.com/ . Pretty intrigued by it, even went so far as to purchase one of the guy's earlier games on PC (Indigo Prophecy). I like playing through alternate endings.
And then of course there's a the brief flash game, One Chance that they enjoyed, since it tries hard to prevent you from playing again on your computer and altering your outcome. It's a bit heavy-handed, since there's really just one "win" ending (sort of). I prefer the games that give you a variety of outcomes. Which Heavy Rain seems to be pretty promising in that regard.
Yeah, but plenty of dorks also forget to delete it. Or even if they do delete it, they forget that their shell write a new one as soon as they log out:P
Some script kiddie left a rootkit on my Redhat 4 box back in '98 or so using a remote samba vulnerability. I traced back through some of the other intermediate boxes he pwned, and finally found a link back to his own box in a.bash_history that also ended in "rm/root/.bash_history"
I'm not even talking about the hell beasts or the silly flashlight. Those sequences where you have to run outside on the martian surface with limited oxygen scared the $#!+ out of me. Almost as much as the thought of losing internet connectivity.
My favourite was the bee larvae. You pick them out of the honeycomb. They were just like little smooth peanut butter capsules, except with little heads peeking out. Once in a while you get an adult for some crunchiness.
The larger insects taste kinda like fried froglegs.
$1 million in EMC gear probably translates to only about $50,000 worth of real-world computer equipment at market prices. They're pretty notorious for charging ridiculous amounts more than NetApp et. al. for their junk.
Heh, the customers probably thought of him as Robin Hood.
j0... you can't really call yourself nerds unless you head over to http://theregister.co.uk/ every once in a while and take in some of the wry British take on tech.
Start with the BOFH archives and you'll be fully conversant in no time! (OK, I'll give one small hint: PFY = "pimply-faced youth" )
Yep, I just bought one of these last week and am pretty happy with it now that I have TNT-lite on it.
It has a great CPU / GPU and a very nice large display. The viewing angle problem isn't terrible, in widescreen format people beside you will be able to watch the content. In portrait mode the colors will be a bit off if the viewing angle isn't ideal.
Worth mentioning is that is does lack some features that will limit your Android hacking:
No GPS, though supposedly you can tether one via bluetooth. GPS is certainly a killer feature for many apps, though, not just enabling better maps and navigation but also for photo location tagging, augmented reality using Layar, etc.
No magnetometer / compass, see above
1.3MP low res camera (mostly for video conferencing quality). Some of the other tablets with this chipset should be able to shoot 720p video.
you'll need a dock to get an HDMI output. Supposedly at some point Sears had some mail-in rebate for a free dock from Viewsonic.
no mobile data other than wifi / bluetooth, though you can tether
That said, I'm actually pretty happy with it, since my cheap-ass android phone (HTC 3G Slide) complements it nicely, providing most of the missing features it lacks (physical keyboard, HSDPA tethering, GPS/compass).
The G-Tablet isn't going to replace my netbook... but it runs a different OS and has a different interface, so I do use them for slightly different things.
OK, OK, maybe when humans can blow bubble rings, and dolphins can blow smoke rings, we'll call it even http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q/wants to see a dolphin light a fire
But yeah, we'll keep seeing a frustrating trend to fewer moving parts.
On the bright side, a generation of T9 txtspk didn't kill the keyboard.
On the dark side, accuracy with touchscreen keyboards is so bad, that I think it will just drive up the adoption of speech-to-text recognition, because it won't be so bad in comparison:-P
"Silly computer! I SAID, 'I want a bottle in front of me!' NOT 'a frontal lobotomy!'"
Hmm, no, just hit the "Num", then the "Alt" on the ConnectBot virtual keyboard (I think it's new for v1.7.1, it appears in the bottom right of the screen) and then all the special keys pop up.
Hey, at least you're not using emacs... though it's actually surprisingly easy to triple-click the thumbpad to send Ctrl-Meta (well, actually Esc-Ctrl-) for some of those keyboard-kungfu sequences:P
But yeah, ConnectBot needs some kind of macro support. Or voice recognition >:-D
The ConnectBot SSH client can do port forwarding, so you can set up a secure tunnel for androidVNC (which is probably better than X forwarding as far as maintaining persistent sessions across mobile networks go). The phone supports T-mobile HSDPA network, which can give you noticeably lower latency than EDGE / GPRS, and near-DSL speeds. Your ssh sessions stay connected in the background until you tell them to disconnect, and the keyboard is pretty comfortable to use.
Some random notes:
+ Terminal with default font is 80x25!
+ the trackpad button is the Ctrl key, hitting it twice sends the Esc key. Works great with screen.
- no cursor buttons, and the trackpad can be quite finicky when trying to send several l/r u/d
- the HTC Slide uses the older ARMv6 cpu, so no 3D-intensive apps like Google Earth Mobile or high-end games. Other than that, it runs everything fine
- sending some special characters in ConnectBot can be a chore, such as pipes and < >... need to call up the softkeyboard for those, by first closing the physical keyboard, tapping on the softkeyboard icon, then calling up the "num" then "alt" keyboard:-/ . Probably better to make aliases for your often-used command strings. But that's something that could be remedied in software, hopefully... ConnectBot doesn't appear to use the physical Symbol key well.
Maybe now, but back in 2007 when the AM2+ platform was still new the ECS board had pretty good reviews (performance within 2% of other boards with the same chipset that cost $30-$40 more).
Anyway, that ~$60 I spent on the cheap-ass board managed to hold me over for a few years until DDR3 came out and became cheap enough to save me a little money on an eventual RAM upgrade:P
I ordered a replacement cap a while ago, hoping I could repair the board so I could build a system for my son, but alas, my old soldering irons don't get hot enough for motherboard desoldering work:/ Not going to throw any more money at it's, he'll have to make do with crappy old laptops:P
Maybe some of the nicer ones... but some of the bad caps have still been lingering around.
I still lost an AM2+ ECS motherboard to a blown cap a couple of years ago, and that's when I unexpectedly upgraded to a DDR3-capable AM3 motherboard.
Of course, there were extenuating circumstances... we had just left out of the country for two weeks, and a summertime power & A/C outage was probably a factor. Also ended up making my UPS battery explode (though I didn't notice it until I removed the battery about a year later and found the casing cracked and acid all over the place:P )
Anyway, awesome how you can run a home server for months / years at a time without incident, until you leave for two weeks.:P
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Simply have human operators responsible for "monitoring" the robots. They take all the liability if something goes wrong.
After all, that's why (largely autonomous) light rail / subway trains pay college students / poor people / etc. to sit in the cab and hold the "door open" button for the train.
Probably also why we'll never have fully automated cars and passenger aircraft as well. Easiest to just blame the driver / pilot / etc. for failing to handle the situation appropriately. Or at least they're their to cast doubt on the court cases, as in how Toyota insists that drivers are just confusing the brake and the gas pedals with the runaway throttle problem.
Simply doesn't make sense for any company to allow themselves to be held fully liable for any fully automated product they sell, when they can shift / share the blame with some kind of operator.
Hmm, well, what I meant is that we're getting more energy from the sun because we're not radiating as much of it back into space. That is how greenhouse gases are supposed to work, right? :P
It would be neat to see some sort of measurement of atmospheric energy, though of course that is harder to come by. But even lacking historical data at altitude and at sea, we'd be looking for regional wind patterns, particularly those that balance warm areas with cold areas. We've seen the polar regions heat up tremendously over the past few decades to compensate for what's going on, which kinda attributes a lot to Earth's ability to self-regulate and buffer changes. But if you remember the way buffer solutions act in Chemistry, once they tip out of equilibrium, they make a pretty rapid adjustment to the temperature / pH they would have been at had there been no buffering effect.
Are averages even the best measure?
Sure, so we're getting more energy from the sun. Which means more heat, which makes air rise, and suck in cold air from the polar regions.
Thus, we have the polar regions rapidly heating up in not-so-statistically-insignificant terms of 5 - 10 degrees. And record unseasonably cold and hot flashes in the temperate regions in between.
There must be some measure other than an averaged thermometer readings that is actually meaningful in this context. Insert joke about hospital with a bunch of people with fevers and a bunch of dead people with an average temperature of 96.6F
Yeah, been reading about it at http://arstechnica.com/ . Pretty intrigued by it, even went so far as to purchase one of the guy's earlier games on PC (Indigo Prophecy). I like playing through alternate endings.
And then of course there's a the brief flash game, One Chance that they enjoyed, since it tries hard to prevent you from playing again on your computer and altering your outcome. It's a bit heavy-handed, since there's really just one "win" ending (sort of). I prefer the games that give you a variety of outcomes. Which Heavy Rain seems to be pretty promising in that regard.
Hey, does it work like Dan Brown's "GPS dot" in the Da Vinci Code?
/ can't believe I read that book all the way through
// should have followed my instinct to stop after the second blatant spelling error
/// haven't seen it, but maybe the first time the movie version is better than the book?
FWIW, supposedly Mark Zuckerberg commutes in a relatively humble Acura TSX. http://time.com/poy
Yeah, nobody's ever altered that file.
Yeah, but plenty of dorks also forget to delete it. Or even if they do delete it, they forget that their shell write a new one as soon as they log out :P
Some script kiddie left a rootkit on my Redhat 4 box back in '98 or so using a remote samba vulnerability. I traced back through some of the other intermediate boxes he pwned, and finally found a link back to his own box in a .bash_history that also ended in "rm /root/.bash_history"
Switched to Debian about then. :-P
These people have obviously never played DOOM3.
I'm not even talking about the hell beasts or the silly flashlight. Those sequences where you have to run outside on the martian surface with limited oxygen scared the $#!+ out of me. Almost as much as the thought of losing internet connectivity.
KeePassX , with a master password, and hell, if you want, maybe another secret keyfile only distributed via encrypted e-mail or by hand.
Well, there's /root/.bash_history
But if your sudo activity log has you doing "su -", then whatever gets borked up after that is automagically your fault as a matter of policy ^_^
"trust but verify"
To get some transparency / accountability, just set up an authlog black hole that includes all of the sudo activity from your servers.
http://www.google.com/images?q=thai+insect+market
Good stuff, high in protein.
My favourite was the bee larvae. You pick them out of the honeycomb. They were just like little smooth peanut butter capsules, except with little heads peeking out. Once in a while you get an adult for some crunchiness.
The larger insects taste kinda like fried froglegs.
Heh, realized later that the TFA was actually written by an Aussie paper, so so much the better! :P
$1 million in EMC gear probably translates to only about $50,000 worth of real-world computer equipment at market prices. They're pretty notorious for charging ridiculous amounts more than NetApp et. al. for their junk.
Heh, the customers probably thought of him as Robin Hood.
j0 ... you can't really call yourself nerds unless you head over to http://theregister.co.uk/ every once in a while and take in some of the wry British take on tech.
Start with the BOFH archives and you'll be fully conversant in no time! (OK, I'll give one small hint: PFY = "pimply-faced youth" )
Yep, I just bought one of these last week and am pretty happy with it now that I have TNT-lite on it.
It has a great CPU / GPU and a very nice large display. The viewing angle problem isn't terrible, in widescreen format people beside you will be able to watch the content. In portrait mode the colors will be a bit off if the viewing angle isn't ideal.
Worth mentioning is that is does lack some features that will limit your Android hacking:
That said, I'm actually pretty happy with it, since my cheap-ass android phone (HTC 3G Slide) complements it nicely, providing most of the missing features it lacks (physical keyboard, HSDPA tethering, GPS/compass).
The G-Tablet isn't going to replace my netbook... but it runs a different OS and has a different interface, so I do use them for slightly different things.
Right, because everybody knows that humans and dolphins can interbreed.
I'm not saying that you should, but you could always search for "prehensile penis bestiality"... you know, for research porpoises.
OK, OK, maybe when humans can blow bubble rings, and dolphins can blow smoke rings, we'll call it even /wants to see a dolphin light a fire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMCf7SNUb-Q
Oh, I kinda like the quiet keyboards.
But yeah, we'll keep seeing a frustrating trend to fewer moving parts.
On the bright side, a generation of T9 txtspk didn't kill the keyboard.
On the dark side, accuracy with touchscreen keyboards is so bad, that I think it will just drive up the adoption of speech-to-text recognition, because it won't be so bad in comparison :-P
"Silly computer! I SAID, 'I want a bottle in front of me!' NOT 'a frontal lobotomy!'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
Hmm, no, just hit the "Num", then the "Alt" on the ConnectBot virtual keyboard (I think it's new for v1.7.1, it appears in the bottom right of the screen) and then all the special keys pop up.
Hey, at least you're not using emacs... though it's actually surprisingly easy to triple-click the thumbpad to send Ctrl-Meta (well, actually Esc-Ctrl-) for some of those keyboard-kungfu sequences :P
But yeah, ConnectBot needs some kind of macro support. Or voice recognition >:-D
I'm fairly happy with my cheap-ass HTC Slide running CyanogenMOD . You can get them for about half the price of the big expensive Android phones.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/migrating-to-android-for-palm-linux.html
Keyboard pic
The ConnectBot SSH client can do port forwarding, so you can set up a secure tunnel for androidVNC (which is probably better than X forwarding as far as maintaining persistent sessions across mobile networks go). The phone supports T-mobile HSDPA network, which can give you noticeably lower latency than EDGE / GPRS, and near-DSL speeds. Your ssh sessions stay connected in the background until you tell them to disconnect, and the keyboard is pretty comfortable to use.
Some random notes:
Moore's law is dead in everything except transistor count.
Here's the picture I was looking for, smack in the middle of:
http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Above 4Ghz, the power loss due to transistor current leakage suddenly starts going way up and becomes the most significant term.
It will take a fundamental change in the way we build transistors to get any kind of efficiency above 4Ghz... maybe photonic or micromechanical gates.
Heh, yeah I ended up with a Gigabyte board.
Maybe now, but back in 2007 when the AM2+ platform was still new the ECS board had pretty good reviews (performance within 2% of other boards with the same chipset that cost $30-$40 more).
Anyway, that ~$60 I spent on the cheap-ass board managed to hold me over for a few years until DDR3 came out and became cheap enough to save me a little money on an eventual RAM upgrade :P
I ordered a replacement cap a while ago, hoping I could repair the board so I could build a system for my son, but alas, my old soldering irons don't get hot enough for motherboard desoldering work :/ Not going to throw any more money at it's, he'll have to make do with crappy old laptops :P
Maybe some of the nicer ones... but some of the bad caps have still been lingering around.
I still lost an AM2+ ECS motherboard to a blown cap a couple of years ago, and that's when I unexpectedly upgraded to a DDR3-capable AM3 motherboard.
Of course, there were extenuating circumstances... we had just left out of the country for two weeks, and a summertime power & A/C outage was probably a factor. Also ended up making my UPS battery explode (though I didn't notice it until I removed the battery about a year later and found the casing cracked and acid all over the place :P )
Anyway, awesome how you can run a home server for months / years at a time without incident, until you leave for two weeks. :P