Heh, it shouldn't be about the money, though... they should have specified high availability from the very beginning. They often throw it out during the prototyping stage, saying they need to Keep It Simple Stupid just to get things working, but then all the software is never designed to be able to handle redundancy, and shoehorning it in later becomes pretty much like starting again from scratch.
Also, designing in redundancy is usually worse than having no redundancy at all if it's never tested. There should be a pretty simple test plan, where, say, the CTO comes in and is allowed to pull any single random wire or component out of the rack and see how the system reacts / recovers. But unfortunately people are usually using the system by that time, and it's too much of a hassle to come in off-hours and pay everyone overtime for such a test.
Oh cool... I always thought there was a good reason for POTS to sound worse than 8-bit / 8kHzsamples from my old ISA Sound Blaster card.
I thought there might already be some 8b/10b encoding going on too like in ethernet that brought you down from 64kbps, but I guess not... maybe that's why the best you could practically expect from a 56kbps modem was 40+kbps with any error correction overhead.
I did enjoy learning about the Viterbi decoder and other forms of forward error correction used in wireless mobile networks. Seems like there are still plenty of other applications you could apply that kind of thing towards...
Meh, the business bullshitters in charge also use the G, mostly to stand for "Generation". So the parent is mostly correct in that context.
Verizon / Sprint started as CDMA (code division multiple access, GPS satellite signals also use this) networks, vs. everyone else who started as GSM use TDMA (time division multiple access).
In CDMA, all units basically transmit on the same wide frequency, but have a unique code to distinguish their signal from others. In TDMA, all the units get timeslices (~120 per second) and narrower frequency bands, and transmit bursts of packets during their allotted timeslice. That's why you can hear GSM phones cause audible humming (apparently at 217Hz) when you place them near an amplified speaker. Also made GSM phones theoretically more energy efficient, since they don't have to broadcast the carrier wave the entire time they transmit. http://www.smartdevicecentral.com/article/that+crazy+gsm+buzz/199379_1.aspx
Originally CDMA might have been a bit better for sparse country networks, and GSM better suited for densely populated city networks, but with the new standards emerging around the "3G" timeframe, they both pretty much incorporated each other's technologies into the newer WCDMA standards.
POTS (Plain old telephone service) : 64kbps line that carries uncompressed 8kHz 8-bit mono audio (that's why phone calls sound like crap when they're on TV / Radio talk shows). Also sort of explains why the fastest dialup modems were around 56k (after data protocol and error correction overhead).
1G AMPS: the old analog(ue) brick mobile phones the rock stars used in the 80s
GSM 2G voice: 8kHz 8-bit mono audio compressed using some codec that allows them to fit it in a ~7kbps - ~13kbps stream at roughly the same audio quality, except with compression artifacts. Different phones would support different codecs, but would fall back to some lowest common denominator. That's why some mobile calls sounded like crap while others sounded somewhat better. The data mode was called 3GPP (ha! 3G before the new meaning of 3G!) and could give you roughly the same data rates.
GSM 2.5G data: Then GPRS came along and gave you 56-114kbps, I think mostly by allowing you to use more timeslots if no one else was using them.
GSM 2.5G data the second: EDGE came along and gave you ~240kbps, mainly by squeezing more data bits into the carrier wave.
GSM 3G makes it more CDMA-like, where it can also use more of the frequency spectrum to pack bits. So now you can hog up to 1Mbps from the spectrum by using more timeslots and more of the available spectrum bandwidth.
GSM 4G: I'm not really sure where they're going with LTE Advanced, but more of the same, probably. Which means we'll probably have bunch more 3.5G brandings running around for a bit.
Word, dude... watching mobile phones discover the internet seems like watching the whole industry go back to where it was 10 years ago. They're even re-making all of the same mistakes, like proprietary lock-in, little to no cross-platform compatibility, lame security models... what fun it is to play the prophet for the next generation:-P
They renamed "the company formerly known as SUN" to "Oracle America". So they probably refer to them internally as OA, the same as corporatespeak for "Office Administrator". I have nothing against a good secretary, but that's still seems pretty denigrating, esp. considering SUN's technical background. But we always knew Oracle was pretty evil, I suppose.
Heh, no, I just use the handicapped turnstile, which is mounted on the side rather than the top and is actually a bit below waist level. So while you probably look awesome doing a power slide over the top, we're all bent down over our knees grinding our buttocks over the smart reader's erogenous zone until the extra wide orange appendages part for us.
DC metro turnstiles went smartcard + RFID a few years back. It's actually pretty nice to be able to open the gates by sidling up to the sensor while your arms are full.
All the same, I keep a traditional disposable magstripe card that I bought with cash in my wallet, in case I need to go somewhere without being tracked. Haven't really used it yet other than for guests, but I'm sure someday I'll be trying to dispose of a body and I'll curse it for not being able to use the ass trick.
Hell with mini-itx, I don't know why more manufacturers don't pump out nano-itx gear. NVidia already showed us it could be done years ago, but no manufacturer has really stepped up to the plate: http://www.google.com/images?q=nvidia ion reference platform
Sure there's the fit-PC2, which is cute... but still suffers from the crappy PowerVR video with limited driver support.
That's what I thought... they probably just bought and rebranded another small company's flight simulator, as they often do when it's too hard to innovate for themselves.
Also, maybe the term "reboot" will be more appropriate for when they fire the new development team again later this year? ^_^
Yeah really... and besides, apprehending the perpetrator will be a simple matter of searching FB Places for who was near your home, hell, they'd probably even set their status to: "Im in ur base, steelin ur stuff, wifin ur daughterz"
Really! I'm only being a maybe a little sarcastic ^_^
They mention that the other ants in the colony can usually detect when one of the ants gets infected, and actually move her as far from the colony as possible if they can before she goes all Zahn on them.
Heh, well, I already admitted to being a Verizon customer, so yeah, I'm probably blinded by my complete idiocy.
But I don't watch TV, so I don't have cable, which I guess I've heard horror stories about being a bunch of regional monopolies. And it looks like it's just Verizon and maybe a bit of AT&T rolling out fiber networks. But I asked the Verizon tech not to cut my copper phone lines, so I still have the hordes of DSL providers to choose from. And I've been known to subscribe to multiple ISPs at once so I'd have multiple ways to get connected if one fails for some reason... as service gets cheaper I think more people might go this route. Heck, I still have my Metricom Ricochet modem:P
I actually kinda wish telecom would get hit by some major monopoly, if only temporarily, so the peoples would be motivated to finally deploy a decent community mesh network, maybe based on OLSRd or something.
Sounds more like a certain 4 congresscritters didn't feel "included" enough in the drafting of policy. Nothing some campaign contributions couldn't rectify.
I kind of feel that the less regulation the better... too many ways for it to be misapplied. And there's still enough competition and alternatives out there to keep any one ISP from doing anything too nasty.
But I would love it if they found some way to prevent Verizon from blocking HTTP and SMTP ports on residential FiOS so I wouldn't have to sign up for their business FiOS just so I could run my own damn web and email servers on the default ports.
Word up. I'd say the first goal is to store your raw, bulk data consistently. Then you can have several sets of post processing scripts that all draw from the same raw data set.
You want this data format to be well-documented, but I wouldn't bother meticulously marking it up with XML tags and other metadata or whatever. You just want to be able to read it fast, and have other scripts be able to convert it into other formats that would be useful for analysis, be it matlab, octave, csv, or some tediously marked-up XML. You do want to be able to grep and filter the data pretty easily, so keep that in mind when you're designing the format. It will likely end up being pretty repetitive, but that's OK, since you'll likely store it compressed. That can improve performance when reading it, since the storage medium you're pulling the data from is often slower than the processor doing the decompression... and it also provides some data integrity / consistency checking. Oh, and of course, you can store more raw data if its compressed.
My wife lost her grandmother a few years ago... here are the things she wishes she could have gotten from her before she passed:
The story of her life : her earliest memories, what she remembers of her parents and grandparents, her brothers and sisters. All this will be relevant to your daughters once they grow up a little more and have children of their own... they'll want to know more about their family background and characteristics... and a lot of that information on your wife's side of the family will be best delivered by her. If you do http://www.geni.com/ or any other genealogical mapping thing, that might be a good way to start filling in blanks.
It's a good opportunity to just set up the camera / recorder somewhere out of the way, and forget about it and have a pleasant discussion face to face. I'd even go so far as to recommend that you get a friend to conduct the autobiographical "interview", because people talk about different things to outsiders than to family... I've always found out more interesting things about my own family by listening to them talk about that kind of thing to strangers.
I've sure you can think of other interview questions, but here are a few to get started:
Where were your favorite places to travel?
What were some things you did to save money when times were tough?
What did you want to grow up to be when you were young?
How did you meet your husband?
How did historical events affect their lives?
Have fun! Not everyone gets the opportunity to make peace and say goodbye...
Yeah, that's also pretty sad, because this is otherwise a pretty neat idea to reduce the plot sizes in cemeteries. But people are going to think the tagline, and go for some large conventional stretch coffin instead.
It's like Chevy would never be able to break into manufacturing light aircraft, just because of their silly "Like a Rock" tagline.
Oh well, it's just a matter of time before we have little "condo-crypt highrises" for the deceased like they do in South America. Or maybe the small little crematorium condos. I actually kinda like the little spirit houses the Asians have to keep the ghosts from haunting their real homes, but I think they still keep the ashes somewhere else.
I don't think the leaked Afghanistan war documents are a 'little egg'. It's clear proof that the war is lost and there is no hope for winning. This whole fuss about the leaked documents are a diversion for other serious issue the current administration failed with: BP, the economy, watered down regulations, broken campaign promisses, etc...
I think another/. poster said it best when admitting we just have had terrible timing with our presidents lately. Obama would have done everything to save those people in New Orleans after Katrina. And Bush would have done everything to save that oil swirling around in the gulf after New Horizons.
But hey, you know, if Obama was competent, we would never have found out about any of this! I didn't think I would have said this after Bush/Cheney, maybe we need more incompetents as HMFIC (at least as far as gov't transparency goes:P )
The sad thing is that it really doesn't have to be that way. I shouldn't have to safeguard public records information like my birthday or my mother's maiden name. Whoever started using those things to as any kind of authentication token are the ones truly responsible.
In a true open and transparent society, it'd be pretty trivial to track down who committed the fraud in your name and have that added to your record. But people seem to fear getting a UUID (or dozens... hey you can have more than one, right?) more than the obscurity that the lack of information assures you...and all the problems that come along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, it shouldn't be about the money, though... they should have specified high availability from the very beginning. They often throw it out during the prototyping stage, saying they need to Keep It Simple Stupid just to get things working, but then all the software is never designed to be able to handle redundancy, and shoehorning it in later becomes pretty much like starting again from scratch.
Also, designing in redundancy is usually worse than having no redundancy at all if it's never tested. There should be a pretty simple test plan, where, say, the CTO comes in and is allowed to pull any single random wire or component out of the rack and see how the system reacts / recovers. But unfortunately people are usually using the system by that time, and it's too much of a hassle to come in off-hours and pay everyone overtime for such a test.
...seriously? Will USB 6.0 be super-hyper-megaspeed USB?
Nah, that makes too much sense...
I always get thrown off by BIOS screens letting you choose between "FullSpeed" meaning USB 1.1 and "HiSpeed" meaning USB 2.0. Yes, Full < High
So I predict USB 4.0 will go be referred to as "ThisOneGoesToElevenSpeed" and USB 5.0 will be referred to as "GoodEnoughSpeed"
http://xkcd.com/624/
Simple fix, they just have to rename themselves to teachhub or something... hawt.
I support public education... I married a teacher.
Oh cool... I always thought there was a good reason for POTS to sound worse than 8-bit / 8kHzsamples from my old ISA Sound Blaster card.
I thought there might already be some 8b/10b encoding going on too like in ethernet that brought you down from 64kbps, but I guess not... maybe that's why the best you could practically expect from a 56kbps modem was 40+kbps with any error correction overhead.
I did enjoy learning about the Viterbi decoder and other forms of forward error correction used in wireless mobile networks. Seems like there are still plenty of other applications you could apply that kind of thing towards...
During military wargaming exercises, it's pretty much always Red vs. Blue.
But I guess Halo covered that already.
http://redvsblue.com/
Meh, the business bullshitters in charge also use the G, mostly to stand for "Generation". So the parent is mostly correct in that context.
Verizon / Sprint started as CDMA (code division multiple access, GPS satellite signals also use this) networks, vs. everyone else who started as GSM use TDMA (time division multiple access).
In CDMA, all units basically transmit on the same wide frequency, but have a unique code to distinguish their signal from others. In TDMA, all the units get timeslices (~120 per second) and narrower frequency bands, and transmit bursts of packets during their allotted timeslice. That's why you can hear GSM phones cause audible humming (apparently at 217Hz) when you place them near an amplified speaker. Also made GSM phones theoretically more energy efficient, since they don't have to broadcast the carrier wave the entire time they transmit.
http://www.smartdevicecentral.com/article/that+crazy+gsm+buzz/199379_1.aspx
Originally CDMA might have been a bit better for sparse country networks, and GSM better suited for densely populated city networks, but with the new standards emerging around the "3G" timeframe, they both pretty much incorporated each other's technologies into the newer WCDMA standards.
Here's my dicey understanding of the GSM generations:
(See the bottom of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Data_Rates_for_GSM_Evolution for the actual standards lumped under each G)
POTS (Plain old telephone service) : 64kbps line that carries uncompressed 8kHz 8-bit mono audio (that's why phone calls sound like crap when they're on TV / Radio talk shows). Also sort of explains why the fastest dialup modems were around 56k (after data protocol and error correction overhead).
1G AMPS: the old analog(ue) brick mobile phones the rock stars used in the 80s
GSM 2G voice: 8kHz 8-bit mono audio compressed using some codec that allows them to fit it in a ~7kbps - ~13kbps stream at roughly the same audio quality, except with compression artifacts. Different phones would support different codecs, but would fall back to some lowest common denominator. That's why some mobile calls sounded like crap while others sounded somewhat better. The data mode was called 3GPP (ha! 3G before the new meaning of 3G!) and could give you roughly the same data rates.
GSM 2.5G data: Then GPRS came along and gave you 56-114kbps, I think mostly by allowing you to use more timeslots if no one else was using them.
GSM 2.5G data the second: EDGE came along and gave you ~240kbps, mainly by squeezing more data bits into the carrier wave.
GSM 3G makes it more CDMA-like, where it can also use more of the frequency spectrum to pack bits. So now you can hog up to 1Mbps from the spectrum by using more timeslots and more of the available spectrum bandwidth.
GSM 4G: I'm not really sure where they're going with LTE Advanced, but more of the same, probably. Which means we'll probably have bunch more 3.5G brandings running around for a bit.
Word, dude... watching mobile phones discover the internet seems like watching the whole industry go back to where it was 10 years ago. They're even re-making all of the same mistakes, like proprietary lock-in, little to no cross-platform compatibility, lame security models... what fun it is to play the prophet for the next generation :-P
They renamed "the company formerly known as SUN" to "Oracle America". So they probably refer to them internally as OA, the same as corporatespeak for "Office Administrator". I have nothing against a good secretary, but that's still seems pretty denigrating, esp. considering SUN's technical background. But we always knew Oracle was pretty evil, I suppose.
Real-life zombies are probably more subtle. They probably live among us, and you don't even realize it!
Read this about parasites that can alter human and other mammal behavior and come back and say it isn't as much of a stretch as you'd think:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=547
Case in point: cat ladies.
Heh, no, I just use the handicapped turnstile, which is mounted on the side rather than the top and is actually a bit below waist level. So while you probably look awesome doing a power slide over the top, we're all bent down over our knees grinding our buttocks over the smart reader's erogenous zone until the extra wide orange appendages part for us.
DC metro turnstiles went smartcard + RFID a few years back. It's actually pretty nice to be able to open the gates by sidling up to the sensor while your arms are full.
All the same, I keep a traditional disposable magstripe card that I bought with cash in my wallet, in case I need to go somewhere without being tracked. Haven't really used it yet other than for guests, but I'm sure someday I'll be trying to dispose of a body and I'll curse it for not being able to use the ass trick.
Hell with mini-itx, I don't know why more manufacturers don't pump out nano-itx gear. NVidia already showed us it could be done years ago, but no manufacturer has really stepped up to the plate:
http://www.google.com/images?q=nvidia ion reference platform
Sure there's the fit-PC2, which is cute... but still suffers from the crappy PowerVR video with limited driver support.
That's what I thought... they probably just bought and rebranded another small company's flight simulator, as they often do when it's too hard to innovate for themselves.
Also, maybe the term "reboot" will be more appropriate for when they fire the new development team again later this year? ^_^
Yeah really... and besides, apprehending the perpetrator will be a simple matter of searching FB Places for who was near your home, hell, they'd probably even set their status to: "Im in ur base, steelin ur stuff, wifin ur daughterz"
Really! I'm only being a maybe a little sarcastic ^_^
Not to mention
Futurama - Season 3 Ep. 4 Parasites Lost
Though in that case, Fry got quite a lot of upgrades from his intestinal colony.
Yeah, forget the article, the BBC coverage is much much more awesome! Here's an excerpt of just the cordyceps portion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCOQ0VU24xw
They mention that the other ants in the colony can usually detect when one of the ants gets infected, and actually move her as far from the colony as possible if they can before she goes all Zahn on them.
I remember stumbling upon it when I was watching videos about other parasites. Some good stuff out there... There are also parasites that can do mind control on mammals:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=547
While you're at it, minus while look for bot fly larvae and of course the intestinal parasites while you're at it. Pleasant dreams!
Heh, well, I already admitted to being a Verizon customer, so yeah, I'm probably blinded by my complete idiocy.
But I don't watch TV, so I don't have cable, which I guess I've heard horror stories about being a bunch of regional monopolies. And it looks like it's just Verizon and maybe a bit of AT&T rolling out fiber networks. But I asked the Verizon tech not to cut my copper phone lines, so I still have the hordes of DSL providers to choose from. And I've been known to subscribe to multiple ISPs at once so I'd have multiple ways to get connected if one fails for some reason... as service gets cheaper I think more people might go this route. Heck, I still have my Metricom Ricochet modem :P
I actually kinda wish telecom would get hit by some major monopoly, if only temporarily, so the peoples would be motivated to finally deploy a decent community mesh network, maybe based on OLSRd or something.
We have a winner!
Here's hoping that technological prowess always finds a way to trump political fandangling!
Sounds more like a certain 4 congresscritters didn't feel "included" enough in the drafting of policy. Nothing some campaign contributions couldn't rectify.
I kind of feel that the less regulation the better... too many ways for it to be misapplied. And there's still enough competition and alternatives out there to keep any one ISP from doing anything too nasty.
But I would love it if they found some way to prevent Verizon from blocking HTTP and SMTP ports on residential FiOS so I wouldn't have to sign up for their business FiOS just so I could run my own damn web and email servers on the default ports.
Word up. I'd say the first goal is to store your raw, bulk data consistently. Then you can have several sets of post processing scripts that all draw from the same raw data set.
You want this data format to be well-documented, but I wouldn't bother meticulously marking it up with XML tags and other metadata or whatever. You just want to be able to read it fast, and have other scripts be able to convert it into other formats that would be useful for analysis, be it matlab, octave, csv, or some tediously marked-up XML. You do want to be able to grep and filter the data pretty easily, so keep that in mind when you're designing the format. It will likely end up being pretty repetitive, but that's OK, since you'll likely store it compressed. That can improve performance when reading it, since the storage medium you're pulling the data from is often slower than the processor doing the decompression... and it also provides some data integrity / consistency checking. Oh, and of course, you can store more raw data if its compressed.
My wife lost her grandmother a few years ago... here are the things she wishes she could have gotten from her before she passed:
The story of her life : her earliest memories, what she remembers of her parents and grandparents, her brothers and sisters. All this will be relevant to your daughters once they grow up a little more and have children of their own... they'll want to know more about their family background and characteristics... and a lot of that information on your wife's side of the family will be best delivered by her. If you do http://www.geni.com/ or any other genealogical mapping thing, that might be a good way to start filling in blanks.
It's a good opportunity to just set up the camera / recorder somewhere out of the way, and forget about it and have a pleasant discussion face to face. I'd even go so far as to recommend that you get a friend to conduct the autobiographical "interview", because people talk about different things to outsiders than to family... I've always found out more interesting things about my own family by listening to them talk about that kind of thing to strangers.
I've sure you can think of other interview questions, but here are a few to get started:
Have fun! Not everyone gets the opportunity to make peace and say goodbye...
Probably the same type of person who would enjoy listening to "The Psycopathology of Everyday Life" by King Missle:
The Miracle of Childbirth
Yeah, that's also pretty sad, because this is otherwise a pretty neat idea to reduce the plot sizes in cemeteries. But people are going to think the tagline, and go for some large conventional stretch coffin instead.
It's like Chevy would never be able to break into manufacturing light aircraft, just because of their silly "Like a Rock" tagline.
Oh well, it's just a matter of time before we have little "condo-crypt highrises" for the deceased like they do in South America. Or maybe the small little crematorium condos. I actually kinda like the little spirit houses the Asians have to keep the ghosts from haunting their real homes, but I think they still keep the ashes somewhere else.
I don't think the leaked Afghanistan war documents are a 'little egg'. It's clear proof that the war is lost and there is no hope for winning. This whole fuss about the leaked documents are a diversion for other serious issue the current administration failed with: BP, the economy, watered down regulations, broken campaign promisses, etc ...
I think another /. poster said it best when admitting we just have had terrible timing with our presidents lately. Obama would have done everything to save those people in New Orleans after Katrina. And Bush would have done everything to save that oil swirling around in the gulf after New Horizons.
But hey, you know, if Obama was competent, we would never have found out about any of this! I didn't think I would have said this after Bush/Cheney, maybe we need more incompetents as HMFIC (at least as far as gov't transparency goes :P )
The sad thing is that it really doesn't have to be that way. I shouldn't have to safeguard public records information like my birthday or my mother's maiden name. Whoever started using those things to as any kind of authentication token are the ones truly responsible.
In a true open and transparent society, it'd be pretty trivial to track down who committed the fraud in your name and have that added to your record. But people seem to fear getting a UUID (or dozens... hey you can have more than one, right?) more than the obscurity that the lack of information assures you.. .and all the problems that come along with it.