I don't have as much trouble with my family's computers... maybe you just need to tell them to stop surfing pr0n sites:P
But if they insist, just stick a Linux LiveCD in their box "until you get around to fixing windows". And let them know they can surf all the (legal) p0rn they like with it with little repercussion:P
My current favorite is Linux Mint : http://www.linuxmint.com/ It's based on Ubuntu, but they're a bit less shy about including non-free software such as Flash and proprietary video drivers by default.
If they like it, you can also create a USB drive version of it so they can carry their changes (updated software and files) around with them. If they still manage to break it, you can simply copy over the casper-rw file over again with an empty version (or from the last working backup) http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-linux-mint-7-usb-flash-drive-from-cd/
The feds appear to have spent a lot of money developing nice Flash-based "Information Assurance" training materials complete with videos and voiceovers and nice little sub-plots and quizzes meant to be very accessible to their workers.
I'm old skool, so I have most of my stuff in KeyRing for PalmOS. There's a jpilot plugin so I can sync and access it from Linux.
Someday I plan to migrate to KeePass, and then have some plugin automatically sync and login with Firefox using some sort of master password.
Also need to make some dead man's switch so my wife can get access to all of the accounts if something happens to me. Right now my plan is to write down my master password with my last drops of blood as I lie face down on the pavement.
I've played with Pandora radio a bit before, but it doesn't tend to work for my taste in music. I like songs with funny lyrics... Monty Python, King Missile, Nellie McKay... the algorithms that focus strictly on musical styles generate pretty hilarious results, but not what I'm looking for:P
I've been pretty happy with some of the dj internet radio stations, though, like somafm.com and some of the ones on di.fm . Before I found some of those stations, I didn't really think there was much of any music that I liked. Certainly not on broadcast or satellite radio.
Hmm, I do find this interesting... perhaps this kind of effect can be how some saunas attribute "health benefits" to the "natural oscillations" emitted by rooms covered in different colored rocks?
I pretty much dismissed it before, but it's interesting if there might be some way for your environment to affect those kinds of operations inside of your cells.
As far as I've heard and experienced, the whole "nerd" stigma is an entirely American concept. There aren't really any such thing as "nerds" in Russian or Asian schools; some kids get better grades than others, but they all play football ("soccer") together or climb mountains or whatever. Would anyone in the international community care to elaborate?
I spent about 4 years growing up in Thailand during my childhood and went to an international school. So my personal sampling is skewed. I suppose we did make fun of kids with "teh ghey", but that eventually wore off once we realized how popular they were with the girls.
On returning to the US in 8th grade, the thing that got me the most was that no one played... back East we'd chomp down our lunches in 5 minutes and run out to spend the rest of our break time playing "balloon" or "rabbit" or "tee" or some other form form of zombie / team tag. The only form of physical activity was excruciatingly over-organized team sports with lots of rules and very brief bursts of activity followed by protracted yelling and arguments... more of a game for the enjoyment of politicians and lawyers if you ask me.
Anyway, other countries do have a lot more respect for education and teachers as a profession. Here they're treated more like some form of social worker, maybe marginally higher than street sweepers or bus drivers. Although the same thing appears to be happening to medical doctors now (back when I was growing up in Asia, a doctor was about the best thing a kid could grow up to be... so I was actually kinda surprised to find a lot of my childhood friends growing up to be computer programmers:P ).
'My political team is the best because it was my dad's and they best stoke my primitive fears,' as opposed to 'They have the best policies for me and my family.'
That reminds me of an old joke:
Q: "Why are you a republican?" A: "Well, because my father was a republican, and my father's father was a republican." Q: "What if your father was a horse thief, and your father's father was a horse thief?" A: "Well, then I'd probably be a democrat."
I pre-ordered my N900 through Amazon a few weeks back. I figured it'd be easier to get Android working under Maemo than the other way around.
Also, Maemo has a pretty long history of development. I was actually planning on buying an N810 a few months ago until I found out that the N900 might actually have a decent GPS.
Plus, Android phones will be cheap and easy to come by... so hopefully I'll get one for my wife and get to play with it there. But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box, and the N900 is pretty much the first thing that fits the bill in that respect. I could care less about the smartphone bit, other than the network connectivity, and of course the fact that I shouldn't need to carry a separate mobile phone around with me anymore.
I played around with Familiar linux (from http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old IPaq for a while, but it was always a bit frustrating that the hardware support wasn't completely there. So it shouldn't be too hard for Nokia to improve upon that experience:P
I really do hope Google caves in to the demand for a native google maps / google earth application on the Maemo, though.
Books (and software code) fall under copyright. So it's different than a license... You can't as well copy parts out of a book and call it your own without giving due credit to the original author. That kind of attribution is what the GPL helps sort out, though.
If you want a more truly free license, than go with one of the BSD'ish ones, that allow companies to take the code and roll it into their own proprietary black box. I think philosophically the BSD license only seeks to maintain copyright so that same company can't greedily claim copyright for themselves and start suing everyone else for using the same BSD code they stole. So you see why at least/some/ licensing terms are necessary. As a contribution to society, BSD only wants to make sure that the code used by all these proprietary products has a solid foundation. Just think... if it wasn't for the BSD network stack, Microsoft OS's would probably be completely pwned off the internets by now...
GPL does take licensing quite a bit farther to make their contribution to society... it is a vendetta against proprietary lock-in (and all those poor SOBs that had to attempt to deal with bugs in proprietary code with binary fiddling and patching... I figure RMS was particularly scarred by something like this in his younger years, and fully understand how he could have gone off the deep end as a result.) Proprietary lock-in is a form of extortion, which I think most people will agree is quite unethical.
On the other hand, I think a lot of people and businesses have the misconception that the GPL automatically means "public domain"... nowhere in the GPL does it state that the GPL'd code that you modify and give to someone else also automatically has to be released back upstream too. It can stay completely private between you and your customer. It only stipulates that you have to give your customer the power to fix your code, and also that the customer can go on and give the code to the rest of the public (and all of their competition) too if they want, or they could also take it to another programmer (your competition) if they want. That's the viral freedom-as-in-libre. It's not necessarily free-as-in-gratuit / beer (though a lot of OSS code is in addition to being GPL'd).
We're transitioning from a manufacturing economy to almost a completely imaginary intellectual property economy. The ones with all the money and power will be the ones with all the licenses - also imaginary. Think about that.
Well, #1... security measures only serve as deterrents. There will be a way around every security device, the only metric you really need to worry about is whether your:
(cost to circumvent) / (value of assets + cost to secure)
ratio is conveniently higher than your neighbors (ha ha, security people hate any mention of "convenience").
So... #2: by far the best thing you can do is to make sure your assets are relatively worthless compared to what other "target" have. Live a frugal life. Keep offsite backups of your photo albums. Don't keep secrets. And if you do, bury them with enough other crap (maybe using steganography if necessary) to decrease the signal/noise enough to make finding and sorting through the information kind of useless to those not in the know. Maybe you have lots of invalid bank and credit card information lying around. Or put a whole bunch of passwords in your secret password vault, in case it gets compromised (good sites will eventually lock them out for trying them all, and failed attempts will also tip you off and give you time to respond).
Next measure in the equation is to increase the cost of your perpetrator to circumvent security measures or commit crimes, far above what they'd gain by stealing your assets.
Cheap deterrents first: live up a flight of stairs... thieves are inherently lazy and will go for the "low hanging fruit" instead of you. In the context of this article, put your laptop up high in a closet or stash it in a drawer... make them search through dirty laundry for it.
The best society wouldn't need any security at all... if there was enough transparency and free flow of information, all thieves would get caught and reprimanded. So participate in the whole neighborhood watch thing, make sure your perp has to perform his act in very public settings, uniquely tag your stuff, and post warnings to remind them and make them nervous about getting arrested / shot / going to hell etc.
Finally, we get to the part of the equation where you actually have to actively do something for extra security measures.
First, make it a habit to perform the rudimentary simple steps of locking your door and always having your keys on you. Deadbolt is much better than the handle switch, and also helps insure that you remembered your keys. I involuntarily lock my house and car doors now, and always brush my pockets with my hands to check that my keys and wallet are still there. At this point, I usually notice within 5 minutes if something's missing.
Passwords and encryption are just more sophisticated keys and locks. Not uncircumventable, but much better than nothing. But before spending lots of money on more complex 2- & 3-factor keys and locks... especially those that can completely shoot you in the foot and result in losing all your data... most people invest in other measures... alarms and security cameras that would increase the chances of the perp getting caught. I haven't seen a whole lot that focuses on this area yet... the phone home mechanisms and stuff like that, but I figure it would be much more productive to concentrate on these kinds of security measures in the near term.
I'm hoping they'll turn up in a sidebar along with "sponsored" links.
But hopefully Google will only crawl twitter and use it to improve rankings, since twitter users seem to like to tweet links to URLs they like.
So this will probably just enhance google search results the same way they did when they brought in StumbleUpon. A lot of google results show StumbleUpon rankings and listings to comments, maybe now they'll also have a "X,XXX tweets" metric as well.
Do they allow women yet? I thought I had read somewhere that these kinds of simulations kept failing because the French and Russian "Simunauts" would start getting all aggressive over the attention of the female crewmembers after a few days.
So no, you probably wouldn't enjoy a porno. Well, unless you swing that way.
Actually, I thought some of the NASA space shuttle astronauts (who were coed) had proposed having sex in orbit, but mission control always declined/denied/cockblocked somehow.
Palm used to have a pretty neat developer community that would make their stuff do all kinds of wacky things. I've read a bit about the original creator of the Palm Pilot and how his company would get bought out and all the corporate folks would come in, and then he'd run off and start another company (Handspring) and introduce new ways to expand the device (remember the springboard modules? I actually had the GSM visorphone module one way back when). Anyway, I'm pretty distraught that Palm is kinda going the Apple way... they sort of replaced the expansion modules with SDIO, but now in the Palm Pre they got rid of expansion memory entirely (probably to lock you in to installing apps from their online store or via their proprietary conduit). Anyway, I had been holding out for Palm's Linux-based OS for years, but now that the Pre is here, I'm holding out even longer for Nokia's N900 "pocket debian box".
I've played with Familiar Linux ( http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old HP iPaq for a while, but the touchscreen gave out just as I had figured out a semi-usable configuration. Unfortunately, it didn't have much support from HP, so things like suspend or audio never worked completely right.
So I've been pretty excited about Nokia's whole Maemo effort, and even got the dev emulator running on my box at home. (Haven't figured out what to do next with it, other than look at the menu system:P ). It seems to have an emulator for legacy Palm apps as well, and I've also seen mention of it doing Android apps. I'd have just been happy with a decent ssh client:) After having used midpssh on a Blackberry, I'm looking forward to having a keyboard with a ctrl key.
They have quite a few years of community development effort behind them already with their previous models. I'm a bit concerned about their upcoming migration from gtk to qt, but applaud Nokia for buying Qt from Trolltech and releasing it under an OSS license, probably single-handedly saving the KDE project from Stallmanist criticism. I'm not even a big fan of KDE, but there are a few apps in there that are better than their GNOME counterparts.
Sorry for sounding like a shill, but I've always been pretty happy with Nokia... back in the 90's I bought one of their midrange phones and could actually set up and use a lot of the features like speeddial or voice dialing without having to crack open the manual. Even today I still have phone (Sony Ericsson, Samsung, etc.) where I have to dig around way too much to figure out how to simply sync my address book with my SIM card. I've also had good experiences with the hardware... dropped the phones several times without problems, once I managed to repair a corroded battery inside my phone, and recently my wife put her Nokia in the dryer with wet camping equipment for about 20 minutes and it still worked. The casing melted off, but we bought a new faceplate and still use it:P
Anyway, that's all the anecdotes I have on the subject.
We'll, I was hoping to just google cloud vs. grid vs. distributed vs. cluster vs. etc. computing, but there doesn't seem to be much official-sounding distinction out there. Which means if we start our own thread here it might become definitive!
"cloud" computing: fluffy term used by people who really don't know anything other than that they run their applications from a web page and their data appears to be stored on the web because they can access it from more than one web browser.
"hosted" / "server farm" computing: buying server resources from someone who has a real datacenter who tries to take care of your hardware. You access all of your data over the network "cloud". Redundancy & support varies based on pricing & services.
"grid" / "utility" computing: computing infrastructure where you should be able to simply scale up CPU, data, etc. resources for your operation simply by throwing money at turning on more boxes. You don't necessarily need to share it with others, though.
"cluster" computing: a computing system made up of more or less independent, generally homogeneous nodes, where problems can be partitioned out. Generally has some form of redundancy so you don't lose work when a single node dies, but probably won't survive a data center failure.
"distributed" computing: special applications that can be farmed out to the net to break parts of computing or storage across a heterogeneous network of computers distributed over many locations. Ideally it's written to be highly redundant and tolerate faults such as nodes joining / leaving the cluster.
As far as reliability goes, the TIA data center tiers seems to be the only common way of talking about maintaining "business continuity". I've read through it briefly, and can somewhat paraphrase the intent (mildly inaccurately, mostly because the standard itself is kinda loose and not defined in too much detail with regards to servers) as:
Tier 1 "basic" : You have a room for servers with a door to keep random people from tripping over the plugs. Maybe you have a UPS on your server so it can do a graceful shutdown without data loss when the power or AC goes out.
Tier 2 : You have your stuff in racks with a raised floor for air conditioning and some wire racks hanging from the ceiling for cable management.
Tier 3 : You have redundant UPS's and RAIDs, CRACs, network links, and stuff, so you can make repairs when common things break without turning off the system (typically anything with moving parts or high currents, like power supplies, fans, disks, batteries needs to be hot-swappable). Which means you should also have some sort of monitoring and alert system so you know when that stuff actually fails so you can replace it before the redundant components also fail. This is intended to reach 24x7 availability with high uptimes... , maybe 3-5 nines.
Tier 4 : Like Tier 3, but certified for mission-critical / life-critical use, like in hospitals and maybe for airplanes and stuff. It should survive prolonged power outages (so you have a diesel generator with a day or two worth of fuel.)
Unfortunately, it just covers build specs for individual data centers, so it doesn't really cover other business continuity things like maintaining offsite backups so you can somewhat easily rebuild from scratch if a natural disaster takes out one of your data centers or something. But it's kind of different worlds of IT between designing facilities and architecting "cloud" services, which unfortunately don't seem to communicate or collaborate as much as they should to reach the kinds of "distributed grid of redundant load-sharing data centers" configurations we'd expect.
I'm glad cooperative gameplay is enjoying a resurgence... it had always been my favorite mode since the days of the original Contra, hell, even since Clowns on the C64.
With a single-player game, sure they might have more control over the experience, but at best you can get good at pushing buttons in an exact, repeatable order. And while watching experienced players breeze through Super Mario Bros. or Quake done Quick is interesting for a spell, it's kind of sad that that might represent the apogee of the single-player experience.... if you're really good, you can do it the same way each time.
Multiplayer adds a lot more dynamicism missing from games, and allows you to focus on developing your character in some way that would actually be appreciated by someone else... do you always watch their back? Do you always leave them behind? Which kinds of spoils of war do you leave for them to pick up?
Yeah, I certainly agree that they're far too closed. I've really liked using Palm stuff over the years... still use my Palm T|X as my primary organizer while holding out for their Linux-based offering. Then the Pre came out without any kind of memory card support, which was the main dealbreaker for me... I couldn't figure out why they'd make such a blatant omission, but it's starting to make sense now that they're following the Apple model of locking down the device so you can only put things on it OTA through their channels or via their proprietary wired conduit.
Now that I think about it, they've started this some time ago, when they removed the USBdrive mode when going from the Palm T5 to the Palm T|X, though you could still work around it by installing apps in the SD card and moving it things to/from its main memory using FileZ.
Anyway, I didn't want to be stuck with their tethering application to get things in and out of the device, so I ended up waiting a few months more... I just pre-ordered an unlocked Nokia N900 a week ago. While it's more expensive, it's essentially a pocketable Debian box which is more along the lines of what I've always wanted anyway.
I'll miss Palm's well-designed PIM apps, but Maemo has a free PalmOS 5 Garnet emulator on it (you have to pay extra for the PalmOS 5 emulator on the Pre for carrying over your legacy Palm apps - brilliant), so Maemo even seems to offer a better upgrade path for us die-hard Palm users than Palm does these days:P .
Well, the classic thermo problem is that you have a box full of gas. Suddenly, you double the volume of the box - in the example you open a partition into another box next to it, and the gas expands to fill the new volume. You can harness that energy gradient to do some useful work. Afterwards, the gas is fully mixed between the initial and final volumes of the box, the entropy is maxed out, and you can't really get anything out of it anymore.
If the universe were constrained to a constant volume, we probably would be in heat death already, since everything would have mixed. But because the volume keeps expanding, the universe has maintained lots of lumps and clusters of high energy and low energy, and a lot of which is all clustered into stringy bits, so you can still take advantage of energy gradients to do things. As long as there is empty space next to filled, space, there's lower entropy.
You could argue that the purpose of life is to decrease local entropy per unit volume (at the expense of higher global entropy)... The insides of stars are pretty interesting, but only on a scale of several thousand miles. However, life forms will find an energy gradient - heat and radiation from the sun - and use that to organize molecules to make things pretty interesting on a scale of nanometers and micrometers.
All of this activity generates high-entropy waste heat, but as long as there's somewhere for all of this heat to go (radiated off into empty space) then we're locally safe from heat death, where we just turn to a uniform gas or plasma stew.
"I heard it from Slashdot", but I think the deal was that Google used "commodity" server hardware that they spec'd and cobbled together on their own, instead of just buying into established premium-grade servers like IBM Bladecenters or HP Proliants or Dell PowerEdge or something like that.
Actually, I thought I had heard that they build their clusters using SuperMicro boxes (which are integrated and sold by a variety of distributors), but I can't find anything to back that up now. But yeah, black box commodity servers.
Well, they still control the URL used to download the app, so they can ostensibly yank an app if "the community" finds out something is laden with malware. Pretty much the same way big open source distribution points work.
I bet they also make you click through some legal disclaimer when you download any app through them anyway.
I'm glad they're going for the side of "too open" vs. "too closed", while still maintaining some modicum of control. It's not like they let people load apps directly from anywhere, propagating who-knows-what.
The universe is still expanding in all directions at the speed of light, then the entropy per unit volume will still stay low enough to be habitable, right?
Or is the problem that the rate of increase in volume will not keep pace, since it takes longer and longer for the universe to double in volume at a constant rate of expansion?
Hear hear... I want to be able to opt-in to a system somewhere that prevents anyone from opening a credit card account in my name unless the application is digitally signed by me or something like that. There should be no reason I have to hide my SSN and birthday and Mother's maiden name... in fact they're all pretty much a matter of public record already anyway. There must be some agency, tied to the credit reporting agencies, that offers something like that.
Credit cards companies and even banks are all to eager to allow anyone to sign up, because for them, the profit from legally collecting all kinds of fees from people far outweigh any losses due to fraudulent charges, especially when they can pass them on to collection agencies anyway, who can usually get people pay them off just to clean their record. Someone needs to rein those types of operations in.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have as much trouble with my family's computers... maybe you just need to tell them to stop surfing pr0n sites :P
But if they insist, just stick a Linux LiveCD in their box "until you get around to fixing windows". And let them know they can surf all the (legal) p0rn they like with it with little repercussion :P
My current favorite is Linux Mint : http://www.linuxmint.com/ It's based on Ubuntu, but they're a bit less shy about including non-free software such as Flash and proprietary video drivers by default.
If they like it, you can also create a USB drive version of it so they can carry their changes (updated software and files) around with them. If they still manage to break it, you can simply copy over the casper-rw file over again with an empty version (or from the last working backup)
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/create-a-linux-mint-7-usb-flash-drive-from-cd/
The feds appear to have spent a lot of money developing nice Flash-based "Information Assurance" training materials complete with videos and voiceovers and nice little sub-plots and quizzes meant to be very accessible to their workers.
http://iase.disa.mil/eta/issv3/issv3/index.htm
Of course, not everything will be relevant to your family, but it's a good start.
I'm old skool, so I have most of my stuff in KeyRing for PalmOS. There's a jpilot plugin so I can sync and access it from Linux.
Someday I plan to migrate to KeePass, and then have some plugin automatically sync and login with Firefox using some sort of master password.
Also need to make some dead man's switch so my wife can get access to all of the accounts if something happens to me. Right now my plan is to write down my master password with my last drops of blood as I lie face down on the pavement.
If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what's the opposite of progress?
Anyway, I lol'd at the Libraries of Congress per second thing... shame the downmodder didn't "get" it.
I live in the DC area and drive by the National Archives every once in a while, and I still hate it when it's used as an analogy.
I've played with Pandora radio a bit before, but it doesn't tend to work for my taste in music. I like songs with funny lyrics... Monty Python, King Missile, Nellie McKay... the algorithms that focus strictly on musical styles generate pretty hilarious results, but not what I'm looking for :P
I've been pretty happy with some of the dj internet radio stations, though, like somafm.com and some of the ones on di.fm . Before I found some of those stations, I didn't really think there was much of any music that I liked. Certainly not on broadcast or satellite radio.
Hmm, I do find this interesting... perhaps this kind of effect can be how some saunas attribute "health benefits" to the "natural oscillations" emitted by rooms covered in different colored rocks?
I pretty much dismissed it before, but it's interesting if there might be some way for your environment to affect those kinds of operations inside of your cells.
As far as I've heard and experienced, the whole "nerd" stigma is an entirely American concept. There aren't really any such thing as "nerds" in Russian or Asian schools; some kids get better grades than others, but they all play football ("soccer") together or climb mountains or whatever. Would anyone in the international community care to elaborate?
I spent about 4 years growing up in Thailand during my childhood and went to an international school. So my personal sampling is skewed. I suppose we did make fun of kids with "teh ghey", but that eventually wore off once we realized how popular they were with the girls.
On returning to the US in 8th grade, the thing that got me the most was that no one played... back East we'd chomp down our lunches in 5 minutes and run out to spend the rest of our break time playing "balloon" or "rabbit" or "tee" or some other form form of zombie / team tag. The only form of physical activity was excruciatingly over-organized team sports with lots of rules and very brief bursts of activity followed by protracted yelling and arguments... more of a game for the enjoyment of politicians and lawyers if you ask me.
Anyway, other countries do have a lot more respect for education and teachers as a profession. Here they're treated more like some form of social worker, maybe marginally higher than street sweepers or bus drivers. Although the same thing appears to be happening to medical doctors now (back when I was growing up in Asia, a doctor was about the best thing a kid could grow up to be... so I was actually kinda surprised to find a lot of my childhood friends growing up to be computer programmers :P ).
'My political team is the best because it was my dad's and they best stoke my primitive fears,' as opposed to 'They have the best policies for me and my family.'
That reminds me of an old joke:
Q: "Why are you a republican?"
A: "Well, because my father was a republican, and my father's father was a republican."
Q: "What if your father was a horse thief, and your father's father was a horse thief?"
A: "Well, then I'd probably be a democrat."
haw haw /registered independent
I pre-ordered my N900 through Amazon a few weeks back. I figured it'd be easier to get Android working under Maemo than the other way around.
Also, Maemo has a pretty long history of development. I was actually planning on buying an N810 a few months ago until I found out that the N900 might actually have a decent GPS.
Plus, Android phones will be cheap and easy to come by... so hopefully I'll get one for my wife and get to play with it there. But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box, and the N900 is pretty much the first thing that fits the bill in that respect. I could care less about the smartphone bit, other than the network connectivity, and of course the fact that I shouldn't need to carry a separate mobile phone around with me anymore.
I played around with Familiar linux (from http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old IPaq for a while, but it was always a bit frustrating that the hardware support wasn't completely there. So it shouldn't be too hard for Nokia to improve upon that experience :P
I really do hope Google caves in to the demand for a native google maps / google earth application on the Maemo, though.
Books (and software code) fall under copyright. So it's different than a license... You can't as well copy parts out of a book and call it your own without giving due credit to the original author. That kind of attribution is what the GPL helps sort out, though.
If you want a more truly free license, than go with one of the BSD'ish ones, that allow companies to take the code and roll it into their own proprietary black box. I think philosophically the BSD license only seeks to maintain copyright so that same company can't greedily claim copyright for themselves and start suing everyone else for using the same BSD code they stole. So you see why at least /some/ licensing terms are necessary. As a contribution to society, BSD only wants to make sure that the code used by all these proprietary products has a solid foundation. Just think... if it wasn't for the BSD network stack, Microsoft OS's would probably be completely pwned off the internets by now...
GPL does take licensing quite a bit farther to make their contribution to society... it is a vendetta against proprietary lock-in (and all those poor SOBs that had to attempt to deal with bugs in proprietary code with binary fiddling and patching... I figure RMS was particularly scarred by something like this in his younger years, and fully understand how he could have gone off the deep end as a result.) Proprietary lock-in is a form of extortion, which I think most people will agree is quite unethical.
On the other hand, I think a lot of people and businesses have the misconception that the GPL automatically means "public domain"... nowhere in the GPL does it state that the GPL'd code that you modify and give to someone else also automatically has to be released back upstream too. It can stay completely private between you and your customer. It only stipulates that you have to give your customer the power to fix your code, and also that the customer can go on and give the code to the rest of the public (and all of their competition) too if they want, or they could also take it to another programmer (your competition) if they want. That's the viral freedom-as-in-libre. It's not necessarily free-as-in-gratuit / beer (though a lot of OSS code is in addition to being GPL'd).
We're transitioning from a manufacturing economy to almost a completely imaginary intellectual property economy. The ones with all the money and power will be the ones with all the licenses - also imaginary. Think about that.
Well, #1... security measures only serve as deterrents. There will be a way around every security device, the only metric you really need to worry about is whether your:
(cost to circumvent) / (value of assets + cost to secure)
ratio is conveniently higher than your neighbors (ha ha, security people hate any mention of "convenience").
So... #2: by far the best thing you can do is to make sure your assets are relatively worthless compared to what other "target" have. Live a frugal life. Keep offsite backups of your photo albums. Don't keep secrets. And if you do, bury them with enough other crap (maybe using steganography if necessary) to decrease the signal/noise enough to make finding and sorting through the information kind of useless to those not in the know. Maybe you have lots of invalid bank and credit card information lying around. Or put a whole bunch of passwords in your secret password vault, in case it gets compromised (good sites will eventually lock them out for trying them all, and failed attempts will also tip you off and give you time to respond).
Next measure in the equation is to increase the cost of your perpetrator to circumvent security measures or commit crimes, far above what they'd gain by stealing your assets.
Cheap deterrents first: live up a flight of stairs... thieves are inherently lazy and will go for the "low hanging fruit" instead of you. In the context of this article, put your laptop up high in a closet or stash it in a drawer... make them search through dirty laundry for it.
The best society wouldn't need any security at all... if there was enough transparency and free flow of information, all thieves would get caught and reprimanded. So participate in the whole neighborhood watch thing, make sure your perp has to perform his act in very public settings, uniquely tag your stuff, and post warnings to remind them and make them nervous about getting arrested / shot / going to hell etc.
Finally, we get to the part of the equation where you actually have to actively do something for extra security measures.
First, make it a habit to perform the rudimentary simple steps of locking your door and always having your keys on you. Deadbolt is much better than the handle switch, and also helps insure that you remembered your keys. I involuntarily lock my house and car doors now, and always brush my pockets with my hands to check that my keys and wallet are still there. At this point, I usually notice within 5 minutes if something's missing.
Passwords and encryption are just more sophisticated keys and locks. Not uncircumventable, but much better than nothing. But before spending lots of money on more complex 2- & 3-factor keys and locks ... especially those that can completely shoot you in the foot and result in losing all your data... most people invest in other measures ... alarms and security cameras that would increase the chances of the perp getting caught. I haven't seen a whole lot that focuses on this area yet... the phone home mechanisms and stuff like that, but I figure it would be much more productive to concentrate on these kinds of security measures in the near term.
I'm hoping they'll turn up in a sidebar along with "sponsored" links.
But hopefully Google will only crawl twitter and use it to improve rankings, since twitter users seem to like to tweet links to URLs they like.
So this will probably just enhance google search results the same way they did when they brought in StumbleUpon. A lot of google results show StumbleUpon rankings and listings to comments, maybe now they'll also have a "X,XXX tweets" metric as well.
But far be it from me to speculate.
Not to mention Wolfenstein.
Hey, look at that first picture and caption right in your face when you bring up the fine article!
Oh, I suppose you could be talking about the summary ;-)
Do they allow women yet? I thought I had read somewhere that these kinds of simulations kept failing because the French and Russian "Simunauts" would start getting all aggressive over the attention of the female crewmembers after a few days.
So no, you probably wouldn't enjoy a porno. Well, unless you swing that way.
Actually, I thought some of the NASA space shuttle astronauts (who were coed) had proposed having sex in orbit, but mission control always declined/denied/cockblocked somehow.
Excellent... thank you for that pointer :>
Palm used to have a pretty neat developer community that would make their stuff do all kinds of wacky things. I've read a bit about the original creator of the Palm Pilot and how his company would get bought out and all the corporate folks would come in, and then he'd run off and start another company (Handspring) and introduce new ways to expand the device (remember the springboard modules? I actually had the GSM visorphone module one way back when). Anyway, I'm pretty distraught that Palm is kinda going the Apple way... they sort of replaced the expansion modules with SDIO, but now in the Palm Pre they got rid of expansion memory entirely (probably to lock you in to installing apps from their online store or via their proprietary conduit). Anyway, I had been holding out for Palm's Linux-based OS for years, but now that the Pre is here, I'm holding out even longer for Nokia's N900 "pocket debian box".
I've played with Familiar Linux ( http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old HP iPaq for a while, but the touchscreen gave out just as I had figured out a semi-usable configuration. Unfortunately, it didn't have much support from HP, so things like suspend or audio never worked completely right.
So I've been pretty excited about Nokia's whole Maemo effort, and even got the dev emulator running on my box at home. (Haven't figured out what to do next with it, other than look at the menu system :P ). It seems to have an emulator for legacy Palm apps as well, and I've also seen mention of it doing Android apps. I'd have just been happy with a decent ssh client :) After having used midpssh on a Blackberry, I'm looking forward to having a keyboard with a ctrl key.
They have quite a few years of community development effort behind them already with their previous models. I'm a bit concerned about their upcoming migration from gtk to qt, but applaud Nokia for buying Qt from Trolltech and releasing it under an OSS license, probably single-handedly saving the KDE project from Stallmanist criticism. I'm not even a big fan of KDE, but there are a few apps in there that are better than their GNOME counterparts.
Sorry for sounding like a shill, but I've always been pretty happy with Nokia... back in the 90's I bought one of their midrange phones and could actually set up and use a lot of the features like speeddial or voice dialing without having to crack open the manual. Even today I still have phone (Sony Ericsson, Samsung, etc.) where I have to dig around way too much to figure out how to simply sync my address book with my SIM card. I've also had good experiences with the hardware... dropped the phones several times without problems, once I managed to repair a corroded battery inside my phone, and recently my wife put her Nokia in the dryer with wet camping equipment for about 20 minutes and it still worked. The casing melted off, but we bought a new faceplate and still use it :P
Anyway, that's all the anecdotes I have on the subject.
YYYY-MM-DD is the only sane way to write dates... and it even sorts properly.
But alas, we live in a world of insanity.
OK, I suppose I'd be somewhat annoyed if we gave temperature in Kelvins.
Just be glad we don't write web addesses in XML!
<a href="<URI protocol=http><HOST>slashdot</HOST><DN>org</DN><PATH>search</PATH><EXTENSION>pl</EXTENSION><POST><QUERY term=q>Where's the beef?</QUERY></POST></URI>">
We'll, I was hoping to just google cloud vs. grid vs. distributed vs. cluster vs. etc. computing, but there doesn't seem to be much official-sounding distinction out there. Which means if we start our own thread here it might become definitive!
"cloud" computing: fluffy term used by people who really don't know anything other than that they run their applications from a web page and their data appears to be stored on the web because they can access it from more than one web browser.
"hosted" / "server farm" computing: buying server resources from someone who has a real datacenter who tries to take care of your hardware. You access all of your data over the network "cloud". Redundancy & support varies based on pricing & services.
"grid" / "utility" computing: computing infrastructure where you should be able to simply scale up CPU, data, etc. resources for your operation simply by throwing money at turning on more boxes. You don't necessarily need to share it with others, though.
"cluster" computing: a computing system made up of more or less independent, generally homogeneous nodes, where problems can be partitioned out. Generally has some form of redundancy so you don't lose work when a single node dies, but probably won't survive a data center failure.
"distributed" computing: special applications that can be farmed out to the net to break parts of computing or storage across a heterogeneous network of computers distributed over many locations. Ideally it's written to be highly redundant and tolerate faults such as nodes joining / leaving the cluster.
As far as reliability goes, the TIA data center tiers seems to be the only common way of talking about maintaining "business continuity". I've read through it briefly, and can somewhat paraphrase the intent (mildly inaccurately, mostly because the standard itself is kinda loose and not defined in too much detail with regards to servers) as:
Tier 1 "basic" : You have a room for servers with a door to keep random people from tripping over the plugs. Maybe you have a UPS on your server so it can do a graceful shutdown without data loss when the power or AC goes out.
Tier 2 : You have your stuff in racks with a raised floor for air conditioning and some wire racks hanging from the ceiling for cable management.
Tier 3 : You have redundant UPS's and RAIDs, CRACs, network links, and stuff, so you can make repairs when common things break without turning off the system (typically anything with moving parts or high currents, like power supplies, fans, disks, batteries needs to be hot-swappable). Which means you should also have some sort of monitoring and alert system so you know when that stuff actually fails so you can replace it before the redundant components also fail. This is intended to reach 24x7 availability with high uptimes... , maybe 3-5 nines.
Tier 4 : Like Tier 3, but certified for mission-critical / life-critical use, like in hospitals and maybe for airplanes and stuff. It should survive prolonged power outages (so you have a diesel generator with a day or two worth of fuel.)
Unfortunately, it just covers build specs for individual data centers, so it doesn't really cover other business continuity things like maintaining offsite backups so you can somewhat easily rebuild from scratch if a natural disaster takes out one of your data centers or something. But it's kind of different worlds of IT between designing facilities and architecting "cloud" services, which unfortunately don't seem to communicate or collaborate as much as they should to reach the kinds of "distributed grid of redundant load-sharing data centers" configurations we'd expect.
I'm glad cooperative gameplay is enjoying a resurgence... it had always been my favorite mode since the days of the original Contra, hell, even since Clowns on the C64. With a single-player game, sure they might have more control over the experience, but at best you can get good at pushing buttons in an exact, repeatable order. And while watching experienced players breeze through Super Mario Bros. or Quake done Quick is interesting for a spell, it's kind of sad that that might represent the apogee of the single-player experience.... if you're really good, you can do it the same way each time. Multiplayer adds a lot more dynamicism missing from games, and allows you to focus on developing your character in some way that would actually be appreciated by someone else... do you always watch their back? Do you always leave them behind? Which kinds of spoils of war do you leave for them to pick up?
Now that I think about it, they've started this some time ago, when they removed the USBdrive mode when going from the Palm T5 to the Palm T|X, though you could still work around it by installing apps in the SD card and moving it things to/from its main memory using FileZ.
Anyway, I didn't want to be stuck with their tethering application to get things in and out of the device, so I ended up waiting a few months more... I just pre-ordered an unlocked Nokia N900 a week ago. While it's more expensive, it's essentially a pocketable Debian box which is more along the lines of what I've always wanted anyway.
I'll miss Palm's well-designed PIM apps, but Maemo has a free PalmOS 5 Garnet emulator on it (you have to pay extra for the PalmOS 5 emulator on the Pre for carrying over your legacy Palm apps - brilliant), so Maemo even seems to offer a better upgrade path for us die-hard Palm users than Palm does these days :P .
If the universe were constrained to a constant volume, we probably would be in heat death already, since everything would have mixed. But because the volume keeps expanding, the universe has maintained lots of lumps and clusters of high energy and low energy, and a lot of which is all clustered into stringy bits, so you can still take advantage of energy gradients to do things. As long as there is empty space next to filled, space, there's lower entropy.
You could argue that the purpose of life is to decrease local entropy per unit volume (at the expense of higher global entropy)... The insides of stars are pretty interesting, but only on a scale of several thousand miles. However, life forms will find an energy gradient - heat and radiation from the sun - and use that to organize molecules to make things pretty interesting on a scale of nanometers and micrometers.
All of this activity generates high-entropy waste heat, but as long as there's somewhere for all of this heat to go (radiated off into empty space) then we're locally safe from heat death, where we just turn to a uniform gas or plasma stew.
Actually, I thought I had heard that they build their clusters using SuperMicro boxes (which are integrated and sold by a variety of distributors), but I can't find anything to back that up now. But yeah, black box commodity servers.
I bet they also make you click through some legal disclaimer when you download any app through them anyway.
I'm glad they're going for the side of "too open" vs. "too closed", while still maintaining some modicum of control. It's not like they let people load apps directly from anywhere, propagating who-knows-what.
The universe is still expanding in all directions at the speed of light, then the entropy per unit volume will still stay low enough to be habitable, right? Or is the problem that the rate of increase in volume will not keep pace, since it takes longer and longer for the universe to double in volume at a constant rate of expansion?
Credit cards companies and even banks are all to eager to allow anyone to sign up, because for them, the profit from legally collecting all kinds of fees from people far outweigh any losses due to fraudulent charges, especially when they can pass them on to collection agencies anyway, who can usually get people pay them off just to clean their record. Someone needs to rein those types of operations in.