>Obviously no one manipulates the reactor control rods over the internet, outsourced to India.
Your business plan intrigues me and I would like to offer you our highly competitive fully virtualised e-cloud dot web 2.0 Reactor As A Service SPAM-2-SCRAM platform hosted in Dubai for the low, low price of $1 million per day.
Perhaps because others were doing it. A number of independent projects tried to back up Geocities, and may have between them recovered most of the data.
Sure it is. You just go to the "app store" and click on the application you want to install.
The system sorts out the relevant details.
Amen to this. Synaptic in Ubuntu is awesome. If a program is reasonably well known, chances are it'll already be in the package repository, so all you have to do is fire up Synaptic, search for it by name, click, vroom, all the dependencies get installed.
If it's not, or there's a newer version done by a third party - like say, Skype or NVidia drivers - the manufacturer might have already built a.deb /.rpm and put it up on their website.
This single unified packaging system (and there's only one per platform - apt/deb on Ubuntu/Debian, rpm on others) is used for EVERYTHING: applications and system components alike.
And if there's ever a security update for ANY program you have installed: up comes a popup, click/vroom, you're done, that's it.
Want to uninstall anything? Synaptic, uninstall, click/vroom, also done.
And you can do all of this by the command line if you want, or you can use shinier, simpler glossy App Store looking things which don't give you everything but let you click at the shiny games. Your choice as to how complex you want to make it.
Want to make a package or look inside one to see what it does? Easy, it's just a zip archive, a bunch of files, a manifest and some scripts. All text. And the tools to make them are out in the repository too.
Compare with OSX, where you have.imgs, which you have to manually download, which may contain app bundles for 'applications' (which can't install shared libraries) or.pkgs for system components... or Windows, where you have msi (bless it's blackened little soul) for applications or system stuff, Hotfixes and Fixits for patches, WSUS to auto-install MS patches (but not applications or security fixes for applications) and each app has its own proprietary auto patcher/downloader which assumes you're not in an enterprise environment...
The very nature of fission (at least the designs we currently have; possibly pebble bed or screw-reflector designs might sidestep some of this problem but I'm dubious) lends itself to centralisation. Because fission is a process which is fundamentally hazardous and produces toxic byproducts (radioactive isotopes) which we don't have good natural biological detection and defence against, it requires a certain minimum amount of high-tech monitoring protocols to be used with any degree of safety. A fire, you can burn yourself, but your skin will detect the heat and you can fairly easily learn to stay way. Poisonous industrial chemicals are worse, you could breathe fumes like the Bhopal disaster (though there'll often be visible cloud/mist to warn you to stay clear). But a piece of 'hot' uranium or a radioactive cloud, your body won't necessarily give you any cues until it's too late; if you see a blue flash from a criticality incident up close, you're probably already dying.
This means that to deploy fission successfully, it really can't be decentralised beyond a certain point because the operators have to be trained, monitored, etc. So there's a certain minimum of high-tech, high capital civilisation required to keep it running. And this has a big effect: it forces the shape of the power generation infrastructure to be like a pyramid, with a few big operators (even with international government/military involvement due to weapon proliferation or terrorism concerns).
Because of this pyramid structure forced by monitoring and safety concerns, it means big decisions must be made by a few people at the top - corporate executives, DOE officers, etc. And unfortunately, this means that the potential for corporate/governmental corruption - or even just the ordinary level of big-organisation blindness - is bigger than in an industry (like say, Internet development) where the technology is relatively safe and it would be okay for there to be lots of small semi-skilled players.
So now we have an environment where the technology itself forces big installations, big organisations, with all the inefficiencies that implies, and the potential for big mistakes made by a few. That's not really an ideal situation; the technology is driving the shape of the social organisation that creates it rather than the other way around.
A lot of these problems go away, or are minimised, if we don't look at fission as the solution but look at more decentralised energy alternatives like solar.
If you use Apple, you're a young, cool, hip, media loving yuppy. Even if you're 50 years old you must still believe in this image to fit with Apple. You sit in coffee shops for hours with your Apple devices wearing black turtlenecks and sipping over-priced latte's.
I don't know about you, but I slurp my overpriced lattes, I don't sip them.
"Scientists have proven climate change is real. It's now up to ECONOMISTS to determine which would be worse for humanity- to allow the climate to continue changing or to restructure our economy to prevent climate change."
These would be the same economists who brought us the banking meltdown?
How hard is it to pick and remember a four digit number of your choice?
Plenty hard enough, if you have to remember say a dozen of those (one for your cellphone, one for your voicemail, one for your banking card, one for your credit card, one for your banking website, one for your Cardax door entry system, one for the alarm system, one for your video store card, one for your DVD player parental lockout, one for your laptop BIOS security lockout... complete the list), and THEN maybe change some of those on a monthly basis.
(Yes, you want them all different, because do you want your cellphone company knowing your company Cardax code?)
That's, what, 32 or more random digits? If they are all PINs rather than passwords? And then if you had say just one of those being changed monthly, that's 48 more digits in a year. With no easy way of memorising them. How big is YOUR trivia brain?
Add in the fact that some of these are essential hardware-based systems storing important life information with perhaps no way of overriding them if you forget the PIN, and that they may also have 'three wrong guesses and you're locked out' security...
This is the recipe for terror and paranoia right there.
It worries me how many IT people think that THEIR system is the only one users have to deal with. Of course it isn't! It's one of dozens to hundreds. So multiply all your 'the users only have to remember this...' silliness by that factor to realise the cognitive load you're creating.
The concern over the eating-the-world scenario was allayed to physicists' satisfaction based on calculations about cosmic rays. The kinds of collisions that would produce strangelets happen constantly to the moon because of the lack of an atmosphere or magnetic field to shield it, and the moon's still there. Statistics suggest, therefore, that these particular concerns are unlikely to be realized.
Or that the moon itself is part of the conspiracy! It got eaten by a giant strangelet millions of years ago and it's been watching us all this time. Pretending to be nothing more than a rock.
Think about it, people. How did we manage to fake the Apollo landings so easily? Because the moon was in on it!
How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter?
We know because most of us are not wearing goatees.
Speak for yourself. *I* come from the planet which worked out how to kill millions of people in a neat airdroppable package.
Isn't that what the Apollo plaque says? "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon... we came to bring terror to all the galaxy. Muhahahaha!"
To his credit, the Win95 UI was pretty darn good. Gnome is still struggling to grasp the simplicity of making the Start Menu a folder, and Apple struck out wildly with the Dock. Taskbar and right-click for 'context menu' was awesome.
But the same UI team did some silly things too. The magic 'My Documents' folder... with a space... which morphs into 'Bob's Documents'..... brrrrrr. We're still being burned by that today.
I should add - being a general-purpose device IMO makes a netbook MORE of an 'appliance', not LESS of one.
If I have a shiny iPad, Sony WalkPad, Microsoft SurfaceBook, Amazon Kindle, etc... I'm now back in the nasty 80s where nothign connects and my jacket is full of devices just to get anything done. They're pretty, but they're not 'just works' usable. They all have their quirks and gimmicks I have to learn.
But if all my devices are just ordinary, boring, standard PCs, and I can trust they've all got USB, SVGA, keyboard, screen.... then they become interchangeable bricks. Anything works anywhere.
Dumb boring bricks are good! Companies hate them, because they can't sell value-added features - but for the consumer, it means simplicity. Cuts through the labyrinth of features. Just buy based on size of the screen, battery life, etc.
In summary, the 80s were a horrible decade for hardware standards on personal computers.
Oh yes. I fondly remember sending files via XMODEM over BBS because that was the only way to get from PC to Commodore to Apple... though why I wanted do that I forget, since you couldn't actually read or run anything from another system.
Slashdot Mirror
terrets != Tourettes but that was probably intentional right?
I read it as "typing ferrets".
It could be true!
and if it's not, I got a business model to patent.
Chertoff even? I'm surprised they didn't put "Heckuva Job Brownie" in as Cybersecurity Czar.
No problem, we'll just outlaw social contact for sysadmins.
It's not like we'll notice anyway.
And terrorists are not exactly known for being rational.
Anyone who pisses them off is going to face mega retaliation...
The scary thing is, the "act like a raving maniac with a nuke" strategy is actually cold-blooded hardcore game theory rational.
Just ask RAND.
The one which could survive without Farmville the longest.
North Korea, perhaps.
>Obviously no one manipulates the reactor control rods over the internet, outsourced to India.
Your business plan intrigues me and I would like to offer you our highly competitive fully virtualised e-cloud dot web 2.0 Reactor As A Service SPAM-2-SCRAM platform hosted in Dubai for the low, low price of $1 million per day.
Perhaps because others were doing it. A number of independent projects tried to back up Geocities, and may have between them recovered most of the data.
* http://geociti.es/
* http://reocities.com/
* http://www.archiveteam.org/
I don't know about Greek, but it's a good thing that at least the authentication server for the Epic of Gilgamesh is still online.
So all the stories about Montezuma's palaces of gold were just that?
What the hell is kdenlive?
What the hell is Final Cut Pro?
Sure it is. You just go to the "app store" and click on the application you want to install.
The system sorts out the relevant details.
Amen to this. Synaptic in Ubuntu is awesome. If a program is reasonably well known, chances are it'll already be in the package repository, so all you have to do is fire up Synaptic, search for it by name, click, vroom, all the dependencies get installed.
If it's not, or there's a newer version done by a third party - like say, Skype or NVidia drivers - the manufacturer might have already built a .deb / .rpm and put it up on their website.
This single unified packaging system (and there's only one per platform - apt/deb on Ubuntu/Debian, rpm on others) is used for EVERYTHING: applications and system components alike.
And if there's ever a security update for ANY program you have installed: up comes a popup, click/vroom, you're done, that's it.
Want to uninstall anything? Synaptic, uninstall, click/vroom, also done.
And you can do all of this by the command line if you want, or you can use shinier, simpler glossy App Store looking things which don't give you everything but let you click at the shiny games. Your choice as to how complex you want to make it.
Want to make a package or look inside one to see what it does? Easy, it's just a zip archive, a bunch of files, a manifest and some scripts. All text. And the tools to make them are out in the repository too.
Compare with OSX, where you have .imgs, which you have to manually download, which may contain app bundles for 'applications' (which can't install shared libraries) or .pkgs for system components... or Windows, where you have msi (bless it's blackened little soul) for applications or system stuff, Hotfixes and Fixits for patches, WSUS to auto-install MS patches (but not applications or security fixes for applications) and each app has its own proprietary auto patcher/downloader which assumes you're not in an enterprise environment...
It's like night and day really.
True, but there is another angle to this:
The very nature of fission (at least the designs we currently have; possibly pebble bed or screw-reflector designs might sidestep some of this problem but I'm dubious) lends itself to centralisation. Because fission is a process which is fundamentally hazardous and produces toxic byproducts (radioactive isotopes) which we don't have good natural biological detection and defence against, it requires a certain minimum amount of high-tech monitoring protocols to be used with any degree of safety. A fire, you can burn yourself, but your skin will detect the heat and you can fairly easily learn to stay way. Poisonous industrial chemicals are worse, you could breathe fumes like the Bhopal disaster (though there'll often be visible cloud/mist to warn you to stay clear). But a piece of 'hot' uranium or a radioactive cloud, your body won't necessarily give you any cues until it's too late; if you see a blue flash from a criticality incident up close, you're probably already dying.
This means that to deploy fission successfully, it really can't be decentralised beyond a certain point because the operators have to be trained, monitored, etc. So there's a certain minimum of high-tech, high capital civilisation required to keep it running. And this has a big effect: it forces the shape of the power generation infrastructure to be like a pyramid, with a few big operators (even with international government/military involvement due to weapon proliferation or terrorism concerns).
Because of this pyramid structure forced by monitoring and safety concerns, it means big decisions must be made by a few people at the top - corporate executives, DOE officers, etc. And unfortunately, this means that the potential for corporate/governmental corruption - or even just the ordinary level of big-organisation blindness - is bigger than in an industry (like say, Internet development) where the technology is relatively safe and it would be okay for there to be lots of small semi-skilled players.
So now we have an environment where the technology itself forces big installations, big organisations, with all the inefficiencies that implies, and the potential for big mistakes made by a few. That's not really an ideal situation; the technology is driving the shape of the social organisation that creates it rather than the other way around.
A lot of these problems go away, or are minimised, if we don't look at fission as the solution but look at more decentralised energy alternatives like solar.
If you use Apple, you're a young, cool, hip, media loving yuppy. Even if you're 50 years old you must still believe in this image to fit with Apple. You sit in coffee shops for hours with your Apple devices wearing black turtlenecks and sipping over-priced latte's.
I don't know about you, but I slurp my overpriced lattes, I don't sip them.
"Scientists have proven climate change is real. It's now up to ECONOMISTS to determine which would be worse for humanity- to allow the climate to continue changing or to restructure our economy to prevent climate change."
These would be the same economists who brought us the banking meltdown?
Thanks, but no thanks.
How hard is it to pick and remember a four digit number of your choice?
Plenty hard enough, if you have to remember say a dozen of those (one for your cellphone, one for your voicemail, one for your banking card, one for your credit card, one for your banking website, one for your Cardax door entry system, one for the alarm system, one for your video store card, one for your DVD player parental lockout, one for your laptop BIOS security lockout... complete the list), and THEN maybe change some of those on a monthly basis.
(Yes, you want them all different, because do you want your cellphone company knowing your company Cardax code?)
That's, what, 32 or more random digits? If they are all PINs rather than passwords? And then if you had say just one of those being changed monthly, that's 48 more digits in a year. With no easy way of memorising them. How big is YOUR trivia brain?
Add in the fact that some of these are essential hardware-based systems storing important life information with perhaps no way of overriding them if you forget the PIN, and that they may also have 'three wrong guesses and you're locked out' security...
This is the recipe for terror and paranoia right there.
It worries me how many IT people think that THEIR system is the only one users have to deal with. Of course it isn't! It's one of dozens to hundreds. So multiply all your 'the users only have to remember this...' silliness by that factor to realise the cognitive load you're creating.
Once production is geared up, the cost will come down, unless they are using unobtanium in the paints on the ceramic plates.
And even if they are, a few more Marines will sort out any trouble from the blue monkeys.
The concern over the eating-the-world scenario was allayed to physicists' satisfaction based on calculations about cosmic rays. The kinds of collisions that would produce strangelets happen constantly to the moon because of the lack of an atmosphere or magnetic field to shield it, and the moon's still there. Statistics suggest, therefore, that these particular concerns are unlikely to be realized.
Or that the moon itself is part of the conspiracy! It got eaten by a giant strangelet millions of years ago and it's been watching us all this time. Pretending to be nothing more than a rock.
Think about it, people. How did we manage to fake the Apollo landings so easily? Because the moon was in on it!
How do we know that we aren't the anti-matter and that what we think is anti-matter is really matter?
We know because most of us are not wearing goatees.
Speak for yourself. *I* come from the planet which worked out how to kill millions of people in a neat airdroppable package.
Isn't that what the Apollo plaque says? "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the Moon... we came to bring terror to all the galaxy. Muhahahaha!"
But the two devices are not mutually exclusive and in fact are complementary.
Only if you have the disposable cash and gadget luggage space to buy both.
Dunno about netbooks, but Blackberries charge via USB, which is wonderful.
No, do let's. Keep rubbing it in everyone's faces that Apple is locking down the computer and turning their back on their Apple II heritage.
(Which they did ever since Macintosh but never mind...)
Appliances are the wrong answer, but they're the wrong answer to a legitimate question, which is 'why does the personal computer suck so badly?'
To his credit, the Win95 UI was pretty darn good. Gnome is still struggling to grasp the simplicity of making the Start Menu a folder, and Apple struck out wildly with the Dock. Taskbar and right-click for 'context menu' was awesome.
But the same UI team did some silly things too. The magic 'My Documents' folder... with a space... which morphs into 'Bob's Documents'..... brrrrrr. We're still being burned by that today.
I should add - being a general-purpose device IMO makes a netbook MORE of an 'appliance', not LESS of one.
If I have a shiny iPad, Sony WalkPad, Microsoft SurfaceBook, Amazon Kindle, etc... I'm now back in the nasty 80s where nothign connects and my jacket is full of devices just to get anything done. They're pretty, but they're not 'just works' usable. They all have their quirks and gimmicks I have to learn.
But if all my devices are just ordinary, boring, standard PCs, and I can trust they've all got USB, SVGA, keyboard, screen.... then they become interchangeable bricks. Anything works anywhere.
Dumb boring bricks are good! Companies hate them, because they can't sell value-added features - but for the consumer, it means simplicity. Cuts through the labyrinth of features. Just buy based on size of the screen, battery life, etc.
Doesn't it?
Maybe for you. But I run Ubuntu on my netbook and I love that I can do everything that I can do on my desktop. That's a plus, not a minus.
I don't want a crippled device. That means having an 'oh crap I can't do what I need to do' moment when I least want it.
In summary, the 80s were a horrible decade for hardware standards on personal computers.
Oh yes. I fondly remember sending files via XMODEM over BBS because that was the only way to get from PC to Commodore to Apple... though why I wanted do that I forget, since you couldn't actually read or run anything from another system.