I can just see it now... spammers hiring script kiddies to write computation mailers to bulk email and DDOS the whole internet, taking over IIS servers and flooding your inbox at the same time.
I'm not a sysadmin, nor an email guru of any sort, so I have to ask the most basic question: Why use SMTP at all? It seems to me, a protocol that is a little more sophistocated, with mandatory digitally signed content (including headers), and rejection of all connections without a certificate, would block all spammers pretty quickly. Generating a certificate is non-trivial and time consuming, and often is a manual process. There's also multiple levels of certificates, from the online-verified only, to the independent 3rd party verified from a trusted certificate authority (human).
However, then you'd need support in servers for the new protocol (probably not too quickly done), and support in clients for the new inbound and outbound protocol. Then users could have the choice of accepting or blocking old SMTP messages, accepting or blocking low-confidence certificates, or blocking specific users, or even blocking users who were authenticated by specific trusted certificate authrities (in case spammers bribed someone for authentication).
I know, this is probably a radical departure from the tried and true SMTP protocol, but servers are the problem, not spammers. Servers should not propagate junk mail, because they shouldn't accept it in the first place. I don't mind receiving mail from a person that I can reply to, but I want to know it's a person, not just an email address they just made up on a free server, or a spoofed reply to.
Why not buy TV content the same way we buy music and movies? At the video store. I don't see a reason why there need be advertising involved. The real question is: how do we support the creation of the content consumers want to see? The answer is pay for it. I refuse to support television in its current form, so I don't watch anything (except for Enterprise, which I usually download cuz I miss the timeslot).
But I will happily pay for stuff that makes me laugh or smile, tweaks my anticipation for the next installment, etc. What I expect for the service is to either receive a DVD in the mail with the show every couple of weeks, or be able to tune in to a server on the internet and download it either directly to my PVR (which I don't own--yet) or via my cable box. If there's advertising, I want it to offset the cost of the show, and be tuned to my interests, and NOT be in the middle of the show. It ruins the flow of a story and destroys all the suspense and tension that might be built by a good story.
The way I figure it, as a subscription-based model, you'll see fewer shows being produced, but those that are produced will be of higher quality and greater depth. People would be highly attached to the stories, reminiscent of the radio serials of the 1930's-50's. Life would change. Channel surfing would cease to exist; regular TV would be useful only has a news-delivery mechanism (this is a Good Thing, as local stations can barely do that well); people might be enticed to do outdoorsy things that are free, rather than stay inside and be advertised to constantly. Best of all, shows could very well be targeted towards more mature audiences with fewer complaints from the puritanical extremist groups. A little nudity hasn't hurt European audiences any.;-)
Gosh, where would she be if she'd had to stay in her homeland of Russia in the 1920s?
Probably an underground writer of the same sort of materials, perhaps dead at a much earlier age for having beliefs that contrasted with a State mandated hive-mind of anonymity. Her beliefs came directly from her experience with extreme 'altruism' of communal life. And she came away knowing that altruism cannot be mandated, if it exists at all.
Personally, I don't think a little altruism is a very bad thing at all.
Altruism, or the denial of it, is a small part of objectivist dogma. I personally believe that people are generally not altruistic. An act of kindness can come from any person, but the feeling that you've done well by someone is the 'selfish' reward. True altruism, in my opinion, requires a person to do right by others when there is no appreciation, or possibly backlash, and still feel good about their actions. People just don't work that way.
Letting free markets decide what is best for people is as stupid as letting an oligarchic government decide what is best for people. It's just letting one minority (the richest 1%) replace another minority (a fascistic, or possibly communistic government) in making decisions for everyone.
Um, a free market isn't driven by a few megalomaniacal businesspeople. The free market is driven by consumer purchases and interests. The people choose what they want, and they get it. Fascism has nothing to do with it.
Quite right. I realized that when I tried to compute 1,000,000 iterations of 196. I had (mistakenly) thought that Perl operated on strings for integers, which would ultimately mean it internally supported BigNums. A minor change to the script to use Math::BigNum and it works fine, though quite a bit slower.:-)
Sorry, I wrote this on my windows machine at work, so I don't have a proper sh-bang at the top, but this'll tell you whether or not a number converges to a palindrome in less than 10,000,000 iterations, and if so, where and how. A preliminary run took a long time.:-) Drop the iterations down to about 1,000 and it's pretty quick, and gives you an idea what might be interesting to explore.
(ps-yes, it was nicely formatted and commented, but the LAMENESS filter rejects code like that.;-)
# Do some perl madness
sub FindPalindrome
{
my ($value) = @_;
for (my $j=1; $j=10000000; $j++)
{
$value += reverse($value);
if ($value==reverse($value))
{
print("$_[0] found in $j steps, palindrome of $value.\n");
return $j;
}
}
print("$_[0] might be a Lychrel number!\n");
return $j;
}
{
for (my $i=0; $i1000; $i++)
{
FindPalindrome($i);
}
}
I bought my diamond loose from a relative "in the biz", and had it set in platinum--the only way to go. Even at half price, it ran me more than twice the paltry $2k you're quibbling about. Good rings aren't to be had for that sum, and you're right, it's better spent elsewhere if you can't afford to put money into investment quality diamonds. Get her a beautiful ring with a CZ, tell her it's a lab-created diamond, and let her know that what you plan to do is provide for both of your futures with the savings. Could be a honeymoon vacation, could be a downpayment. Whatever. The point is, if you don't have the money to spend, don't.
For people who have the means, but choose not to, you look cheap and your friends will know it. Anyone who has a $60,000+ car, owns a house, or has a good paying job (>$35k) will be seen as having no excuse. I'd be inclined to agree. If you can't show a financial committment to your betrothed, but can afford your toys, there's something wrong. It's not even so much that it's a diamond--heck, buy her a ruby or a new car or a nice pair of earrings--just something as a downpayment on your future.
The #1 thing you need to learn is picking your battles. Compromise is part of living with someone, as is taking stands on things that are so important that you'd rather be without that person than cave. (I've been married 3 wonderful years and never had to make that choice.)
As far as people judging you by diamond size and whatnot, it only matters when you just get engaged. You could just as well "rent" a diamond by adding it to your homeowners insurance policy, then leave it in the hotel on a trip. It pays for itself and you have a good story to tell your friends.
In any era of disconfidence, there will be upheaval--this one is no different. If we're lucky ('we' meaning people in software and hardware development), the number of positions will shrink, but the workload and pay increase.
I'll go on the unpopular edge and say I think IT has been overhyped, personally, as if it were the fundamentals of all industry. I think it's important, but certainly not as much as true business. IT is infrastructure and support. All it can do is act as a lubricant for other processes, not create on its own. To have a massive IT department with huge budgets, particularly if the business is not directly in an information-dependent business, is like paying structural engineers 6-figure salaries to make sure the building is still level.
Someday, when software and hardware become truly stable and less bug-ridden, IT departments may just go the way of the contract skilled labor. Until then, we have dedicated personnel and associated costs.
One of the major issues with having in-house people for IT is that they look for work to keep themselves on payroll. It's natural. The next big thing is XYZ, and we need to have it! That typically spells investment in time and money, but not necessarily a justified need being filled. I've seen it done in past companies many times, and thought nothing of it because we had money to pay for it. Not anymore.
For instance, I got 3 different machine upgrades in one year because our IT department kept raising the bar on machines and didn't want to keep older ones around, because it was more work for them to maintain different configurations. It caused more upheaval for the whole company than not doing any upgrades at all, and kept them mighty busy doing conversions. We had 6 people on staff to serve less than 80 employees. Tail wagging the dog syndrome.
I agree with you that the journalist's opinions are usually unwarranted (and unimportant) to the reader. But ultimately, the journalist also is the one choosing which parts to edit out and which parts to retain, so spin is inevitable.
What makes a good journalist isn't finding one viewpoint and repeating what they say. It's finding opposing viewpoints and presenting both sides equally. The degree to one side dominates an article is the degree of bias. The article in question is one of a 3-part series, and could be considered relatively unbiased as a series, I suppose, but because they are issued in installments, this is not journalism. It's a chronicle of research that's too large for a single article, so the author stretched it out.
For instance, when CNN runs a viewer-email about the war in Afghanistan every 30 minutes for 12 hours, but does not supply any opposing viewpoints from viewer-email, then follow it with a disclaimer "This is not necessarily the views of this station", that's a line of crap. By propelling only one viewpoint, it becomes the opinion of the station.
The Oklahoma warranty that comes with most software clearly states:
If it breaks in half, you get to keep both parts.
Offering a stronger warranty isn't in the best interests of developers, because it adds liability. That's certainly something that would add weight to "Trustworthy Computing" and "Unbreakable" databases. Until legislation (such as the UCITA) specifies what legal warranty a user can expect from paid software, I won't expect to get one.
In any event, I'd expect different treatment for source code than binaries, seeing as how you can fix it if something breaks, or pay someone else who can.
I actually troweled through all three pages of this drivel and found practically zero answers to any of the, IMHO, worthy questions posed. Instead, I saw ranting from a mental patient, a regurgitation about legal trouble that is pretty minor from all visible aspects, and a lot of hype surrounding what is ultimately a ridiculously complex database of english sentence structures. There's no AI in A.L.I.C.E. It's just a database with some embedded Javascript. It has no state, it provides no answers that were not pre-programmed, and its decision branches are static. It is only Artificial.
I was quite interested in A.L.I.C.E. because I had high hopes that it somehow involved reinforcement learning for understanding how to converse with people in real-time, or at least symbolically driven natural language conversions, or at the very least some clever state management for topics. The very minimal experiments I did 15 years ago as a high school student were only an order of magnitude simpler than this, and he gets articles written about him? Absurd.
Yes, I'm venting, but I work pretty hard to keep up to date on many aspects of AI (specifically FLC, decision trees, GA, GP, ANN, CBR, as well as the old school methods), and to see this get any attention at all is insulting to the many hundreds of true pioneers in the field. It must be terribly lonely chasing after a trophy (STT) that nobody values anymore.
In an interesting, but startlingly unrelated, circumstance, I found that not all of the U.K. has bothered switching to the metric system.
My kid has Avent baby bottles, which are high quality bottles manufactured by an English company called Avent. The directions for all baby formula instructions are "one scoop per 2 fl. oz." All the bottles have fluid ounces measurements, too. However, the British FL OZ is slightly smaller than the American FL OZ, and I know this because the bottles have markings for both countries!!!
What amazes me is that the directions don't say which is the appropriate marking to use, so apparently American children require more sustenance than the British. Or maybe it's just adjusting disposable income for taxes... grin.
Zoe Ophelia is a lot easier to misidentify as Zoophiliac than a recursive acronym. I pity her.
After the difficulty my wife and I had naming our son (8 weeks ago), I think I might get to use a geek name on the second, since we're out of options. I'm thinking Ed Lynn or maybe Juan Octal. At least they look like real names, sorta...;-)
Agreed. I did such a good job of noise proofing my rack cabinet that I wound up moving all my machines into it, to shut them up. Here's a step-by-step with photos.
Hear, hear. ESD isn't a myth, but it's largely *not* responsible for failures. I worked at one of the big microchip manufacturers for a couple of years in back-end test, where cpus get run through their paces before shipping to customers (bulk, not consumers). I probably handled on the order of a half million chips a year. We had ground straps and special shoes with metal woven into the rubber soles ($150/pair), metal weave smocks like the stereotypical scientists wear, etc.. In all the time I was there, only one obvious case of ESD came up. One guy worked all day without a good strap and everything he touched zapped. He fried about 20,000 cpus that day. Man, it was a bad scene. It's because he was wearing a thick wool sweater under his smock. But you're quite right, ESD is largely not a problem if you take minor precautions.
Unplug the power cable to the motherboard, so it's only grounded!!
Leave the case and power supply plugged in.
Touch the power supply (not the case, they're usually painted and often poorly grounded) before, after, and during handling of components. Or hold it constantly if you can manage.
Work on tile or wood floors, and have bare feet if you prefer. Rubber soles insulate. Even this is only for the very paranoid.
That's it. I've only fried a single component ever, an old hard drive, and it was because I drove around with the components rubbing against the cloth seats in my car in the sun in mid-winter, sliding around. I reached out and picked it up and felt the shock. uh-oh. Sure enough, it was toast. But it's still pretty rare.
"Piracy is not a private offense, it hurts everyone by diminishing the incentive to invest in the creation of music."
That cracked me up! I guess everyone feels there is a humanitarian need for paying for music in this world. That's like coal miners saying oil and natural gas are bad for everone because there isn't enough coal mines opening up anymore. The afflicted parties and everyone are usually quite at odds with each other.:-)
My doctor has a "light pen"/digital pen that he uses in place of a mouse. The stupid thing has its 'left-click' as the front of the pen, so you have to push the pen against the monitor to click. Double-clicking is nearly impossible because the monitor is vertical and your hands aren't that steady.
A digital pen that operates horizontally would have a tremendous advantage over current generation light pens. Granted. But it's not a replacement for the keyboard (as everyone here has argued), and it's certainly not a good substitute for the mouse.
It might be useful as a replacement for Waccom tablets for digital artists, but that's about it.
I'd much rather have a fingernail mounted virtual mouse that had its own cursor on screen that tracked my every vertical/horizontal movement, and at the touch of a 'synch cursor' key, snaps the real mouse cursor to the ghost cursor. That way you could type and ignore it, then when you want to use the mouse, don't even move your hand, just wave it in the air and snap the cursor to your position when you're done.
I can most assuredly state that what developers want isn't even 10x more power. It's better libraries. The PS2 is a royal stiffy to use because the interfaces are archaic and in some cases, simply lacking. Compared to the XBox (just a windows PC in fancy wrapping) or even the GameCube (which is proprietary, but relatively easy to work with), the PS2 is somewhat underpowered and difficult to develop on. This role reversal from N64 vs. PS1 days makes it much more challenging to produce quality titles.
The interesting thing to note is that artists don't have the tools capable of managing nor time in the schedule to spend making billions of polygons for each model. Increased content means longer development time. As it is, the graphics chips on the current consoles take away so much of the real work that games have little to worry about when fitting in gameplay CPU requirements. Even memory constraints are fairly relaxed these days. I mean, I never thought I'd see the day when the STL is used for console games.:-)
Assuming you're using someone else's server to host your domain, they might be running a really nice spam killing package that does a good job of keeping up to date. Chances are, Yahoo doesn't. By forwarding, your domain's SMTP filters kill off the unwanted crap.
2002-02-14 17:39:39 Linux movie gets some big screen in Austin (articles,media) (rejected)
sigh.
On March 22, "Revolution OS" will be shown at the north location of Alamo Draft House, in Austin, TX. Not only that, but the owner will be burning Linux cds (dunno what distro) for people in the lobby.
Tell me that isn't a serious geek cool thing to do.
If you want to play the link game and not address my points, fine.
I really wish you'd stop telling me what I'm saying. I'm not talking about central servers now any more than I was talking about Freenet earlier.
Then define your stance. Either you're saying it can't be done, or it's possible with P2P, or it's client/server. You've already stated it can be done in software now for zero cost, and you're now saying it's not client/server. So it must be P2P somehow. Now show that it can be done with an authentication scheme plausible of being masked as a file system. This is what you're arguing, isn't it? I again, flatly defy you to do this. I have mathematical proof that any such system can be compromised as P2P authentication is isomorphic to copy protection and DRM in software.
It's impossible to retrieve two different files with the same key, by design. A key is an md5 checksum of the PGP encrypted data. There's no 'stale copy' of any data, anywhere. You can request different files with different keys, but you cannot ever get different data when looking for a specific key, no matter how many machines or caches it falls into. Why don't you read before you start 'spouting' or 'blustering' your uninformed opinions, yourself?
I agree that Freenet today is not a file system. You've given plenty of good arguements against that. However, it can serve as a good basis from which to build one, and arguably is as close to a real file system as one can make with P2P technology. The truth of the matter is, a decentralized modern file system cannot be made without sacrificing security. It requires centralized authentication servers, which invalidates the decentralization property of the file system. But, if you're so certain it can be done with P2P and typical authenticated security models, why not spend a little time researching it? Get back to me when you wizen up.
Private namespaces are not the same as directories, and the rudimentary access control they offer is in no way comparable to the sorts of permissions that any legitimate filesystem on any modern general-purpose OS is expected to support.
Then you're proposing this 'shared drive network of computers' have a central server. There's no alternative which offers authorization for users, which allows proper access controls. I don't deny that the permission model for FreeNet isn't exactly standard OS fare. I specifically made that distinction, in fact. But I absolutely defy you to come up with a pure P2P way to do it with identical security to modern OSes without a central authority. The article did not appear to be promoting someone running servers to authenticate users, so my assertion is entirely appropriate.
but Freenet does not ensure consistency according to even the loosest definitions.
FreeNet has (mostly) the same properties as a WORM drive's file system. Once written, data cannot be changed. Someone could very well write a file system driver that makes such access possible, and FreeNet would appear to the user similarly as a cdrom drive that they can write to.
Isn't ISO9660 a coherent model?
Good point about hardware crashes, by the way. I overlooked that. And the reason I brought up the USB drive is in the fairly near future, the prices will be very, very reasonable. I don't think any of the solutions we're discussing will be feasible immediately, so looking a few years in the future is appropriate for a basis of comparison. And still, software is not zero cost. Perhaps from the user's perspective, but it has great cost for the infrastructure.
Show some class. Treat people you don't know with some measure of respect, particularly if you disagree with them.
Freenet is not a filesystem. I can't mount it, I can't use plain old read/write [...] there are no directories, no permissions, no data consistency
It's not a file system because it daemons haven't been written to make it appear so. You could write specific applications that talk directly with NFS, but nobody does it. You're wrong about the last three points, though. It does have encrypted shared private namespaces, where people would have to have your public key to read the files. That's rudimentary file permissions for read. You also cannot publish to that directory unless you use the private key, which is rudimentary file permissions for write. No data consistency? I'm not sure what you mean here, since it's checksumed and encrypted and passed around in pieces all over the place, it seems very self-consistent. Perhaps you should read up on it. Just because you don't have to supply a password and username doesn't mean there's no permissions. It's done the only way a truly P2P system can be done without a centralized authentication system can be done. Anything else puts all your eggs in one basket. That single point of failure boots reliability out the window.
Replication also has tremendous benefits
Agreed. But only for certain types of data that can take advantage of it. How does it improve the file which is only used in one place, by one person, when sitting at a specific computer? It doesn't. Replication wastes resources in this case. Taking that choice away from users is a step in the wrong direction, then.
...until you, or you plus multiple other people, need to access that same data from multiple places - perhaps concurrently.
Again, agreed. However, there is an identifiable subset of data that needs this treatment. NFS and VPN handles this quite nicely. The hard part is setting a random machine up to access the files. Hence the bootable CD configured to do so.
The complexity of network distribution should be hidden from the user anyway. The whole idea of a distributed data store is that the complexity is hidden in the system so that users' lives are simpler.
Complexity exists and has resultant issues, whether the user directly interacts with the it or not. Due to the distributed nature of a purely networked file system it's always possible that a critical file is unavailable due to any number of errors along the way. So what use is a uniform filesystem where ALL files can be missing or available at the whim of a 3rd party? A blend of traditional with the ability to mount network-shared data is a much better fit.
where are you going to find such a device? How fast will it be? How reliable?
Don't you read/.? USB drives in the 1gb range that are the size of a pocket key are available today, for about $900. Multi-gig ones will be along shortly, no doubt. They're memory sticks. Faster than hard drives, and being solid-state, more reliable.
How much will it cost, compared to the software-solution cost of zero dollars?
Uh, nothing is free. There's a current bandwidth and time cost for retrieval that is quite high. Adding software cannot remove that burden--it can only mask the entropy in a system, not reduce it.
For what it's worth, people around here say 'ails'.:-)
The distributed file system thing is exactly what FreeNet already does. However, the key differences between local data and network data, which nobody seems willing to address fully, is what happens when the 'net' runs out of space? Some data gets replicated more than other data--typically by frequency of use--meaning data that's really really important to one person may not be available because too many people are watching Britney Spears movies, and they get replicated more rather than the so-called important data.
Replication of data has tremendous cost: bandwidth, time, and storage space. Its retrieval is also non-trivial. Local data is by far more manageable and secure, so much so that a fully distributed system just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people would prefer to carry their data with them.
Consider instead, a bootable business card CD burned with your favorite OS, and a key-sized multi-gig USB memory drive. Constrained to something that will fit in your pocket very comfortably, or even in a normal sized wallet, you can have everything the way you want it, anywhere you go. No need to add the complexity of network distribution at all.
Too often, visionaries put faith in a silver bullet to cure all ails. I prefer simple solutions to solve individual problems effectively.
That's interesting. I didn't know that about Macs. PC keyboards are completely different, though. The original ones, you could lay your arm across the thing and query which keys were down and it would tell you ALL of them. Any made in the past 10 years, though, will only return about five keys. Why? I assume a simplification in the circuitry. The bus itself can still handle all the keys at once, but they keyboards can't. I proved this to a friend once by taking two different keyboards (new and old) and swapping them into a program I wrote to display down-keys. Without closing the program even, you could see that older keyboards (particularly IBM ones) could handle it perfectly, but the newer couldn't.
Back in those days, you actually COULD have 3 people play a multiplayer game on a single keyboard. Lots of body heat, but lots of fun too.
Slashdot Mirror
I can just see it now... spammers hiring script kiddies to write computation mailers to bulk email and DDOS the whole internet, taking over IIS servers and flooding your inbox at the same time.
I'm not a sysadmin, nor an email guru of any sort, so I have to ask the most basic question: Why use SMTP at all? It seems to me, a protocol that is a little more sophistocated, with mandatory digitally signed content (including headers), and rejection of all connections without a certificate, would block all spammers pretty quickly. Generating a certificate is non-trivial and time consuming, and often is a manual process. There's also multiple levels of certificates, from the online-verified only, to the independent 3rd party verified from a trusted certificate authority (human).
However, then you'd need support in servers for the new protocol (probably not too quickly done), and support in clients for the new inbound and outbound protocol. Then users could have the choice of accepting or blocking old SMTP messages, accepting or blocking low-confidence certificates, or blocking specific users, or even blocking users who were authenticated by specific trusted certificate authrities (in case spammers bribed someone for authentication).
I know, this is probably a radical departure from the tried and true SMTP protocol, but servers are the problem, not spammers. Servers should not propagate junk mail, because they shouldn't accept it in the first place. I don't mind receiving mail from a person that I can reply to, but I want to know it's a person, not just an email address they just made up on a free server, or a spoofed reply to.
(at least, I didn't see it modded up anywhere)
;-)
Why not buy TV content the same way we buy music and movies? At the video store. I don't see a reason why there need be advertising involved. The real question is: how do we support the creation of the content consumers want to see? The answer is pay for it. I refuse to support television in its current form, so I don't watch anything (except for Enterprise, which I usually download cuz I miss the timeslot).
But I will happily pay for stuff that makes me laugh or smile, tweaks my anticipation for the next installment, etc. What I expect for the service is to either receive a DVD in the mail with the show every couple of weeks, or be able to tune in to a server on the internet and download it either directly to my PVR (which I don't own--yet) or via my cable box. If there's advertising, I want it to offset the cost of the show, and be tuned to my interests, and NOT be in the middle of the show. It ruins the flow of a story and destroys all the suspense and tension that might be built by a good story.
The way I figure it, as a subscription-based model, you'll see fewer shows being produced, but those that are produced will be of higher quality and greater depth. People would be highly attached to the stories, reminiscent of the radio serials of the 1930's-50's. Life would change. Channel surfing would cease to exist; regular TV would be useful only has a news-delivery mechanism (this is a Good Thing, as local stations can barely do that well); people might be enticed to do outdoorsy things that are free, rather than stay inside and be advertised to constantly. Best of all, shows could very well be targeted towards more mature audiences with fewer complaints from the puritanical extremist groups. A little nudity hasn't hurt European audiences any.
Gosh, where would she be if she'd had to stay in her homeland of Russia in the 1920s?
Probably an underground writer of the same sort of materials, perhaps dead at a much earlier age for having beliefs that contrasted with a State mandated hive-mind of anonymity. Her beliefs came directly from her experience with extreme 'altruism' of communal life. And she came away knowing that altruism cannot be mandated, if it exists at all.
Personally, I don't think a little altruism is a very bad thing at all.
Altruism, or the denial of it, is a small part of objectivist dogma. I personally believe that people are generally not altruistic. An act of kindness can come from any person, but the feeling that you've done well by someone is the 'selfish' reward. True altruism, in my opinion, requires a person to do right by others when there is no appreciation, or possibly backlash, and still feel good about their actions. People just don't work that way.
Letting free markets decide what is best for people is as stupid as letting an oligarchic government decide what is best for people. It's just letting one minority (the richest 1%) replace another minority (a fascistic, or possibly communistic government) in making decisions for everyone.
Um, a free market isn't driven by a few megalomaniacal businesspeople. The free market is driven by consumer purchases and interests. The people choose what they want, and they get it. Fascism has nothing to do with it.
Quite right. I realized that when I tried to compute 1,000,000 iterations of 196. I had (mistakenly) thought that Perl operated on strings for integers, which would ultimately mean it internally supported BigNums. A minor change to the script to use Math::BigNum and it works fine, though quite a bit slower. :-)
Sorry, I wrote this on my windows machine at work, so I don't have a proper sh-bang at the top, but this'll tell you whether or not a number converges to a palindrome in less than 10,000,000 iterations, and if so, where and how. A preliminary run took a long time. :-) Drop the iterations down to about 1,000 and it's pretty quick, and gives you an idea what might be interesting to explore.
;-)
(ps-yes, it was nicely formatted and commented, but the LAMENESS filter rejects code like that.
# Do some perl madness
sub FindPalindrome { my ($value) = @_; for (my $j=1; $j=10000000; $j++) { $value += reverse($value); if ($value==reverse($value)) { print("$_[0] found in $j steps, palindrome of $value.\n"); return $j; } } print("$_[0] might be a Lychrel number!\n"); return $j; } { for (my $i=0; $i1000; $i++) { FindPalindrome($i); } }
:-)
I bought my diamond loose from a relative "in the biz", and had it set in platinum--the only way to go. Even at half price, it ran me more than twice the paltry $2k you're quibbling about. Good rings aren't to be had for that sum, and you're right, it's better spent elsewhere if you can't afford to put money into investment quality diamonds. Get her a beautiful ring with a CZ, tell her it's a lab-created diamond, and let her know that what you plan to do is provide for both of your futures with the savings. Could be a honeymoon vacation, could be a downpayment. Whatever. The point is, if you don't have the money to spend, don't.
For people who have the means, but choose not to, you look cheap and your friends will know it. Anyone who has a $60,000+ car, owns a house, or has a good paying job (>$35k) will be seen as having no excuse. I'd be inclined to agree. If you can't show a financial committment to your betrothed, but can afford your toys, there's something wrong. It's not even so much that it's a diamond--heck, buy her a ruby or a new car or a nice pair of earrings--just something as a downpayment on your future.
The #1 thing you need to learn is picking your battles. Compromise is part of living with someone, as is taking stands on things that are so important that you'd rather be without that person than cave. (I've been married 3 wonderful years and never had to make that choice.)
As far as people judging you by diamond size and whatnot, it only matters when you just get engaged. You could just as well "rent" a diamond by adding it to your homeowners insurance policy, then leave it in the hotel on a trip. It pays for itself and you have a good story to tell your friends.
I will also point out that up until 1940, engagement rings were not diamond bearing, but typically other stones.
In any era of disconfidence, there will be upheaval--this one is no different. If we're lucky ('we' meaning people in software and hardware development), the number of positions will shrink, but the workload and pay increase.
I'll go on the unpopular edge and say I think IT has been overhyped, personally, as if it were the fundamentals of all industry. I think it's important, but certainly not as much as true business. IT is infrastructure and support. All it can do is act as a lubricant for other processes, not create on its own. To have a massive IT department with huge budgets, particularly if the business is not directly in an information-dependent business, is like paying structural engineers 6-figure salaries to make sure the building is still level.
Someday, when software and hardware become truly stable and less bug-ridden, IT departments may just go the way of the contract skilled labor. Until then, we have dedicated personnel and associated costs.
One of the major issues with having in-house people for IT is that they look for work to keep themselves on payroll. It's natural. The next big thing is XYZ, and we need to have it! That typically spells investment in time and money, but not necessarily a justified need being filled. I've seen it done in past companies many times, and thought nothing of it because we had money to pay for it. Not anymore. For instance, I got 3 different machine upgrades in one year because our IT department kept raising the bar on machines and didn't want to keep older ones around, because it was more work for them to maintain different configurations. It caused more upheaval for the whole company than not doing any upgrades at all, and kept them mighty busy doing conversions. We had 6 people on staff to serve less than 80 employees. Tail wagging the dog syndrome.
I agree with you that the journalist's opinions are usually unwarranted (and unimportant) to the reader. But ultimately, the journalist also is the one choosing which parts to edit out and which parts to retain, so spin is inevitable.
What makes a good journalist isn't finding one viewpoint and repeating what they say. It's finding opposing viewpoints and presenting both sides equally. The degree to one side dominates an article is the degree of bias. The article in question is one of a 3-part series, and could be considered relatively unbiased as a series, I suppose, but because they are issued in installments, this is not journalism. It's a chronicle of research that's too large for a single article, so the author stretched it out.
For instance, when CNN runs a viewer-email about the war in Afghanistan every 30 minutes for 12 hours, but does not supply any opposing viewpoints from viewer-email, then follow it with a disclaimer "This is not necessarily the views of this station", that's a line of crap. By propelling only one viewpoint, it becomes the opinion of the station.
JH
The Oklahoma warranty that comes with most software clearly states:
If it breaks in half, you get to keep both parts.
Offering a stronger warranty isn't in the best interests of developers, because it adds liability. That's certainly something that would add weight to "Trustworthy Computing" and "Unbreakable" databases. Until legislation (such as the UCITA) specifies what legal warranty a user can expect from paid software, I won't expect to get one.
In any event, I'd expect different treatment for source code than binaries, seeing as how you can fix it if something breaks, or pay someone else who can.
JH
I actually troweled through all three pages of this drivel and found practically zero answers to any of the, IMHO, worthy questions posed. Instead, I saw ranting from a mental patient, a regurgitation about legal trouble that is pretty minor from all visible aspects, and a lot of hype surrounding what is ultimately a ridiculously complex database of english sentence structures. There's no AI in A.L.I.C.E. It's just a database with some embedded Javascript. It has no state, it provides no answers that were not pre-programmed, and its decision branches are static. It is only Artificial.
I was quite interested in A.L.I.C.E. because I had high hopes that it somehow involved reinforcement learning for understanding how to converse with people in real-time, or at least symbolically driven natural language conversions, or at the very least some clever state management for topics. The very minimal experiments I did 15 years ago as a high school student were only an order of magnitude simpler than this, and he gets articles written about him? Absurd.
Yes, I'm venting, but I work pretty hard to keep up to date on many aspects of AI (specifically FLC, decision trees, GA, GP, ANN, CBR, as well as the old school methods), and to see this get any attention at all is insulting to the many hundreds of true pioneers in the field. It must be terribly lonely chasing after a trophy (STT) that nobody values anymore.
In an interesting, but startlingly unrelated, circumstance, I found that not all of the U.K. has bothered switching to the metric system.
My kid has Avent baby bottles, which are high quality bottles manufactured by an English company called Avent. The directions for all baby formula instructions are "one scoop per 2 fl. oz." All the bottles have fluid ounces measurements, too. However, the British FL OZ is slightly smaller than the American FL OZ, and I know this because the bottles have markings for both countries!!!
What amazes me is that the directions don't say which is the appropriate marking to use, so apparently American children require more sustenance than the British. Or maybe it's just adjusting disposable income for taxes... grin.
Zoe Ophelia is a lot easier to misidentify as Zoophiliac than a recursive acronym. I pity her.
;-)
After the difficulty my wife and I had naming our son (8 weeks ago), I think I might get to use a geek name on the second, since we're out of options. I'm thinking Ed Lynn or maybe Juan Octal. At least they look like real names, sorta...
Agreed. I did such a good job of noise proofing my rack cabinet that I wound up moving all my machines into it, to shut them up. Here's a step-by-step with photos.
That's it. I've only fried a single component ever, an old hard drive, and it was because I drove around with the components rubbing against the cloth seats in my car in the sun in mid-winter, sliding around. I reached out and picked it up and felt the shock. uh-oh. Sure enough, it was toast. But it's still pretty rare.
"Piracy is not a private offense, it hurts everyone by diminishing the incentive to invest in the creation of music."
:-)
That cracked me up! I guess everyone feels there is a humanitarian need for paying for music in this world. That's like coal miners saying oil and natural gas are bad for everone because there isn't enough coal mines opening up anymore. The afflicted parties and everyone are usually quite at odds with each other.
My doctor has a "light pen"/digital pen that he uses in place of a mouse. The stupid thing has its 'left-click' as the front of the pen, so you have to push the pen against the monitor to click. Double-clicking is nearly impossible because the monitor is vertical and your hands aren't that steady.
A digital pen that operates horizontally would have a tremendous advantage over current generation light pens. Granted. But it's not a replacement for the keyboard (as everyone here has argued), and it's certainly not a good substitute for the mouse.
It might be useful as a replacement for Waccom tablets for digital artists, but that's about it.
I'd much rather have a fingernail mounted virtual mouse that had its own cursor on screen that tracked my every vertical/horizontal movement, and at the touch of a 'synch cursor' key, snaps the real mouse cursor to the ghost cursor. That way you could type and ignore it, then when you want to use the mouse, don't even move your hand, just wave it in the air and snap the cursor to your position when you're done.
I can most assuredly state that what developers want isn't even 10x more power. It's better libraries. The PS2 is a royal stiffy to use because the interfaces are archaic and in some cases, simply lacking. Compared to the XBox (just a windows PC in fancy wrapping) or even the GameCube (which is proprietary, but relatively easy to work with), the PS2 is somewhat underpowered and difficult to develop on. This role reversal from N64 vs. PS1 days makes it much more challenging to produce quality titles.
:-)
The interesting thing to note is that artists don't have the tools capable of managing nor time in the schedule to spend making billions of polygons for each model. Increased content means longer development time. As it is, the graphics chips on the current consoles take away so much of the real work that games have little to worry about when fitting in gameplay CPU requirements. Even memory constraints are fairly relaxed these days. I mean, I never thought I'd see the day when the STL is used for console games.
Assuming you're using someone else's server to host your domain, they might be running a really nice spam killing package that does a good job of keeping up to date. Chances are, Yahoo doesn't. By forwarding, your domain's SMTP filters kill off the unwanted crap.
2002-02-14 17:39:39 Linux movie gets some big screen in Austin (articles,media) (rejected)
sigh.
On March 22, "Revolution OS" will be shown at the north location of Alamo Draft House, in Austin, TX. Not only that, but the owner will be burning Linux cds (dunno what distro) for people in the lobby.
Tell me that isn't a serious geek cool thing to do.
If you want to play the link game and not address my points, fine.
I really wish you'd stop telling me what I'm saying. I'm not talking about central servers now any more than I was talking about Freenet earlier.
Then define your stance. Either you're saying it can't be done, or it's possible with P2P, or it's client/server. You've already stated it can be done in software now for zero cost, and you're now saying it's not client/server. So it must be P2P somehow. Now show that it can be done with an authentication scheme plausible of being masked as a file system. This is what you're arguing, isn't it? I again, flatly defy you to do this. I have mathematical proof that any such system can be compromised as P2P authentication is isomorphic to copy protection and DRM in software.
That's fine, but don't you think it's a little disrespectful to assume that other people who've spent a lot more time than you studying the problem have given up too.
Prove you're one of those people, or that they disagree with my assertion that P2P is unauthenticatable. Otherwise, you're hand waving.
Two nodes attempting to read the same data from Freenet simultaneously might well get different data, if one finds a stale copy in someone's cache first and the other finds a fresh copy in another cache. That is not consistent/coherent behavior.
It's impossible to retrieve two different files with the same key, by design. A key is an md5 checksum of the PGP encrypted data. There's no 'stale copy' of any data, anywhere. You can request different files with different keys, but you cannot ever get different data when looking for a specific key, no matter how many machines or caches it falls into. Why don't you read before you start 'spouting' or 'blustering' your uninformed opinions, yourself?
I agree that Freenet today is not a file system. You've given plenty of good arguements against that. However, it can serve as a good basis from which to build one, and arguably is as close to a real file system as one can make with P2P technology. The truth of the matter is, a decentralized modern file system cannot be made without sacrificing security. It requires centralized authentication servers, which invalidates the decentralization property of the file system. But, if you're so certain it can be done with P2P and typical authenticated security models, why not spend a little time researching it? Get back to me when you wizen up.
Over and out.
Not to belabor this overly, but...
Private namespaces are not the same as directories, and the rudimentary access control they offer is in no way comparable to the sorts of permissions that any legitimate filesystem on any modern general-purpose OS is expected to support.
Then you're proposing this 'shared drive network of computers' have a central server. There's no alternative which offers authorization for users, which allows proper access controls. I don't deny that the permission model for FreeNet isn't exactly standard OS fare. I specifically made that distinction, in fact. But I absolutely defy you to come up with a pure P2P way to do it with identical security to modern OSes without a central authority. The article did not appear to be promoting someone running servers to authenticate users, so my assertion is entirely appropriate.
but Freenet does not ensure consistency according to even the loosest definitions.
FreeNet has (mostly) the same properties as a WORM drive's file system. Once written, data cannot be changed. Someone could very well write a file system driver that makes such access possible, and FreeNet would appear to the user similarly as a cdrom drive that they can write to. Isn't ISO9660 a coherent model?
Good point about hardware crashes, by the way. I overlooked that. And the reason I brought up the USB drive is in the fairly near future, the prices will be very, very reasonable. I don't think any of the solutions we're discussing will be feasible immediately, so looking a few years in the future is appropriate for a basis of comparison. And still, software is not zero cost. Perhaps from the user's perspective, but it has great cost for the infrastructure.
Got it? Good. Now we can move on.
...until you, or you plus multiple other people, need to access that same data from multiple places - perhaps concurrently.
/.? USB drives in the 1gb range that are the size of a pocket key are available today, for about $900. Multi-gig ones will be along shortly, no doubt. They're memory sticks. Faster than hard drives, and being solid-state, more reliable.
:-)
Show some class. Treat people you don't know with some measure of respect, particularly if you disagree with them.
Freenet is not a filesystem. I can't mount it, I can't use plain old read/write [...] there are no directories, no permissions, no data consistency
It's not a file system because it daemons haven't been written to make it appear so. You could write specific applications that talk directly with NFS, but nobody does it. You're wrong about the last three points, though. It does have encrypted shared private namespaces, where people would have to have your public key to read the files. That's rudimentary file permissions for read. You also cannot publish to that directory unless you use the private key, which is rudimentary file permissions for write. No data consistency? I'm not sure what you mean here, since it's checksumed and encrypted and passed around in pieces all over the place, it seems very self-consistent. Perhaps you should read up on it. Just because you don't have to supply a password and username doesn't mean there's no permissions. It's done the only way a truly P2P system can be done without a centralized authentication system can be done. Anything else puts all your eggs in one basket. That single point of failure boots reliability out the window.
Replication also has tremendous benefits
Agreed. But only for certain types of data that can take advantage of it. How does it improve the file which is only used in one place, by one person, when sitting at a specific computer? It doesn't. Replication wastes resources in this case. Taking that choice away from users is a step in the wrong direction, then.
Again, agreed. However, there is an identifiable subset of data that needs this treatment. NFS and VPN handles this quite nicely. The hard part is setting a random machine up to access the files. Hence the bootable CD configured to do so.
The complexity of network distribution should be hidden from the user anyway. The whole idea of a distributed data store is that the complexity is hidden in the system so that users' lives are simpler.
Complexity exists and has resultant issues, whether the user directly interacts with the it or not. Due to the distributed nature of a purely networked file system it's always possible that a critical file is unavailable due to any number of errors along the way. So what use is a uniform filesystem where ALL files can be missing or available at the whim of a 3rd party? A blend of traditional with the ability to mount network-shared data is a much better fit.
where are you going to find such a device? How fast will it be? How reliable?
Don't you read
How much will it cost, compared to the software-solution cost of zero dollars?
Uh, nothing is free. There's a current bandwidth and time cost for retrieval that is quite high. Adding software cannot remove that burden--it can only mask the entropy in a system, not reduce it.
For what it's worth, people around here say 'ails'.
The distributed file system thing is exactly what FreeNet already does. However, the key differences between local data and network data, which nobody seems willing to address fully, is what happens when the 'net' runs out of space? Some data gets replicated more than other data--typically by frequency of use--meaning data that's really really important to one person may not be available because too many people are watching Britney Spears movies, and they get replicated more rather than the so-called important data.
Replication of data has tremendous cost: bandwidth, time, and storage space. Its retrieval is also non-trivial. Local data is by far more manageable and secure, so much so that a fully distributed system just doesn't make sense. What does make sense is that people would prefer to carry their data with them.
Consider instead, a bootable business card CD burned with your favorite OS, and a key-sized multi-gig USB memory drive. Constrained to something that will fit in your pocket very comfortably, or even in a normal sized wallet, you can have everything the way you want it, anywhere you go. No need to add the complexity of network distribution at all.
Too often, visionaries put faith in a silver bullet to cure all ails. I prefer simple solutions to solve individual problems effectively.
That's interesting. I didn't know that about Macs. PC keyboards are completely different, though. The original ones, you could lay your arm across the thing and query which keys were down and it would tell you ALL of them. Any made in the past 10 years, though, will only return about five keys. Why? I assume a simplification in the circuitry. The bus itself can still handle all the keys at once, but they keyboards can't. I proved this to a friend once by taking two different keyboards (new and old) and swapping them into a program I wrote to display down-keys. Without closing the program even, you could see that older keyboards (particularly IBM ones) could handle it perfectly, but the newer couldn't.
Back in those days, you actually COULD have 3 people play a multiplayer game on a single keyboard. Lots of body heat, but lots of fun too.