Removing unnecessary parts from a circuit until it stops working, is now something "new"?
From Wikipedia entry on Madman Muntz:
Muntz played the madman in his unorthodox television commercials, but in fact he was a shrewd businessman and a self-taught electrical engineer. By trial and error, taking apart and studying Philco, RCA, and DuMont televisions, he figured out how to reduce the devices' electrical components to their minimum functional number. This practice became known as "Muntzing".
He often carried a pair of wire clippers, and when he thought that one of his employees was "over-engineering" a circuit, he would begin snipping components out until the picture or sound stopped working. At that point, he would tell the engineer "Well, I guess you have to put that last part back in" and walk away.
Interestingly Eco's article was from 1994. And it was "Macintosh users vs MS-DOS users", not so much "Apple the company vs IBM".
This is a link to an English translation of Eco's article
Things were a little different back then, than I see it today. Today, definitely "Apple the company" is defining a selling their route to salvation as a full multi-media company. This did not describe Apple in 1994, which was to be honest struggling under the "Macintosh" brand, I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have imagined Apple ever become so broad back then. And today the "PC-clone" users (this is the obvious descendant from the "MS-DOS" religion) includes a multitude of religions that battle each other quite strongly (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
It's a pretty sad commentary when uptimes approaching a good chunk of a decade, are taken as evidence of improper maintenance.
I compare with my car's engine... if I maintain it right, then it can very well last for 20 years between overhauls. Why shouldn't a computer (or a computer's software) be at least as reliable, as that? Shouldn't the length of time between overhaul (aka "reinstalling the OS") be evidence of very good maintenance (as well as fundamentally good design and configuration?)
And keep in mind that the applications, especially applications open to the big bad outside world over the net, are kept updated. Just that updating them never requires a reboot and certainly not an OS reinstall.
The 3-R's mentality of Windows (Retry, Reboot, and Reinstall) I did not expect would have affected slashdotters. The machines aren't there to suck up my time maintaining them. They're there, to do their job.
My average Unix (in the past decade, Linux) system uptime between reboots is now 3 to 4 years.
Not surprisingly, most of the reboots are there exactly for installation (aka "rebuild") of an updated OS usually on the next generation of server hardware. Major package upgrades (e.g. MySQL, Apache) almost never require any tinkering with the OS.
I compare that to typical Windows servers in my group, where reboots happen in many cases nightly as a preventative measure, and the system is still some crufty old version of Windows (e.g. Windows NT), the application packages are deeply tied to DLL's and drivers, and I suspect that the statistics and attitudes are apples vs oranges.
What I can say as guy who sells ad space on his website: My Google AdSense income has gone up by a factor of 5 to 10 in the past two months. No, I'm not gonna be able to retire on this money. But it's an obvious increase. And I see it coming at exactly the same time as I see Google cracking down on rank spamming.
I think Google has "rationalized" a lot of their ad process (both ranking and sales) and the only guys who are hurt, are the ones who were gaming the system to begin with. e.g. click fraud and spamming the ranking.
My impression listening to this boil up in the local media, is that the issue was not just dropped cellphone calls on one cellphone carrier, but rather the routing and concentration of 911 calls into several of the 911 call centers.
Essentially the 911 call centers "phone company" is Verizon and some SNAFU between Verizon and the call center was resulting in dropped calls.
This is not any new technology problem, going back to the creation of 911 the original PBX's simply melted under any intermittent high call volume.
The knowledge that there is something actually informational there below the surface of glitz, is hacking in a way.
At one point I was sure that hacking - knowing what was going on below the surface - was by definition the ability to wire a flip-flop together and later to code in machine code and then Fortran. And using this to, say, put something up on the Rose Bowl scoreboard.
Today I am willing to enlarge that to typing Unix shell commands, and extracting hidden text from PDF's. Yes, both are relaxing the previous standards for "depth".
We have to watch out, because pretty soon just knowing of the ctrl-A, ctrl-C, Ctrl-V sequence is going to be tantamount to knowing how to build a blue box. Maybe just like we distinguish "hacking" from "phreaking", maybe we should distinguish mining PDF's or MS-Word.DOC's for hidden information from hacking? Hmm... PdFreaking? PreaDFing?
I'm not so sure what anyone is in such a huff about. PDF is very hacker-friendly, and the confusion that the general public has in their belief that a PDF is just a "printer ready" format (as opposed to a general purpose vector-graphics, text, and programming environment) ALWAYS works to the hacker's benefit and never to "big brother's" benefit.
Perfect example: when the TSA's army of contractors "redacted" a document for public release, they simply drew (in PDF) black rectangles above the redacted text. Yet the original text was still there and intact.
Some here seem to view content that's below the surface (not visible with standard settings on standard Adobe tools) as a problem. Yet it is the perfect route to security leaks, a treasure-trove to anyone who knows how to look below the surface. And we hackers are the ones who know how to do that.
We already had "the internet" regulated, tarriffed, and adopted by the suits.
It was called X.25.
In retrospect it was the best possible scenario. All the standards writers, and the big business suits, and the government, and the telcos, were chasing X.25. Giving hackers the freedom to do TCP/IP and SMTP and FTP and the web etc.
I note that the example cited in the lead article, is simply what you would get if you hit those keys on a calculator.
If only we all used RPN, and there was no equals sign!
I am also extremely frustrated that all calculators have a divide button, but very few have the "gozinta" button. "Gozinta" is a way more useful concept than "divide" most of the time.
e.g. "7 gozinta 42" has the answer "6 times". I can do that rather painlessly on most RPM calcs with xy but on most other calculators it's more like "7, I already typed that in, I'll hit 1/x, then multiply by 42 and hit equals".
Project management exists ONLY to turn problems that are easy, into hard multi-million (or in this case nearly a billion) dollar problems.
e.g. California's IT systems, which for decades had been existing and solved via simple easily indexed key-value databases, got supposedly "converted" to Oracle in the late 90's and early 2000's. And in the process, the state of California bought MORE ORACLE LICENSES THAN IT HAD EMPLOYEES.
A motor mount is very nice but don't use your lack of one to not take photos of the perseids.
The best photos will be done with fairly wide-angle lenses and exposures of minutes and while some of the star field motion will be noticeable it will not be objectionable. The perseids will be bright streaks obviously different than the tiny little arcs executed by the stars.
Now, if you want to make dark-sky photos of small faint objects, with truly long exposures and much narrower fields of view, a motor mount is indeed a necessity. But not for the perseids.
It's so easy to over-provision. Hardware is cheap and if you don't ask for more than you think you need, you may end up (especially after the app becomes popular, gasp!) needing more than you thought at first.
It's like two kids fighting over a pie. Mom comes in, and kid #1 says "I think we should split it equally". Kid #2 says "I want it all". Mom listens to both sides and the kid who wanted his fair share only gets one quarter of the pie, while the kid who wanted it all gets three quarters. That's why you have to ask for more than you fairly need. It happens not just at the hardware purchase end but all the way up the pole. And you better spend the money you asked for or you're gonna lose it, too.
When I was in college, I had a halfway decent bike but vandals would remove any part not literally chained down. Lost several seats and wheels. Sometimes the vandals would find the wheels chained up and damage them instead. Othertimes they would just randomly remove screws and nuts, maybe in some half-assed attempt to steal something, but more likely just to damage the bike. Tires were regularly slashed too.
It got to the point where damage to the bike was costing me $50 to $100 every few months.
I then painted the bike pink with bright green polkadots. I painted the seat and wheels this garish pattern too and made sure that a good amount of pink overspray ended up on the tires (very nice tires, Continental real rubber). You know what? They never ever touched the bike after that. That was the smartest thing I ever did.
I don't think that it was that the pink and polkadots ruined the resale value of any stolen parts (that must've been pretty much zero to begin with), I think it was more of an abhorrently ugly color scheme making it completely undesirable to even get close to it.
Once I worked at a place, where the phones were this indescribibly ugly shade of beigish pink. Sorta like the avocado green popular in the 70's but far far worse. Betcha they chose that color because nobody would ever steal a phone that color.
Take that $150M, divide it by the 50K workers, and come up with a bill of $30000 per worker.
Now, that's not the worst thing in the world, but $30000 works out to like several years tuition at many state colleges. In some case $30K will pay for a 4-year degree.
Now, the worst thing in the world: Reminds me of the cost to a local police department, $15M, to get new radios for HQ and 250 officers in the county. That worked out to $60K per officer.
Interesting that this seems to have been written up as a "hardware" or "storage" topic.
The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.
For example, some people worry about privacy when they go to the grocery store and know that all their purchases are being tracked by their loyalty card, or worry that the big bad US government is tapping all the E-mail.
In fact, I'm 100% sure that some IT geek had some wet dream years ago about recording everybody's purchases and E-mail and phone call and it's being done every which way.;
The true "IT application" issue is that there is no real business need for this data 99.999% of the time. It gets recorded, probably gets staged off to tape, maybe indexed in some giant table, and then... sits there for years with no actual need for it.
I'm sure the IT geeks who dreamed up the technical ability to record all this stuff, thought they were hot shit when they came up with it. Oh, man, those IT architects were just having a big go-round whipping this problem in scalability. In their heads, they were gonna record everything on disk, then go home and fuck the prom queen.
Sales vs units in use - desktop vs laptop lifetime
on
Flight of the Desktops
·
· Score: 1
If you look at the data (Forrester Research) in the Slate article, you'll see that it's for SALES, not UNITS IN USE.
If you look at the data that way it makes sense. Laptops/netbooks/iPads have a much shorter lifecycle than a desktop PC. Heck, most of us techies are still using a desktop "PC" box we bought in the 1990's, just upgraded CPU/memory/hard-disk/power-supply wise every couple of years. In the Forrester Research stats I bet that counted as one PC sale.
OTOH while there do exist hard drive and memory upgrades for laptops, the tendency is not to replace a laptop every few years.
So yes, in terms of sales I see this trend as absoultely necessary. But sales are not units in use.
The overall trend I see, is that there will be big screens at home, and they will be hooked to a computer. That computer might be called a media center. Or a desktop.
Seymour Cray on virtual memory
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Virtual memory leads to virtual performance."
Just what I always wanted, a B-tree implementation that is guaranteed to swap.
Perhaps the most wise thing Richard Nixon ever said:
President Richard Nixon reflected this outlook when he decided in 1969 to abandon the U.S. offensive germ warfare program. "We'll never use the damn germs, so what good is biological warfare as a deterrent?" Nixon told his speechwriter William Safire. "If somebody uses germs on us, we'll nuke 'em."
Power supply chassis delivers 13.65VDC. It charges the lead acid batteries you see off to the side. Motherboard has switching converters that go straight from battery voltage to 3.3V/5V/12V, and whatever volts the CPU takes (1.65V?).
The motherboard in the system you picture is a variant of a Gigabyte GA-9IVDP. I think that system design is at least a few years old now, it wouldn't surprise me if some Google plants still have a buttload of them, but the design is continually evolving to use whatever commodity parts can be found cheap enough or in higher performance.
Think about the above: you don't need no stinkin UPS. Everything is about performance per dollar (where dollar includes power and physical plant costs too).
General opinion of the hardware hackers is that the power supply is expected to outlast several generations of server hardware, it might look like the power supply was kinda strapped to the motherboard plate, but really the motherboard plate is strapped onto the power supply!
Slashdot Mirror
From Wikipedia entry on Madman Muntz:
In related news, the Flag Of Japan Inc. is suing all websites that contain any red circles.
Interestingly Eco's article was from 1994. And it was "Macintosh users vs MS-DOS users", not so much "Apple the company vs IBM".
This is a link to an English translation of Eco's article
Things were a little different back then, than I see it today. Today, definitely "Apple the company" is defining a selling their route to salvation as a full multi-media company. This did not describe Apple in 1994, which was to be honest struggling under the "Macintosh" brand, I don't think anyone in their wildest dreams would have imagined Apple ever become so broad back then. And today the "PC-clone" users (this is the obvious descendant from the "MS-DOS" religion) includes a multitude of religions that battle each other quite strongly (e.g. Linux vs Windows).
It's a pretty sad commentary when uptimes approaching a good chunk of a decade, are taken as evidence of improper maintenance.
I compare with my car's engine... if I maintain it right, then it can very well last for 20 years between overhauls. Why shouldn't a computer (or a computer's software) be at least as reliable, as that? Shouldn't the length of time between overhaul (aka "reinstalling the OS") be evidence of very good maintenance (as well as fundamentally good design and configuration?)
And keep in mind that the applications, especially applications open to the big bad outside world over the net, are kept updated. Just that updating them never requires a reboot and certainly not an OS reinstall.
The 3-R's mentality of Windows (Retry, Reboot, and Reinstall) I did not expect would have affected slashdotters. The machines aren't there to suck up my time maintaining them. They're there, to do their job.
My average Unix (in the past decade, Linux) system uptime between reboots is now 3 to 4 years.
Not surprisingly, most of the reboots are there exactly for installation (aka "rebuild") of an updated OS usually on the next generation of server hardware. Major package upgrades (e.g. MySQL, Apache) almost never require any tinkering with the OS.
I compare that to typical Windows servers in my group, where reboots happen in many cases nightly as a preventative measure, and the system is still some crufty old version of Windows (e.g. Windows NT), the application packages are deeply tied to DLL's and drivers, and I suspect that the statistics and attitudes are apples vs oranges.
What I can say as guy who sells ad space on his website: My Google AdSense income has gone up by a factor of 5 to 10 in the past two months. No, I'm not gonna be able to retire on this money. But it's an obvious increase. And I see it coming at exactly the same time as I see Google cracking down on rank spamming.
I think Google has "rationalized" a lot of their ad process (both ranking and sales) and the only guys who are hurt, are the ones who were gaming the system to begin with. e.g. click fraud and spamming the ranking.
My impression listening to this boil up in the local media, is that the issue was not just dropped cellphone calls on one cellphone carrier, but rather the routing and concentration of 911 calls into several of the 911 call centers. Essentially the 911 call centers "phone company" is Verizon and some SNAFU between Verizon and the call center was resulting in dropped calls. This is not any new technology problem, going back to the creation of 911 the original PBX's simply melted under any intermittent high call volume.
The knowledge that there is something actually informational there below the surface of glitz, is hacking in a way.
At one point I was sure that hacking - knowing what was going on below the surface - was by definition the ability to wire a flip-flop together and later to code in machine code and then Fortran. And using this to, say, put something up on the Rose Bowl scoreboard.
Today I am willing to enlarge that to typing Unix shell commands, and extracting hidden text from PDF's. Yes, both are relaxing the previous standards for "depth".
We have to watch out, because pretty soon just knowing of the ctrl-A, ctrl-C, Ctrl-V sequence is going to be tantamount to knowing how to build a blue box. Maybe just like we distinguish "hacking" from "phreaking", maybe we should distinguish mining PDF's or MS-Word .DOC's for hidden information from hacking? Hmm... PdFreaking? PreaDFing?
Perfect example: when the TSA's army of contractors "redacted" a document for public release, they simply drew (in PDF) black rectangles above the redacted text. Yet the original text was still there and intact.
Some here seem to view content that's below the surface (not visible with standard settings on standard Adobe tools) as a problem. Yet it is the perfect route to security leaks, a treasure-trove to anyone who knows how to look below the surface. And we hackers are the ones who know how to do that.
We already had "the internet" regulated, tarriffed, and adopted by the suits.
It was called X.25.
In retrospect it was the best possible scenario. All the standards writers, and the big business suits, and the government, and the telcos, were chasing X.25. Giving hackers the freedom to do TCP/IP and SMTP and FTP and the web etc.
BEST POSSIBLE SCENARIO!
This sounds morally equivalent to ham radio SSTVin terms of speed (or lack of) and technique... and hams had been doing SSTV snce the 1960's.
I note that the example cited in the lead article, is simply what you would get if you hit those keys on a calculator.
If only we all used RPN, and there was no equals sign!
I am also extremely frustrated that all calculators have a divide button, but very few have the "gozinta" button. "Gozinta" is a way more useful concept than "divide" most of the time.
e.g. "7 gozinta 42" has the answer "6 times". I can do that rather painlessly on most RPM calcs with xy but on most other calculators it's more like "7, I already typed that in, I'll hit 1/x, then multiply by 42 and hit equals".
Project management exists ONLY to turn problems that are easy, into hard multi-million (or in this case nearly a billion) dollar problems.
e.g. California's IT systems, which for decades had been existing and solved via simple easily indexed key-value databases, got supposedly "converted" to Oracle in the late 90's and early 2000's. And in the process, the state of California bought MORE ORACLE LICENSES THAN IT HAD EMPLOYEES.
A motor mount is very nice but don't use your lack of one to not take photos of the perseids.
The best photos will be done with fairly wide-angle lenses and exposures of minutes and while some of the star field motion will be noticeable it will not be objectionable. The perseids will be bright streaks obviously different than the tiny little arcs executed by the stars.
Now, if you want to make dark-sky photos of small faint objects, with truly long exposures and much narrower fields of view, a motor mount is indeed a necessity. But not for the perseids.
Tim.
It's so easy to over-provision. Hardware is cheap and if you don't ask for more than you think you need, you may end up (especially after the app becomes popular, gasp!) needing more than you thought at first.
It's like two kids fighting over a pie. Mom comes in, and kid #1 says "I think we should split it equally". Kid #2 says "I want it all". Mom listens to both sides and the kid who wanted his fair share only gets one quarter of the pie, while the kid who wanted it all gets three quarters. That's why you have to ask for more than you fairly need. It happens not just at the hardware purchase end but all the way up the pole. And you better spend the money you asked for or you're gonna lose it, too.
If you're cool enough, you *CAN* have a pink car and be proud of it. Needless to say slashdot dweebs need not apply.
http://elviscadillacs.tripod.com/ElvisPinkCad.jpg
When I was in college, I had a halfway decent bike but vandals would remove any part not literally chained down. Lost several seats and wheels. Sometimes the vandals would find the wheels chained up and damage them instead. Othertimes they would just randomly remove screws and nuts, maybe in some half-assed attempt to steal something, but more likely just to damage the bike. Tires were regularly slashed too.
It got to the point where damage to the bike was costing me $50 to $100 every few months.
I then painted the bike pink with bright green polkadots. I painted the seat and wheels this garish pattern too and made sure that a good amount of pink overspray ended up on the tires (very nice tires, Continental real rubber). You know what? They never ever touched the bike after that. That was the smartest thing I ever did.
I don't think that it was that the pink and polkadots ruined the resale value of any stolen parts (that must've been pretty much zero to begin with), I think it was more of an abhorrently ugly color scheme making it completely undesirable to even get close to it.
Once I worked at a place, where the phones were this indescribibly ugly shade of beigish pink. Sorta like the avocado green popular in the 70's but far far worse. Betcha they chose that color because nobody would ever steal a phone that color.
Take that $150M, divide it by the 50K workers, and come up with a bill of $30000 per worker.
Now, that's not the worst thing in the world, but $30000 works out to like several years tuition at many state colleges. In some case $30K will pay for a 4-year degree.
Now, the worst thing in the world: Reminds me of the cost to a local police department, $15M, to get new radios for HQ and 250 officers in the county. That worked out to $60K per officer.
Interesting that this seems to have been written up as a "hardware" or "storage" topic.
The problem is, that IT people dream up all these "write only" applications that record data, without any rational plan for what the data might actually be used for in the business.
For example, some people worry about privacy when they go to the grocery store and know that all their purchases are being tracked by their loyalty card, or worry that the big bad US government is tapping all the E-mail.
In fact, I'm 100% sure that some IT geek had some wet dream years ago about recording everybody's purchases and E-mail and phone call and it's being done every which way.;
The true "IT application" issue is that there is no real business need for this data 99.999% of the time. It gets recorded, probably gets staged off to tape, maybe indexed in some giant table, and then ... sits there for years with no actual need for it.
I'm sure the IT geeks who dreamed up the technical ability to record all this stuff, thought they were hot shit when they came up with it. Oh, man, those IT architects were just having a big go-round whipping this problem in scalability. In their heads, they were gonna record everything on disk, then go home and fuck the prom queen.
If you look at the data (Forrester Research) in the Slate article, you'll see that it's for SALES, not UNITS IN USE.
If you look at the data that way it makes sense. Laptops/netbooks/iPads have a much shorter lifecycle than a desktop PC. Heck, most of us techies are still using a desktop "PC" box we bought in the 1990's, just upgraded CPU/memory/hard-disk/power-supply wise every couple of years. In the Forrester Research stats I bet that counted as one PC sale.
OTOH while there do exist hard drive and memory upgrades for laptops, the tendency is not to replace a laptop every few years.
So yes, in terms of sales I see this trend as absoultely necessary. But sales are not units in use.
The overall trend I see, is that there will be big screens at home, and they will be hooked to a computer. That computer might be called a media center. Or a desktop.
"Virtual memory leads to virtual performance."
Just what I always wanted, a B-tree implementation that is guaranteed to swap.
Perhaps the most wise thing Richard Nixon ever said:
$200 + $24.99 for the book.
It does make some common sense suggestions regarding useful low-end hardware.
With a USB cable at Fry's costing more than the book maybe the book's price isn't so bad :-)
Power supply chassis delivers 13.65VDC. It charges the lead acid batteries you see off to the side. Motherboard has switching converters that go straight from battery voltage to 3.3V/5V/12V, and whatever volts the CPU takes (1.65V?).
The motherboard in the system you picture is a variant of a Gigabyte GA-9IVDP. I think that system design is at least a few years old now, it wouldn't surprise me if some Google plants still have a buttload of them, but the design is continually evolving to use whatever commodity parts can be found cheap enough or in higher performance.
Think about the above: you don't need no stinkin UPS. Everything is about performance per dollar (where dollar includes power and physical plant costs too).
General opinion of the hardware hackers is that the power supply is expected to outlast several generations of server hardware, it might look like the power supply was kinda strapped to the motherboard plate, but really the motherboard plate is strapped onto the power supply!
Tim.
Something is wrong with the way we keep using the phrase "downloading copyrighted material" like it implies something illegal is going on.
The Linux kernel is copyrighted. Me downloading it is not illegal.
If I buy a book for my Kindle and download it, that's not illegal either.
But they are examples of downloading copyrighted material.
There needs to be a language adjustment such that we use "illegally downloading copyrighted material" instead.