Not sure what you mean about Windows being listed in the #2 slot... in the chart above, that's total number of systems in the top 500 that run that particular OS.
So out of 500, there are 367 Linux systems, 98 Unix systems, 24 "mixed" OS systems (whatever the heck that means), 5 Mac OS based systems, 5 BSDs, and 2 Windows-based ones. That makes Windows pretty conclusively the least-popular supercomputer OS.
For a machine that's more expensive and has less flash and RAM, is there even a reason to pick up a WRT54G?
No.
The new "G" version (v5, I think) is literally nothing but a crippled GL. And it's really crippled: they halved it's ram, IIRC, and reduced the flash as well. In any case, they cut back on its resources so badly that for a while, it looked like running anything but the proprietary VxWorks OS on it would be impossible.
Even now, with this 'micro' Linux OS, it's still a shadow of what you can do on a GL.
Avoid them like the plague; if you can't find a "GL" series, then buy a different router. There's no reason to get a Linksys except for that model (and the previous un-crippled "G" models, v1 - v3). There are better products out there if you can't find the GL, by other companies -- I've never had a stock Linksys product that didn't suck; the one redeeming value of the WRT45G was upgradability. Without that, it's nothing.
As long as we're talking about sources for used systems, I'd like to plug Retrobox, who despite their obnoxious use of Javascript on their website, sell refurbished computers -- sometimes very nice ones -- for very reasonable prices.
I picked up a HP P4-based xw5000 "Workstation" (certified to run RHEL) with a dual-head NVidia Quadro4 NVS graphics card about six months ago for $280. Works great; use it every day. Sure, in the winter it also serves as a space heater, but it does what it's supposed to do.
Right now they have desktop PCs from $9 (for a Compaq Deskpro, 266MHz Celeron and 6.4GB HD) to $280 (an HP Pavilion P4 2.8GHz, 500MB RAM, 80GB HD). They also sell laptops and servers.
My experience with them was very positive -- the only catch is that they actually refurbish the machine AFTER you order it, so be prepared for a delay before it ships. Like, at least a week or so before it goes out their door. However, in return you get a unit that's cosmetically nice (at least mine was), has a clean drive, and is well packed. Drop your favorite *NIX on it, and away you go.
At least for most people with jobs, computers are now something that you get to decide how many you want, rather than how many you can afford / whether you can afford.
Agreed. I've yet to find an IT department anywhere -- educational, corporate, or otherwise -- that didn't have a back room somewhere that was stacked with old PCs collecting dust.
If you act friendly and approach someone in charge when they're in a good mood, maybe you could get a "permanent loaner" to use until you can afford your own.
Computers are getting harder and harder to get rid of, and particularly desktops are not something that people exactly enjoy carting around. If you offered to pick one up from wherever the graveyard is, you might find your lack of computer issues immediately solved.
Of course, it probably won't be a very new computer, and if you're unlucky it'll be broken (but assuming you have access to a few of them, it's not hard to swap parts and cannibalize yourself a working unit, even if they've seen much better days). The main problem will be finding software to run on it; in that department I recommend grabbing yourself a minimal Linux distribution, although I suppose if you hunt around you might be able to find an older copy of Win98 or W2K. (Probably illegal, if it's OEM...)
I know this sounds cheesy, but sometimes you have to take your low budget and instead of viewing it as a limitation, look at it as a challenge. You have $0 (or $20, or whatever), and you need a computer. That's not an impossible proposition. You're not going to get anything that's going to impress people with its HL2 framerates or run WoW, but you'll definitely get something that you can word-process, browse the net, and do email on. Enough good computers are thrown out each day that I can guarantee that.
"Hack something together that you can show the sales folks, and then keep adding to it with horrible kludges until you get something resembling the final product which complies. Ship immediately."
I know you're being facetious, but that's exactly what I envisioned whenever I hear about these "agile" methodologies.
I guess it's because I work on software where the tolerance for bugs is a lot less than it is (apparently) in desktop PC software, but I have a hard time seeing one of these methodologies producing clean code.
If your application is going to get shipped and then never looked at again, I guess "clean code" might not matter, but if you're building an enterprise system, or writing a custom application that has to be maintained by other people later (people who probably aren't going to be quite so much of an 1337 h4x0r as you), it's a must.
Documentation and specifications aren't just something that you do in order to satisfy the PHBs of the world; they serve a real function. A system that's been well-specified to begin with is much easier to fix later, at least in my experience, than one that's been produced during a death march and is nothing but a giant rat's nest of code.
I could see the benefit of an "agile" development cycle for prototyping or producing a quick demo, but the idea of critical pieces of software -- software that your customers are going to depend on and that other people, months, years, or decades down the line are going to have to maintain and update -- being built this way scares me a little.
Listening to programmers bitch about documentation is like listening to a bunch of carpenters bitch about architectural plans. Of course you could get the house built a lot faster if you just took 15 builders and said "hey you, build a wall here!" and "you, build a bathroom over there!"... but I wouldn't want to live in the resulting house. Would you?
OS (# systems) (Percent) Linux 367 73.40% Windows 2 0.40% Unix 98 19.60% BSD 4 0.80% Mixed 24 4.80% Mac OS 5 1.00% Totals 500 100%
Alternately there's a more refined breakdown listing them by Operating System type and version. Oddly, "Linux" is listed both as an operating system family and as a distinct flavor/distro... I can only assume that the systems using "Linux" as the particular operating system are using a custom-made distro, instead of one of the commercial ones (which are listed separately on the detailed chart). Unless they just failed to report one in particular.
As for the Windows-based systems, there were one each for Windows 2003 Server and Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
I'm not sure that the GoogleNet counts as a single "computer." While we can argue semantics about something like BlueGene, it at least can be directed to apply all of its resources to a single problem (whether or not they actually do this in practice, I'm not sure). If the GoogleNet can be used as a supercomputer, then perhaps it should be on the list; but my understanding is that if the system can't be applied to any single arbitrary (properly programmed) task, then it's not enough of a unique entity to make it on the list.
I'm sure they have official rules that dictate what is and what isn't a 'computer' for the purposes of the list, as well.
I would be very interested to see any references to the court case in question, regarding instant messenges being a protected form of communication with an assumption of privacy, similar to telephone coversations.
I have never heard of such a thing, and frankly I'm a little hesitant to believe it because it seems too pro-consumer and pro-privacy to have happened recently.
The list of which states require single-party notification for recording conversations and which require two-party notification would also be fairly interesting, since I don't think I'm the only one here that logs and retains all my IM conversations, and never really gave a thought to whether it was legal or not.
For analog work, I definitely recommend not skimping on your cables. You generally get what you pay for in audio and RF cabling (well, at least until you get into the "audiophile" stuff, which I don't believe in though YMMV).
Or if the cable was going to be under a lot of stress, and moved constantly (like it was going around the hinge of a door or something) then you'd want to spend extra. Or if it failing could mean that Bad Things happen. Or if it was going to live in an electrically noisy environment and needed to be shielded better.
But for just a regular cable on a home computer, where it's going to get connected and then left that way for months or years, and the consequences of it failing are that you have to rip it out and spend 5 or 10 minutes replacing it...I can't justify a $30 cable.
I'm not a total cheapskate: I have coax and triax cable that costs almost as much per foot as those expensive USB cables are for the whole assembly, and it's worth every penny. But what you're paying for in the stuff at BB is some big molded connectors and a brand name (and an exclusivity agreement with BB, naturally). Particularly since I've looked at the braid on some Monster products, and they're not much better than my $3 chinese USB ones.
Actually what would probably be a very effective theft deterrent was if you just had a camera (like an iSight or one of those built-in ones) and displayed the video in real time, full screen, on the computer's monitor as the screen saver.
It's always unsettling to see yourself on TV, even if you logically believe that the signal isn't going anywhere. There's nothing that says "you're being watched" like your own face on a video monitor.
Seconded. I also wonder about this with regards to the 100BT connections quoted in reference to the UK cafe. If the backhaul is only 1Gb, then I hope they don't have more than 10 clients connected when they're quoting 100Mb.
If I saw a cafe advertising "Gigabit Internet Connections," my immediate suspicion would be that they have either: (in order of decreasing crapitude) A) Gigabit links to each machine, and then some shitty 128kb backhaul B) A Gigabit backhaul, and then 10/100 links to each client c) A Gigabit backhaul, and then Gigabit links to each client
The third case might, I suppose, be borderline honest, since theoretically if you were the only person in the cafe, you could enjoy gigabit speeds to the Internet, but that's barely practical. Although I suppose given the advertising of most consumer internet connections (advertising "burst" rather than continuous throughput, etc.), it's not as bad as it could be.
I think they do that because it's their way of screwing people who buy cheap USB peripherals. Example: those $30 printers they sell in some cases don't come with cables. Oh, it'll come with an AC adapter, but not a USB (or at least the salesperson will insist that it doesn't). Then they hand you the $30 "MonsterCable" USB cable, in the hopes of recouping their profit margin that they didn't get on the printer. I've seen them do this to people over and over, and it's just painful to watch.
The only reason I go into BestBuy is when there's something free, or at a ridiculously low price (their 'loss leaders'). And then I go into the store, get the one item, and leave.
I can go on PriceWatch and get 6' USB cables for around $1-3 a piece, with shipping, from a no-name Mom-n-Pop. I've yet to have one of them fail, but even if they're not the same quality as Monster's, I feel quite comfortable getting one and having nine backups on hand, for the same price.
Is "Human Proteome Folding" the same as Folding@Home, the one run by Stanford? I like the philosophy of the Stanford project (results will be free, all papers published to journals will also be published on the 'net, etc.) so I'm interested to know whether WGC's Folding project is the same one, or a competing one.
Also -- although I guess it's less important now than it would have been a few years ago, WCG is x86 only. You can't run it on your G5 or your Itanium (or SparcStation, or Alpha) like you can with some of the Boinc-based projects.
I don't know who's been installing separate applications for each project -- Boinc has been around for a while, and it runs as a daemon that controls small "worker" programs that are specific to each project (and downloaded automatically when you sign up for a new project, along with the initial datasets).
Actually it's my understanding that some telephone lines -- the ones that are up on the poles -- are actually pressurized with some kind of inert gas. I don't know if they do this continuously, or just as some maintainance procedure, but I once saw a big tank of gas strapped to a telephone pole with a hose running up to where somebody was working, and I asked the other guys (who were shovel-leaning, naturally) what was going on. I think it was nitrogen but it might have been argon or something instead. They were a little cagey about what exactly they were doing, but the compressed gas was definitely theirs. (They were SNET guys, I believe -- this was in Connecticut a while ago.)
The gas required to continuously pressurize underground conduits (and the labor required to seal them all) would be enormous, I suspect... although for sections of line that are particularly difficult to repair, I could see the benefit.
Actually the physical separation is much more important than just keeping people from sticking the media in the wrong drive. If that was the only issue, they could just color-code the computers and media and probably be OK.
The concern has to do with radiation produced by equipment; classified systems are shielded (sometimes) or kept in shielded rooms (more commonly, because actual shielded equipment is more expensive) with RF chokes on all the lines going in and out. The idea being that you don't want somebody to be able to listen to RF signals that your monitor on your classified system is putting out, by attaching an antenna to the building's cold-water pipe.
Where the problem gets even more complicated is that you can compromise a well-shielded system (one that doesn't radiate any information back into the power lines, etc.) if you put it close to an un-shielded (unclassified) system. The RF being produced by the shielded system will couple to the coils and whatnot in the unshielded system (which doesn't have any fancy chokes on its connections) and now you're back to radiating classified information into the building's power/water grid.
The '3 foot rule' is definitely arbitrary, but apparently it's the distance at which the people who are paid to think about these things believe that a classified system won't interact with an unclassified system and produce any significant radiation back into the building's infrastructure. If it sounds paranoid, that's because it is -- this was all Cold War era research -- but that doesn't meant it's not still true.
You're right though in saying that the artificial division between EMSEC and COMSEC and COMPUSEC is outdated and should be replaced with something more inclusive and relevant; however, the EMSEC precautions aren't completely outdated, and still exist for a reason where classified data is concerned.
I was wondering whether a screensaver of huge eyes, or maybe a realistically rendered human head that stared out into the room and looked around, would stop people from swiping stuff off of my desk.
A lot of big box stores do similar things. Look up at the cieling of your friendly local neighborhood Wal-Mart sometime. You'll see those black camera domes sticking down about every 20 feet or so.
I did an estimate once, and in the Super Wal-Mart in my area, there would have literally been hundreds of cameras. While perhaps they're all real (if anyone would take surveillance to that obsessive a level, it would be Wally World), they don't all need to be. They could just have 25% or 50% of them actually set up with a camera inside, and the rest just empty black domes. Since you'll never know which ones are cameras and which ones are fake, you have to assume (if you're going to do any kind of significant shoplifting) that they're all real.
Of course, the semi-intelligent person realizes that with that many cameras, and with the staffing levels at places like Wal-Mart, they can't possibly be actively watching all the cameras, all the time, particularly if every dome on the cieling was real...even viewed through multiplexers, each camera is only being monitored for a small fraction of the time it's on. (Unless there are warehouses full of people somewhere, staring at the live feeds; come to think if it, I wouldn't put that past Wal-Mart.)
Actually I looked at the eyes and I didn't think they looked very concerned and hurt. I thought they looked pissed, honestly.
It's kind of an "angry librarian" complex, I think. You're not really sure what happens if you piss it off, but it might not be pleasant so you just avoid finding out.
I'm well aware that current energy output pales in comparison to the energy input from the sun. However, what I was talking about was a situtation where that was no longer the case, because of the development of a new source of energy which increased total capacity far beyond what we do currently. I'm aware this is somewhat pie-in-the-sky... but this was a discussion about building giant sunshades and geoengineering; I hardly think it's that unwarranted. So I suppose I'm taking on premise that the energy output from manmade mass-energy converters is nontrivial.
I did err in using the phrase "closed system." The Earth is obviously not a closed system. If we assume that the current temperature is the steady state where the input (from the sun) equals the output (blackbody radiation, presumably), and that the rate of output is basically proportional to the earth's temperature, if we increase the input (or add another input), then the system will come to a new steady-state temperature that is higher than before.
To a theoretical person inside the system, with no control over (or potentially, knowledge of) the input due to insolation or the output due to radiation, the system could seem as though it's closed: when they begin adding energy to the system, the equilibrium temperature increases; when they stop, it decreases. Thermally it's not closed at all, but in terms of the pure cause and effect (if I do this, then this happens), it might seem that way.
Yeah I was kinda wondering about how they're going to manage the whole DRM business.
It sounds like it will support DRM-ed music stores (they mention Yahoo's subscription service, I think); how they're going to accomplish this I'm not sure of. I can only assume that each service will have its own binary blob for parsing and playing back its own files, and then the interface will pass commands to these blobs?
Still seems like it would be easy to get around: if the DRM parts are compartmentalized, how hard would it be to lie to them? For example, let's say you have a subscription-music service that makes all your music expire after a certain date if it doesn't get a 'keep alive' reset command. Couldn't you just keep passing it the wrong date? (This is a trivial example, I'm sure that the system would pull its time off the internet from an authenticated, trusted server, but it seems like there could be other attacks that would take this form.)
And if the music player software actually has access to the decrypted audio stream that the blob produces (for example, if it has a graphic equalizer, or visualizer), then it's pretty trivial to make the software do conversion as well. I can only imagine that even if you asked people not to implement such features, they would be in such demand that people would put them in and distribute modded versions regardless. (And, if it's GPL OSS, you can't really do anything about this.)
I don't see how the DRM components could possibly be open source. As I think we all know, DRM relies fundamentally on obscurity: you can't build "open source DRM," because then you just make the inevitable reverse-engineering happen more quickly. And I don't think you can have a subscription music service without DRM (unless it's like eMusic's, where you get a certain number of downloads per month). I guess what I mean is that you can't have an "all you can eat" subscription service without DRM, at least that I can imagine.
It would seem that something like this lends itself to MiTM attacks pretty readily, because it's easy for an attacker to set up a bad node, which purports to be a Fon accesspoint, but in reality exists only to get people to sign on to it. All I have to do in order to harvest people's passwords is set up my own router and give it the correct SSID, and wait for people to try and sign in.
I guess that would qualify less as 'hacking' and more as 'phishing,' and I guess it's really more spoofing than a man-in-the-middle attack (although it could be made into a MiTM easily as well), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be effective.
The problem is that switching to nuclear energy sources -- whether nuclear or even that Holy Grail of free-energy, fusion -- really only postpones the problem. Or rather, changes its immediate cause.
Right now we have global warming because of CO2 production and the "Greenhouse Effect." Fair enough; but I can easily imagine a future, particularly one where we develop a source of basically free, limitless energy, where that energy itself begins to become a problem.
If you set up a 1,000 MW power plant, whether you're burning oil or cracking atoms (or smashing them together) to get that energy, that's a billion watts of power going into our ecosystem that wasn't there before. And it all ends up as heat. Greenhouse effect or no greenhouse effect, pour enough energy in the form of heat into an essentially closed system, and the temperature's going to rise.
Especially if we think that we might discover fusion, or some other new source of energy, we need to know how to regulate the other big energy input to this planet: that of the sun. If we started doing a lot of mass-to-energy conversion, we'd probably want to offset the energy that we're dumping into the biosphere from our power plants by decreasing the input from the sun a little. So basically, we figure out our energy production, and "dial down" the solar radiation by that amount. My favorite crackpot idea for doing this involves a cloud of ice crystals at the Earth/Sun L1 point, but you can pick yours.
In the long run (what I call the 'steady state'), solar-input regulation seems to be the only way to prevent climate change, if future developments allowed for more energy production than the planet radiated into space at night without increasing in temperature.
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Not sure what you mean about Windows being listed in the #2 slot ... in the chart above, that's total number of systems in the top 500 that run that particular OS.
So out of 500, there are 367 Linux systems, 98 Unix systems, 24 "mixed" OS systems (whatever the heck that means), 5 Mac OS based systems, 5 BSDs, and 2 Windows-based ones. That makes Windows pretty conclusively the least-popular supercomputer OS.
The new "G" version (v5, I think) is literally nothing but a crippled GL. And it's really crippled: they halved it's ram, IIRC, and reduced the flash as well. In any case, they cut back on its resources so badly that for a while, it looked like running anything but the proprietary VxWorks OS on it would be impossible.
Even now, with this 'micro' Linux OS, it's still a shadow of what you can do on a GL.
Avoid them like the plague; if you can't find a "GL" series, then buy a different router. There's no reason to get a Linksys except for that model (and the previous un-crippled "G" models, v1 - v3). There are better products out there if you can't find the GL, by other companies -- I've never had a stock Linksys product that didn't suck; the one redeeming value of the WRT45G was upgradability. Without that, it's nothing.
As long as we're talking about sources for used systems, I'd like to plug Retrobox, who despite their obnoxious use of Javascript on their website, sell refurbished computers -- sometimes very nice ones -- for very reasonable prices.
I picked up a HP P4-based xw5000 "Workstation" (certified to run RHEL) with a dual-head NVidia Quadro4 NVS graphics card about six months ago for $280. Works great; use it every day. Sure, in the winter it also serves as a space heater, but it does what it's supposed to do.
Right now they have desktop PCs from $9 (for a Compaq Deskpro, 266MHz Celeron and 6.4GB HD) to $280 (an HP Pavilion P4 2.8GHz, 500MB RAM, 80GB HD). They also sell laptops and servers.
My experience with them was very positive -- the only catch is that they actually refurbish the machine AFTER you order it, so be prepared for a delay before it ships. Like, at least a week or so before it goes out their door. However, in return you get a unit that's cosmetically nice (at least mine was), has a clean drive, and is well packed. Drop your favorite *NIX on it, and away you go.
At least for most people with jobs, computers are now something that you get to decide how many you want, rather than how many you can afford / whether you can afford.
I have personally run feasibility studies that show the ease of acquisition of a girlfriend and of a computer are firmly in favor of the computer.
And that doesn't begin to consider the TCO.
Agreed. I've yet to find an IT department anywhere -- educational, corporate, or otherwise -- that didn't have a back room somewhere that was stacked with old PCs collecting dust.
If you act friendly and approach someone in charge when they're in a good mood, maybe you could get a "permanent loaner" to use until you can afford your own.
Computers are getting harder and harder to get rid of, and particularly desktops are not something that people exactly enjoy carting around. If you offered to pick one up from wherever the graveyard is, you might find your lack of computer issues immediately solved.
Of course, it probably won't be a very new computer, and if you're unlucky it'll be broken (but assuming you have access to a few of them, it's not hard to swap parts and cannibalize yourself a working unit, even if they've seen much better days). The main problem will be finding software to run on it; in that department I recommend grabbing yourself a minimal Linux distribution, although I suppose if you hunt around you might be able to find an older copy of Win98 or W2K. (Probably illegal, if it's OEM...)
I know this sounds cheesy, but sometimes you have to take your low budget and instead of viewing it as a limitation, look at it as a challenge. You have $0 (or $20, or whatever), and you need a computer. That's not an impossible proposition. You're not going to get anything that's going to impress people with its HL2 framerates or run WoW, but you'll definitely get something that you can word-process, browse the net, and do email on. Enough good computers are thrown out each day that I can guarantee that.
I guess it's because I work on software where the tolerance for bugs is a lot less than it is (apparently) in desktop PC software, but I have a hard time seeing one of these methodologies producing clean code.
If your application is going to get shipped and then never looked at again, I guess "clean code" might not matter, but if you're building an enterprise system, or writing a custom application that has to be maintained by other people later (people who probably aren't going to be quite so much of an 1337 h4x0r as you), it's a must.
Documentation and specifications aren't just something that you do in order to satisfy the PHBs of the world; they serve a real function. A system that's been well-specified to begin with is much easier to fix later, at least in my experience, than one that's been produced during a death march and is nothing but a giant rat's nest of code.
I could see the benefit of an "agile" development cycle for prototyping or producing a quick demo, but the idea of critical pieces of software -- software that your customers are going to depend on and that other people, months, years, or decades down the line are going to have to maintain and update -- being built this way scares me a little.
Listening to programmers bitch about documentation is like listening to a bunch of carpenters bitch about architectural plans. Of course you could get the house built a lot faster if you just took 15 builders and said "hey you, build a wall here!" and "you, build a bathroom over there!"
Just to follow up, you can get OS information here: http://www.top500.org/stats/27/osfam/ (by family)
... I can only assume that the systems using "Linux" as the particular operating system are using a custom-made distro, instead of one of the commercial ones (which are listed separately on the detailed chart). Unless they just failed to report one in particular.
OS (# systems) (Percent)
Linux 367 73.40%
Windows 2 0.40%
Unix 98 19.60%
BSD 4 0.80%
Mixed 24 4.80%
Mac OS 5 1.00%
Totals 500 100%
Alternately there's a more refined breakdown listing them by Operating System type and version. Oddly, "Linux" is listed both as an operating system family and as a distinct flavor/distro
As for the Windows-based systems, there were one each for Windows 2003 Server and Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003.
I'm not sure that the GoogleNet counts as a single "computer." While we can argue semantics about something like BlueGene, it at least can be directed to apply all of its resources to a single problem (whether or not they actually do this in practice, I'm not sure). If the GoogleNet can be used as a supercomputer, then perhaps it should be on the list; but my understanding is that if the system can't be applied to any single arbitrary (properly programmed) task, then it's not enough of a unique entity to make it on the list.
I'm sure they have official rules that dictate what is and what isn't a 'computer' for the purposes of the list, as well.
Its supprising that no microsoft systems are listed....
Well, they only published the requirements for Vista a few weeks ago; I'm sure they'll do better next year.
I would be very interested to see any references to the court case in question, regarding instant messenges being a protected form of communication with an assumption of privacy, similar to telephone coversations.
I have never heard of such a thing, and frankly I'm a little hesitant to believe it because it seems too pro-consumer and pro-privacy to have happened recently.
The list of which states require single-party notification for recording conversations and which require two-party notification would also be fairly interesting, since I don't think I'm the only one here that logs and retains all my IM conversations, and never really gave a thought to whether it was legal or not.
For analog work, I definitely recommend not skimping on your cables. You generally get what you pay for in audio and RF cabling (well, at least until you get into the "audiophile" stuff, which I don't believe in though YMMV).
Or if the cable was going to be under a lot of stress, and moved constantly (like it was going around the hinge of a door or something) then you'd want to spend extra. Or if it failing could mean that Bad Things happen. Or if it was going to live in an electrically noisy environment and needed to be shielded better.
But for just a regular cable on a home computer, where it's going to get connected and then left that way for months or years, and the consequences of it failing are that you have to rip it out and spend 5 or 10 minutes replacing it...I can't justify a $30 cable.
I'm not a total cheapskate: I have coax and triax cable that costs almost as much per foot as those expensive USB cables are for the whole assembly, and it's worth every penny. But what you're paying for in the stuff at BB is some big molded connectors and a brand name (and an exclusivity agreement with BB, naturally). Particularly since I've looked at the braid on some Monster products, and they're not much better than my $3 chinese USB ones.
Actually what would probably be a very effective theft deterrent was if you just had a camera (like an iSight or one of those built-in ones) and displayed the video in real time, full screen, on the computer's monitor as the screen saver.
It's always unsettling to see yourself on TV, even if you logically believe that the signal isn't going anywhere. There's nothing that says "you're being watched" like your own face on a video monitor.
I just hope they built this place with an easy-to-clean floor.
Seconded. I also wonder about this with regards to the 100BT connections quoted in reference to the UK cafe. If the backhaul is only 1Gb, then I hope they don't have more than 10 clients connected when they're quoting 100Mb.
If I saw a cafe advertising "Gigabit Internet Connections," my immediate suspicion would be that they have either: (in order of decreasing crapitude)
A) Gigabit links to each machine, and then some shitty 128kb backhaul
B) A Gigabit backhaul, and then 10/100 links to each client
c) A Gigabit backhaul, and then Gigabit links to each client
The third case might, I suppose, be borderline honest, since theoretically if you were the only person in the cafe, you could enjoy gigabit speeds to the Internet, but that's barely practical. Although I suppose given the advertising of most consumer internet connections (advertising "burst" rather than continuous throughput, etc.), it's not as bad as it could be.
Yup.
I think they do that because it's their way of screwing people who buy cheap USB peripherals. Example: those $30 printers they sell in some cases don't come with cables. Oh, it'll come with an AC adapter, but not a USB (or at least the salesperson will insist that it doesn't). Then they hand you the $30 "MonsterCable" USB cable, in the hopes of recouping their profit margin that they didn't get on the printer. I've seen them do this to people over and over, and it's just painful to watch.
The only reason I go into BestBuy is when there's something free, or at a ridiculously low price (their 'loss leaders'). And then I go into the store, get the one item, and leave.
I can go on PriceWatch and get 6' USB cables for around $1-3 a piece, with shipping, from a no-name Mom-n-Pop. I've yet to have one of them fail, but even if they're not the same quality as Monster's, I feel quite comfortable getting one and having nine backups on hand, for the same price.
Is "Human Proteome Folding" the same as Folding@Home, the one run by Stanford? I like the philosophy of the Stanford project (results will be free, all papers published to journals will also be published on the 'net, etc.) so I'm interested to know whether WGC's Folding project is the same one, or a competing one.
Also -- although I guess it's less important now than it would have been a few years ago, WCG is x86 only. You can't run it on your G5 or your Itanium (or SparcStation, or Alpha) like you can with some of the Boinc-based projects.
I don't know who's been installing separate applications for each project -- Boinc has been around for a while, and it runs as a daemon that controls small "worker" programs that are specific to each project (and downloaded automatically when you sign up for a new project, along with the initial datasets).
Actually it's my understanding that some telephone lines -- the ones that are up on the poles -- are actually pressurized with some kind of inert gas. I don't know if they do this continuously, or just as some maintainance procedure, but I once saw a big tank of gas strapped to a telephone pole with a hose running up to where somebody was working, and I asked the other guys (who were shovel-leaning, naturally) what was going on. I think it was nitrogen but it might have been argon or something instead. They were a little cagey about what exactly they were doing, but the compressed gas was definitely theirs. (They were SNET guys, I believe -- this was in Connecticut a while ago.)
... although for sections of line that are particularly difficult to repair, I could see the benefit.
The gas required to continuously pressurize underground conduits (and the labor required to seal them all) would be enormous, I suspect
Actually the physical separation is much more important than just keeping people from sticking the media in the wrong drive. If that was the only issue, they could just color-code the computers and media and probably be OK.
The concern has to do with radiation produced by equipment; classified systems are shielded (sometimes) or kept in shielded rooms (more commonly, because actual shielded equipment is more expensive) with RF chokes on all the lines going in and out. The idea being that you don't want somebody to be able to listen to RF signals that your monitor on your classified system is putting out, by attaching an antenna to the building's cold-water pipe.
Where the problem gets even more complicated is that you can compromise a well-shielded system (one that doesn't radiate any information back into the power lines, etc.) if you put it close to an un-shielded (unclassified) system. The RF being produced by the shielded system will couple to the coils and whatnot in the unshielded system (which doesn't have any fancy chokes on its connections) and now you're back to radiating classified information into the building's power/water grid.
The '3 foot rule' is definitely arbitrary, but apparently it's the distance at which the people who are paid to think about these things believe that a classified system won't interact with an unclassified system and produce any significant radiation back into the building's infrastructure. If it sounds paranoid, that's because it is -- this was all Cold War era research -- but that doesn't meant it's not still true.
You're right though in saying that the artificial division between EMSEC and COMSEC and COMPUSEC is outdated and should be replaced with something more inclusive and relevant; however, the EMSEC precautions aren't completely outdated, and still exist for a reason where classified data is concerned.
I was wondering whether a screensaver of huge eyes, or maybe a realistically rendered human head that stared out into the room and looked around, would stop people from swiping stuff off of my desk.
A lot of big box stores do similar things. Look up at the cieling of your friendly local neighborhood Wal-Mart sometime. You'll see those black camera domes sticking down about every 20 feet or so.
I did an estimate once, and in the Super Wal-Mart in my area, there would have literally been hundreds of cameras. While perhaps they're all real (if anyone would take surveillance to that obsessive a level, it would be Wally World), they don't all need to be. They could just have 25% or 50% of them actually set up with a camera inside, and the rest just empty black domes. Since you'll never know which ones are cameras and which ones are fake, you have to assume (if you're going to do any kind of significant shoplifting) that they're all real.
Of course, the semi-intelligent person realizes that with that many cameras, and with the staffing levels at places like Wal-Mart, they can't possibly be actively watching all the cameras, all the time, particularly if every dome on the cieling was real...even viewed through multiplexers, each camera is only being monitored for a small fraction of the time it's on. (Unless there are warehouses full of people somewhere, staring at the live feeds; come to think if it, I wouldn't put that past Wal-Mart.)
Actually I looked at the eyes and I didn't think they looked very concerned and hurt. I thought they looked pissed, honestly.
It's kind of an "angry librarian" complex, I think. You're not really sure what happens if you piss it off, but it might not be pleasant so you just avoid finding out.
I'm well aware that current energy output pales in comparison to the energy input from the sun. However, what I was talking about was a situtation where that was no longer the case, because of the development of a new source of energy which increased total capacity far beyond what we do currently. I'm aware this is somewhat pie-in-the-sky ... but this was a discussion about building giant sunshades and geoengineering; I hardly think it's that unwarranted. So I suppose I'm taking on premise that the energy output from manmade mass-energy converters is nontrivial.
I did err in using the phrase "closed system." The Earth is obviously not a closed system. If we assume that the current temperature is the steady state where the input (from the sun) equals the output (blackbody radiation, presumably), and that the rate of output is basically proportional to the earth's temperature, if we increase the input (or add another input), then the system will come to a new steady-state temperature that is higher than before.
To a theoretical person inside the system, with no control over (or potentially, knowledge of) the input due to insolation or the output due to radiation, the system could seem as though it's closed: when they begin adding energy to the system, the equilibrium temperature increases; when they stop, it decreases. Thermally it's not closed at all, but in terms of the pure cause and effect (if I do this, then this happens), it might seem that way.
Yeah I was kinda wondering about how they're going to manage the whole DRM business.
It sounds like it will support DRM-ed music stores (they mention Yahoo's subscription service, I think); how they're going to accomplish this I'm not sure of. I can only assume that each service will have its own binary blob for parsing and playing back its own files, and then the interface will pass commands to these blobs?
Still seems like it would be easy to get around: if the DRM parts are compartmentalized, how hard would it be to lie to them? For example, let's say you have a subscription-music service that makes all your music expire after a certain date if it doesn't get a 'keep alive' reset command. Couldn't you just keep passing it the wrong date? (This is a trivial example, I'm sure that the system would pull its time off the internet from an authenticated, trusted server, but it seems like there could be other attacks that would take this form.)
And if the music player software actually has access to the decrypted audio stream that the blob produces (for example, if it has a graphic equalizer, or visualizer), then it's pretty trivial to make the software do conversion as well. I can only imagine that even if you asked people not to implement such features, they would be in such demand that people would put them in and distribute modded versions regardless. (And, if it's GPL OSS, you can't really do anything about this.)
I don't see how the DRM components could possibly be open source. As I think we all know, DRM relies fundamentally on obscurity: you can't build "open source DRM," because then you just make the inevitable reverse-engineering happen more quickly. And I don't think you can have a subscription music service without DRM (unless it's like eMusic's, where you get a certain number of downloads per month). I guess what I mean is that you can't have an "all you can eat" subscription service without DRM, at least that I can imagine.
It would seem that something like this lends itself to MiTM attacks pretty readily, because it's easy for an attacker to set up a bad node, which purports to be a Fon accesspoint, but in reality exists only to get people to sign on to it. All I have to do in order to harvest people's passwords is set up my own router and give it the correct SSID, and wait for people to try and sign in.
I guess that would qualify less as 'hacking' and more as 'phishing,' and I guess it's really more spoofing than a man-in-the-middle attack (although it could be made into a MiTM easily as well), but that doesn't mean it wouldn't be effective.
The problem is that switching to nuclear energy sources -- whether nuclear or even that Holy Grail of free-energy, fusion -- really only postpones the problem. Or rather, changes its immediate cause.
Right now we have global warming because of CO2 production and the "Greenhouse Effect." Fair enough; but I can easily imagine a future, particularly one where we develop a source of basically free, limitless energy, where that energy itself begins to become a problem.
If you set up a 1,000 MW power plant, whether you're burning oil or cracking atoms (or smashing them together) to get that energy, that's a billion watts of power going into our ecosystem that wasn't there before. And it all ends up as heat. Greenhouse effect or no greenhouse effect, pour enough energy in the form of heat into an essentially closed system, and the temperature's going to rise.
Especially if we think that we might discover fusion, or some other new source of energy, we need to know how to regulate the other big energy input to this planet: that of the sun. If we started doing a lot of mass-to-energy conversion, we'd probably want to offset the energy that we're dumping into the biosphere from our power plants by decreasing the input from the sun a little. So basically, we figure out our energy production, and "dial down" the solar radiation by that amount. My favorite crackpot idea for doing this involves a cloud of ice crystals at the Earth/Sun L1 point, but you can pick yours.
In the long run (what I call the 'steady state'), solar-input regulation seems to be the only way to prevent climate change, if future developments allowed for more energy production than the planet radiated into space at night without increasing in temperature.