Well that's not entirely what I meant. Ethical considerations will affect some people's actions, perhaps even most people's actions, so teaching (indoctrinating) them is worthwhile on a large scale. Teaching people that stealing and violence are wrong keeps society from falling apart overnight. However, that doesn't mean that stealing and violence don't occur.
With something like weapons development, what I'm saying is that it's better to take the people who are going to make bigger and better killing machines (or viruses, or whatever) and give them a way to do it that minimizes the risk of those same weapons being used against us. Or really, do something to insulate the people who are going to make weapons from the people who are going to use them indiscriminately. Since you're not going to stop people from either, you can at least try to keep them far apart.
Thus I'm quite happy to have the U.S. Government -- being a U.S. citizen, I prefer to be on the side with all the guns, of course your opinions can vary from mine -- keep the weapons researchers gainfully employed in our labs. If we did as some peaceniks occasionally suggest, and just stopped paying for it tomorrow, we'd have a situation like they had/have in Russia, where suddenly a lot of nuclear scientists/engineers are FedExing their resumes to North Korea and Iran.
You may not think that the U.S. is necessarily the best entity to be in control of all those weapons, and I might even agree with you in theory, but there are a whole lot of worse people to have them.
I think that you are forgetting that there are people out there -- some quite intelligent people, actually -- who can be totally aware and cognizant of the fact that they're doing something immoral, and do it anyway. In the extreme, we call them sociopaths, but even "average" people will do amoral things if they're compensated correctly.
There are lots of people who worked in weapons development who were probably good, law-abiding, go-to-church-on-Sunday people who believe killing is wrong; I'm willing to bet all of them probably thought they were moral.
People have an incredible ability to compartmentalize their lives; you can try to indoctrinate some researcher that making a new strain of superflu or a bigger bomb is bad, and they'll still go in to work on Monday and do it. Maybe they'll develop a drinking problem, beat their wife, or get depressed, but I think they'd still do it. People work on projects because aside from the tangible benefits (paycheck, nice car/house, etc.) it's a technical challenge. No amount of moralizing is going to make that less attractive to people who are really good an interested in the subject matter.
And you'd always have the quasi-sociopaths who just don't give a damn about morality and can happily say "yep, I'm building a bigger bomb, it's going to kill millions of people at once, but isn't it beautiful?" It doesn't matter what the government does to encourage or discourage them, they're going to do their thing one way or another. If they weren't given cubicles to fill in some US weapons-research lab, the brightest and most highly-motivated would find someone else to do it for. (E.g., Gerald Bull, the guy behind the Iraqi 'Supergun,' before he was assassinated.) I would much prefer to have people like that working in a bunker somewhere in Nevada than Manchuria.
It's naive to think that the people who work on weapons would just work on vaccines or solving world hunger; I think you need to consider the possibility that many of them may enjoy their jobs, and do them with the full knowledge of what their inventions are used for.
Also, just because the white, christian male conquered large parts of the world, does not mean we were culturally superiour. We just happened to better at killing than them.
I think that basically is the argument for being, if not culturally "superior," at least having a significantly more robust (perhaps virulent?) culture.
Combined with a whole lot of luck in terms of happening to get the bits of land with choice natural and agricultural resources, of course.
You can play the cultural relativism game all you want, and talk about how bright and beautiful all the civilizations are that got wiped out along the way, but at some point you have to stop yourself and ask 'why is it that they didn't wipe up out instead?' I'm sure the more softhearted among us will disagree, but perhaps the only measure of a civilization at the end of the day is how effective it is at wiping out everyone else to it's own advantage.
I agree, it doesn't seem to cut out the biggest part of the FTTC proposition, which is either digging up or pulling fiber under the street, or stringing it on poles. One way or the other, you have to get the bandwidth to the home, and then what the homeowner does with it after that really is their business.
My only guess is that it's more a response to the cable company's usurpation of the phone company, from a marketing standpoint. They want to be able to offer a "whole house, full services" solution, that includes telephone/video/internet, and this technology is how they're hoping to gain a little PR, and maybe spread some FUD and make the cable companies nervous.
But you're absolutely right, I don't know why Verizon would be concerned about the expense of rewiring a house, since last time I checked, they're not going to be paying for that anyway. I'm glad that they're looking out for my expenses as a homeowner, but you're correct in saying there has to be a motive for them here.
I think this is the real headline here -- basically what Verizon wants to do is run fiber to your house, to the outside service entrance or basement or whatever, and then unplug the Cable Company's wires from where they attach to the wires inside your house, and plug themselves in there. Then their signal -- instead of the Cable Co.'s -- goes to everyplace you have a cable jack. Which is quite a few places, in many modern homes.
For you, the customer, they can say "hey, you don't need to run Cat 5 all over your house this way"... while at the same time, cutting the cable company totally out of the picture.
I think it's their way of responding to the Cable Companies who are bundling TV+Highspeed Internet+VOIP packages, where they install a VOIP box and plug your analog phone into it, effectively cutting out the phone company.
Frankly I think it would be better if both companies agreed on a common wiring standard (hey, how about Cat 6 UTP?) and then plugged THAT into whatever network line the customer wanted to use -- whether it was the Cable Co.'s or the Telco's.
I think you are not considering though how these controversies work.
When you have a small (or not so small) core of very determined people who want an outcome that most people would not like -- in this case, the banning of everything contrary to their "Christian" values, not just videogames, but books, television, and movies as well -- there is a very real 'slippery slope.' It may not be a logical argument, but it's a human one.
To use your example, it would be as if you had a friend who really wanted, for reasons all their own, to get you addicted to crack cocaine. They're being pretty sly about it, but more than anything they'd like to get you to go down to that crack house, walk inside, and buy yourself a couple of nice rocks to smoke. They're pretty persuasive -- but when you're sitting in your house, it's pretty easy to come up with reasons why you don't want to go there. It's a long walk, it's cold outside, I've got better things to do, etc.
When your friend is with you, constantly arguing with you and wearing you down, trying to convince you to go into the crack house, it might be a really bad idea for you to walk down the street to the Blockbuster. If your route took you right past the crack house, suddenly a lot of your arguments would be undermined. If you had a moment of weakness -- just a single moment -- you might just find yourself in there, smoking some rocks.
Therefore, knowing that you're prone to bouts of stupidity, you'd be wise not to go anywhere near the crack house while in the company of your friend.
Bringing it back to the issue at hand, banning violent video games might be an act similar to going down to Blockbuster. Most people might not even consider it to be censorship per se, however it does move us a little closer to a position from which censorship would be possible. So therefore, if you find the ultimate aim of some of the pro-videogame-regulation folks unacceptable (and, of course, if you believe that the ultimate aim of many people pushing video-game censorship is more than just getting rid of violent games), it makes sense to oppose them at every opportunity.
The body politic in the US does not move calmly in one direction or the other. It stumbles, lurches, and occasionally runs and backpedals. Over any short period of time, it's motion might be described as chaotic -- diving in one direction, then the opposite. The "slippery slope" argument simply states that given these short-term unpredictabilities, it doesn't pay to put the entire country in a position where one temporary bout of insanity would put it over a precipice. In fact, the whole idea is to keep it as far away from that precipice as possible, giving you more opportunities to stop things if it starts moving in that direction.
In most installations, power and signal are run in totally independent conduit systems. Separate junction boxes, etc., all the way back to wherever they're grounded.
In fact I think that's code. I just did a quick search and I can't find anything related to it, but I think it's required that "high voltage" and "low voltage" wires are run separately, and IIRC the definition of HV is anything over about 40V. Computer networking, telephone, and most home-audio speaker wires are low voltage and thus go in separate conduits. Obviously trust your electrician if he/she says different, but these are the requirements that were told to me by one I was working with not that long ago, during an audio system install. We had two, totally parallel conduit systems installed in order to use powered speakers -- one for the line-level audio and one for the 120VAC circuit.
Is there any way I could have flip-up baseboards or something like that to give me easy access to some hidden cavity?
I've never actually seen this per se, but it doesn't seem impossible. Basically what you're asking for is wire duct, but sunk into the walls around the base of a room and with molding placed over it where the cables aren't actually entering and exiting. I'm not sure how you'd sink them into the walls without just making the wall thicker (because how do you sink something 6" into the wall without compromising it structurally?).
If all you want to do is a few pieces of twisted pair, I have seen (on one of those home shows) someone put up surface-mount raceways, and then use a router to cut a groove on the backside of some thick molding and cover it. This was not at floor level, but up where the wall met the cieling. Depending on the style of your house, heavy crown molding might not exactly be your style, but it's something to think about. Of course, then you get into the issue of having to use a fish tape to replace the cabling.
All a matter of money; I'm sure a good finish carpenter could find all sorts of clever ways to give you hinged access to cable raceways and other infrastructure, it's just that most people firstly don't think about that when they're building, and secondly probably aren't willing to spend the money it would take to do a really first-class job.
Really what you'd want is a lot of conduit running throughout the house, preferably metallic stuff, and run totally independent of the power lines. End-run it all back to some central place, like a corner of the basement or a big server closet, and you'd be able to run anything you wanted. Analog audio, coax, twisted-pair, fiber... Just remember to leave a bunch of pull lines in the conduit.
Frankly what most geeks want, I think, is a home that's built more like a commercial or industrial structure. Raised-flooring or double-hung cielings, for instance, aren't exactly aesthetically pleasing but make network installation a lot easier than it is in the typical home. My rationale would be this: sure, raised flooring and exposed metal conduit aren't seemly, but they're a lot better than having an exposed tangle of wires, and that's the alternative if you build homes the typical way (with the wires laid in holes bored in the wall studs).
Actually I've always thought the ultimate geek dwelling would just be a single floor of some old industrial buidling; someplace where you could hang cable trays directly from exposed cieling beams. (Not to mention 3-ph 480V power, for when you pick up that surplus Cray on eBay.)
I guess if you go down that route, you'd pretty much have to give up on ever getting laid there, though.
While the show may have been shown on the Discovery Channel, it was originally made for the UK's "Channel Four" network by Diverse Productions. It was written by Simon Singh, so the same-name thing is not just a coincidence.
Diverse lists it on their website, but there's no link to a DVD or any other signs that it exists. Too bad, because at 5, 30-minute episodes it would make a good two disc set (throw one 30-minute reel of extras on there and you'd have two 90 minute DVDs). I'd bet they'd make far more revenue from that then they would from having it sit around in their archives.
In a completely unrelated note, they are apparently looking for families who want to be on a show they're filming for TLC here in the US. Very... wide variety of subject matter they deal with. (One might almost call it 'diverse'... okay, I'm done.)
...the rubber-hose technique of cryptanalysis, (in which a rubber hose is applied forcefully and frequently to the soles of the feet until the key to the cryptosystem is discovered, a process that can take a surprisingly short time and is quite computationally inexpensive)
I wanted to second this. I read this a while back, and it's what really got me interested in modern cryptography; he works up very gently from basic "Boy Scout" type secret-message ciphers (winding a paper tape around a stick, etc.) up to Diffie-Hellman key exchange and a fairly good explanation of quantum cryptography.
The list of further reading in the back, as I recall, is quite good also. I think that's where I first was pointed towards Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, which is a great (if quite dense) tome, once you've decided you're interested in the subject. I think it's much better for someone to cut their teeth on a slightly less-academic book than Schneier's if they're unfamiliar with the subject, however.
You're trying to tell me it's only "hardcore Linux users" that build a PC and don't want to fork over $200 minimum for a Windows license?
No, but most people I know who have built machines and aren't Linux users, but don't want to pay $200 for Windows just pirated it.
In fact, most of the people I know who built barebones machines are running either pirated versions of Windows, or OEM versions from older machines that they're not using, or educational discount versions. (Mainly pirated ones, though.)
If all you're trying to do is avoid the "Windows tax," piracy is a lot easier for most people than loading up Linux and using WINE. The latter requires that, in addition to being cheap, you also have an interest in using an OS other than Windows -- that in itself is fairly rare among large swaths of the computer-using public.
[I'm not meaning to diss WINE or Linux here, I'm really not, and I'm also no fan of Windows. At home I have two systems, a uniprocessor P4 system running Ubuntu and a dual-processor G5. (Yeah my power bill sucks, but that's another story.) I have Cedega running on the Ubuntu box for playing Windows games. However, I do this because I really dislike Windows AND I like Linux; if it was just the former, I would just pirate Windows.]
Well, and I say this as an Apple user... it might just have something to do with the fact that Apple makes both the OS and computers, while Microsoft does not.
If Apple wants to use new technology x, theoretically they should be able to have one meeting where they get the lead hardware and software people in a room, tell them how it's going to be, and then have them go and do it. I have no idea how much inter-office communication there is, never having worked there, or what sort of politicking goes on, but even if it's horrendously bad and dysfunctional, it has to be easier than getting Microsoft and even the manufacturers of 75% of the PC systems (which would be like Dell, HP/Compaq, Lenovo, Toshiba, and Gateway, I think) into one room, much less to actually agree on anything by choice.
Sure, maybe MS could do some arm-twisting and force some technology on manufacturers, but it's nothing compared to the ability Apple has, given the complete control over its systems.
You're seriously under-estimating the size required for iLife. The OS itself only takes up around 3GB, 4GB if you install the Developer Tools (which are a must-have in my opinion, since they include some of the "essentials" like GCC). GarageBand and iDVD are huge space hogs; GarageBand has several GB of samples included, and iDVD has a few GB of DVD templates. So that's where the 10GB footprint comes from, it's mostly not the OS.
Granted, it's a far cry from System 7; I remember swearing like hell when my OS took up more than 10MB...and now I'm defending 3GB. Jeez.
The intended purpose of ASC Purple is nuclear weapons simulations.
Since they can't actually do tests, either aboveground or below, by treaty anymore, they do simulations instead. I assume these have something to do with modeling how radioactive decay affects the weapons' usability and yield over time (since I don't think they're really in the business of designing new toys, but who knows really), so that you know that a bomb is going to go "pop" instead of "fizzle" when you want it to.
I'd imagine that those kinds of simulations could easily produce tera- and petabytes of data, when run with the sort of precision and initial conditions that LLNL probably wants to use.
I think BlueGene/L (No. 1 on the list of top supercomputers, Purple is 3) is used for the same purpose. Or at least, that was their reason/excuse for purchasing it; exactly what they do with it every day is anybody's guess.
"GPFS is available as:
* GPFS for AIX 5L on POWER(TM)
* GPFS for Linux on IBM AMD processor-based servers and
IBM eServer® xSeries®
* GPFS for Linux on POWER"
From the articles I've read, this was accomplished using (some subset of) ASC Purple, which is full of a lot of either custom or IBM-proprietary stuff (or else stuff that nobody but IBM seems to be using).
"Purple has 2 million gigabytes of storage from more than 11,000 Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks.... Each login node has eight 10-gigabytes-per-second network connections for parallel file transfer protocol and two 1-gigabyte-per-second network connections for network file systems and secure shell protocol. The system has a three-stage 1,536 port dual plane Federation switch interconnect..."
I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster.
It does sound a little like it was a case of "hey, what can we do with $230M worth of hardware? I know, let's break some records." So they did. I'm not sure that there's anything there that anyone else couldn't do, with different technologies, given the same investment of capital -- it's just a matter of who else wants to, and has the capability.
I think the "news" is the transfer rate, not the file system.
According to this article, the idea was just to see how fast a sustained transfer rate they could achieve. That rate was 102 GiB/s, which apparently is a record. The purpose of the project apparently has something to do with reducing the bottlenecking in parallel-computing interconnects. The machine they used, ASC Purple (a weapons-research system at Lawrence Livermore Labs) has about 10,000+ processors, so that's their obvious application.
The filesystem itself doesn't seem to be anything new -- I have no idea why the poster fixated on that, since it's kind of a minor footnote in most of the articles I've read about this today.
And WINE's progress is a poor example. Part of the reason for its slow pace is that there hasn't really been as strong a need for it as there is today. Until Intel-based Macs appeared, there was no real compelling need for WINE - it ran on x86 boxes that could boot Windows anyway. Now we have x86 boxes that can't boot Windows, WINE's API-level Windows app support is a somewhat interesting for Mac users.
I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.
WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.
But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.
There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.
I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.
If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well that's not entirely what I meant. Ethical considerations will affect some people's actions, perhaps even most people's actions, so teaching (indoctrinating) them is worthwhile on a large scale. Teaching people that stealing and violence are wrong keeps society from falling apart overnight. However, that doesn't mean that stealing and violence don't occur.
With something like weapons development, what I'm saying is that it's better to take the people who are going to make bigger and better killing machines (or viruses, or whatever) and give them a way to do it that minimizes the risk of those same weapons being used against us. Or really, do something to insulate the people who are going to make weapons from the people who are going to use them indiscriminately. Since you're not going to stop people from either, you can at least try to keep them far apart.
Thus I'm quite happy to have the U.S. Government -- being a U.S. citizen, I prefer to be on the side with all the guns, of course your opinions can vary from mine -- keep the weapons researchers gainfully employed in our labs. If we did as some peaceniks occasionally suggest, and just stopped paying for it tomorrow, we'd have a situation like they had/have in Russia, where suddenly a lot of nuclear scientists/engineers are FedExing their resumes to North Korea and Iran.
You may not think that the U.S. is necessarily the best entity to be in control of all those weapons, and I might even agree with you in theory, but there are a whole lot of worse people to have them.
I think that you are forgetting that there are people out there -- some quite intelligent people, actually -- who can be totally aware and cognizant of the fact that they're doing something immoral, and do it anyway. In the extreme, we call them sociopaths, but even "average" people will do amoral things if they're compensated correctly.
There are lots of people who worked in weapons development who were probably good, law-abiding, go-to-church-on-Sunday people who believe killing is wrong; I'm willing to bet all of them probably thought they were moral.
People have an incredible ability to compartmentalize their lives; you can try to indoctrinate some researcher that making a new strain of superflu or a bigger bomb is bad, and they'll still go in to work on Monday and do it. Maybe they'll develop a drinking problem, beat their wife, or get depressed, but I think they'd still do it. People work on projects because aside from the tangible benefits (paycheck, nice car/house, etc.) it's a technical challenge. No amount of moralizing is going to make that less attractive to people who are really good an interested in the subject matter.
And you'd always have the quasi-sociopaths who just don't give a damn about morality and can happily say "yep, I'm building a bigger bomb, it's going to kill millions of people at once, but isn't it beautiful?" It doesn't matter what the government does to encourage or discourage them, they're going to do their thing one way or another. If they weren't given cubicles to fill in some US weapons-research lab, the brightest and most highly-motivated would find someone else to do it for. (E.g., Gerald Bull, the guy behind the Iraqi 'Supergun,' before he was assassinated.) I would much prefer to have people like that working in a bunker somewhere in Nevada than Manchuria.
It's naive to think that the people who work on weapons would just work on vaccines or solving world hunger; I think you need to consider the possibility that many of them may enjoy their jobs, and do them with the full knowledge of what their inventions are used for.
We can either drink Green Tea or drink Beer. Take your pick, you'll die either way.
So does this mean I can drink a beer with breakfast, and tell everyone who stares at me that it's for my health?
Also, just because the white, christian male conquered large parts of the world, does not mean we were culturally superiour. We just happened to better at killing than them.
I think that basically is the argument for being, if not culturally "superior," at least having a significantly more robust (perhaps virulent?) culture.
Combined with a whole lot of luck in terms of happening to get the bits of land with choice natural and agricultural resources, of course.
You can play the cultural relativism game all you want, and talk about how bright and beautiful all the civilizations are that got wiped out along the way, but at some point you have to stop yourself and ask 'why is it that they didn't wipe up out instead?' I'm sure the more softhearted among us will disagree, but perhaps the only measure of a civilization at the end of the day is how effective it is at wiping out everyone else to it's own advantage.
I agree, it doesn't seem to cut out the biggest part of the FTTC proposition, which is either digging up or pulling fiber under the street, or stringing it on poles. One way or the other, you have to get the bandwidth to the home, and then what the homeowner does with it after that really is their business.
My only guess is that it's more a response to the cable company's usurpation of the phone company, from a marketing standpoint. They want to be able to offer a "whole house, full services" solution, that includes telephone/video/internet, and this technology is how they're hoping to gain a little PR, and maybe spread some FUD and make the cable companies nervous.
But you're absolutely right, I don't know why Verizon would be concerned about the expense of rewiring a house, since last time I checked, they're not going to be paying for that anyway. I'm glad that they're looking out for my expenses as a homeowner, but you're correct in saying there has to be a motive for them here.
Bingo.
... while at the same time, cutting the cable company totally out of the picture.
I think this is the real headline here -- basically what Verizon wants to do is run fiber to your house, to the outside service entrance or basement or whatever, and then unplug the Cable Company's wires from where they attach to the wires inside your house, and plug themselves in there. Then their signal -- instead of the Cable Co.'s -- goes to everyplace you have a cable jack. Which is quite a few places, in many modern homes.
For you, the customer, they can say "hey, you don't need to run Cat 5 all over your house this way"
I think it's their way of responding to the Cable Companies who are bundling TV+Highspeed Internet+VOIP packages, where they install a VOIP box and plug your analog phone into it, effectively cutting out the phone company.
Frankly I think it would be better if both companies agreed on a common wiring standard (hey, how about Cat 6 UTP?) and then plugged THAT into whatever network line the customer wanted to use -- whether it was the Cable Co.'s or the Telco's.
I think you are not considering though how these controversies work.
When you have a small (or not so small) core of very determined people who want an outcome that most people would not like -- in this case, the banning of everything contrary to their "Christian" values, not just videogames, but books, television, and movies as well -- there is a very real 'slippery slope.' It may not be a logical argument, but it's a human one.
To use your example, it would be as if you had a friend who really wanted, for reasons all their own, to get you addicted to crack cocaine. They're being pretty sly about it, but more than anything they'd like to get you to go down to that crack house, walk inside, and buy yourself a couple of nice rocks to smoke. They're pretty persuasive -- but when you're sitting in your house, it's pretty easy to come up with reasons why you don't want to go there. It's a long walk, it's cold outside, I've got better things to do, etc.
When your friend is with you, constantly arguing with you and wearing you down, trying to convince you to go into the crack house, it might be a really bad idea for you to walk down the street to the Blockbuster. If your route took you right past the crack house, suddenly a lot of your arguments would be undermined. If you had a moment of weakness -- just a single moment -- you might just find yourself in there, smoking some rocks.
Therefore, knowing that you're prone to bouts of stupidity, you'd be wise not to go anywhere near the crack house while in the company of your friend.
Bringing it back to the issue at hand, banning violent video games might be an act similar to going down to Blockbuster. Most people might not even consider it to be censorship per se, however it does move us a little closer to a position from which censorship would be possible. So therefore, if you find the ultimate aim of some of the pro-videogame-regulation folks unacceptable (and, of course, if you believe that the ultimate aim of many people pushing video-game censorship is more than just getting rid of violent games), it makes sense to oppose them at every opportunity.
The body politic in the US does not move calmly in one direction or the other. It stumbles, lurches, and occasionally runs and backpedals. Over any short period of time, it's motion might be described as chaotic -- diving in one direction, then the opposite. The "slippery slope" argument simply states that given these short-term unpredictabilities, it doesn't pay to put the entire country in a position where one temporary bout of insanity would put it over a precipice. In fact, the whole idea is to keep it as far away from that precipice as possible, giving you more opportunities to stop things if it starts moving in that direction.
In most installations, power and signal are run in totally independent conduit systems. Separate junction boxes, etc., all the way back to wherever they're grounded.
In fact I think that's code. I just did a quick search and I can't find anything related to it, but I think it's required that "high voltage" and "low voltage" wires are run separately, and IIRC the definition of HV is anything over about 40V. Computer networking, telephone, and most home-audio speaker wires are low voltage and thus go in separate conduits. Obviously trust your electrician if he/she says different, but these are the requirements that were told to me by one I was working with not that long ago, during an audio system install. We had two, totally parallel conduit systems installed in order to use powered speakers -- one for the line-level audio and one for the 120VAC circuit.
So, basically ... what you're telling me is that you want to live in a cave.
I think that's been done.
Is there any way I could have flip-up baseboards or something like that to give me easy access to some hidden cavity?
I've never actually seen this per se, but it doesn't seem impossible. Basically what you're asking for is wire duct, but sunk into the walls around the base of a room and with molding placed over it where the cables aren't actually entering and exiting. I'm not sure how you'd sink them into the walls without just making the wall thicker (because how do you sink something 6" into the wall without compromising it structurally?).
If all you want to do is a few pieces of twisted pair, I have seen (on one of those home shows) someone put up surface-mount raceways, and then use a router to cut a groove on the backside of some thick molding and cover it. This was not at floor level, but up where the wall met the cieling. Depending on the style of your house, heavy crown molding might not exactly be your style, but it's something to think about. Of course, then you get into the issue of having to use a fish tape to replace the cabling.
All a matter of money; I'm sure a good finish carpenter could find all sorts of clever ways to give you hinged access to cable raceways and other infrastructure, it's just that most people firstly don't think about that when they're building, and secondly probably aren't willing to spend the money it would take to do a really first-class job.
Really what you'd want is a lot of conduit running throughout the house, preferably metallic stuff, and run totally independent of the power lines. End-run it all back to some central place, like a corner of the basement or a big server closet, and you'd be able to run anything you wanted. Analog audio, coax, twisted-pair, fiber ... Just remember to leave a bunch of pull lines in the conduit.
Frankly what most geeks want, I think, is a home that's built more like a commercial or industrial structure. Raised-flooring or double-hung cielings, for instance, aren't exactly aesthetically pleasing but make network installation a lot easier than it is in the typical home. My rationale would be this: sure, raised flooring and exposed metal conduit aren't seemly, but they're a lot better than having an exposed tangle of wires, and that's the alternative if you build homes the typical way (with the wires laid in holes bored in the wall studs).
Actually I've always thought the ultimate geek dwelling would just be a single floor of some old industrial buidling; someplace where you could hang cable trays directly from exposed cieling beams. (Not to mention 3-ph 480V power, for when you pick up that surplus Cray on eBay.)
I guess if you go down that route, you'd pretty much have to give up on ever getting laid there, though.
You put a very small sock on the cat-door doorknob.
Duh.
So, some sort of EMP weapon?
... I hate to see what happens to burglars. :)
I'm not sure if your guests will come over more than once.
In fact, if that's what happens to a guest
Reminds me a little of this discussion.
It's a vast circle meta-criticism, of which the output is mainly trolling.
While the show may have been shown on the Discovery Channel, it was originally made for the UK's "Channel Four" network by Diverse Productions. It was written by Simon Singh, so the same-name thing is not just a coincidence.
... wide variety of subject matter they deal with. (One might almost call it 'diverse' ... okay, I'm done.)
Diverse lists it on their website, but there's no link to a DVD or any other signs that it exists. Too bad, because at 5, 30-minute episodes it would make a good two disc set (throw one 30-minute reel of extras on there and you'd have two 90 minute DVDs). I'd bet they'd make far more revenue from that then they would from having it sit around in their archives.
Their web page for the series is:
http://www.diverse.tv/programme.aspx?id=8
In a completely unrelated note, they are apparently looking for families who want to be on a show they're filming for TLC here in the US. Very
Computationally inexpensive, indeed.
I wanted to second this. I read this a while back, and it's what really got me interested in modern cryptography; he works up very gently from basic "Boy Scout" type secret-message ciphers (winding a paper tape around a stick, etc.) up to Diffie-Hellman key exchange and a fairly good explanation of quantum cryptography.
The list of further reading in the back, as I recall, is quite good also. I think that's where I first was pointed towards Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography, which is a great (if quite dense) tome, once you've decided you're interested in the subject. I think it's much better for someone to cut their teeth on a slightly less-academic book than Schneier's if they're unfamiliar with the subject, however.
You're trying to tell me it's only "hardcore Linux users" that build a PC and don't want to fork over $200 minimum for a Windows license?
No, but most people I know who have built machines and aren't Linux users, but don't want to pay $200 for Windows just pirated it.
In fact, most of the people I know who built barebones machines are running either pirated versions of Windows, or OEM versions from older machines that they're not using, or educational discount versions. (Mainly pirated ones, though.)
If all you're trying to do is avoid the "Windows tax," piracy is a lot easier for most people than loading up Linux and using WINE. The latter requires that, in addition to being cheap, you also have an interest in using an OS other than Windows -- that in itself is fairly rare among large swaths of the computer-using public.
[I'm not meaning to diss WINE or Linux here, I'm really not, and I'm also no fan of Windows. At home I have two systems, a uniprocessor P4 system running Ubuntu and a dual-processor G5. (Yeah my power bill sucks, but that's another story.) I have Cedega running on the Ubuntu box for playing Windows games. However, I do this because I really dislike Windows AND I like Linux; if it was just the former, I would just pirate Windows.]
Well, and I say this as an Apple user... it might just have something to do with the fact that Apple makes both the OS and computers, while Microsoft does not.
If Apple wants to use new technology x, theoretically they should be able to have one meeting where they get the lead hardware and software people in a room, tell them how it's going to be, and then have them go and do it. I have no idea how much inter-office communication there is, never having worked there, or what sort of politicking goes on, but even if it's horrendously bad and dysfunctional, it has to be easier than getting Microsoft and even the manufacturers of 75% of the PC systems (which would be like Dell, HP/Compaq, Lenovo, Toshiba, and Gateway, I think) into one room, much less to actually agree on anything by choice.
Sure, maybe MS could do some arm-twisting and force some technology on manufacturers, but it's nothing compared to the ability Apple has, given the complete control over its systems.
Er .... no.
You're seriously under-estimating the size required for iLife. The OS itself only takes up around 3GB, 4GB if you install the Developer Tools (which are a must-have in my opinion, since they include some of the "essentials" like GCC). GarageBand and iDVD are huge space hogs; GarageBand has several GB of samples included, and iDVD has a few GB of DVD templates. So that's where the 10GB footprint comes from, it's mostly not the OS.
Granted, it's a far cry from System 7; I remember swearing like hell when my OS took up more than 10MB...and now I'm defending 3GB. Jeez.
The intended purpose of ASC Purple is nuclear weapons simulations.
Since they can't actually do tests, either aboveground or below, by treaty anymore, they do simulations instead. I assume these have something to do with modeling how radioactive decay affects the weapons' usability and yield over time (since I don't think they're really in the business of designing new toys, but who knows really), so that you know that a bomb is going to go "pop" instead of "fizzle" when you want it to.
I'd imagine that those kinds of simulations could easily produce tera- and petabytes of data, when run with the sort of precision and initial conditions that LLNL probably wants to use.
I think BlueGene/L (No. 1 on the list of top supercomputers, Purple is 3) is used for the same purpose. Or at least, that was their reason/excuse for purchasing it; exactly what they do with it every day is anybody's guess.
GPFS (apparently -- I know only of what I've learned in the last few hours) is available for Linux, from IBM, right now.
Some people further up in the discussion have warned however that it's not as stable on Linux as it is on AIX, which is really its native platform.
From IBM's page on GPFS:
"GPFS is available as:
* GPFS for AIX 5L on POWER(TM)
* GPFS for Linux on IBM AMD processor-based servers and
IBM eServer® xSeries®
* GPFS for Linux on POWER"
From the articles I've read, this was accomplished using (some subset of) ASC Purple, which is full of a lot of either custom or IBM-proprietary stuff (or else stuff that nobody but IBM seems to be using).
... Each login node has eight 10-gigabytes-per-second network connections for parallel file transfer protocol and two 1-gigabyte-per-second network connections for network file systems and secure shell protocol. The system has a three-stage 1,536 port dual plane Federation switch interconnect ..."
According to the published/unclassified spec sheet:
"Purple has 2 million gigabytes of storage from more than 11,000 Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks.
I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster.
It does sound a little like it was a case of "hey, what can we do with $230M worth of hardware? I know, let's break some records." So they did. I'm not sure that there's anything there that anyone else couldn't do, with different technologies, given the same investment of capital -- it's just a matter of who else wants to, and has the capability.
I think the "news" is the transfer rate, not the file system.
According to this article, the idea was just to see how fast a sustained transfer rate they could achieve. That rate was 102 GiB/s, which apparently is a record. The purpose of the project apparently has something to do with reducing the bottlenecking in parallel-computing interconnects. The machine they used, ASC Purple (a weapons-research system at Lawrence Livermore Labs) has about 10,000+ processors, so that's their obvious application.
The filesystem itself doesn't seem to be anything new -- I have no idea why the poster fixated on that, since it's kind of a minor footnote in most of the articles I've read about this today.
And WINE's progress is a poor example. Part of the reason for its slow pace is that there hasn't really been as strong a need for it as there is today. Until Intel-based Macs appeared, there was no real compelling need for WINE - it ran on x86 boxes that could boot Windows anyway. Now we have x86 boxes that can't boot Windows, WINE's API-level Windows app support is a somewhat interesting for Mac users.
I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.
WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.
But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.
There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.
I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.
If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.