A popular web site should not have to pay the bandwidth charges, the costs should be borne by the people who are using the service. There just doesn't happen to be any convenient and low overhead way to do that right now. But that is how things should be structured.
For some reason, none of the micropayment schemes have ever caught on. But they will some day, and then popular web sites can pay the bandwidth charges from that.
Your question is really backwards ; the idea of writing the same data to two or three places is just a very crude form of the "normal error correction" you refer to. "normal error correction" on CDs is implemented by cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon data encoding. It is far far more efficient than simply duplicating the data several times.
If you can describe the error model of the medium, that is what types of errors are likely to occur (random dropouts, scratches which cause burst errors), you can then lay out the data on the disk to convert the statistically most likely errors into error distributions that your error correcting code is most able to deal with. For example, the Reed Solomon code deals with random errors the best, so you use two dimensional interleaving to convert burst errors (caused by scratches) into random errors sprinkled over many code words.
The Reed Solomon code can correct an unbelievable number of errors, it is almost perfect. If you have 2N parity bytes, it can correct N random errors or up to 2N "erasures" (errors where you know the location of the error, due to the underlying demodulator telling you something is fucked).
So if you naively just duplicate 100 Gigabytes data three times, you've got 300 GB but then you're screwed if two bytes of that data are corrupted in the different copies. If you use Reed Solomon, you would only need two extra bytes to give you the same protection.
Take a look at the numbers, how many of your friends died in a car accident and how many died from a terriorist act....
Number dead from car accidents: 0
Number dead from terrorist bombing: 4
(2 world trade center attack, 2 air india bombing)
OpenLaszlo is a high level toolkit for writing GUI apps in the browser. Supports Flash and DHTML is in the works.
www.openlaszlo.org click on the DHTML demo.
Journalists who are in China literally risk their lives to break stories critical to the Chinese government.
As I recall, after the Tiananmen square massacre, the Chinese government was taking hundreds of people they had rounded up there out and shooting them in the fucking head. There are journalists and activists and numerous political prisoners rotting in jail, and being tortured.
Drawing moral equivalence between the US government and the Chinese government is absurd. Yes there are constant issues of abuse of power in the US, but dragging people out and shooting them in the head is one whole fucking different ball of wax.
I have a little Mini-ITX system hooked up to a flat panel display on my wall, running gqview set to randomly walk the image directory tree with a new image every 30 seconds.
All my computers use rsync to nightly update a copy of the master image directory onto this picture frame machine.
So whatever machine I download images to from my camera, the pictures find their way to the big photo frame by the next day.
I also have a web server on the machine, which displays an autoupdating page with the current image on it, so my parents can run a web browser remotely which synchonizes it's picture with whatever is on my wall at the moment.
The Pandora app was written using OpenLaszlo ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/ ), a free software rich internet application development platform. Why do you suppose they did that instead of using Macromedia's tools and runtime?
Why is this modded as 'insightful'??
on
A Flu Pandemic?
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· Score: 4, Informative
The Spanish Flu (1918) killed young healthy people very quickly, it turned their lungs into sponge rubber. It was not at all like the "flu" that we are used to. People who blithely confuse the yearly 'achy go to bed for a few days' flu with the killer flu should read the books written during that period about what it was like. People were dying all over the place, sometimes within 24 hours of contracting the disease.
You have no idea what you are talking about
on
A Flu Pandemic?
·
· Score: 1
You have obviously never read anything about how the "Spanish Flu" killed people. It has nothing to do with diarrhea, decongestants, bed rest, worms, or anything. The flu was so deadly because it specifically turned the young and healthiest people's lungs into hard red sponge within 24 hours. It is not like the flu you get and go to bed achy for a few days.
Modern medicine also won't be much use because the hospitals will be totally overwhelmed, and there will be 100 to 1 ratio of people wanting to use ICU vs beds.
Someone sets up a nice public service, and some asshole has to come along to abuse it. This isn't clever, it's no different from any other act of mindless vandalism. Society is held together by an implicit contract that people not act like selfish pigs. The guy who releases this software is a selfish pig.
I use PayPal, even though they are scum bags, but I don't give them my credit card info. I set up a special bank account which I only keep a minimal (~ $20) balance, so they cannot drain my main account. That way I can use PayPal without worrying about them stealing my money. It's easy to ask your bank to set up a new special account.
I have a proposal for a Personal Virtual Computer which would basically be a virtual Linux machine. It gives you the capability to have a completely personal environment, but one which can be hosted remotely by a service provider.
You get the best of both worlds; ability to install your own apps and no need to physically maintain a machine.
The system administration could be drastically simplified for the common case, and security issues could be patched by an automated updater, similar to Debian apt-get.
The problem is that ISP's don't want this model; they want to lock people into keeping their data in proprietary systems.
I visited Singapore about eight years ago. My impression was that the government put a lot of effort into keeping the ethnic tensions under control -- signs printed in three or four languages, pushes to make the population more "polite", I think that if the authoritarian government there let up, there would be some serious ethnic violence. Sad but true. I only hope that they can find a solution that allows them to live together peacefully without being under such a repressive regime.
Re:About as practical as a backpack full of bricks
on
New Twist on Power Walking
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nobody seems to get it, the load is not some extra stuff you need to put in your pack - the machine just needs some weight to swing around. So the weight can be your dirty laundry, tent, laptop, whatever is in the pack already.
If Mengle had experimented on embryonic clusters of cells, it wouldn't have been a serious ethical issue. Experimenting on sentient humans is different. If I have to point that out to you, it is hard to see what the point of pursuing this further is.
OpenLaszlo is an open-source tool for building Rich Internet Apps that compiles them down to Flash applications. The advantage is that the graphics are smooth, it runs pixel-for-pixel identical in virtually any browser, no cross-platform incompatibilities.
An OpenLaszlo app behaves essentially like an Ajax app; data requests are made for XML data (or media) in the background, and the user interface is presented as a seamless window-system style desktop app.
The OpenLaszlo project has a set of Rich Internet App components and a framework for building them, it compiles to Flash player format, however, not to DHTML at the moment.
But if you are trying to make a cross platform browser-embedded app, this is probably the least work to have the same code run on Win/Mac/Linux browsers.
The Internet billing model right now is fucked up. The content provider pays, the consumers pay nothing but a flat rate. So if you have a popular web site today and get slashdotted, you are hosed.
The users should pay the bandwidth costs, not the content providers. Otherwise, you can go bankrupt trying to publish free information.
My father was 17 and preparing to ship out as a radar operator for the land invasion of Japan, when the bomb was dropped, and the war ended.
I don't know if he would have lived through that invasion, it was predicted to be terrible. After the battles for Pacific islands, the mass murder of civilians by the Japanese in Okinawa, it was pretty certain to be an awful thing.
He told me that after the first A bomb was exploded, many people in the world simply did not believe or understand what happened. Many thought that the US had towed a barge of explosives into the waterfront and detonated it.
I don't think people today second-guessing the decisions made then have as much moral superiority as they think they do.
Slashdot Mirror
A popular web site should not have to pay the bandwidth charges, the costs should be borne by the people who are using the service. There just doesn't happen to be any convenient and low overhead way to do that right now. But that is how things should be structured.
For some reason, none of the micropayment schemes have ever caught on. But they will some day, and then popular web sites can pay the bandwidth charges from that.
Around 1987 I was doing email SMTP over packet radio, using Phil Karn's network TCP/IP package for DOS.
There ought to be a death penalty for frivolous or fraudulent packet claims.
Your question is really backwards ; the idea of writing the same data to two or three places is just a very crude form of the "normal error correction" you refer to. "normal error correction" on CDs is implemented by cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon data encoding. It is far far more efficient than simply duplicating the data several times.
If you can describe the error model of the medium, that is what types of errors are likely to occur (random dropouts, scratches which cause burst errors), you can then lay out the data on the disk to convert the statistically most likely errors into error distributions that your error correcting code is most able to deal with. For example, the Reed Solomon code deals with random errors the best, so you use two dimensional interleaving to convert burst errors (caused by scratches) into random errors sprinkled over many code words.
The Reed Solomon code can correct an unbelievable number of errors, it is almost perfect. If you have 2N parity bytes, it can correct N random errors or up to 2N "erasures" (errors where you know the location of the error, due to the underlying demodulator telling you something is fucked).
So if you naively just duplicate 100 Gigabytes data three times, you've got 300 GB but then you're screwed if two bytes of that data are corrupted in the different copies. If you use Reed Solomon, you would only need two extra bytes to give you the same protection.
Number dead from terrorist bombing: 4 (2 world trade center attack, 2 air india bombing)
So, what was your point?
OpenLaszlo is a high level toolkit for writing GUI apps in the browser. Supports Flash and DHTML is in the works. www.openlaszlo.org click on the DHTML demo.
Journalists who are in China literally risk their lives to break stories critical to the Chinese government.
As I recall, after the Tiananmen square massacre, the Chinese government was taking hundreds of people they had rounded up there out and shooting them in the fucking head. There are journalists and activists and numerous political prisoners rotting in jail, and being tortured.
Drawing moral equivalence between the US government and the Chinese government is absurd. Yes there are constant issues of abuse of power in the US, but dragging people out and shooting them in the head is one whole fucking different ball of wax.
I use cygwin and rsync to backup everything to two Linux boxes in the house.
All my PC's can rsync to the master repository.
Every machine in my house can use this, using rsync on cygwin on the PC's, the
Mac runs unix already...
I have a little Mini-ITX system hooked up to a flat panel display on my wall, running gqview set to randomly walk the image directory tree with a new image every 30 seconds.
All my computers use rsync to nightly update a copy of the master image directory onto this picture frame machine.
So whatever machine I download images to from my camera, the pictures find their way to the big photo frame by the next day.
I also have a web server on the machine, which displays an autoupdating page with the current image on it, so my parents can run a web browser remotely which synchonizes it's picture with whatever is on my wall at the moment.
The Pandora app was written using OpenLaszlo ( http://www.openlaszlo.org/ ), a free software rich internet application development platform. Why do you suppose they did that instead of using Macromedia's tools and runtime?
The Spanish Flu (1918) killed young healthy people very quickly, it turned their lungs into sponge rubber. It was not at all like the "flu" that we are used to. People who blithely confuse the yearly 'achy go to bed for a few days' flu with the killer flu should read the books written during that period about what it was like. People were dying all over the place, sometimes within 24 hours of contracting the disease.
You have obviously never read anything about how the "Spanish Flu" killed people. It has nothing to do with diarrhea, decongestants, bed rest, worms, or anything. The flu was so deadly because it specifically turned the young and healthiest people's lungs into hard red sponge within 24 hours. It is not like the flu you get and go to bed achy for a few days.
Modern medicine also won't be much use because the hospitals will be totally overwhelmed, and there will be 100 to 1 ratio of people wanting to use ICU vs beds.
Someone sets up a nice public service, and some asshole has to come along to abuse it. This isn't clever, it's no different from any other act of mindless vandalism. Society is held together by an implicit contract that people not act like selfish pigs. The guy who releases this software is a selfish pig.
I've got a patent on the letters 'X', 'M', and 'L', filed in 1997.
I am not aware of any prior art.
I use PayPal, even though they are scum bags, but I don't give them my credit card info. I set up a special bank account which I only keep a minimal (~ $20) balance, so they cannot drain my main account. That way I can use PayPal without worrying about them stealing my money. It's easy to ask your bank to set up a new special account.
You get the best of both worlds; ability to install your own apps and no need to physically maintain a machine.
The system administration could be drastically simplified for the common case, and security issues could be patched by an automated updater, similar to Debian apt-get.
The problem is that ISP's don't want this model; they want to lock people into keeping their data in proprietary systems.
1) LED crank flashlights
2) firewood
3) dehydrated food
4) water filter
5) Ham radio (Hf or VHF)
6) gas powered chain saw
7) charcoal
I visited Singapore about eight years ago. My impression was that the government put a lot of effort into keeping the ethnic tensions under control -- signs printed in three or four languages, pushes to make the population more "polite", I think that if the authoritarian government there let up, there would be some serious ethnic violence. Sad but true. I only hope that they can find a solution that allows them to live together peacefully without being under such a repressive regime.
Nobody seems to get it, the load is not some extra stuff you need to put in your pack - the machine just needs some weight to swing around. So the weight can be your dirty laundry, tent, laptop, whatever is in the pack already.
Putting companies out of business that help imprison Chinese dissidents is 'doing something about it'.
Yahoo being a "publicly traded company" doesn't absolve them of being complicit with dictatorships.
I don't mind buying Chinese manufactured goods, unless they are made by, for example, prisoners who are being used as slave labor.
Now you don't have to lose your keys, just have to get them in salty water, or rub your feet on the carpet and touch them, or ....
If Mengle had experimented on embryonic clusters of cells, it wouldn't have been a serious ethical issue. Experimenting on sentient humans is different. If I have to point that out to you, it is hard to see what the point of pursuing this further is.
An OpenLaszlo app behaves essentially like an Ajax app; data requests are made for XML data (or media) in the background, and the user interface is presented as a seamless window-system style desktop app.
Simple Example
The OpenLaszlo project has a set of Rich Internet App components and a framework for building them, it compiles to Flash player format, however, not to DHTML at the moment. But if you are trying to make a cross platform browser-embedded app, this is probably the least work to have the same code run on Win/Mac/Linux browsers.
The Internet billing model right now is fucked up.
The content provider pays, the consumers pay nothing but a flat rate. So if you have a popular web site today and get slashdotted, you are hosed.
The users should pay the bandwidth costs, not the content providers. Otherwise, you can go bankrupt trying to publish free information.
My father was 17 and preparing to ship out as a radar operator for the land invasion of Japan, when the bomb was dropped, and the war ended.
I don't know if he would have lived through that invasion, it was predicted to be terrible. After the battles for Pacific islands, the mass murder of civilians by the Japanese in Okinawa, it was pretty certain to be an awful thing.
He told me that after the first A bomb was exploded, many people in the world simply did not believe or understand what happened. Many thought that the US had towed a barge of explosives into the waterfront and detonated it.
I don't think people today second-guessing the decisions made then have as much moral superiority as they think they do.