I predict that Microsoft will come up with a new, better secured way of transferring mail messages over the Internet.
Almost. More likely an open-source project will come up with the next-generation Internet messaging system. Microsoft will create their own "extensions" to the system which will ("unfortunately") render Microsoft's version of the system incompatible with the "standard".
Microsoft will count on their domination of the market to ensure that their, and only their, solution becomes the defacto standard.
Why don't they talk about the Federation economy much? Because it's socialist.
This thread seems to be going pretty badly off-topic. Let me help a little, since the original article was actually pretty insightless.
I reread Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" recently, which is also interesting in this respect. The film messed this up pretty badly, but it comes across loud and clear in the book that democracy as we know it was considered a failure.
The cornerstone of this (in Heinlein's book) is the "History and Moral Philosophy" that is taught in school. We're told that Moral Philosophy has become a science, one which can be described and proven with mathematical rules. There are lots of nice insights into morals as a whole and the failures of our current civilisation to produce a moral society.
I read one of the articles on this and mabey I missed something but where is this energy coming from? If there is no input of energy then how is there an output.
I don't know which article you read but it can't have been the same as the ones I read, which state that the device makes use of electrokinetic phenomena. The device takes kinetic energy (movement) and converts it into electricity.
Not too sure why the slashdot crowd is so negative about this one - it could be very cool. OK, the efficiencies are currently pathetic, but the first planes didn't fly very far, and the first cars couldn't drive very fast. A new technology needs to be tested and explored to reach it's potential.
I would think that the potential of this technology is obvious. A solid-state device is generally more reliable and efficient than one with moving parts. Imagine being able to replace turbines in hydroelectric plants and nuclear power stations with these devices. The tides are another natural source of water with kinetic energy.
And it's another application of nanotech - since you're going to want as many of those tiny channels as possible.
good idea, but at least burnt coal is mostly co2 i'd much rather that, than who knows what noxious crap like benzene emitted from car exhausts (especially bad if the catalytic converter is old).
I mostly agree. On the other hand, if 40% of the power is lost in transmission lines (that's the figure I seem to remember), then that adds up to a lot less CO2!
Lovin's suggestion is actually a lot more detailed (and takes a global view), and talks about reforming natural gas for use in a fuel cell. Good idea, but possibly a little too futuristic.
there's a house in Queensland, Australia that uses solar power and batteries to sustain itself. In summer it puts power back into the grid.... they produce more power than they use.
That's the aim! To be a net power-producer, or at least net neutral. The question (to my mind) is whether a grid made up of such people would be stable enough.
It wouldn't be hard to make setups like this attractive to people building houses, especially if they could be helped with the initial outlay which they could repay over time with their power credits.
Sniff... sniff... Ahh! The odor of politics! This all seems to come back to subsidies and taxes. Does the government support those trying reduce pollution (in setups like this that you mention), or does it act counter-productively, by providing incentives for people to pollute (e.g. USA SUV loophole). Like you say, that's what going to govern what the majority of people (new home builders, in this case) do.
And while it's great that individuals go and and build such houses (proving the tech.), in the end this will only help if it's adopted by the majority.
Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house?
A great idea, and one that gets discussed by Amory Lovins in Natural Capitalism (See chapter 2, "Reinventing the Wheels", about half way through).
Lots of details to be worked out, of course. What happens when your car's not there? When it breaks down? Do you store energy yourself at home (H2, whatever), or do you rely on the grid?
What does the grid become? I was shocked (groan... bad pun) to learn how much power the transmission lines lose. What if lots of people are doing the same thing with their cars, and supplying surplus power back to the grid? Then there's not so much power being transmitted over long distances because the power you use is being generated within a mile or so of your house. But can such a system be stable/reliable enough?
And, of course, we'd need to take a good look at pollution. The idea of everybody's car engines running 24 hours a day instead of 2 hours isn't a pretty one, but we'd need to do the math, and work out how much pollution is being reduced by closing down power plants.
But since it's already possible to sell power back to the grid in many places, I guess someone is probably already doing just what you suggest...
"The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons... Back in the way back time there was no such thing as a disk drive, and there was only ram."
I don't consider what occurred back in "way back" time to be good enough reason to keep doing so today.
"Ram had/has to be made in a power of two because it has to completley fill its address space so the NEXT ram chip begins where the other ends. Otherwise you'd have holes in your address space."
pedant-mode: No longer strictly true (although most architectures may still require this). CC-NUMA does not, for example.
A couple more points: note that if you're one of the people who expects a 120 GiB when buying a 120 GB disk, you're in an educated minority. A minority which, in fact, should already know that manufacturers list hard-disks in decimal units.
Lastly, as the article points out, while the difference between decimal and binary units is quite small at the K and M level, it's becoming more confusing as we progress. 12.6% difference (at the P level) is really quite significant. Time to clear the mess up.
ob flame-bait: not that Americans have a great record when it comes to keeping up to date with their units.;)
Isn't SCO costing SGI an awful lot of time and effort (i.e. money) to scour code
I don't know about "a lot of money".
- SGI has the source code - I imagine it's not too hard to automate the searching for matches between Sys V code and what's being released.
- The communications between SCO and SGI are not public. SGI say that SCO contacted them (umm... ok, us, not that I know any more about this than you:) early summer, which gives you an idea as to how much of the communications _don't_ get around. Who says that SCO didn't, in this case, identify the "offending" pieces?
SGI is struggling (I don't think I'm giving away any company secrets there;). I hope we make it through this. I _like_ working here.
I used to work in the computer centre at CERN, and they've been using distributed computing (read "clusters") for a long time (at least 10 years) now. By the time I left, there were already some 500 2 CPU Linux PCs in the computer centre, and a serious amount of thought was being given to building a mezzanine level within the computer centre to create more floor space for PCs. CERNs problem was always one of scale.
Now it seems they want to buy floor space at other institutions around the world.:) I hope it all works out. What I'm wondering is what sort of network they have connecting the sites - the work load of these machines is very simple - but mostly IO bound. What sort of bandwidth do they need to make 15,000 TB available all over the world?
More fun facts - at the time I left they had 5 STK Powderhorn silos, holding their current data. Prediction for LHC requirements (including better tape storage densities) was that they would need another 40 silos. If you've seen an STK Powderhorn, then you know just how ig the things are. So another building was to be built just for these silos.:)
Oh, and as someone pointed out, the 15,000 TBs a year is just the data that gets kept - the live data from the detectors is preprocessed in the computer centre and "thinned out". The data rates coming into the computer centre are truly mind-boggling.
Why has the parent been labelled flamebait? Just because he criticised the posted article? That sucks.
I poked around a bit on dvorkin's website, and have to agree with the parent poster - dvorkin is very difficult to read or take seriously. Try the section on "Ethnic Pride" from http://www.dvorkin.com/yinotjew.htm , for example. It's hard to understand how a professional programmer can create such logic!
Maybe it goes some way to explaining why he's unemployed?
First, the obvious one. This is not for use at home! It's a highly specialised filesystem which, even distributed over several machines, will perform badly for "normal" use.
At first I was asking myself why Google needed their own filesystem, rather than using one of the many filesystems already available. Actually, I'm still not convinced that another commercial filesystem couldn't do what they need (SGI's CXFS will be available for Linux soon, won't it? True, it's not big on fault tolerance...), but still it's clear that Google's needs are pretty special.
Also, at which point does the master become a bottleneck? I'm sure they've spec'd it properly, but I'm still curious...
So, how big of a screen is it going to take for the difference between this resolution and HDTV to be perceptable to the human eye?
You make a good point (someone mod this guy up - I want to reply!), to which I want to add:
I work in VR, and it's not unusual for people to get nauseous in VR, not because of the extremely high resolution, but rather because of the immersion - when your complete field of vision is moving, but you aren't, some people get pretty sick. We have a bucket next to the powerwall for just such occasions.
According to the article, several viewers of this UHDV were nauseous, but I suggest it had more to do with the 4mx7m screen, than with the high resolution.
The ink in itself is pretty cool. But the articles raise many questions without answering them. Like:
- How fragile is the stuff?
- How are the pixels wired up?
- Are we going to be able to handle a sheet of this paper, or are they going to be mounted in some device (like in the photo on the nature article - doesn't look much different to a laptop)?
In short, the stuff looks pretty easy to damage...
On the geological timescale, 3000 years of solid Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is really just a little blip.
Yeah, and the rocks really don't care if they're above or below water.
I, on the other hand...
Has Neal been reading jwz?
on
Quicksilver
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I know that Neal Stephenson doesn't much enjoy contact with his readers, so this is perhaps the best place to ask this question. Maybe someone on Slashdot even has an answer.:)
Anyone else suspect a connection between Randy's wisdom-tooth episode and this blog entry from Jamie Zawinski on the same subject? Or is it just my own experience with dental surgeons that makes me cringe at both of these?
Damn, there's a lot of uninformed opinions floating around on this topic.
A while ago I stumbled upon this great article which deals in detail with a lot of the issues concerning nuclear power: http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm
Admittedly it comes from the pro-nuclear camp - I'd be interested to know if anyone can point me to information which contradicts what's stated (claimed?) in this document?
Will your insurance company pick it up if you (I mean it) damages another car?
Well, will they pay if you ram another car with your cruise-control on? I imagine so.
I think this is pretty cool - I've seen BMW demonstrating the same technology.
It's a pretty typical geek thing: "Hey, we've already got sensors on the front and back of the car, we're moving to electrically powered steering, and the computer can calculate the path into the parking place better than most drivers. Let's get coding!"
I don't know how the Toyota system works, but in the BMW system, the driver still operates the gas - the car takes care of steering and (I think) brakes. So it parks no faster than you're comfortable with.
Another cool idea from BMW was to replace the hand-brake lever with a button. Saves place in the car, and allows them to do cool things like engaging the hand-brake automatically when you come to a stop, and releasing it automatically when you drive off. Can you still do hand-brake turns with the thing? No idea!
Now, as to whether we need more and more of our lives to be automated, that's another question. But, like a robot vacuum cleaner, the tech is pretty interesting.
Or does it kinda look like nuclear power could run every home in the United states by itself? (Of course, if we wanted to run businesses and industry, we'd have to bring all the other plants back on.)
Yeah, and we all know that your government ranks its people much higher than it's businesses and industries, right?
A few years back I did software-support, and ended up remotely logging in to our customer's machines, often over a firewall.
When the firewall only allowed telnet access and I needed to transfer files, I'd either end up building a.tar.gz.uu file and either using cat & script to transfer them, or cutting and pasting between windows. What a pain!
At that time, I started to work on a tool to allow me to transfer files over telnet. What stopped me was an ethical problem - if a company only allows telnet through their firewall, and not ftp, then they don't want people tranferring files through the firewall.
I wonder if these extensions to ssh will run into a similar problem. That is, companies not allowing ssh access through the firewall because it can be used for more than just login sessions...
"even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water." I think that says more about the creek than it does the waste.
A typical knee-jerk reaction that nearly all of us have, myself included. But perhaps quite an unfair one.
This is going to seem a little off-topic. Bear with me!
We seem to be quite often short of water these days, and since we don't have a lot of new water catchment possibilities, it would seem that it can only get worse as the population increases.
Saving water seems to be the key here. Not only through more efficient appliances, but also through multiple uses of our water. How much sense does it make to be flushing our toilets with drinking water?
Some houses already capture "grey water" and use it for tasks where drinking water is not required. Obviously there's some filtering required. I've heard of other projects which are completely water self-sufficient. Yes, you end up boiling your potatoes in recycled piss!
Pretty revulsive to us today, but who knows? Maybe our grandkids will find it completely normal.
Slashdot Mirror
I predict that Microsoft will come up with a new, better secured way of transferring mail messages over the Internet.
Almost. More likely an open-source project will come up with the next-generation Internet messaging system. Microsoft will create their own "extensions" to the system which will ("unfortunately") render Microsoft's version of the system incompatible with the "standard".
Microsoft will count on their domination of the market to ensure that their, and only their, solution becomes the defacto standard.
Why don't they talk about the Federation economy much? Because it's socialist.
This thread seems to be going pretty badly off-topic. Let me help a little, since the original article was actually pretty insightless.
I reread Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" recently, which is also interesting in this respect. The film messed this up pretty badly, but it comes across loud and clear in the book that democracy as we know it was considered a failure.
The cornerstone of this (in Heinlein's book) is the "History and Moral Philosophy" that is taught in school. We're told that Moral Philosophy has become a science, one which can be described and proven with mathematical rules. There are lots of nice insights into morals as a whole and the failures of our current civilisation to produce a moral society.
Would you like to know more?
I read one of the articles on this and mabey I missed something but where is this energy coming from? If there is no input of energy then how is there an output.
I don't know which article you read but it can't have been the same as the ones I read, which state that the device makes use of electrokinetic phenomena. The device takes kinetic energy (movement) and converts it into electricity.
Not too sure why the slashdot crowd is so negative about this one - it could be very cool. OK, the efficiencies are currently pathetic, but the first planes didn't fly very far, and the first cars couldn't drive very fast. A new technology needs to be tested and explored to reach it's potential.
I would think that the potential of this technology is obvious. A solid-state device is generally more reliable and efficient than one with moving parts. Imagine being able to replace turbines in hydroelectric plants and nuclear power stations with these devices. The tides are another natural source of water with kinetic energy.
And it's another application of nanotech - since you're going to want as many of those tiny channels as possible.
good idea, but at least burnt coal is mostly co2 i'd much rather that, than who knows what noxious crap like benzene emitted from car exhausts (especially bad if the catalytic converter is old).
... they produce more power than they use.
I mostly agree. On the other hand, if 40% of the power is lost in transmission lines (that's the figure I seem to remember), then that adds up to a lot less CO2!
Lovin's suggestion is actually a lot more detailed (and takes a global view), and talks about reforming natural gas for use in a fuel cell. Good idea, but possibly a little too futuristic.
there's a house in Queensland, Australia that uses solar power and batteries to sustain itself. In summer it puts power back into the grid.
That's the aim! To be a net power-producer, or at least net neutral. The question (to my mind) is whether a grid made up of such people would be stable enough.
It wouldn't be hard to make setups like this attractive to people building houses, especially if they could be helped with the initial outlay which they could repay over time with their power credits.
Sniff... sniff... Ahh! The odor of politics! This all seems to come back to subsidies and taxes. Does the government support those trying reduce pollution (in setups like this that you mention), or does it act counter-productively, by providing incentives for people to pollute (e.g. USA SUV loophole). Like you say, that's what going to govern what the majority of people (new home builders, in this case) do.
And while it's great that individuals go and and build such houses (proving the tech.), in the end this will only help if it's adopted by the majority.
Why can't I just plug my car's engine into my house?
A great idea, and one that gets discussed by Amory Lovins in Natural Capitalism (See chapter 2, "Reinventing the Wheels", about half way through).
Lots of details to be worked out, of course. What happens when your car's not there? When it breaks down? Do you store energy yourself at home (H2, whatever), or do you rely on the grid?
What does the grid become? I was shocked (groan... bad pun) to learn how much power the transmission lines lose. What if lots of people are doing the same thing with their cars, and supplying surplus power back to the grid? Then there's not so much power being transmitted over long distances because the power you use is being generated within a mile or so of your house. But can such a system be stable/reliable enough?
And, of course, we'd need to take a good look at pollution. The idea of everybody's car engines running 24 hours a day instead of 2 hours isn't a pretty one, but we'd need to do the math, and work out how much pollution is being reduced by closing down power plants.
But since it's already possible to sell power back to the grid in many places, I guess someone is probably already doing just what you suggest...
"Huh? no reason to use binary units?...
... Back in the way back time there was no such thing as a disk drive, and there was only ram."
;)
"The reason we use binary units is for engineering reasons
I don't consider what occurred back in "way back" time to be good enough reason to keep doing so today.
"Ram had/has to be made in a power of two because it has to completley fill its address space so the NEXT ram chip begins where the other ends. Otherwise you'd have holes in your address space."
pedant-mode: No longer strictly true (although most architectures may still require this). CC-NUMA does not, for example.
A couple more points: note that if you're one of the people who expects a 120 GiB when buying a 120 GB disk, you're in an educated minority. A minority which, in fact, should already know that manufacturers list hard-disks in decimal units.
Lastly, as the article points out, while the difference between decimal and binary units is quite small at the K and M level, it's becoming more confusing as we progress. 12.6% difference (at the P level) is really quite significant. Time to clear the mess up.
ob flame-bait: not that Americans have a great record when it comes to keeping up to date with their units.
Isn't SCO costing SGI an awful lot of time and effort (i.e. money) to scour code
:) early summer, which gives you an idea as to how much of the communications _don't_ get around. Who says that SCO didn't, in this case, identify the "offending" pieces?
;). I hope we make it through this. I _like_ working here.
I don't know about "a lot of money".
- SGI has the source code - I imagine it's not too hard to automate the searching for matches between Sys V code and what's being released.
- The communications between SCO and SGI are not public. SGI say that SCO contacted them (umm... ok, us, not that I know any more about this than you
SGI is struggling (I don't think I'm giving away any company secrets there
I used to work in the computer centre at CERN, and they've been using distributed computing (read "clusters") for a long time (at least 10 years) now. By the time I left, there were already some 500 2 CPU Linux PCs in the computer centre, and a serious amount of thought was being given to building a mezzanine level within the computer centre to create more floor space for PCs. CERNs problem was always one of scale.
:) I hope it all works out. What I'm wondering is what sort of network they have connecting the sites - the work load of these machines is very simple - but mostly IO bound. What sort of bandwidth do they need to make 15,000 TB available all over the world?
:)
Now it seems they want to buy floor space at other institutions around the world.
More fun facts - at the time I left they had 5 STK Powderhorn silos, holding their current data. Prediction for LHC requirements (including better tape storage densities) was that they would need another 40 silos. If you've seen an STK Powderhorn, then you know just how ig the things are. So another building was to be built just for these silos.
Oh, and as someone pointed out, the 15,000 TBs a year is just the data that gets kept - the live data from the detectors is preprocessed in the computer centre and "thinned out". The data rates coming into the computer centre are truly mind-boggling.
Why has the parent been labelled flamebait? Just because he criticised the posted article? That sucks.
I poked around a bit on dvorkin's website, and have to agree with the parent poster - dvorkin is very difficult to read or take seriously. Try the section on "Ethnic Pride" from http://www.dvorkin.com/yinotjew.htm , for example. It's hard to understand how a professional programmer can create such logic!
Maybe it goes some way to explaining why he's unemployed?
First, the obvious one. This is not for use at home! It's a highly specialised filesystem which, even distributed over several machines, will perform badly for "normal" use.
At first I was asking myself why Google needed their own filesystem, rather than using one of the many filesystems already available. Actually, I'm still not convinced that another commercial filesystem couldn't do what they need (SGI's CXFS will be available for Linux soon, won't it? True, it's not big on fault tolerance...), but still it's clear that Google's needs are pretty special.
Also, at which point does the master become a bottleneck? I'm sure they've spec'd it properly, but I'm still curious...
So, how big of a screen is it going to take for the difference between this resolution and HDTV to be perceptable to the human eye?
You make a good point (someone mod this guy up - I want to reply!), to which I want to add:
I work in VR, and it's not unusual for people to get nauseous in VR, not because of the extremely high resolution, but rather because of the immersion - when your complete field of vision is moving, but you aren't, some people get pretty sick. We have a bucket next to the powerwall for just such occasions.
According to the article, several viewers of this UHDV were nauseous, but I suggest it had more to do with the 4mx7m screen, than with the high resolution.
The ink in itself is pretty cool. But the articles raise many questions without answering them. Like:
- How fragile is the stuff?
- How are the pixels wired up?
- Are we going to be able to handle a sheet of this paper, or are they going to be mounted in some device (like in the photo on the nature article - doesn't look much different to a laptop)?
In short, the stuff looks pretty easy to damage...
On the geological timescale, 3000 years of solid Ward Hunt Ice Shelf is really just a little blip.
Yeah, and the rocks really don't care if they're above or below water.
I, on the other hand...
I know that Neal Stephenson doesn't much enjoy contact with his readers, so this is perhaps the best place to ask this question. Maybe someone on Slashdot even has an answer. :)
Anyone else suspect a connection between Randy's wisdom-tooth episode and this blog entry from Jamie Zawinski on the same subject? Or is it just my own experience with dental surgeons that makes me cringe at both of these?
Wow! If you'd ever thought about doing IT work in the military, these comments have to have put you off by now.
If not, maybe the possibility of getting shot/bombed will be a further dis-incentive?
Wired did a great article on IT on the frontline a short while back.
Damn, there's a lot of uninformed opinions floating around on this topic.
A while ago I stumbled upon this great article which deals in detail with a lot of the issues concerning nuclear power: http://www.uic.com.au/ne.htm
Admittedly it comes from the pro-nuclear camp - I'd be interested to know if anyone can point me to information which contradicts what's stated (claimed?) in this document?
Will your insurance company pick it up if you (I mean it) damages another car?
Well, will they pay if you ram another car with your cruise-control on? I imagine so.
I think this is pretty cool - I've seen BMW demonstrating the same technology.
It's a pretty typical geek thing: "Hey, we've already got sensors on the front and back of the car, we're moving to electrically powered steering, and the computer can calculate the path into the parking place better than most drivers. Let's get coding!"
I don't know how the Toyota system works, but in the BMW system, the driver still operates the gas - the car takes care of steering and (I think) brakes. So it parks no faster than you're comfortable with.
Another cool idea from BMW was to replace the hand-brake lever with a button. Saves place in the car, and allows them to do cool things like engaging the hand-brake automatically when you come to a stop, and releasing it automatically when you drive off. Can you still do hand-brake turns with the thing? No idea!
Now, as to whether we need more and more of our lives to be automated, that's another question. But, like a robot vacuum cleaner, the tech is pretty interesting.
(No, I don't drive a BMW - I just work here!)
No, the politicians won't notice the lack of gimp.org.
But we do. And the IT magazines will. It's all just part of spreading the word. I bet it'll even get some TV coverage here in Germany.
Or does it kinda look like nuclear power could run every home in the United states by itself? (Of course, if we wanted to run businesses and industry, we'd have to bring all the other plants back on.)
Yeah, and we all know that your government ranks its people much higher than it's businesses and industries, right?
(that's humour, folks, not a troll!)
There are 70 lawyers in my firm.
:)
At least one has come into my office...
I'm sure you had a good reason to say that the way you did but, "At least one"?
Are you counting in legalese?
"It's a snap to coax barnyard animals like pigs and cattle..."
:)
Anyone else read that the way I did?
A few years back I did software-support, and ended up remotely logging in to our customer's machines, often over a firewall.
.tar.gz.uu file and either using cat & script to transfer them, or cutting and pasting between windows. What a pain!
When the firewall only allowed telnet access and I needed to transfer files, I'd either end up building a
At that time, I started to work on a tool to allow me to transfer files over telnet. What stopped me was an ethical problem - if a company only allows telnet through their firewall, and not ftp, then they don't want people tranferring files through the firewall.
I wonder if these extensions to ssh will run into a similar problem. That is, companies not allowing ssh access through the firewall because it can be used for more than just login sessions...
Maybe, just maybe, the president has access to intelligence that we don't.
Maybe he should share it with other world leaders?
"even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water." I think that says more about the creek than it does the waste.
A typical knee-jerk reaction that nearly all of us have, myself included. But perhaps quite an unfair one.
This is going to seem a little off-topic. Bear with me!
We seem to be quite often short of water these days, and since we don't have a lot of new water catchment possibilities, it would seem that it can only get worse as the population increases.
Saving water seems to be the key here. Not only through more efficient appliances, but also through multiple uses of our water. How much sense does it make to be flushing our toilets with drinking water?
Some houses already capture "grey water" and use it for tasks where drinking water is not required. Obviously there's some filtering required. I've heard of other projects which are completely water self-sufficient. Yes, you end up boiling your potatoes in recycled piss!
Pretty revulsive to us today, but who knows? Maybe our grandkids will find it completely normal.
Found out today that the server that we use for authenticating 100's of users on our very large IRIX DB server is Windows.
How did I find out? After it caught a virus and was down for the whole day.
Sigh. Perhaps management will learn something from this...