diversity and decentralization
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"H-Prize" Announced
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think the answer to our energy issues is to have as many distributed forms of energy production as we can. Right now we are very depedent on one. If we have supply problems it causes issues. As well it causes a type of monopoly. There are many oil companies, but they all kind of work in concert given that they sell the exact same thing.
We need electrical cars, fuel cell cars, hyrodgen cars, ethanol cars, and a whole slew of others so that the open market can thrive. Cars themselves should run off different sources as well. Charge themselves with solar when available. If they sit outside have some small wind turbines. I'm sure there is a way to convert the energy of falling rain drops if we think about it hard enough.
The first argument is always that we have to retro fit all our gas stations. I don't understand why this is such a big deal. I think we have gotten so used to the centralized controlled gas industry that we have lost touch. If a new stick of gum comes out the stores put it on the shelf. I'm hoping alternate energies will start up a grass root movement of new gas stations that off all sorts of fuel alternatives. A little push from the goverment wouldn't help either.
What we end up with is like the coke\pepsi model. Coke produces the recipe, and then individual bottlers make it throughout the country. When you buy a coke it was probably made pretty close to you.
Lastly we need to think about ways to generate things like ethanol by using renweable sources like solar panels. They can collect solor energy slowing, but then use it to produce more explosive energy sources. Fuel cells can run off natural gas which is plentiful and then use that electricity to create the ethenol. For instance there are self running sewage plants that extract the methane gas and run it through fuel cells to power the plant.
Products just lying around are really easy to work with sure, but they are rarely clean and renewable. If we team up different energy sources and create a more diverse "energy ecosystem" then we'll be better off.
I'm a huge fan of the DVD and CD. I don't buy as much as I used to, mostly because the movies as of late have been sucking wind. It is funny for someone like me who is a proffesional developer and has been playing with computers since I was 12 would be so against them as a distribution model for content, but I am.
People are going to pirate, no point in trying to stop it. But most of us want the to buy, for many reasons. We also want to be treated fairly. This is when the masses start to pirate. Why should I pay full price for an 80's CD that has already sold 20 million copies. Computer games go down in price as they age, why don't CDs. Funny enough DVDs have become cheaper then CDs and the bargain bin at best buy always has someone buying that 7.99 copy of Duece Bigalow.
What I want is a set top box that I can place my DVD into once and have it play it over and over. If it breaks, I buy another, dust off the DVD, put it back in and have it play once more. I don't care about art work or some fancy menu, I just want to pull up my movies whenever I want them in real time.
Now comes in the problem of NetFlix movies and borrowing the friends. There is no real way to stop this from being ripped, but why should they care. They got their fee from netflix, they know the demographic of the person who watched the film, and they might get someone to rent another one of their movies from that actor or such.
And Netflix does allow the user to buy the DVD. To me Netflix is the new cinema, and the industry should get behind it. I wouldn't mind paying an extra 1 or 2 dollars on top of my Netflix fee for a movie that is brand new. If the industry does want to sell dvds early, just sell them for a bit more. Sell a brand new dvd for the 25.99 price, and then drop it to 199.99 6 months later. This might seem like a lot of money to throw away, but remember that a ticket to a movie is around 10 bucks and popcorn, gas, sometimes parking, etc. Last time I went I ended up spending over 2
People often want their Tivos to burn to DVD and such. Even though I think it'd be great, I think it is not the best model. We need to work together here to make this market work. One thing we can give up are machine that copy things. Can someone hack the Tivo harddrive anyways, yes, let them, if the authorities comes in your house for some other reason and catches you, go to jail or pay a modest fine. Jail time seems extreme, but a 10,000 dollar fine you have to pay over a period of time will make people think twice. We need a reasonable system so that it can be enforced in the courts.
We have this for music, the MP3 player. The problem with music these days are the CDs are overpriced, and the music is garbage unless your a 15 year old girl. Yes there are still good bands out there, but most of the time I just want to listen to it a few times. Napster is doing a pretty good job of this, is it rippable easily, yep, but I'm not doing that. What I'd like from Itunes and others stores is to send you your music on a burned CD every month or when it changes. Then we can buy online, download, and have a hard copy backup in the future.
Hopefully the entertainment industry can come together on this one. I feel bad for the cinemas, but I think like bowling alleys we will just have less of them, and they'll give you a copy of the DVD when you leave.
I know this isn't the final answer, but to me it is by far the most responsible and far reaching.
No cost. You already have DNS servers for your MX record if you are a valid server.
Using DNS means that we already have a great infrastructure.
Doesn't stop emails from people like amazon.com if you want them, but adding @amazon.com to your block list is now valid.
Faster and more reliable then content filtering.
Makes phising a bit harder, as you can no longer send support@citigroup.com.
Will spammers register real domains, yes. Will they send emails with a fake from address that has at least a valid domain, yes. It makes it just that much harder, and makes it harder to use farms. If the SPF record has a huge subnet then the spam blockers can ignore it, and then put it on a watch list.
At least we are adding some level of authentication to the process.
The cost of SPF is so little, I don't understand why their is not more push for it, and why we can't just give it a shot. I'd rather do that then go thru some authentication process with a company and then pay for some type of certicificate. Lastly, as a programmer I hate when all of the suden we have to do quadruple opt-outs, when the real problem is people sending gobs of rolex adds from their dorm room with or without their knowledge.
I think it is about time to start thinking about the GPU as a device, like a cd-rom or harrdrive instead of a card.
They already require an external power supply in some cases, and with SLI are using a special type of connector.
I'd like to see a GPU that comes in the form of a 5.25 bay expansion, with a pci-x card that connects it via a cable to the mobo.
Then I think the industry could come up with a standard cable for all cards. Or not, given that nvidia or whoever could come up with just about anything. I could see a card that interfaces through the memory slots ( if your motherboard had enough realastate). A GPU directly connected to Hypertransport anyone?
If a police office needs to test out shooting a gun, he goes to a firing range. You wouldn't have him field test it.
I feel for the prof, there isn't a good "firing range" on the internet. It would make for an interesting business. Setup a virtual network of servers with targets/exploits and have the students try and hit them.
If there is money to be made off of this, how long before major game makers take people watching people playing games into account during design.
The watching of the game doesn't have to 100% live, it could be delayed. I'm thinking a server simply ships all the commands going on in a game to a replica, or several replicas that then can have many cameras attached. Major matches could have millions wanting to watch, and mostly live.
On top of that you'll want commentators. Replay and a lot of other things to really make watching the games fun.
Next I think is scoring. Using counterstrike as an example you can take wins and types of wins into account to score. I'd say you have 10 matches. Each team plays 5 matches as terrorist, and 5 as CT. If you defuse the bomb you get 2 points, if you win by killing everyone you get 5 points, and so on. Of course this would lead to a point where someone could win the game in less then 10 matches. My point is that we need to start thinking about these things to make matches close, and interesting to watch, not just play.
If they know they are probably being tapped, or that their phone conversation might be being recorded by their telcom company ( something I think will happen given the cheapness of storage ) they will stop using it.
I'm not in the business of crime, so I have no need to be hiding my conversations. At the same time I don't want my personal talks about marital troubles being recorded and used against me in a divorce court. ( Sweetie if you reading I don't want that it is just hypothectical ). If I was in crime I certainly wouldn't be talking about it on the phone. Here are my alternatives.
First I'd encrypt several times in a way only know by me and the other side to make it appear to be binary data.
Then I'd chat on private channels on Counter-strike servers or something. Something that I know is not logging. I suppose the govt could sniff the packets and record them all and try and extract the info, but is it worth it. After the tap had been placed on my internet account I guess they would start recording all the packets, but that would sure add up. Heck I'd stream movies in the background just to make it harder. If I was being really paranoid I sent chunks of the message through several channels.
On top of that I'll use a code agreed on by the both parties. "I hate the Dallas Cowboys" means meet me here at xyz time or something.
I think it'd be better if they could tap into my machine via backdoors and take screenshots, however, this would probably require a human, and would be pretty detectable.
If the govt thinks they can just start a blanket approach to this problem, I think they'll find that it will just change the problem. Better to over use taps so people are lazy and continue to use easy to monitor channels.
The argument that we might have stopped 9/11 by having programs like this is a bit silly. We had so much more evidence then phone calls. The FBI and several people knew about the people who where going to do the attack, they just didn't act. Hindsight is 20/20, and if something even remotely like that happens again it will be taken very seriously.
Personally if you do make a phone call out of the country I think the govt has a right to monitor it. They setup the infrastructure and they have jurisdiction to anything dealing with the border. If you fly out of the country they can check you bags at customs and a whole slew of other things. The thing that they need to do is just lay that out. Let people know that they can be tapped, and if they are notify them. When you call long distance before the call starts play a message. "This phone call may be monitored by the U.S. govt for security reasons".
People will say that terrorist then won't use the phone system and we can't catch them that way. Well news flash they already are not.
This actually sounds more like Google wanting their own private backbone then a new internet protocol.
Google needs to transfer large amounts of data through out the world and is probably looking for ways to reduce latency across the world. We have a private DS3 line from our office to our co-lo, wouldn't google want the same kind of thing at a large scale, and without having to deal with Sprint, Verison, or AT&T.
They could also use this for an VOIP solution as well, which to me is more likely. That way they can ship the voice calls on to the local phone switches throughout the country. I wouldn't be suprised to see Google offices going up all round the nation.
Going last mile and creating another internet is a huge endeavour that I don't think even google could take on. Leave that up to the telcom who are already in bed with the govt agencies required to do something like that.
Although I don't generally like sueing which got us in the case in the first place RIM should go after InPro with all their resources and crush them like a bug. Someone needs to put these patent companies in their place and set some precedence. This has cost not only RIM, but lots of other people money and time. If I was the government I'd go after InPro as well, think of all the tax dollars they have wasted.
This sounds like a perfect candidate for a swap partion, especially on Windows. Windows swap is a huge performance hog. I turn it off if the machine has 2 gigs+ of memory. Windows tends to swap memory not based on the lack of it, but the lack of access. So if you let a program sit in the background over night and then switch to it your HD goes crazy.
With swap being on this you'd still get transfer rate problems, but access rates should be extremely higher. Especially when the "drive" is fragmented. A defrag program would run pretty fast on one of these as well.
It is to bad that OSs don't have support for these types of devices yet. I'd rather use it as an actual drive cache and not bother my main RAM. If the OS loaded a file up it could place it on the RAM drive and read and write to it.
Related, most of my servers at work have 128 or 256 meg SCSI RAID cards. I wish that technique would make it into the retail market.
Over the last few years almost all the big worms and security holes have come about due to the dreaded buffer overflow. What steps has Microsoft made to sweep through your expansive code base looking for such things?
Great now we are going to have a black market for high end printers. Let some guy buy the printer, then steal it and sell it for illegal activity.
Heck hacking printers to remove this stuff will be considered organized crime.
If you could do this without anyone in the world knowing it would work, but people figure this stuff out and quickly. What a waste of effort by our goverment and a waste of time by our engineers. Does anyone have a backbone left?
One of the biggest advantages of enterprise level dbs is that they are not file based. That is there is one or more files that can store many table/indexes/etc.
Postgres recently added tablespaces, which allow you to specify a sub folder for these files. This is better then before, but not nearly where it needs to be.
There are advantages to having single files versus a larger file, but most are administrative in nature. It can also lessen the effect of corruption. A sinlge table might fail and would not effect others. If a big database file corrupts it can damage a lot of data.
Having a single files allows quite a few things.
First it greatly reduces File system level fragmentation. The file grows once and the sectors are right next to each other. When you have 10+ gigs of data this is a real concern.
Second it create a unified caching mechanism. The big file is broken into pages, generally 8k, which in turn store data rows. The data is not only user data, but indexes, system information. Other pages are used to store stats about other pages, and have header information about the file itself. Why is this important to caching, because you simply have a cache table, everytime a page is loaded it gets cached. Writing to page happens in memory and then written to disk. Enterprise dbs have huge caches. This is why 64 bit is so important for dbs, so we can have larger then 4 gig caches.
Third is backing up. Some might say the file backup is easier, I beg to differ. Especailly when it gets big. When you go to backup you backup each page in the file. You mark each one as being backedup. At the end of the backup you backup the write ahead log. This allows you to restore to exactly the time the backup finished. Lastly, a diff backup simple looks at each page that has changed since the backup and backs only those pages up. Diffs can be very fast and faster to restore then a write ahead log.
Also, single files on different drives arrays to increase performance. This is also capable with tablespaces. The good part is that the database knows only the file id that tables go on, and then file id corresponds to a file name on any path. With the right tool you can move the files around easily.
Replication is also easier because writes are to a file id and page id. The replica database can have files place on any drive at any map point as long as the data.
Both mysql and postgres got a way to go, but they are very nice products and one day can easily compete with the big boys. Although it will be a while before they are able to run high end clustered box with shared storage and super high speed interconnects, but if you need that kind of power, you've probably got the money...actually you absolutly do if you can afford the hardware.
I'd rather see a kind of plugin interface on the plane. A wire ( or not ) that connects my phone to the seat i'm at. This then goes into the planes system, and then the signal is amped and sent out.
Perhaps if we did something like this instead we'd be able to tell SETI what this looks like and filter it out. Unless just the signal itself would disrupt it ( I didn't RTFA...sorry ).
Would it annoy me ( I heard earlier ), a bit. The NX bit in the Intel line does essentially what the segments could have done, at the page level.
I guess my point was that the very idea that you in data can just specify a place to jump to was always a bit dangerous. You can't really blame the early guys, but a little of the blame does fall on them.
DLL/library function tables annoy me just as much, as they are easily hooked.
Performance was real problem, so I don't blame the engineers of the past, but it is time to move on. The fact that an OS call is still simply a jump ( with a context switch ). I'd like a stripped down version of Web services in our OS's. Make a binary/text request and get one back as the response. Then our Os's can run on their own thread, and the programs can just wait for responses, or do something else until it gets them. To think of the os as as server, and the program as a client in a real way.
Obviously they are caused by irresponsible programing, but just imagine if the nature of the stack wouldn't allow them. If some kind of mechanism beside a simple jump had been used. Like registering an address in the CPU via an instruction and then calling that jump. Would we have had half the problems?
Would we have the same basic post. Would we have it at all?
The post would be more like.
"Firefox has some basic issue releasing memory in certain scenarios involving DHTML. Recently a tool has been released to help alleviate the problem until the problems are fixed."
Do we have to act like children around here. It is a software program, not a brutal dictator.
People wonder why people have doubts about open source. One reason is accountability.
If linux.org got hacked, who'd care, or even if slashdot ( remember ). MS at least is standing up and admiting it has a problem. OS just hides behind it's structure. Because we are open we will get patched.
Somebody hacked into their computers in order to steal password, not to shame MS. Be mad at the hackers for once. Is this going to be any different if/when MS is not king of the hill? No, get over it.
On a side note. Has slashdot ever consider not allowing posts to a story? This is a classic example of a useless post section. About the only thing useful might be how they got in, but no is going to know that until this story isn't on the front page.
Can we IhateMS.slashdot.org and stick these stories there?
John Smith calls Longhorn disappointing would have been better.
Essentially slashdot turned a story that should have been called "New longhorn build/screenshots" into major flaimbait.
I seriously think that Slashdot should allow their subscribers to "vote" on the new stories that most people don't see...or a subset..if to many people think it is bad it gets red flagged for Taco to stare at or something.
Yey, slashdot started a AMD/Intel FanBoy battle. Can we just admit that both have a lot of strengths, and that Intel or AMD ain't going anywhere and be done with it. When you go to store to buy your next CPU, buy the one you like and leave the rest of us the fcuk alone.
What would be really nice is if someone came out with open standard protocols that support all the things that exchange does.
Email is already taken care of with IMAP4.
We need an open protocol for Calender, Tasks, Journals, Contacts, and all that good stuff.
Then we can have a ton of clients written that can plug into any number of email server.
We are running Exchange 5.5, and upgrading to a newer version is incrediably hard. MS screwed up big time by requiring active directory, and all that jazz to make it work. I don't understand why Exchange can't just run stand-alone or with NT security. All about making people upgrade, probably going to byte them in the but.
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I think the answer to our energy issues is to have as many distributed forms of energy production as we can. Right now we are very depedent on one. If we have supply problems it causes issues. As well it causes a type of monopoly. There are many oil companies, but they all kind of work in concert given that they sell the exact same thing.
We need electrical cars, fuel cell cars, hyrodgen cars, ethanol cars, and a whole slew of others so that the open market can thrive. Cars themselves should run off different sources as well. Charge themselves with solar when available. If they sit outside have some small wind turbines. I'm sure there is a way to convert the energy of falling rain drops if we think about it hard enough.
The first argument is always that we have to retro fit all our gas stations. I don't understand why this is such a big deal. I think we have gotten so used to the centralized controlled gas industry that we have lost touch. If a new stick of gum comes out the stores put it on the shelf. I'm hoping alternate energies will start up a grass root movement of new gas stations that off all sorts of fuel alternatives. A little push from the goverment wouldn't help either.
What we end up with is like the coke\pepsi model. Coke produces the recipe, and then individual bottlers make it throughout the country. When you buy a coke it was probably made pretty close to you.
Lastly we need to think about ways to generate things like ethanol by using renweable sources like solar panels. They can collect solor energy slowing, but then use it to produce more explosive energy sources. Fuel cells can run off natural gas which is plentiful and then use that electricity to create the ethenol. For instance there are self running sewage plants that extract the methane gas and run it through fuel cells to power the plant.
Products just lying around are really easy to work with sure, but they are rarely clean and renewable.
If we team up different energy sources and create a more diverse "energy ecosystem" then we'll be better off.
I'm a huge fan of the DVD and CD. I don't buy as much as I used to, mostly because the movies as of late have been sucking wind. It is funny for someone like me who is a proffesional developer and has been playing with computers since I was 12 would be so against them as a distribution model for content, but I am.
People are going to pirate, no point in trying to stop it. But most of us want the to buy, for many reasons. We also want to be treated fairly. This is when the masses start to pirate. Why should I pay full price for an 80's CD that has already sold 20 million copies. Computer games go down in price as they age, why don't CDs. Funny enough DVDs have become cheaper then CDs and the bargain bin at best buy always has someone buying that 7.99 copy of Duece Bigalow.
What I want is a set top box that I can place my DVD into once and have it play it over and over. If it breaks, I buy another, dust off the DVD, put it back in and have it play once more. I don't care about art work or some fancy menu, I just want to pull up my movies whenever I want them in real time.
Now comes in the problem of NetFlix movies and borrowing the friends. There is no real way to stop this from being ripped, but why should they care. They got their fee from netflix, they know the demographic of the person who watched the film, and they might get someone to rent another one of their movies from that actor or such.
And Netflix does allow the user to buy the DVD. To me Netflix is the new cinema, and the industry should get behind it. I wouldn't mind paying an extra 1 or 2 dollars on top of my Netflix fee for a movie that is brand new. If the industry does want to sell dvds early, just sell them for a bit more. Sell a brand new dvd for the 25.99 price, and then drop it to 199.99 6 months later. This might seem like a lot of money to throw away, but remember that a ticket to a movie is around 10 bucks and popcorn, gas, sometimes parking, etc. Last time I went I ended up spending over 2
People often want their Tivos to burn to DVD and such. Even though I think it'd be great, I think it is not the best model. We need to work together here to make this market work. One thing we can give up are machine that copy things. Can someone hack the Tivo harddrive anyways, yes, let them, if the authorities comes in your house for some other reason and catches you, go to jail or pay a modest fine. Jail time seems extreme, but a 10,000 dollar fine you have to pay over a period of time will make people think twice. We need a reasonable system so that it can be enforced in the courts.
We have this for music, the MP3 player. The problem with music these days are the CDs are overpriced, and the music is garbage unless your a 15 year old girl. Yes there are still good bands out there, but most of the time I just want to listen to it a few times. Napster is doing a pretty good job of this, is it rippable easily, yep, but I'm not doing that. What I'd like from Itunes and others stores is to send you your music on a burned CD every month or when it changes. Then we can buy online, download, and have a hard copy backup in the future.
Hopefully the entertainment industry can come together on this one. I feel bad for the cinemas, but I think like bowling alleys we will just have less of them, and they'll give you a copy of the DVD when you leave.
I know this isn't the final answer, but to me it is by far the most responsible and far reaching.
Will spammers register real domains, yes. Will they send emails with a fake from address that has at least a valid domain, yes. It makes it just that much harder, and makes it harder to use farms. If the SPF record has a huge subnet then the spam blockers can ignore it, and then put it on a watch list. At least we are adding some level of authentication to the process.
The cost of SPF is so little, I don't understand why their is not more push for it, and why we can't just give it a shot. I'd rather do that then go thru some authentication process with a company and then pay for some type of certicificate. Lastly, as a programmer I hate when all of the suden we have to do quadruple opt-outs, when the real problem is people sending gobs of rolex adds from their dorm room with or without their knowledge.
I think it is about time to start thinking about the GPU as a device, like a cd-rom or harrdrive instead of a card.
They already require an external power supply in some cases, and with SLI are using a special type of connector.
I'd like to see a GPU that comes in the form of a 5.25 bay expansion, with a pci-x card that connects it via a cable to the mobo.
Then I think the industry could come up with a standard cable for all cards. Or not, given that nvidia or whoever could come up with just about anything. I could see a card that interfaces through the memory slots ( if your motherboard had enough realastate). A GPU directly connected to Hypertransport anyone?
If a police office needs to test out shooting a gun, he goes to a firing range. You wouldn't have him field test it.
I feel for the prof, there isn't a good "firing range" on the internet. It would make for an interesting business. Setup a virtual network of servers with targets/exploits and have the students try and hit them.
If there is money to be made off of this, how long before major game makers take people watching people playing games into account during design.
The watching of the game doesn't have to 100% live, it could be delayed. I'm thinking a server simply ships all the commands going on in a game to a replica, or several replicas that then can have many cameras attached. Major matches could have millions wanting to watch, and mostly live.
On top of that you'll want commentators. Replay and a lot of other things to really make watching the games fun.
Next I think is scoring. Using counterstrike as an example you can take wins and types of wins into account to score. I'd say you have 10 matches. Each team plays 5 matches as terrorist, and 5 as CT.
If you defuse the bomb you get 2 points, if you win by killing everyone you get 5 points, and so on.
Of course this would lead to a point where someone could win the game in less then 10 matches. My point is that we need to start thinking about these things to make matches close, and interesting to watch, not just play.
Criminals will evolve as this techonlogy evolves.
If they know they are probably being tapped, or that their phone conversation might be being recorded by their telcom company ( something I think will happen given the cheapness of storage ) they will stop using it.
I'm not in the business of crime, so I have no need to be hiding my conversations. At the same time I don't want my personal talks about marital troubles being recorded and used against me in a divorce court. ( Sweetie if you reading I don't want that it is just hypothectical ). If I was in crime I certainly wouldn't be talking about it on the phone. Here are my alternatives.
First I'd encrypt several times in a way only know by me and the other side to make it appear to be binary data.
Then I'd chat on private channels on Counter-strike servers or something. Something that I know is not logging. I suppose the govt could sniff the packets and record them all and try and extract the info, but is it worth it. After the tap had been placed on my internet account I guess they would start recording all the packets, but that would sure add up. Heck I'd stream movies in the background just to make it harder. If I was being really paranoid I sent chunks of the message through several channels.
On top of that I'll use a code agreed on by the both parties. "I hate the Dallas Cowboys" means meet me here at xyz time or something.
I think it'd be better if they could tap into my machine via backdoors and take screenshots, however, this would probably require a human, and would be pretty detectable.
If the govt thinks they can just start a blanket approach to this problem, I think they'll find that it will just change the problem. Better to over use taps so people are lazy and continue to use easy to monitor channels.
The argument that we might have stopped 9/11 by having programs like this is a bit silly. We had so much more evidence then phone calls. The FBI and several people knew about the people who where going to do the attack, they just didn't act. Hindsight is 20/20, and if something even remotely like that happens again it will be taken very seriously.
Personally if you do make a phone call out of the country I think the govt has a right to monitor it. They setup the infrastructure and they have jurisdiction to anything dealing with the border. If you fly out of the country they can check you bags at customs and a whole slew of other things. The thing that they need to do is just lay that out. Let people know that they can be tapped, and if they are notify them. When you call long distance before the call starts play a message. "This phone call may be monitored by the U.S. govt for security reasons".
People will say that terrorist then won't use the phone system and we can't catch them that way. Well news flash they already are not.
This actually sounds more like Google wanting their own private backbone then a new internet protocol.
Google needs to transfer large amounts of data through out the world and is probably looking for ways to reduce latency across the world. We have a private DS3 line from our office to our co-lo, wouldn't google want the same kind of thing at a large scale, and without having to deal with Sprint, Verison, or AT&T.
They could also use this for an VOIP solution as well, which to me is more likely. That way they can ship the voice calls on to the local phone switches throughout the country. I wouldn't be suprised to see Google offices going up all round the nation.
Going last mile and creating another internet is a huge endeavour that I don't think even google could take on. Leave that up to the telcom who are already in bed with the govt agencies required to do something like that.
Although I don't generally like sueing which got us in the case in the first place RIM should go after InPro with all their resources and crush them like a bug. Someone needs to put these patent companies in their place and set some precedence. This has cost not only RIM, but lots of other people money and time. If I was the government I'd go after InPro as well, think of all the tax dollars they have wasted.
This sounds like a perfect candidate for a swap partion, especially on Windows. Windows swap is a huge performance hog. I turn it off if the machine has 2 gigs+ of memory. Windows tends to swap memory not based on the lack of it, but the lack of access. So if you let a program sit in the background over night and then switch to it your HD goes crazy.
With swap being on this you'd still get transfer rate problems, but access rates should be extremely higher. Especially when the "drive" is fragmented. A defrag program would run pretty fast on one of these as well.
It is to bad that OSs don't have support for these types of devices yet. I'd rather use it as an actual drive cache and not bother my main RAM. If the OS loaded a file up it could place it on the RAM drive and read and write to it.
Related, most of my servers at work have 128 or 256 meg SCSI RAID cards. I wish that technique would make it into the retail market.
Over the last few years almost all the big worms and security holes have come about due to the dreaded buffer overflow. What steps has Microsoft made to sweep through your expansive code base looking for such things?
Great now we are going to have a black market for high end printers. Let some guy buy the printer, then steal it and sell it for illegal activity.
Heck hacking printers to remove this stuff will be considered organized crime.
If you could do this without anyone in the world knowing it would work, but people figure this stuff out and quickly. What a waste of effort by our goverment and a waste of time by our engineers. Does anyone have a backbone left?
One of the biggest advantages of enterprise level dbs is that they are not file based. That is there is one or more files that can store many table/indexes/etc.
Postgres recently added tablespaces, which allow you to specify a sub folder for these files. This is better then before, but not nearly where it needs to be.
There are advantages to having single files versus a larger file, but most are administrative in nature. It can also lessen the effect of corruption. A sinlge table might fail and would not effect others. If a big database file corrupts it can damage a lot of data.
Having a single files allows quite a few things.
First it greatly reduces File system level fragmentation. The file grows once and the sectors are right next to each other. When you have 10+ gigs of data this is a real concern.
Second it create a unified caching mechanism. The big file is broken into pages, generally 8k, which in turn store data rows. The data is not only user data, but indexes, system information. Other pages are used to store stats about other pages, and have header information about the file itself. Why is this important to caching, because you simply have a cache table, everytime a page is loaded it gets cached. Writing to page happens in memory and then written to disk. Enterprise dbs have huge caches. This is why 64 bit is so important for dbs, so we can have larger then 4 gig caches.
Third is backing up. Some might say the file backup is easier, I beg to differ. Especailly when it gets big. When you go to backup you backup each page in the file. You mark each one as being backedup. At the end of the backup you backup the write ahead log. This allows you to restore to exactly the time the backup finished. Lastly, a diff backup simple looks at each page that has changed since the backup and backs only those pages up. Diffs can be very fast and faster to restore then a write ahead log.
Also, single files on different drives arrays to increase performance. This is also capable with tablespaces. The good part is that the database knows only the file id that tables go on, and then file id corresponds to a file name on any path. With the right tool you can move the files around easily.
Replication is also easier because writes are to a file id and page id. The replica database can have files place on any drive at any map point as long as the data.
Both mysql and postgres got a way to go, but they are very nice products and one day can easily compete with the big boys. Although it will be a while before they are able to run high end clustered box with shared storage and super high speed interconnects, but if you need that kind of power, you've probably got the money...actually you absolutly do if you can afford the hardware.
I'd rather see a kind of plugin interface on the plane. A wire ( or not ) that connects my phone to the seat i'm at. This then goes into the planes system, and then the signal is amped and sent out.
Perhaps if we did something like this instead we'd be able to tell SETI what this looks like and filter it out. Unless just the signal itself would disrupt it ( I didn't RTFA...sorry ).
Would it annoy me ( I heard earlier ), a bit. The NX bit in the Intel line does essentially what the segments could have done, at the page level.
I guess my point was that the very idea that you in data can just specify a place to jump to was always a bit dangerous. You can't really blame the early guys, but a little of the blame does fall on them.
DLL/library function tables annoy me just as much, as they are easily hooked.
Performance was real problem, so I don't blame the engineers of the past, but it is time to move on. The fact that an OS call is still simply a jump ( with a context switch ). I'd like a stripped down version of Web services in our OS's. Make a binary/text request and get one back as the response. Then our Os's can run on their own thread, and the programs can just wait for responses, or do something else until it gets them. To think of the os as as server, and the program as a client in a real way.
without buffer overruns.
Obviously they are caused by irresponsible programing, but just imagine if the nature of the stack wouldn't allow them. If some kind of mechanism beside a simple jump had been used. Like registering an address in the CPU via an instruction and then calling that jump. Would we have had half the problems?
as a reduced price lunch.
Would we have the same basic post. Would we have it at all?
The post would be more like.
"Firefox has some basic issue releasing memory in certain scenarios involving DHTML. Recently a tool has been released to help alleviate the problem until the problems are fixed."
Do we have to act like children around here. It is a software program, not a brutal dictator.
People wonder why people have doubts about open source. One reason is accountability.
If linux.org got hacked, who'd care, or even if slashdot ( remember ). MS at least is standing up and admiting it has a problem. OS just hides behind it's structure. Because we are open we will get patched.
Somebody hacked into their computers in order to steal password, not to shame MS. Be mad at the hackers for once. Is this going to be any different if/when MS is not king of the hill? No, get over it.
On a side note. Has slashdot ever consider not allowing posts to a story? This is a classic example of a useless post section. About the only thing useful might be how they got in, but no is going to know that until this story isn't on the front page.
Can we IhateMS.slashdot.org and stick these stories there?
The slogan is very subject and so incomplete.
John Smith calls Longhorn disappointing would have been better.
Essentially slashdot turned a story that should have been called "New longhorn build/screenshots" into major flaimbait.
I seriously think that Slashdot should allow their subscribers to "vote" on the new stories that most people don't see...or a subset..if to many people think it is bad it gets red flagged for Taco to stare at or something.
you had to kill dragons to be a knight. Maybe Mozzilla counts, but he hasn't slayed it yet.
All this reverse crap means nothing.
We need to push SPF or something else forward so people are required to do work in order to send an email.
This makes the from address mean something, and harder to spoof.
Now spammers can register a valid email server, but then they have a place to be tracked to. If they are offshore we could do something about that.
Speaking of which, being able to categorize my mail by country would help alot.
Is there a standard for the mail servers to give their clients IP information about the server that delivered the message? This would help alot.
Yey, slashdot started a AMD/Intel FanBoy battle.
Can we just admit that both have a lot of strengths, and that Intel or AMD ain't going anywhere and be done with it. When you go to store to buy your next CPU, buy the one you like and leave the rest of us the fcuk alone.
The fact that we can turn food and other organic material in electricty is what excites me, more then the robot itself.
Could we use this to process our junk, or a good chunk of it in to electricty.
A compost pile that can power power your house, if only just as a small supplement would be cool.
What would be really nice is if someone came out
with open standard protocols that support all the things that exchange does.
Email is already taken care of with IMAP4.
We need an open protocol for Calender, Tasks, Journals, Contacts, and all that good stuff.
Then we can have a ton of clients written that can plug into any number of email server.
We are running Exchange 5.5, and upgrading to a newer version is incrediably hard. MS screwed up big time by requiring active directory, and all that jazz to make it work. I don't understand why Exchange can't just run stand-alone or with NT security. All about making people upgrade, probably going to byte them in the but.