Buy a cheap key fob that stores a couple megs of data. The USB type.
Then put a password safe program on it. Make your passwords long and safe. Make it so you need the key fob to get into you accounts. You copy the first 32 chars (which were encrypted on the fob) from the fob and then add your short password to the end (or beginner, or middle) of the password and access your stuff.
"...allow companies to virtualize multiple operating systems."
Well, how would you describe it? "virtualize multiple operating systems" is exactly what it is doing.
All that other stuff is voodoo horse crap double talk. But in this case, they happen to be running multiple operating systems in separate virtual spaces. There is no better way to describe it.
Seems to me that the developers are on the ball with this one. They get to requisition expensive iPods for, ahem, work. They also get media attention from slashdot.
This is much sexier than burning knoppix.
So from what I gather, google is collecting every scrap of information about everything. This spans from the basic google websearch to google desktop search and eventually google e-mail searching (searching for anonymous content from within their growing gmail database).
When google takes over our web browsers, they will also be able to collect info on more than just what we are searching for -- they will know how we are finding desired content.
Pretty soon google will know everything about everyone. People won't have to bother with the trouble of defining ourselves in the real world anymore -- inspection and introspection of humans can be done through tomorrow's google. I presume it will be utopia.
I am wearing a tinfoil hat right now. What they are doing is perfectly legal. But I still think it is a bit scary.
I imagine that any story which is comprised mainly of pictures that is linked to by slashdot is bound to be brought to its knees before it knew what hit it.
So I've decided to describe the oddities for the slashdotters with active imaginations! Plus I need to work off some caffiene before I hit the sack.
(1) A pallid creature of diminutive size which is characterized by a body shaped like the blade of a pocket knife. The edges of the body form a fin which bears remarkable similarity to a feather. The GI tract is visible as a dark tunnel connecting the throat area and leading halfway down its body to where what appears to be a tiny foot is attached! The foot may actually be an anus, but I'm no biologist and I don't read cyrillic.
(2) This photo shows two beasties in a half meter wide container. The first is a dark, eel-looking fellow with a beaty eye that is glazed over in a sort of post-mortem or thickly armored haze. It is shaped like a bottle rocket -- the back is long , cylindrical, and thin and it has a cylindrical gut of larger diameter attached to the back. His mouth is open a little but no teeth show.
The other fellow is a white squid which has red highlights on its body. The red is probably a result of its blood and viscera being partially drained into its container, but it is difficult to tell from the picture. It looks like a giant, man eating squid from the movies, except it is not giant.
(3) This picture shows a fish held in the hands of a proud seaman. The fish is probably 20 pounds heavy. It is dark like a bottom feeder and has a menacing look about it. The rear half of the animal has a fin on top that looks like an inch tall mohawk. An inch or two without a mohawk separates the rear fin from a threatening dorsal fin. The front of the dorsal fin is shaped like the fang of a snake. It is curved back from vertical, thin, and looks like it could inject a deadly poison (probably doesn't though). He has a large eye which glows an eerie yellow color, probably due to the camera's flash. The mouth is not very clear. To add to this fish's badass appearence, it looks like it has won several knife fights and thick scars crease its body.
(4) This one is ugly. It is in the same type of container as described in picture (2). I imagine that it was once just a very fat fish made of pancake mix, and one day it was dropped on the skillet that is the ocean floor. It is smooshed vertically and resembles "blinky" from the classic Simpson's episode. However, instead of the warm yellow tint of our favorite family, this fish has a mixture of red, brown, and white tints on its body and its face is white like a brie cheese. Come to think of it, its face looks like Marlon Brando. Creepy indeed.
(5) This critter is a sight to behold! It looks like an criptocletus dinosaur on a smaller scale. It has hand and feet fins that look oars. But the best thing about this animal is that it has a beak. It reminds me of an elongated duckbill platypus' beak, except that it is made of flesh instead of a hardened material. Its eye is black and big. I have relatives who eat fish eyes and I'm sure that it would be a wonderful treat for them.
OK, thats all I can handle for now. I hope this helps paint the picture.
Don't forget the extra production required to translate a show for foreign audiences.
I am surprised that it only took a few weeks to translate from english into english. If you've ever seen Snatch or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels you know how difficult it can be to understand untranslated english.
It seems to me that a lot of people are saying "prices go up because people are greedy".
People are greedy. You are partially right. But that isn't the only reason prices go up. Prices also go up to support R&D and creating new fabs. Technicians are working every day to create new and better chips, and this costs money.
Big money.
Ask yourself why you need a 5 gigahertz processor when 1 GHz was plenty fast just a few years ago. If you were so concerned about money you could do your processing on a Motorola 68k.
What if it wasn't about corperate greed, but instead was about your inflated value of the newest and fastest things?
It also uses files, which is totally cheating. Without fi.write(), this guy would have to do a lot more work to have the computer convert a virtual address into the a device real address and accessing the filesystem implementation specific rules to carry out the necessary data and metadata operations to complete the task. And thats just the half of it.
Get a few good students to take part. Their friends will probably check it out too. The hard part is getting the first few students to look into it, but I have a solution for that too:
Make them do it.
OK, so it sounds nefarious and oppressive. Oh well, they are students and are used to it. Their parents make them bring the car home by 10, go to sleep by 12, wake up at 7, and eat their peas. At this stage in their life there aren't many people who are self motivated to do anything other than play video games, or whatever the latest popular thing is. But they are used to being told what to do, and sometimes they like what they are exposed to and tell their friends.
To sum up:
Make the activity fun.
Ask a few good students to attend and get things going.
Ask them to bring a friend next time. Get them to name a friend who they think would enjoy it before they leave the room -- this makes them more likely to actually ask.
Here is how you can get good results from Bake Offs:
Outline what you are testing, how the tests were set up, and let the results point you to a conclusion.
Use the conclusion to make other predictions. Test the predictions with another experiment.
Verify.
If a user sets the same problem up on their own, they should see the same results. If not, then something was cooked funny.
Personally, I look to independent sources for reviews. I would not trust claims made by a manufacturer.
The reviewer decides to bash book series that come out more frequently than once every four years, implying that they are just out for money.
Now, Robert Jordan is one thing. But if you can manage to get past that you will find some great series fantasy that does go to print more frequently. Some great examples are:
(1) George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. This is my favorite series of all. The characters are realistic, the story draws you in, and the outcome is anything but expected. I could only wish that these books came out every month.
(2) Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Tales of Alvin Maker series. Card is a great storyteller who dreams up tales that capture your imagination with stories of what might have been or what might be.
(3) David Duncan's Tale of the King's Blades series mixes swordplay with interesting storylines. The books are truly exciting recounts of great adventures.
I'd just like to point out that some of the "other" series out there are more than just cash cows.
Assume (for this post) that these devices actually work and improve the efficiency of city streets. This is why you can't find them on your block:
(1) Safety. A lot of effort is spent proving that a traffic control device is safe. When traffic lights screw up and allow opposing green lights, people die. It is entirely unacceptable for a traffic control device to screw up.
So when a city is faced with buying a proven design or a new advanced design that improves efficiency but may be a liability concern, the city will go with the proven design.
I concede that the new system would be tested endlessly, but I claim that any complex system will have flaws that don't show up until deployed in the field. I've seen unbreakable unix systems crash. It happens.
I think that provable safety in this application can (and will someday) be done. I just wouldn't want to be the first city adopting it.
So another option to ensure safety is redundancy such as that used in some airplanes. That is, multiple independant systems working on the traffic problem, and if any of them fail the others will notice. Doing this right costs money, which brings us to point 2.
(2) Cost. My city really doesn't even bother fixing road problems. I went to Berkeley CA the other day and they had enormous potholes that were "fixed" by painting bright colors around them so they could be avoided. If Berkeley doesn't want to spend a couple bucks to patch a hole, then why would your little town bother to consider removing existing systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and replace them with ones that probably cost more?
Further, why would you want your city to spend this money for a marginal improvement in flow? The answer is because some intersections are so terrible that you always are caught up in traffic. These intersections are the bottlenecks that hold up everybody, ones where 30% improved efficiency would be a blessing, which brings us to the 3rd point.
(3) This doesn't help the worst intersections. This switching system would be nice for those pesky lights in your neighborhood that always seem to be red when you arrive, and that you are always first in line and usually the only one to go through in your direction.
I claim that the intersections which could use a 30% improvement the most are those that would not be helped by this system. That is because no matter which side is getting green, every precious second of green light is being used by traffic. This is 100% efficiency, as measured by throughput / theoretical maximum throughput. You can not improve this system by watching for groups of cars, since there are always groups of cars coming.
This would be a neat feature on some intersections, but these intersections aren't the ones that DOT really focuses on improving. The effort involved in making small intersections intelligently switch lights isn't generally worth the cost of doing so.
That said, I'd like to see this in use in my neighborhood, and I'm glad that people are looking into solving traffic congestion problems.
I for one am glad to see Intel recognizing that they are no longer the only game in town.
If the world works like I believe it should, the competition between Intel and AMD will provide consumers with better products at lower prices.
Bill Clinton was asked why he would do something as dumb as get involved in the Lewinsky scandal. His reply was:
"I did it for the worst possible reason, because I could."
This is all paraphrased, but it helps to answer the question of "why?". It also gets to the heart of this story -- it was done for the worst possible reason!
Some projects are actually well defined. For example, if a customer has existing hardware in abundance and they need (UNIX|LINUX|Windows) drivers for the hardware -- the task is clearcut and not bound to change quickly. There are many other examples.
Not all customers will screw you over. Many of the will, but it isn't always helpful to mix customer relations with extreme skepticism.
Mission critical is no so much "this needs to happen of the company folds", but more "this needs to happen or (bridge collapses|spaceship crashes|patient dies)"
I just took a two day class on Agile programming. I thought I would share some high level points from the class to help describe an agile environment so that others may decide if this is something that they should investigate for themselves:
Agile is meant for projects where change is a fact of life. If your project has explicit, written in stone, unchanging goals then you should consider another design methodology.
Agile development focuses on rapid delivery of working (but not polished) software. It should be lightweight, but still accomplish the functional goal.
Agile projects should provide value long before they are finished. Each increment of functionality should be useful for a customer.
Agile is not meant for large teams. Agile does not work well with customers who can not provide frequent feedback. Agile is not optimal for projets which have stable needs that are known from the beginning. Agile is not a good choice for mission critical products.
These are the basics as taught to me, they may not be the same as presented in this book.
This reminds me of fuel injectors for cars. They are simply silicon valves that open and close hundreds of times per second depending on fuel needs. More info can be found at howstuffworks: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-injection3.htm
One of the big problems of the auto industry is making engines burn fuel more efficiently. A lot of it has to do with how well the fuel and air mix before combusion. There may even be an application for this in car engines, if we replace single injectors with many thousands of little injectors. This would hopefully allow precise control of air/fuel mixtures which would reduce emissions, improve power, and improve engine efficiency. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, perhaps we could be looking at a new means of supplying fuel to your engine.
There are a lot of steps between here and there, but there is still a good need for mechanical valves outside of the computer storage industries!
"a bunch of more wealthy less experienced people running the lives of the geeks who spent all their time aquiring the items."
Well, that is how it works in the real world. Don't you read Dilbert?
Someone quoteable once said "don't believe everything that you read." Blue gene is unsuitable for nuclear weapons simulations because it has been designed specifically for protien fold calculations.
Perhaps news.com has assumed that because LLNL has done major work with nulcear weapons simulations that they will use all of their computers for this purpose.
Please take a minute to find some information from more reliable sources, such as IBM or DOE. If these guys were going to use Blue Gene for nukes, they would say it on their propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm having a hard time determining if this article was written to be informative, cautionary, or sarcastic.
Buy a cheap key fob that stores a couple megs of data. The USB type.
Then put a password safe program on it. Make your passwords long and safe. Make it so you need the key fob to get into you accounts. You copy the first 32 chars (which were encrypted on the fob) from the fob and then add your short password to the end (or beginner, or middle) of the password and access your stuff.
"...allow companies to virtualize multiple operating systems."
Well, how would you describe it? "virtualize multiple operating systems" is exactly what it is doing.
All that other stuff is voodoo horse crap double talk. But in this case, they happen to be running multiple operating systems in separate virtual spaces. There is no better way to describe it.
Mb = Megabits MB = Megabytes
8Mb = 1MB
I hope this clears things up!
Seems to me that the developers are on the ball with this one. They get to requisition expensive iPods for, ahem, work. They also get media attention from slashdot. This is much sexier than burning knoppix.
So from what I gather, google is collecting every scrap of information about everything. This spans from the basic google websearch to google desktop search and eventually google e-mail searching (searching for anonymous content from within their growing gmail database).
When google takes over our web browsers, they will also be able to collect info on more than just what we are searching for -- they will know how we are finding desired content.
Pretty soon google will know everything about everyone. People won't have to bother with the trouble of defining ourselves in the real world anymore -- inspection and introspection of humans can be done through tomorrow's google. I presume it will be utopia.
I am wearing a tinfoil hat right now. What they are doing is perfectly legal. But I still think it is a bit scary.
I imagine that any story which is comprised mainly of pictures that is linked to by slashdot is bound to be brought to its knees before it knew what hit it.
So I've decided to describe the oddities for the slashdotters with active imaginations! Plus I need to work off some caffiene before I hit the sack.
(1) A pallid creature of diminutive size which is characterized by a body shaped like the blade of a pocket knife. The edges of the body form a fin which bears remarkable similarity to a feather. The GI tract is visible as a dark tunnel connecting the throat area and leading halfway down its body to where what appears to be a tiny foot is attached! The foot may actually be an anus, but I'm no biologist and I don't read cyrillic.
(2) This photo shows two beasties in a half meter wide container. The first is a dark, eel-looking fellow with a beaty eye that is glazed over in a sort of post-mortem or thickly armored haze. It is shaped like a bottle rocket -- the back is long , cylindrical, and thin and it has a cylindrical gut of larger diameter attached to the back. His mouth is open a little but no teeth show.
The other fellow is a white squid which has red highlights on its body. The red is probably a result of its blood and viscera being partially drained into its container, but it is difficult to tell from the picture. It looks like a giant, man eating squid from the movies, except it is not giant.
(3) This picture shows a fish held in the hands of a proud seaman. The fish is probably 20 pounds heavy. It is dark like a bottom feeder and has a menacing look about it. The rear half of the animal has a fin on top that looks like an inch tall mohawk. An inch or two without a mohawk separates the rear fin from a threatening dorsal fin. The front of the dorsal fin is shaped like the fang of a snake. It is curved back from vertical, thin, and looks like it could inject a deadly poison (probably doesn't though). He has a large eye which glows an eerie yellow color, probably due to the camera's flash. The mouth is not very clear. To add to this fish's badass appearence, it looks like it has won several knife fights and thick scars crease its body.
(4) This one is ugly. It is in the same type of container as described in picture (2). I imagine that it was once just a very fat fish made of pancake mix, and one day it was dropped on the skillet that is the ocean floor. It is smooshed vertically and resembles "blinky" from the classic Simpson's episode. However, instead of the warm yellow tint of our favorite family, this fish has a mixture of red, brown, and white tints on its body and its face is white like a brie cheese. Come to think of it, its face looks like Marlon Brando. Creepy indeed.
(5) This critter is a sight to behold! It looks like an criptocletus dinosaur on a smaller scale. It has hand and feet fins that look oars. But the best thing about this animal is that it has a beak. It reminds me of an elongated duckbill platypus' beak, except that it is made of flesh instead of a hardened material. Its eye is black and big. I have relatives who eat fish eyes and I'm sure that it would be a wonderful treat for them.
OK, thats all I can handle for now. I hope this helps paint the picture.
Don't forget the extra production required to translate a show for foreign audiences. I am surprised that it only took a few weeks to translate from english into english. If you've ever seen Snatch or Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels you know how difficult it can be to understand untranslated english.
It seems to me that a lot of people are saying "prices go up because people are greedy".
People are greedy. You are partially right. But that isn't the only reason prices go up. Prices also go up to support R&D and creating new fabs. Technicians are working every day to create new and better chips, and this costs money.
Big money.
Ask yourself why you need a 5 gigahertz processor when 1 GHz was plenty fast just a few years ago. If you were so concerned about money you could do your processing on a Motorola 68k.
What if it wasn't about corperate greed, but instead was about your inflated value of the newest and fastest things?
It also uses files, which is totally cheating. Without fi.write(), this guy would have to do a lot more work to have the computer convert a virtual address into the a device real address and accessing the filesystem implementation specific rules to carry out the necessary data and metadata operations to complete the task. And thats just the half of it.
Get a few good students to take part. Their friends will probably check it out too. The hard part is getting the first few students to look into it, but I have a solution for that too:
Make them do it.
OK, so it sounds nefarious and oppressive. Oh well, they are students and are used to it. Their parents make them bring the car home by 10, go to sleep by 12, wake up at 7, and eat their peas. At this stage in their life there aren't many people who are self motivated to do anything other than play video games, or whatever the latest popular thing is. But they are used to being told what to do, and sometimes they like what they are exposed to and tell their friends.
To sum up:
Make the activity fun.
Ask a few good students to attend and get things going.
Ask them to bring a friend next time. Get them to name a friend who they think would enjoy it before they leave the room -- this makes them more likely to actually ask.
If it really is good, they will come back.
Here is how you can get good results from Bake Offs:
Outline what you are testing, how the tests were set up, and let the results point you to a conclusion.
Use the conclusion to make other predictions. Test the predictions with another experiment.
Verify.
If a user sets the same problem up on their own, they should see the same results. If not, then something was cooked funny.
Personally, I look to independent sources for reviews. I would not trust claims made by a manufacturer.
The reviewer decides to bash book series that come out more frequently than once every four years, implying that they are just out for money.
Now, Robert Jordan is one thing. But if you can manage to get past that you will find some great series fantasy that does go to print more frequently. Some great examples are:
(1) George R R Martin's Song of Ice and Fire. This is my favorite series of all. The characters are realistic, the story draws you in, and the outcome is anything but expected. I could only wish that these books came out every month.
(2) Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game and Tales of Alvin Maker series. Card is a great storyteller who dreams up tales that capture your imagination with stories of what might have been or what might be.
(3) David Duncan's Tale of the King's Blades series mixes swordplay with interesting storylines. The books are truly exciting recounts of great adventures.
I'd just like to point out that some of the "other" series out there are more than just cash cows.
When will Robert Jordan ever finish his series?
Assume (for this post) that these devices actually work and improve the efficiency of city streets. This is why you can't find them on your block:
(1) Safety. A lot of effort is spent proving that a traffic control device is safe. When traffic lights screw up and allow opposing green lights, people die. It is entirely unacceptable for a traffic control device to screw up.
So when a city is faced with buying a proven design or a new advanced design that improves efficiency but may be a liability concern, the city will go with the proven design.
I concede that the new system would be tested endlessly, but I claim that any complex system will have flaws that don't show up until deployed in the field. I've seen unbreakable unix systems crash. It happens.
I think that provable safety in this application can (and will someday) be done. I just wouldn't want to be the first city adopting it.
So another option to ensure safety is redundancy such as that used in some airplanes. That is, multiple independant systems working on the traffic problem, and if any of them fail the others will notice. Doing this right costs money, which brings us to point 2.
(2) Cost. My city really doesn't even bother fixing road problems. I went to Berkeley CA the other day and they had enormous potholes that were "fixed" by painting bright colors around them so they could be avoided. If Berkeley doesn't want to spend a couple bucks to patch a hole, then why would your little town bother to consider removing existing systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and replace them with ones that probably cost more?
Further, why would you want your city to spend this money for a marginal improvement in flow? The answer is because some intersections are so terrible that you always are caught up in traffic. These intersections are the bottlenecks that hold up everybody, ones where 30% improved efficiency would be a blessing, which brings us to the 3rd point.
(3) This doesn't help the worst intersections. This switching system would be nice for those pesky lights in your neighborhood that always seem to be red when you arrive, and that you are always first in line and usually the only one to go through in your direction.
I claim that the intersections which could use a 30% improvement the most are those that would not be helped by this system. That is because no matter which side is getting green, every precious second of green light is being used by traffic. This is 100% efficiency, as measured by throughput / theoretical maximum throughput. You can not improve this system by watching for groups of cars, since there are always groups of cars coming.
This would be a neat feature on some intersections, but these intersections aren't the ones that DOT really focuses on improving. The effort involved in making small intersections intelligently switch lights isn't generally worth the cost of doing so.
That said, I'd like to see this in use in my neighborhood, and I'm glad that people are looking into solving traffic congestion problems.
I for one am glad to see Intel recognizing that they are no longer the only game in town.
If the world works like I believe it should, the competition between Intel and AMD will provide consumers with better products at lower prices.
For what its worth, the BTX board demoed on anandtech was a microBTX form factor -- which might explain the lack of expansion ports.
Dell is based out of Round Rock, Texas -- I picture their phone operators to look like Peter's neighbor Lawrence from Office Space.
"Well you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Just take a look at my cousin, he's broke, don't do shit."
I wouldn't hold it against them for not being able to spell linux.
"I did it for the worst possible reason, because I could."
This is all paraphrased, but it helps to answer the question of "why?". It also gets to the heart of this story -- it was done for the worst possible reason!
Not all customers will screw you over. Many of the will, but it isn't always helpful to mix customer relations with extreme skepticism.
Mission critical is no so much "this needs to happen of the company folds", but more "this needs to happen or (bridge collapses|spaceship crashes|patient dies)"
Agile is meant for projects where change is a fact of life. If your project has explicit, written in stone, unchanging goals then you should consider another design methodology.
Agile development focuses on rapid delivery of working (but not polished) software. It should be lightweight, but still accomplish the functional goal.
Agile projects should provide value long before they are finished. Each increment of functionality should be useful for a customer.
Agile is not meant for large teams. Agile does not work well with customers who can not provide frequent feedback. Agile is not optimal for projets which have stable needs that are known from the beginning. Agile is not a good choice for mission critical products.
These are the basics as taught to me, they may not be the same as presented in this book.
This reminds me of fuel injectors for cars. They are simply silicon valves that open and close hundreds of times per second depending on fuel needs. More info can be found at howstuffworks: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-injection3.htm One of the big problems of the auto industry is making engines burn fuel more efficiently. A lot of it has to do with how well the fuel and air mix before combusion. There may even be an application for this in car engines, if we replace single injectors with many thousands of little injectors. This would hopefully allow precise control of air/fuel mixtures which would reduce emissions, improve power, and improve engine efficiency. If this technology becomes ubiquitous, perhaps we could be looking at a new means of supplying fuel to your engine. There are a lot of steps between here and there, but there is still a good need for mechanical valves outside of the computer storage industries!
But you must remember, The Simpsons will never be cancelled. Therefore, storing every episode is truly a marvelous feat.
"a bunch of more wealthy less experienced people running the lives of the geeks who spent all their time aquiring the items." Well, that is how it works in the real world. Don't you read Dilbert?
Someone quoteable once said "don't believe everything that you read." Blue gene is unsuitable for nuclear weapons simulations because it has been designed specifically for protien fold calculations. Perhaps news.com has assumed that because LLNL has done major work with nulcear weapons simulations that they will use all of their computers for this purpose. Please take a minute to find some information from more reliable sources, such as IBM or DOE. If these guys were going to use Blue Gene for nukes, they would say it on their propaganda.