They've provided Guinness for blood donors (post donation) in Ireland for years, they used to also provide it to new mothers (lots of iron, makes you strong...) Give a pint of blood, get a pint (or three) of the durty old black.
"And, because a Sun Ray Client doesn't contain a disk drive or any means of persistent data storage, it's an unattractive target for theft."
And how do they think the average thief is going to know that it doesn't contain a disk drive? Probably be better off spray-painting it hot pink, that might make it an unattractive target.
Yes, unfortunately the Sun Ray Client laptops I've used have a similar form factor and weight to fat client laptops. A Sun Ray 2 doesn't look much like a PC, though it does look like a Wii which might make it a target for thieves. Either we need a dumb thief "How to tell if you're stealing a PC?" education program or we need to accept that there will be thieves and make sure they only get away with the hardware, not the data or software.
The amount of data in typical business documents and email now vastly exceeds the amount of data you need to push out to a thin client to provide a good user experience. Why not leave the hard drive and all of the data they contain in your home office and only take home the keyboard and screen to display it with (which DOES use an encrypted channel back to the data center). That's what my company does and if a Sun Ray thin client or Gobi laptop ever goes missing, so be it, pull another one off the shelf and keep typing where you left off.
It isn't that difficult. In 2003 I strapped two nearly identical Sony digital 8 camcorders together. I might have used duct tape but I don't remember it being that refined. I used Final Cut Express on a G3 laptop to merge the inputs into a single Red/Green video. Here are the results. Alignment wasn't perfect and as I said the camcorders weren't even identical, but your eyes can compensate somewhat and fill in the gaps to create an illusion of depth.
Another is seamlessly play of audio to and from a floppy drive for goodness sakes. XP SP3 seems to have destroyed the sound capability of my 2Ghz Wintel laptop, it no longer recovers after sleep (You want sound? reboot!) And when it does work it sounds like a warped 33RPM record. Seriously, I know we're probably pushing 32 bit stereo to the DAC now instead of 16 (or 8?) but should the fallback sound at least as good as the 7MHz Amiga did?
And to this day I don't understand how a 7Mhz processor ever played full screen video (even at crappy NTSC resolution) off a 1X CD ROM or a MFM/RLL hard drive with MPEG only a gleam in the motion picture industry's eye, but they did.
It's common knowledge (at least to Amigaphiles) that the 1985 Amiga was at least a decade ahead of the Microsoft game with hardware graphics, built in speech synthesis, preemptive multitasking... What surprises me is how many Amiga ideas died with the Amiga. Must the whole industry suffer from Microsoft's monopoly and Commodore's mismanagement? Here are some ideas I'm still waiting for:
To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...
Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.
Simple speech device. What could be easier than "LIST > speak:" to say a directory listing?
Bidirectional linked list filesystem. If you lose a sector or sector link, most of the file could be rebuilt by following links from both ends towards the bad sector. (Disk doctor)
The keyboard garage. The 1985 Amiga 1000 keyboard tucked neatly under the computer where it didn't take up desk space, was hidden from children's fingers and was spill-proof.
Tight integration of hardware with O.S. O.k. this works against everything we've been taught about abstracting everything but since the PC world has boiled down to little more than an O.S. monopoly, a hardware monopoly and a graphics card monopoly, why not eliminate some of the levels of abstraction that will never be used and make my 2Ghz PC perform every day tasks at least as well as my 7Mhz Amiga did?
Trust the T.S.A. They're Federalized [TM] which is howcome they're so smart. I mean they might have missed the underpants bomber who wasn't on the no fly list that the late Senator Ted Kennedy was on, but they nearly nabbed this guy. Now move along nothing to see here. We must protect ourselves from Polish^H^H^H Oceana^H^H^H Canadian agression.
I helped deploy a configuration of Sun's older Linux based Java Desktop System which allowed install, upgrade and configuration of 8000 desktops across hundreds of branch offices. It wasn't widely reported because Sun dropped this Linux based desktop to allow more focus on its own kernel and Sun Ray technology which easily allows more users per administrator. For Sun Ray desktops on Solaris I would imagine the ratio can be at least 10,000 to one.
"says massive digital archives are threatened by simple bit errors that can render whole files useless.
Isn't this what filesystem devs have been concentrating on for about 5 years now?
Not just 5 years. ZFS's CRC on every datablock and Raid Z (no raid hold) are innovative and obviously the next step in filesystem evolution. But attempts at redundancy aren't new. I'm surprised the article is discussing relatively low teck old hat ideas such as two filesystem headers. Even DOS's FAT used this raid0 type of brute force redundancy by having two FAT tables. The Commodore Amiga's Intuition filesystem did this better than Microsoft back in 1985 by having forward and backward links in every block which made it possible to repair block pointer damage by searching for a reference to the bad block in the preceding and following block.
And I suppose if ZFS doesn't catch on, 25 or 30 years from now Apple or Microsoft will finally come up with it and say, "Hey look what we invented!"
What is wrong with people who name new computer languages? Like it or not, google has become a defacto reference for coders. You can't remember the exact syntax of python string concatenation, Google it and see:
Results 1 - 10 of about 21,200 for python "string concatenation". (0.20 seconds)
And the relevant examples are bunched near the top of the first page. Now try the same for Go: Results 1 - 10 of about 50,000 for Go "string concatenation". (0.20 seconds) Of course none of them are relevant but you can see that Go coders are going to have a much worse Signal/Noise ratio.
The only thing I don't like about the processing language is its name:
Results 1 - 10 of about 45,900 for processing "string concatenation". (0.24 seconds)
Of course it come from a long history of google silly names like 'C' Results 1 - 10 of about 84,300 for C "string concatenation". (0.09 seconds)
Microsoft wasn't very smart here: Results 1 - 10 of about 157,000 for.net "string concatenation". (0.30 seconds)
Sun was better Results 1 - 10 of about 70,600 for Java "string concatenation". (0.19 seconds)
Now we're talking:
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,050 for fortran "string concatenation".
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,230 for cobol "string concatenation".
Of course those last two are much less popular languages but the S/N ratio of the pages you get when you search google for that is very high.
Google should have a naming contest for their new language. Come up with something unique like zarking00g
This was done long ago in what the September 1970 Popular Electronics magazine called, "The Experiment that saved Hi Fi". Then as now, Joe six-pack was accustomed to hearing noisy distorted music. In 1945 he was accustomed to hearing Billie Holiday and big band music with a freq cutoff of 5000Hz or so. If engineers hadn't second guessed Joe and redesigned the experiment FM radio would have always sounded almost exactly like AM radio.
(I once went one a round-the-world holiday. At Fiji's passport control, they gave us garlands, and serenaded us with guitars; at US passport control they growled at us.)
At Virgin Gorda my border card was not accepted because it wasn't done with a blue or black pen (sorry, dark purple ink looks black to me and no they wouldn't lend us a pen, so we were stuck for a while for the bizarre reason that one of their border agents has color hypersensitivity)
At the Republic of Korea, they divided us into male/female queues, emptying every purse of the females but letting most of the men through with huge backpacks.
In Japan and Spain, they plan on paying foreign visitors to go home.
In Ireland, I was refused a type of visa because my academic record wasn't in the form of a parchment diploma (would velum do?)
My point? Most national borders are frayed and reform is unlikely because those in a position to see the problem don't have a vote. And those who can vote are told, "We're just keeping you safe from the bad guy out there, all we need is more money and more power over your^H^H^H^Htheir rights."
You won't find a "100% English" person anywhere *now*. The idea is a myth.
The perfect place for a Jeff Foxworthy joke: "You might be a U.K. border DNA analyzer... if your family tree doesn't branch."
I was born in the U.S. but I visited the village of my ancestors, 3 generations ago in Belgium. The family name is Irish but I was unable to find a connection with Ireland at least back to the mid 1700s. What I did find was a relative with the same surname and a fairly strong family resemblance, a family grave from the time period of their great emigration. The relative had traced his branch of the tree back to Africa as all Europeans came from less than 3000 years ago (which really isn't that many begats when you get right down to it.)
I was researching a short story on Ireland bipolar view on asylum seekers and immigration (only good when we're the economic migrants!) I was looking for a name of an early Irish king, who divided Ireland into tiny self-sufficient plots and whose son killed his other son (sounds almost biblical, doesn't it). His name is Ugaine Mor but I don't think the name will be plausible in my story because to modern ears it sounds African, and it probably was. People got around in the days before jet transportation. This nonsense where we pretend we are united only because of our mitochondrial DNA is silly. Another study showed that most black Americans have more DNA in common with white Americans than they do with African blacks. If someone contributes to their nation/community, follows the laws to not tread on others and if they treat others in their community with respect... I don't care where they were born or what their DNA looks like. This is one of the things the U.S. gets (mostly) right, if those with a vested interest in border economics don't emulate this daft U.K. system.
I mean you can't be too careful, I mean the microSD in a typical phone could smuggle well over a million copies of the U.S. Bill of Rights over the border to Mexico. Someone over there might actually read the thing.
Fanboy worship, disdain for NIH, patent trolls and monopolies have put the brakes on OS evolution by discouraging the adoption of the best features of competing and legacy OSs. I don't mind when OSs die and I understand that companies die so that other companies can grow, but what kills me is when the best features of these old OSs die and either never return or come back decades later.
Apple brought itself back from the dead only by looking past the spinning pinwheel of NeXT waiting for an MOD write and recognizing the value in NeXTstep to be reused as OSX. Microsoft eventually recognized that GUIs, preemtive multitasking and TCP/IP protocols weren't just passing fads and eventually incorporated these into Windows 95. But it seems far more common to speak of one's own OS with religious fervor and ignoring the possibility of value in features the only exist in other dead or alive OSs.
My own favorite features which seemed to die with their OS/company...:
Where are the automatic version saves of VMS (O.K. OpenSolaris's ZFS has that and more but it's been 2 decades in waiting). I don't remember ever losing data or even worrying about losing data on our VMS computers even when we experienced power outages several times a day.
Where are the jitter free mouse movements, fast multitasking and sliding multiple screens of Amiga's intuition? Yes Amiga hardware was good, but modern hardware is much better. There is no reason we can't have the equivalent of 1985 technology.
And why does this demo cause my 2008 2.5GHz CPU to kick up to full speed and turn on the fan? It ran off a floppy on 7MHz 68000 based Amiga.
Why don't modern OSs have a mode where a kid can write a simple text or even a graphical game with a few dozen lines of code as they could with the BASIC interpretor and editor built into nearly every early 1980s 8 bit computer? Compare this to.NET or Apple's expensive and CPU hungry development environment. Yes you can do more with.NET and Objective C, but the learning curve and overhead are such that you're unlikely to see kids use them to write hangman or Star Trek games.
I'll never forget the PC fanboy in Byte magazine criticizing the original Amiga because it didn't have an AUTOEXEC.BAT. Because it was a preemptive multitasking OS from the beginning, it needed an OS startup (Startup-Sequence) and a startup for each user shell. I don't remember exactly how it worked but it was years ahead of cooperative multitasking in Windows until Windows 95 and it took Apple until 1999 to break away from MacOS's hideous cooperative multitasking architecture.
Amiga's device organization was nice. I especially liked the Speak device. Want a directory read to you? list > speak:
Amiga's filesystem used forward and backward linked lists between inodes. That provided more redundancy than having 2 FATs and allowed a disk to be repaired. BeOS uses a database instead of a flat filesystem which fits real world usage patterns more than typical filesystems do.
When you wanted to shutdown an Amiga, you just turned off the power switch and went home. This was true of many pre Windows 95 PC Operating systems.
O.K. Sorry if I sound like an Amiga fanboy, it's the 'dead' OS I know best.
A gas tax is a simple and extremely efficient way of encouraging taxpayers to carpool, avoid unnecessary long trips and avoid buying low mpg cars. A high gas tax also discourages sprawl and forces consumers to pay for the road, oil infrastructure and military required to support a car based society. If the gas tax is high enough, OPEC's leveraging power is reduced. When OPEC multiplied their oil prices by 1000%, those in countries where gas is heavily taxed were buffered from the full impact and the governments always have the option to temporarily reduce gas tax to reduce the impact of oil price volatility.
Oregon's gas tax is high and their 'job saving' requirement that all gas is full service also raises the price. (don't worry about the fact that state government meddling helped forced Oregon house prices well beyond the grasp of these gas station attendants). This Orwellian GPS plan simply increases complexity which increases bureaucracy which keeps Oregon's most protected class employed. But it will drive jobs and freedom-loving people out of Oregon and further drive their economy into ruin. Oregon and California are two of the most beautiful states in our country and they are both being efficiently and completely ruined by bad government.
...My theory about why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the
last few years is that the highly reliable hardware Sun
Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use
consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant...
You'll note that Google started building their cluster when oil was roughly $10/bbl and only the Sierra club and Greenpeace were concerned about global warming. Oil rose to more than $150/bbl, it's currently headed upwards of $70 and many countries (including the U.S.) are considering carbon taxes. Sun made a wise investment in Niagara chip multithread processors. No one else comes close to their throughput/watt and using a cluster of X86 boxes where your application needs throughput computing is like using cooking a pizza in 3 minutes by using 4 ovens whose combined temperature is 2000F.
Google's experiments with lowering their energy cost by moving their servers is not a good long term solution and their 'throw PCs at it' will only work up to a point. Consider the I^2R loss in the cables between PCs, consider the heat generated by 1000 power supplies (even if each is 95% efficient!) Consider that the bottleneck in many applications is throughput, but you have thousands of CPUs idling hot while they're waiting for I/O.
--- Linux || Windows +X86 is not the solution to every problem, but when all you know is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The mortality rate early on, in certain groups and certain places seemed higher than for typical flu. And the outbreak in Mexico was particularly bad. But it crossed my mind that if air pollution were a contributing factor to the mortality rate, there would be no incentive for local governments to report that. There are even studies showing that arsenic (e.g. from air or water pollution) effect the immune system and cause H1N1 outbreaks to be particularly severe.
5 REM The world's least efficient C64/iPhone Malware 10 FOR I = 40960 TO 65536 15 REM COPY ROM BASIC to shadow RAM 20 POKE I, PEEK(I) 30 SAVE PEEK(I),1 40 PRINT "Press Play and Record on tape!" 50 WAIT 6502,1 60 NEXT I 70 PRINT "Send tape to another iPhone user by POST, UPS or Winston the Pigeon"
As a science major, I felt a great disturbance in the force when Reaganomics shifted universities from learning and R&D institutions into glorified trade schools. The engineering and computer science programs were particularly overwhelmed by students whose talents and interests were elsewhere but whose counselors and student debt demanded that they get a degree in what's hot at the moment. A few years later it was MBA and we got a glut of substandard MBAs, then it was Law and I don't know what's next, but I don't think it serves any of us for students to ignore their talent and to have their focus driven, not by their personal aspirations or talent, but by the whims of the stock market their freshman year.
The same goes for basic scientific research. For the most part, in the U.S. funds for basic research is dried up. R&D instead is funded by those with a vested interest in getting the answer they want. "X- drug is safe and effective", "Tobacco is harmless", "Toxic waste is good for you."
IMHO U.S. university focus on the bottom line has turned them into trade-schools, ponzi schemes and country clubs. The fact that the price of university education has risen FAR faster than inflation convinced me that this is yet another bubble. Kudos to openuniversity and straighter to deflate this bubble before it blows up as spectacularly as dotcom and housing have.
At least this idea was previously published at Research Disclosure, a site intended as an inexpensive way to log prior art. It is the next logical step and I'm glad to see that companies are moving in that direction.
I've been scanning my family's color photographs preferentially over the older black and whites because many of them which are not even 30 years old have begun to fade into nothing.
Good plan. While the studies showing well stored Kodochrome longevity of over 200 years and silver B&W longevity approaching 1000 years haven't been proven. I've personally printed from glass negatives more than 70 years old and discovered that the camera optics were better back then (or rather, given F22 and a huge negative, the prints of a typical beach scene showed far more detail than any consumer level digital camera!
Exactly. Two of the ideas behind Fahrenheit 451 is that books should be preserved, and one way to preserve them is in the minds of people (literally, word-for-word memorization). So, how is putting books on the Internet, where they can be copied virtually infinitely, a bad thing?
And furthermore, putting a book on the Internet is like the ultimate preservation technique. Would that there had been some sort of Internet where books could be stored when the library of Alexandria burned!
F451 was misunderstood. I think Ray is more concerned with the balkanization of society where narrow-minded groups decide which book is valuable and which isn't. The Internet provides a perfect venue for t self-indulgent 'mind feedback'. A moon conspiracy enthusiast can spend all day on the web digging up research demonstrating the moon conspiracy, chatting only with other believers. A communist can carefully and efficiently filter the web to demonstrate that communism works. A library is too heavy, slow and solid for this to easily happen. Try to remove all books of a particular political flavor from a library, and you'll have to read nearly every book at multiple levels. Is "The Grapes of Wrath" pro socialist? Pro-communist? Is "Moby Dick" an environmentalist novel? Are modern biology or astronomy textbooks anti-Christian? You quickly run into the case where the whole library must be burned. The internet has enough noise that no one would notice 'the Firemen' pulling out content with depth beyond the shrill political zeitgeist. Right wingers can spend all day on foxnews.com, left wingers can happy choose from hundreds of news sources which feed them what they believe.
Ray has a point here. I've been working on a book which explains the problem with putting all our eggs in 'the Net' more clearly than I can explain here. Think of it this way, 30 years ago you could talk to your neighbor about what was on last night and chances are, you would've seen the same "All in the Family" or whatever. Now we have hundreds of channels on TV and on the internet, at least one 'channel' per individual. We can create our own reality and then find somewhere on the internet that will back it up. It is very fortunate that a library can't do that. Another thing a library can't do is make content disappear without anyone noticing.
Slashdot Mirror
They've provided Guinness for blood donors (post donation) in Ireland for years, they used to also provide it to new mothers (lots of iron, makes you strong...) Give a pint of blood, get a pint (or three) of the durty old black.
"And, because a Sun Ray Client doesn't contain a disk drive or any means of persistent data storage, it's an unattractive target for theft."
And how do they think the average thief is going to know that it doesn't contain a disk drive? Probably be better off spray-painting it hot pink, that might make it an unattractive target.
Yes, unfortunately the Sun Ray Client laptops I've used have a similar form factor and weight to fat client laptops. A Sun Ray 2 doesn't look much like a PC, though it does look like a Wii which might make it a target for thieves. Either we need a dumb thief "How to tell if you're stealing a PC?" education program or we need to accept that there will be thieves and make sure they only get away with the hardware, not the data or software.
The amount of data in typical business documents and email now vastly exceeds the amount of data you need to push out to a thin client to provide a good user experience. Why not leave the hard drive and all of the data they contain in your home office and only take home the keyboard and screen to display it with (which DOES use an encrypted channel back to the data center). That's what my company does and if a Sun Ray thin client or Gobi laptop ever goes missing, so be it, pull another one off the shelf and keep typing where you left off.
It isn't that difficult. In 2003 I strapped two nearly identical Sony digital 8 camcorders together. I might have used duct tape but I don't remember it being that refined. I used Final Cut Express on a G3 laptop to merge the inputs into a single Red/Green video. Here are the results. Alignment wasn't perfect and as I said the camcorders weren't even identical, but your eyes can compensate somewhat and fill in the gaps to create an illusion of depth.
Another is seamlessly play of audio to and from a floppy drive for goodness sakes. XP SP3 seems to have destroyed the sound capability of my 2Ghz Wintel laptop, it no longer recovers after sleep (You want sound? reboot!) And when it does work it sounds like a warped 33RPM record. Seriously, I know we're probably pushing 32 bit stereo to the DAC now instead of 16 (or 8?) but should the fallback sound at least as good as the 7MHz Amiga did? And to this day I don't understand how a 7Mhz processor ever played full screen video (even at crappy NTSC resolution) off a 1X CD ROM or a MFM/RLL hard drive with MPEG only a gleam in the motion picture industry's eye, but they did.
Trust the T.S.A. They're Federalized [TM] which is howcome they're so smart. I mean they might have missed the underpants bomber who wasn't on the no fly list that the late Senator Ted Kennedy was on, but they nearly nabbed this guy. Now move along nothing to see here. We must protect ourselves from Polish^H^H^H Oceana^H^H^H Canadian agression.
I helped deploy a configuration of Sun's older Linux based Java Desktop System which allowed install, upgrade and configuration of 8000 desktops across hundreds of branch offices. It wasn't widely reported because Sun dropped this Linux based desktop to allow more focus on its own kernel and Sun Ray technology which easily allows more users per administrator. For Sun Ray desktops on Solaris I would imagine the ratio can be at least 10,000 to one.
"says massive digital archives are threatened by simple bit errors that can render whole files useless.
Isn't this what filesystem devs have been concentrating on for about 5 years now?
Not just 5 years. ZFS's CRC on every datablock and Raid Z (no raid hold) are innovative and obviously the next step in filesystem evolution. But attempts at redundancy aren't new. I'm surprised the article is discussing relatively low teck old hat ideas such as two filesystem headers. Even DOS's FAT used this raid0 type of brute force redundancy by having two FAT tables. The Commodore Amiga's Intuition filesystem did this better than Microsoft back in 1985 by having forward and backward links in every block which made it possible to repair block pointer damage by searching for a reference to the bad block in the preceding and following block.
And I suppose if ZFS doesn't catch on, 25 or 30 years from now Apple or Microsoft will finally come up with it and say, "Hey look what we invented!"
What is wrong with people who name new computer languages? Like it or not, google has become a defacto reference for coders. You can't remember the exact syntax of python string concatenation, Google it and see:
Results 1 - 10 of about 21,200 for python "string concatenation". (0.20 seconds)
And the relevant examples are bunched near the top of the first page. Now try the same for Go:
Results 1 - 10 of about 50,000 for Go "string concatenation". (0.20 seconds)
Of course none of them are relevant but you can see that Go coders are going to have a much worse Signal/Noise ratio.
The only thing I don't like about the processing language is its name:
Results 1 - 10 of about 45,900 for processing "string concatenation". (0.24 seconds)
Of course it come from a long history of google silly names like 'C'
Results 1 - 10 of about 84,300 for C "string concatenation". (0.09 seconds)
Microsoft wasn't very smart here: .net "string concatenation". (0.30 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 157,000 for
Sun was better
Results 1 - 10 of about 70,600 for Java "string concatenation". (0.19 seconds)
Now we're talking:
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,050 for fortran "string concatenation".
Results 1 - 10 of about 3,230 for cobol "string concatenation".
Of course those last two are much less popular languages but the S/N ratio of the pages you get when you search google for that is very high.
Google should have a naming contest for their new language. Come up with something unique like zarking00g
This was done long ago in what the September 1970 Popular Electronics magazine called, "The Experiment that saved Hi Fi". Then as now, Joe six-pack was accustomed to hearing noisy distorted music. In 1945 he was accustomed to hearing Billie Holiday and big band music with a freq cutoff of 5000Hz or so. If engineers hadn't second guessed Joe and redesigned the experiment FM radio would have always sounded almost exactly like AM radio.
At Virgin Gorda my border card was not accepted because it wasn't done with a blue or black pen (sorry, dark purple ink looks black to me and no they wouldn't lend us a pen, so we were stuck for a while for the bizarre reason that one of their border agents has color hypersensitivity)
At the Republic of Korea, they divided us into male/female queues, emptying every purse of the females but letting most of the men through with huge backpacks.
In the U.K. they plan to take DNA samples and test for mitochondrial bloodlines
In Japan and Spain, they plan on paying foreign visitors to go home.
In Ireland, I was refused a type of visa because my academic record wasn't in the form of a parchment diploma (would velum do?)
My point? Most national borders are frayed and reform is unlikely because those in a position to see the problem don't have a vote. And those who can vote are told, "We're just keeping you safe from the bad guy out there, all we need is more money and more power over your^H^H^H^Htheir rights."
You won't find a "100% English" person anywhere *now*. The idea is a myth.
The perfect place for a Jeff Foxworthy joke: "You might be a U.K. border DNA analyzer... if your family tree doesn't branch."
I was born in the U.S. but I visited the village of my ancestors, 3 generations ago in Belgium. The family name is Irish but I was unable to find a connection with Ireland at least back to the mid 1700s. What I did find was a relative with the same surname and a fairly strong family resemblance, a family grave from the time period of their great emigration. The relative had traced his branch of the tree back to Africa as all Europeans came from less than 3000 years ago (which really isn't that many begats when you get right down to it.) I was researching a short story on Ireland bipolar view on asylum seekers and immigration (only good when we're the economic migrants!) I was looking for a name of an early Irish king, who divided Ireland into tiny self-sufficient plots and whose son killed his other son (sounds almost biblical, doesn't it). His name is Ugaine Mor but I don't think the name will be plausible in my story because to modern ears it sounds African, and it probably was. People got around in the days before jet transportation. This nonsense where we pretend we are united only because of our mitochondrial DNA is silly. Another study showed that most black Americans have more DNA in common with white Americans than they do with African blacks. If someone contributes to their nation/community, follows the laws to not tread on others and if they treat others in their community with respect... I don't care where they were born or what their DNA looks like. This is one of the things the U.S. gets (mostly) right, if those with a vested interest in border economics don't emulate this daft U.K. system.
I mean you can't be too careful, I mean the microSD in a typical phone could smuggle well over a million copies of the U.S. Bill of Rights over the border to Mexico. Someone over there might actually read the thing.
Apple brought itself back from the dead only by looking past the spinning pinwheel of NeXT waiting for an MOD write and recognizing the value in NeXTstep to be reused as OSX. Microsoft eventually recognized that GUIs, preemtive multitasking and TCP/IP protocols weren't just passing fads and eventually incorporated these into Windows 95. But it seems far more common to speak of one's own OS with religious fervor and ignoring the possibility of value in features the only exist in other dead or alive OSs.
My own favorite features which seemed to die with their OS/company...:
O.K. Sorry if I sound like an Amiga fanboy, it's the 'dead' OS I know best.
A gas tax is a simple and extremely efficient way of encouraging taxpayers to carpool, avoid unnecessary long trips and avoid buying low mpg cars. A high gas tax also discourages sprawl and forces consumers to pay for the road, oil infrastructure and military required to support a car based society. If the gas tax is high enough, OPEC's leveraging power is reduced. When OPEC multiplied their oil prices by 1000%, those in countries where gas is heavily taxed were buffered from the full impact and the governments always have the option to temporarily reduce gas tax to reduce the impact of oil price volatility.
Oregon's gas tax is high and their 'job saving' requirement that all gas is full service also raises the price. (don't worry about the fact that state government meddling helped forced Oregon house prices well beyond the grasp of these gas station attendants). This Orwellian GPS plan simply increases complexity which increases bureaucracy which keeps Oregon's most protected class employed. But it will drive jobs and freedom-loving people out of Oregon and further drive their economy into ruin. Oregon and California are two of the most beautiful states in our country and they are both being efficiently and completely ruined by bad government.
I'll take a look at OpenSolaris when there's at minimum 3 variants of it being developed.
Here is a list of 13 OpenSolaris distros as of March 2009:
...My theory about why has Sun Microsystems not done particularly well in the last few years is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant...
You'll note that Google started building their cluster when oil was roughly $10/bbl and only the Sierra club and Greenpeace were concerned about global warming. Oil rose to more than $150/bbl, it's currently headed upwards of $70 and many countries (including the U.S.) are considering carbon taxes. Sun made a wise investment in Niagara chip multithread processors. No one else comes close to their throughput/watt and using a cluster of X86 boxes where your application needs throughput computing is like using cooking a pizza in 3 minutes by using 4 ovens whose combined temperature is 2000F.
Google's experiments with lowering their energy cost by moving their servers is not a good long term solution and their 'throw PCs at it' will only work up to a point. Consider the I^2R loss in the cables between PCs, consider the heat generated by 1000 power supplies (even if each is 95% efficient!) Consider that the bottleneck in many applications is throughput, but you have thousands of CPUs idling hot while they're waiting for I/O.
--- Linux || Windows +X86 is not the solution to every problem, but when all you know is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
The mortality rate early on, in certain groups and certain places seemed higher than for typical flu. And the outbreak in Mexico was particularly bad. But it crossed my mind that if air pollution were a contributing factor to the mortality rate, there would be no incentive for local governments to report that. There are even studies showing that arsenic (e.g. from air or water pollution) effect the immune system and cause H1N1 outbreaks to be particularly severe.
5 REM The world's least efficient C64/iPhone Malware
10 FOR I = 40960 TO 65536
15 REM COPY ROM BASIC to shadow RAM
20 POKE I, PEEK(I)
30 SAVE PEEK(I),1
40 PRINT "Press Play and Record on tape!"
50 WAIT 6502,1
60 NEXT I
70 PRINT "Send tape to another iPhone user by POST, UPS or Winston the Pigeon"
As a science major, I felt a great disturbance in the force when Reaganomics shifted universities from learning and R&D institutions into glorified trade schools. The engineering and computer science programs were particularly overwhelmed by students whose talents and interests were elsewhere but whose counselors and student debt demanded that they get a degree in what's hot at the moment. A few years later it was MBA and we got a glut of substandard MBAs, then it was Law and I don't know what's next, but I don't think it serves any of us for students to ignore their talent and to have their focus driven, not by their personal aspirations or talent, but by the whims of the stock market their freshman year.
The same goes for basic scientific research. For the most part, in the U.S. funds for basic research is dried up. R&D instead is funded by those with a vested interest in getting the answer they want. "X- drug is safe and effective", "Tobacco is harmless", "Toxic waste is good for you."
IMHO U.S. university focus on the bottom line has turned them into trade-schools, ponzi schemes and country clubs. The fact that the price of university education has risen FAR faster than inflation convinced me that this is yet another bubble. Kudos to openuniversity and straighter to deflate this bubble before it blows up as spectacularly as dotcom and housing have.
At least this idea was previously published at Research Disclosure, a site intended as an inexpensive way to log prior art. It is the next logical step and I'm glad to see that companies are moving in that direction.
I've been scanning my family's color photographs preferentially over the older black and whites because many of them which are not even 30 years old have begun to fade into nothing.
Good plan. While the studies showing well stored Kodochrome longevity of over 200 years and silver B&W longevity approaching 1000 years haven't been proven. I've personally printed from glass negatives more than 70 years old and discovered that the camera optics were better back then (or rather, given F22 and a huge negative, the prints of a typical beach scene showed far more detail than any consumer level digital camera!
Kodochrome has also proven itself as these photos taken during the Great Depression demonstrate. Honestly, we didn't need to remake the Great Depression in color, it has already been filmed in glorious Kodachrome color.
Exactly. Two of the ideas behind Fahrenheit 451 is that books should be preserved, and one way to preserve them is in the minds of people (literally, word-for-word memorization). So, how is putting books on the Internet, where they can be copied virtually infinitely, a bad thing? And furthermore, putting a book on the Internet is like the ultimate preservation technique. Would that there had been some sort of Internet where books could be stored when the library of Alexandria burned!
F451 was misunderstood. I think Ray is more concerned with the balkanization of society where narrow-minded groups decide which book is valuable and which isn't. The Internet provides a perfect venue for t self-indulgent 'mind feedback'. A moon conspiracy enthusiast can spend all day on the web digging up research demonstrating the moon conspiracy, chatting only with other believers. A communist can carefully and efficiently filter the web to demonstrate that communism works. A library is too heavy, slow and solid for this to easily happen. Try to remove all books of a particular political flavor from a library, and you'll have to read nearly every book at multiple levels. Is "The Grapes of Wrath" pro socialist? Pro-communist? Is "Moby Dick" an environmentalist novel? Are modern biology or astronomy textbooks anti-Christian? You quickly run into the case where the whole library must be burned. The internet has enough noise that no one would notice 'the Firemen' pulling out content with depth beyond the shrill political zeitgeist. Right wingers can spend all day on foxnews.com, left wingers can happy choose from hundreds of news sources which feed them what they believe.
Ray has a point here. I've been working on a book which explains the problem with putting all our eggs in 'the Net' more clearly than I can explain here. Think of it this way, 30 years ago you could talk to your neighbor about what was on last night and chances are, you would've seen the same "All in the Family" or whatever. Now we have hundreds of channels on TV and on the internet, at least one 'channel' per individual. We can create our own reality and then find somewhere on the internet that will back it up. It is very fortunate that a library can't do that. Another thing a library can't do is make content disappear without anyone noticing.