AngularJS for the front-end, served from S3. Pyramid for backend API, ImageResizer and Pipeline processes, on autoscaling EC2 infra with many other AWS native services. Infrastructure defined with Troposphere to generate CloudFormation.
Oh, oh... maybe I could contribute the "sitting in endless meetings discussing the same problems and action items" module. Or the "write documentation and for management to evaluate it's quality by weight" module. Or a randomizer that multiplies software development time by some value between 3 and 10...
(bitter bitter bitter... large bureacuracies suck)
I used qmail-ldap to build a service which has had zero downtime in over a year, planned or unplanned. I had a handful of 1U servers offering SMTP(S), IMAP(S), POP(S), WebMail, and local DNS and LDAP caches. They stored mail on a backend NetApp accessible to all servers via NFS. One master LDAP server was where accounts were added, and it replicated to the cache slaves on each 1U server. I can add capacity to the NetApp, and add servers to handle load with no downtime. The 1U servers are fronted by a redundant pair of F5 load balancers.
We were able to apply OS patches box-by-box, taking them out of service individually, but without any downtime to the service. Very nice.
Others are using qmail-ldap for large ISPs, of the size you are asking about. Check out their mailing list.
Similar food-lab experimentation is being done at Cafe Atlantico's "Mini Bar" in Washington DC (chef Jose Andres is an alumnus of El Bulli); it's a real treat for food nerds. When we ate there, Harold McGee (food scientist and author of _On Food and Cooking_) sat next to us.
Also at Alinea in Chicago. Haven't eaten there yet, but will in a few weeks. Check out these incredible photos of the food they serve:
Gawd, more fake food. Don't we get that already from McDonalds, Kraft, Budweiser et al? This junk is not good for you and long-term health effects are only partially known.
I strongly recommend the page-turner _Fast Food Nation_. If you're more hard core, read Marion Nestle's _Food Politics_. Also worthwhile (and sadly funny) is the movie _Super Size Me_.
The opposite of this tech-no-food is the Slow Food movement; seek out the farmers, stores and restaurants that support there ideals.
And fercrissakes, start cooking with real ingredients instead of buying processed transfat salt licks made by chemical plants in New Jersey.
This seems very similar to Network Appliance's Filer "SnapMirror" product. It copies changed disk blocks across the net to another system, for disaster recover purposes mainly, but could also be used for read-only use (e.g., publishing). NetApp's license fees for this feature are huge, like $40K per side I think.
I'd really like to use this for backup and disaster recovery. Couple it with FreeBSD's snapshot and you have a large part of the NetApp functionality.
I went to TigerDirect's web site, filled in the comment form telling them I thought their lawsuit was silly and anticompetitive legal nonsense, and that I would no longer shop at their site.
I may not be able to influence the so-called Intellectual Propertly law(lessness) in the U.S. but I can vote with my wallet. Perhaps if businesses who prefer to legislate than innovate are impacted financially, they'll concentrate on the innovation and shrink their legal departments.
To find "interesting" targets, run an image processor over the images looking for lack of detail -- portions without lots of high-frequency information. This would find the Whitehouse, adjacent buildings like the OEOB, the Capitol.
I'd be curious what other buildings have been so well obscured.
Years ago, when I did robotics, we had force/torque sensors on the robot grippers. The actual sensor portion is tiny and requires no actual *movement* -- similar to the Thinkpad mouse-stick. It seems like it would be trivial to build such a sensor directly into the keyboard, to sense X and Y as well as downward pressure. You could instrument the keyboard itself or the case. This could be quite cheap, but I've never seen such a thing.
> In about a year, we'll have an Internet Standard for IM and prescence (and an open one, at that)!
Yeah, and in 6 months, Microsoft will roll out an IM system which steals all its ideas from the Standard, except that it will break one small but critical thing. This will be rolled into the next XP security update, thus exploiting their monopoly further -- everyone with have MSJabber and not be able to talk to "real" Jabber. Just like Kerberos, Just like DNS, Just like HTML... Vomit.
If the lawers are going to blame P2P software developers for (some) unlawful use, then certainly they must hold Microsoft accountable for all the costly damage done by their shoddy coding being taken over by virus writers and their spammers.
I expect there are a lot more infected Windows users than on all the P2P networks combined, and that they are routinely used to commit breaking and entering, denial of service, unlawful and unauthorized use of another's resources, illegal transmission of objectionable material, theft of private documents, etc, etc.
I don't get the appeal. I've used 'em, and I like the zero-admin aspect of thin clients. But I've been doing the same with diskless X Terminals for 10 years, and lately, diskless net-booting FreeBSD boxes. Like the SunRay, something like a diskless VIA EPIA is silent and zero-admin: it just works, has access to all the stuff on the boot/NFS server. Any such machine in the house has access to the same stuff, like the SunRay does.
Oh, I don't have a "smartcard" to store my stuff on like the SunRays do. Guess I'll have to use that USB memory stick that someone gave me for free instead.
What's the attraction? On a diskess box, the box itself does much of the work, so the boot/NFS server just has to worry about serving files. The SunRay server, from the PR and people here, can't handle many clients cuz the server is doing ALL the work. Doesn't scale.
So why is Sun's porting SunRay server SW to Linux better than just booting a cheap box from a Linux or *BSD? It's still proprietary, and IMHO the architecture doesn't scale. And you still have to buy non-commodity SunRays.
If you look at their "shared" source, and later write open source code, you may find their lawyers at your door. "intellectual property theft" and all that. Stay away.
Besides, all you're gonna learn is how to write bloated, slow, vulnerable code anyway.:-)
I was fortunate enough to work with some smart researchers about 10 years ago, showing them the then-very-new web. They were excited about using it as a research publishing mechanism but the journals didn't get it: they thought it couldn't be serious research without peer review, etc. Of course, peer review is quite possible on the net, in fact, facilitated by it. So they wrote a paper about it and surprisingly, BMJ published it:
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening:
The musky scent of aging paper in our medical libraries still evokes an
atmosphere of scholarship. But the cloistered peace of the stacks is
increasingly punctured by the faint sounds of the coming revolution: the
clicks, beeps, and whirrs of computers linked to the internet.
I have a VIA EPIA 6000 running in the kitchen; it boots FreeBSD-5.x diskless over the net and gets its filesystems from my main box. It's silent and zero-maintenance. I would think you could do likewise for a cluster.
A pile of diskless, low-power, low-waste-heat boxes, all booting the same boot image diskless from a main (control) box, all reading/writing their data to NFS shares.
Problem with putting a bunch of mobos in a 1-6U box is replacing them and downtime: to add/remove a mobo, you have to drop the entire cluster. If instead you rigged a rack where boards could be slotted in, connect to power and ethernet on the back, then you could add and remove nodes at will. This would allow you to scale up power or replace dead boards. Seems you could almost have the board slotting in (like a NetApp disk drive) getting net directly to the mini-ITX connectors. I haven't worked out how to do this for power; would be nice if the mobo mfgrs would put fingers on the circuit board edges so they could slot into a card connector (uh, like S-100 bus?:-)
I'm a consultant working as a contractor for NASA. I've been involved in writing two pieces of code we use here which were based on open-source tools. I'd like to give these back to the community, since they helped us, and I think are generally useful: one's an "SSL VPN" (reverse proxy into intranet web and SMB fileshares, in Java); the other's a Web GUI front end for adminning a qmail-ldap mail cluster, in PHP.
I'm having a heck of a time finding what NASA's position is on giving the code away. Issues presented have been code security (what if my login page can be hacked?) and contractor vs. government ownership (but the contractor got paid for the work, right?).
Still working through the process, hoping the code will see the light of day before it becomes obsolete/irrelevant.
It's hardly a coincidence that Bush-2.0 is proposing this in an election year. The states that would most benefit financially -- states with NASA Centers -- include states with some of the largest number of electoral votes: Florida (KSC), California (ARC, JPL, DFRC), Texas (JSC).
The only thing he hasn't done to capitalize on this is to declare the creation of the Ronald Reagan Space Flight Center in New York, the one remaining mega-electoral state without a Center.
I find it interesting that OSX gets *faster* with each release, while WinDoze gets slower and more bloated with each release.
On the other hand, WinBloat causes friends to give me hardware that won't run current MSware fast enough, but it's plenty fast to run ISPs, servers, and desktops with FreeBSD:-)
Until word processors stop encouraging people to do WYSIAYG (what you see is all you get) content creation, you will never be able to get useful content out of the document. MS Office and most others cause you to spend your time fiddling the look-n-feel, setting some lines in bigger fonts, or making other sections in italics. Instead, the author should specify text-sections as DocumentTitle or BookTitle and let the word processor format it. Then, XML would have useful tags denoting semanticly meaningful areas of text; seeing junk like FONT BIGGER WIGGLY ORANGE makes a mockery of markup. TeX and even HTML try to encourage concept-based markup; WYSIAYG does not.
Of course there's no reason they couldn't replace those font, style, justification, color, and "effects" buttons with ones for title, paragraph, quote, and so on. Or more abstract ones like parent, seealso, etc. But I can't see that happen: everyone likes to dork around with the format instead of concentrating on the content -- form over function. Sigh.
I heard a talk by visual communications guru Edward Tufte; he said MS had hired him as a consultant to design the Windows interface. After he pointed out it was ugly, hard to use, and distractingly full of gawdy decorations -- and offered many ideas for improvement -- they got rid of him.
A favorable comparisonany of useability to Microsoft's is a dubious honor at best Maybe the article title could be "KDE sucks as much as XP". I'm not trying to bash KDE, but human factors hasn't been a priority for them (nor MS) as it has obviously been for Apple. Recall Sun's usability analysis of Gnome from a year or two back?
Reminds me of this quote:
I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone.
My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
--Bjarne Stronstrup (originator of C++ programming language)
There's another book, by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones called _StarOffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion_. It's on Sun Press. Reviews and comments can be found at
amazon
Perhaps the point is not so much to "enhance" the soldier. Who needs living humans when you've deployed tens of thousands of meat puppets who are not only quite capable of gatherering information electronically after death, but also routing it over their borg-like network to the DoD mothership. And do you really believe these e-uniforms won't also be fitted with a remotely-controlled suicide mode, with enough blast to take out a nearby target?
Slashdot Mirror
AngularJS for the front-end, served from S3. Pyramid for backend API, ImageResizer and Pipeline processes, on autoscaling EC2 infra with many other AWS native services. Infrastructure defined with Troposphere to generate CloudFormation.
Oh, oh... maybe I could contribute the "sitting in endless meetings discussing the same problems and action items" module. Or the "write documentation and for management to evaluate it's quality by weight" module. Or a randomizer that multiplies software development time by some value between 3 and 10... (bitter bitter bitter... large bureacuracies suck)
I used qmail-ldap to build a service which has had zero downtime in over a year, planned or unplanned. I had a handful of 1U servers offering SMTP(S), IMAP(S), POP(S), WebMail, and local DNS and LDAP caches. They stored mail on a backend NetApp accessible to all servers via NFS. One master LDAP server was where accounts were added, and it replicated to the cache slaves on each 1U server. I can add capacity to the NetApp, and add servers to handle load with no downtime. The 1U servers are fronted by a redundant pair of F5 load balancers.
We were able to apply OS patches box-by-box, taking them out of service individually, but without any downtime to the service. Very nice.
Others are using qmail-ldap for large ISPs, of the size you are asking about. Check out their mailing list.
OFAC is a great, groundbreaking book. It was revised and greatly enlarged in November 2004.
4 800012/qid=1125427399/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-395811 0-4765764?v=glance&s=books
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068
Similar food-lab experimentation is being done at Cafe Atlantico's "Mini Bar" in Washington DC (chef Jose Andres is an alumnus of El Bulli); it's a real treat for food nerds. When we ate there, Harold McGee (food scientist and author of _On Food and Cooking_) sat next to us.
Also at Alinea in Chicago. Haven't eaten there yet, but will in a few weeks. Check out these incredible photos of the food they serve:
Gawd, more fake food. Don't we get that already from McDonalds, Kraft, Budweiser et al? This junk is not good for you and long-term health effects are only partially known.
I strongly recommend the page-turner _Fast Food Nation_. If you're more hard core, read Marion Nestle's _Food Politics_. Also worthwhile (and sadly funny) is the movie _Super Size Me_.
The opposite of this tech-no-food is the Slow Food movement; seek out the farmers, stores and restaurants that support there ideals.
And fercrissakes, start cooking with real ingredients instead of buying processed transfat salt licks made by chemical plants in New Jersey.
I'd really like to use this for backup and disaster recovery. Couple it with FreeBSD's snapshot and you have a large part of the NetApp functionality.
I may not be able to influence the so-called Intellectual Propertly law(lessness) in the U.S. but I can vote with my wallet. Perhaps if businesses who prefer to legislate than innovate are impacted financially, they'll concentrate on the innovation and shrink their legal departments.
I'd be curious what other buildings have been so well obscured.
Years ago, when I did robotics, we had force/torque sensors on the robot grippers. The actual sensor portion is tiny and requires no actual *movement* -- similar to the Thinkpad mouse-stick. It seems like it would be trivial to build such a sensor directly into the keyboard, to sense X and Y as well as downward pressure. You could instrument the keyboard itself or the case. This could be quite cheap, but I've never seen such a thing.
Cool candle-shaped lights. They recharge when they sit on their base station but it's not a direct electrical contact.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/5cf5/
Yeah, and in 6 months, Microsoft will roll out an IM system which steals all its ideas from the Standard, except that it will break one small but critical thing. This will be rolled into the next XP security update, thus exploiting their monopoly further -- everyone with have MSJabber and not be able to talk to "real" Jabber. Just like Kerberos, Just like DNS, Just like HTML... Vomit.
http://os.newsforge.com/os/04/05/03/1520209.shtml? tid=2&tid=82&tid=94
If the lawers are going to blame P2P software developers for (some) unlawful use, then certainly they must hold Microsoft accountable for all the costly damage done by their shoddy coding being taken over by virus writers and their spammers.
I expect there are a lot more infected Windows users than on all the P2P networks combined, and that they are routinely used to commit breaking and entering, denial of service, unlawful and unauthorized use of another's resources, illegal transmission of objectionable material, theft of private documents, etc, etc.
What's the difference?
I don't get the appeal. I've used 'em, and I like the zero-admin aspect of thin clients. But I've been doing the same with diskless X Terminals for 10 years, and lately, diskless net-booting FreeBSD boxes. Like the SunRay, something like a diskless VIA EPIA is silent and zero-admin: it just works, has access to all the stuff on the boot/NFS server. Any such machine in the house has access to the same stuff, like the SunRay does.
Oh, I don't have a "smartcard" to store my stuff on like the SunRays do. Guess I'll have to use that USB memory stick that someone gave me for free instead.
What's the attraction? On a diskess box, the box itself does much of the work, so the boot/NFS server just has to worry about serving files. The SunRay server, from the PR and people here, can't handle many clients cuz the server is doing ALL the work. Doesn't scale.
So why is Sun's porting SunRay server SW to Linux better than just booting a cheap box from a Linux or *BSD? It's still proprietary, and IMHO the architecture doesn't scale. And you still have to buy non-commodity SunRays.
If you look at their "shared" source, and later write open source code, you may find their lawyers at your door. "intellectual property theft" and all that. Stay away. Besides, all you're gonna learn is how to write bloated, slow, vulnerable code anyway. :-)
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/archive/6991ed2.htm
I love the opening:
A pile of diskless, low-power, low-waste-heat boxes, all booting the same boot image diskless from a main (control) box, all reading/writing their data to NFS shares.
Problem with putting a bunch of mobos in a 1-6U box is replacing them and downtime: to add/remove a mobo, you have to drop the entire cluster. If instead you rigged a rack where boards could be slotted in, connect to power and ethernet on the back, then you could add and remove nodes at will. This would allow you to scale up power or replace dead boards. Seems you could almost have the board slotting in (like a NetApp disk drive) getting net directly to the mini-ITX connectors. I haven't worked out how to do this for power; would be nice if the mobo mfgrs would put fingers on the circuit board edges so they could slot into a card connector (uh, like S-100 bus? :-)
I'm having a heck of a time finding what NASA's position is on giving the code away. Issues presented have been code security (what if my login page can be hacked?) and contractor vs. government ownership (but the contractor got paid for the work, right?).
Still working through the process, hoping the code will see the light of day before it becomes obsolete/irrelevant.
The only thing he hasn't done to capitalize on this is to declare the creation of the Ronald Reagan Space Flight Center in New York, the one remaining mega-electoral state without a Center.
I find it interesting that OSX gets *faster* with each release, while WinDoze gets slower and more bloated with each release. On the other hand, WinBloat causes friends to give me hardware that won't run current MSware fast enough, but it's plenty fast to run ISPs, servers, and desktops with FreeBSD :-)
Of course there's no reason they couldn't replace those font, style, justification, color, and "effects" buttons with ones for title, paragraph, quote, and so on. Or more abstract ones like parent, seealso, etc. But I can't see that happen: everyone likes to dork around with the format instead of concentrating on the content -- form over function. Sigh.
A favorable comparisonany of useability to Microsoft's is a dubious honor at best Maybe the article title could be "KDE sucks as much as XP". I'm not trying to bash KDE, but human factors hasn't been a priority for them (nor MS) as it has obviously been for Apple. Recall Sun's usability analysis of Gnome from a year or two back?
Reminds me of this quote:
There's another book, by Solveig Haugland and Floyd Jones called _StarOffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion_. It's on Sun Press. Reviews and comments can be found at amazon
Perhaps the point is not so much to "enhance" the soldier. Who needs living humans when you've deployed tens of thousands of meat puppets who are not only quite capable of gatherering information electronically after death, but also routing it over their borg-like network to the DoD mothership. And do you really believe these e-uniforms won't also be fitted with a remotely-controlled suicide mode, with enough blast to take out a nearby target?