I've latterly been thinking about the googlization of everything digital. I've latterly also been thinking about the spread of botnets (Storm, Kraken and the like). This has led me to conclude there is a Google Black Ops department intent on replacing Google's vast server farms with users' own PCs - i.e., Google aims covertly to use our computers as its hardware!
From Google's perspective it makes perfect sense to use idle cycles on Aunt Harriet's aging Dell to serve googlicious applications to an eager populace. Why shouldn't she host your gmail account?
The whole concept can even be justified from an environmental point of view: scaling is naturally proportional to demand and load-spreading is extremely efficient. In the long term, Google won't need any of its own hardware other than expensive corporate buildings equipped with limitless executive toys and a few dumb terminals. Hell, we're beginning to see that already. Everyone benefits.
As for the the spam emanating from botnets, this is a mere smoke-screen (or should I say cloud-screen?) designed to keep us off the scent.
The cock-up theory of history is widely believed. What better way, then, for administrations to circumvent the law and get away with it than by means such as this?
Plausible incompetence is just as useful a smokescreen as plausible deniability.
Speaking as a materialist, I propose that ESP (or telepathy) does not make evolutionary
sense. If any person had truly been born with anything like such a gift in
the distant past, even in quite a modest and partial form, the selective
advantage would have ensured that the necessary genes would have spread
throughout the population. Also, the faculty would have been improved by
natural selection to become a standard sense. We wouldn't need to recognise
the phenomenon by looking at billions of statistical datapoints, it would
be obvious to all that it existed as it would be part of universal common
experience.
Bad luck. It has been shown that nothing is more effective for longer
periods than DEET, but you must cover every exposed area as mosquitoes
will still go for DEET-free islands in a sea of DEET. It's well worth
reading Fradin and Day's 2002 NEJM review (PDF) of
repellents.
The mosquitos in Athens might be becoming bigger and meaner, but
you probably won't catch anything off them other than an annoying itch.
However, if visiting tropical areas (or (possibly) NYC), it is essential
to avoid mosquito-borne disease. Therefore, as well as covering up and
DEETing as recommended as far as is feasible in the daytime, you should (i) bring, and
use without fail, a mosquito net every night; (ii) take effective
malaria prophylaxis. (Malaria is always unpleasant and frequently
fatal: other such diseases (like dengue) can't be treated at all, so
preventing bites is an important strategy.) Homeopathic "remedies" don't
work. Consult a qualified physician before setting off.
Note that M13 is a bacteriophage, a kind of virus that can only infect bacteria. M13 gets into E. coli via long proteinaceous protuberances known as pili, such as those encoded by the fertility factor F. In a crude analogy, M13 is to E coli what Herpes simplex is to humans.
And another thing. I hope these guys are working on rechargeable versions: I don't want to see landfills getting choked with literally millions of discarded M13-batteries. Won't somebody think of the children?
Dealing with parent's point about the origin of the universe first, that
is clearly nothing to do with the evolution of life on one small planet.
The fundamental silliness of the "First Cause" problem (basically if it
is claimed that the universe needs a First Cause, i.e., God, and that
nothing caused God because he always existed, why not cut out the
middle god and simply argue that space/time always existed?) has
been exposed convincingly by philosophers. See Why
I Am Not A Christian by Bertrand Russell for a comprehensive and
accessible (though admittedly flawed in places) rebuttal of many of the
pro-theistic arguments.
As for ideas about evolution, Darwin convincingly countered most of the
so-called intelligent design arguments over a century ago in "Origin of
Species". Essentially the answer is that given huge stretches of
geological time, an excess of fecundity over resources, and natural
selection, even complex structures such as eyes, livers and Slashdot
editors will emerge. ID arguments that rely on calculations of
probability have totally (if not wilfully) missed the point. For a more
up-to-date and/.-oriented argument arguing the case for evolution by
natural selection, I recommend Darwin's
Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. Consequently today, the vast
majority of biologists subscribe to the following tenets:
The Earth is over four billion years old and life has existed here for most of that time
Evolution has demonstrably occurred: fact, not theory, proved a million times over
There is strong evidence favouring natural selection as the main driver of evolution
Ditto sexual selection in the case of peacocks etc
Adherence to these tenets is extremely unlikely ever to change because
the observable facts are so overwhelmingly in favour of them. Faith?
Of course, but hugely evidence-based and no more a stretch than (for
example) belief in gravity, the prior existence of dinosaurs and the inevitability of death. If ID gains
sway in the US, well, the country may suffer in the same way as the USSR did
when it adopted the politically-motivated but provably wrong doctrine of
Lysenkoism. Incidentally, Darwin also -- completely ignorant of genes
and DNA -- suggested the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Mendel and his successors showed that random mutation was the
fundamental process creating diversity. But the central core of the
theory of natural selection remains scientifically unchallenged.
Here's a potential stop-gap solution: provide two md5sums per file, one
of the whole file as normal, and one of the file offset by one byte.
Let's look at the two hash-equivalent files cited by parent:
Clearly this would not work with all collisions (nothing useful would), but it might hugely
limit their frequency. And it would be relatively easy to tag on tables of
1-byte offset md5sums to existing md5sum tables out there.
Just for the record, my intention wasn't to equate the voracity
of the
two quotations. I was merely pointing out that the
choice of words in the new quote triggered a
reflex memory of the old one.
The Sun guy's claim is right, but it's quite an
alarming image through which to publicise
a bit of software. A bit like, "Drink Coke -- capable of
dissolving your
teeth overnight!"
I broke the habit of a lunchtime and RTFA. According to Jeff Bonwick,
the chief architect of ZFS, "populating 128-bit file systems would exceed
the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit
storage pool without boiling the oceans."
Who else instantly thought of, "640 K ought to be enough for anybody",
uttered by the chief architect of twenty years of chaos?
Don't forget, large corporations are amoral by nature, and any morality
they display is either dictated by statute or is a side effect of their
applying the profit motive. If IBM thought it made better business sense
to side with SCO rather than mass against it, it would. Follow the
money.
Fortunately, because of the GPL, globalisation and the internet,
GNU/Linux or some other functionally equivalent free OS will tend
to survive, even if in the future IBM (for good business reasons)
decides to change its stance.
Totally agree. Is KDE worth the bloat? I think not.
My RH 7.2 machine, (KDE 2.2, 124K, 10Gb, 1000MHz Celeron) came with KDE
installed by default, so I used it for a couple of years. On a whim, I
recently installed icewm. The difference was staggering: a much faster,
cleaner interface; a large choice of one-key window operations; a vastly
more comprehensible configuration. Apart from the following bizarre
anomaly under icewm:
$ time kstart/usr/bin/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program/soffice -p file.doc
(it turned out that somehow kstart was protecting me from the (scandalously underpublicised) pspfontcache bug, easily
fixed) I lost NOTHING except eye chewing gum
(kandy?), and gained a faster machine. AND I can still run all the
KDE and gnome applications.
Yes, I know the latest KDE is better than all its predecessors, but I
want faster, smaller and less buggy, not more features. (I only briefly
dabbled with gnome and it seemed to be little different.) There is a
place for KDE et al, however, largely for those converting from Windows
and out-and-out CLIphobes. Good luck to them, but let's celebrate the
range of choices we have.
Yes. Why do you think MS chose
the whimsically converse word
Longhorn
to signify the development version of desktop
Windows? Someone at MS clearly
has a sense of humour. We know it can't be
BillyG, so that leaves... who?
Damn! You beat me to it! I am so amazed that Cordwainer Smith (1913-1966) has featured so poorly here that I decided to de-lurk. Smith is highly original and inventive, and arguably the most literate SF author who hasn't emerged from (or been co-opted into) the mainstream. "A Planet Named Shayol" is probably the best SF short story ever written, a Dante's "Inferno" on drugs. "Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons" is also a classic tale of attempted sabotage, one of the few SF stories to give minks (yes, minks) a leading role. Unlike most SF, his stories have a deep moral (though not preachy -- I hate preachy) outlook: they are scattered with puns, allusions and allegories. I suspect the nearest SF equivalent to Smith would be Philip K Dick, an author I also admire, with elements of Olaf Stapleton mixed in.
It may be that people in the future will not be kept alive for exactly 400 years by injections of stroon, an immortality drug produced by enormous genetically-engineered sheep from the North Australian colony of Norstrilia. It may also be that interstellar travel will not be pioneered by lining spacecraft with layers of animals to alleviate the effects of the Great Pain of Space. Even so, Smith will make you consider these and other entertainingly weird possibilities.
Most of his sadly limited output was set in a bizarre but consistent universe, culminating in the Instrumentality of Mankind: here's a timeline.
Explore the Cordwainer Smith canon. You'll either love it or hate it. Unfortunately, most of Smith's paperbacks are out of print, and "The Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer Smith" (ISBN: 0915368560) seems only to be available in hardback. Try your local library or secondhand book emporium.
Slashdot Mirror
Too soon.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=957645&cid=24930055
I've latterly been thinking about the googlization of everything digital. I've latterly also been thinking about the spread of botnets (Storm, Kraken and the like). This has led me to conclude there is a Google Black Ops department intent on replacing Google's vast server farms with users' own PCs - i.e., Google aims covertly to use our computers as its hardware!
From Google's perspective it makes perfect sense to use idle cycles on Aunt Harriet's aging Dell to serve googlicious applications to an eager populace. Why shouldn't she host your gmail account?
The whole concept can even be justified from an environmental point of view: scaling is naturally proportional to demand and load-spreading is extremely efficient. In the long term, Google won't need any of its own hardware other than expensive corporate buildings equipped with limitless executive toys and a few dumb terminals. Hell, we're beginning to see that already. Everyone benefits.
As for the the spam emanating from botnets, this is a mere smoke-screen (or should I say cloud-screen?) designed to keep us off the scent.
I, for one, salute our new Gotnet overlord.
Typical. I've only just finished printing out the current Internet.
Every night I back up the internet to my RAID array to protect myself from this and similar eventualities.
It's only a skinny laptop. Get over it.
The cock-up theory of history is widely believed. What better way, then, for administrations to circumvent the law and get away with it than by means such as this?
Plausible incompetence is just as useful a smokescreen as plausible deniability.
But, hey, thanks for trying.
Bad luck. It has been shown that nothing is more effective for longer periods than DEET, but you must cover every exposed area as mosquitoes will still go for DEET-free islands in a sea of DEET. It's well worth reading Fradin and Day's 2002 NEJM review (PDF) of repellents.
The mosquitos in Athens might be becoming bigger and meaner, but you probably won't catch anything off them other than an annoying itch. However, if visiting tropical areas (or (possibly) NYC), it is essential to avoid mosquito-borne disease. Therefore, as well as covering up and DEETing as recommended as far as is feasible in the daytime, you should (i) bring, and use without fail, a mosquito net every night; (ii) take effective malaria prophylaxis. (Malaria is always unpleasant and frequently fatal: other such diseases (like dengue) can't be treated at all, so preventing bites is an important strategy.) Homeopathic "remedies" don't work. Consult a qualified physician before setting off.
Note that M13 is a bacteriophage, a kind of virus that can only infect bacteria. M13 gets into E. coli via long proteinaceous protuberances known as pili, such as those encoded by the fertility factor F. In a crude analogy, M13 is to E coli what Herpes simplex is to humans. And another thing. I hope these guys are working on rechargeable versions: I don't want to see landfills getting choked with literally millions of discarded M13-batteries. Won't somebody think of the children?
Interesting to see him using venetian blinds -- doesn't he like Windows?
As for ideas about evolution, Darwin convincingly countered most of the so-called intelligent design arguments over a century ago in "Origin of Species". Essentially the answer is that given huge stretches of geological time, an excess of fecundity over resources, and natural selection, even complex structures such as eyes, livers and Slashdot editors will emerge. ID arguments that rely on calculations of probability have totally (if not wilfully) missed the point. For a more up-to-date and /.-oriented argument arguing the case for evolution by
natural selection, I recommend Darwin's
Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett. Consequently today, the vast
majority of biologists subscribe to the following tenets:
Adherence to these tenets is extremely unlikely ever to change because the observable facts are so overwhelmingly in favour of them. Faith? Of course, but hugely evidence-based and no more a stretch than (for example) belief in gravity, the prior existence of dinosaurs and the inevitability of death. If ID gains sway in the US, well, the country may suffer in the same way as the USSR did when it adopted the politically-motivated but provably wrong doctrine of Lysenkoism. Incidentally, Darwin also -- completely ignorant of genes and DNA -- suggested the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Mendel and his successors showed that random mutation was the fundamental process creating diversity. But the central core of the theory of natural selection remains scientifically unchallenged.
Just for the record, my intention wasn't to equate the voracity of the two quotations. I was merely pointing out that the choice of words in the new quote triggered a reflex memory of the old one. The Sun guy's claim is right, but it's quite an alarming image through which to publicise a bit of software. A bit like, "Drink Coke -- capable of dissolving your teeth overnight!"
Who else instantly thought of, "640 K ought to be enough for anybody", uttered by the chief architect of twenty years of chaos?
Fortunately, because of the GPL, globalisation and the internet, GNU/Linux or some other functionally equivalent free OS will tend to survive, even if in the future IBM (for good business reasons) decides to change its stance.
My RH 7.2 machine, (KDE 2.2, 124K, 10Gb, 1000MHz Celeron) came with KDE installed by default, so I used it for a couple of years. On a whim, I recently installed icewm. The difference was staggering: a much faster, cleaner interface; a large choice of one-key window operations; a vastly more comprehensible configuration. Apart from the following bizarre anomaly under icewm:
(it turned out that somehow kstart was protecting me from the (scandalously underpublicised) pspfontcache bug, easily fixed) I lost NOTHING except eye chewing gum (kandy?), and gained a faster machine. AND I can still run all the KDE and gnome applications.Yes, I know the latest KDE is better than all its predecessors, but I want faster, smaller and less buggy, not more features. (I only briefly dabbled with gnome and it seemed to be little different.) There is a place for KDE et al, however, largely for those converting from Windows and out-and-out CLIphobes. Good luck to them, but let's celebrate the range of choices we have.
If you use Unix-style mailboxes (and who doesn't?) use of grepmail is
/tmp/beebox
highly recommended. You can do things like:
$ grepmail -d "between Jan 13 and March 7" -i "crenellated beehives" mbox >
This will create a Unix mailbox with all messages containing
"crenellated beehives" (ignoring case) sent between the dates specified.
grepmail has lots of other filters available, and, being written
in Perl, is, er, easily extensible.
Yes. Why do you think MS chose the whimsically converse word Longhorn to signify the development version of desktop Windows? Someone at MS clearly has a sense of humour. We know it can't be BillyG, so that leaves ... who?
Damn! You beat me to it! I am so amazed that Cordwainer Smith
(1913-1966) has featured so poorly here that I decided to de-lurk.
Smith is highly original and inventive, and arguably the most literate
SF author who hasn't emerged from (or been co-opted into) the
mainstream. "A Planet Named Shayol" is probably the best SF short story
ever written, a Dante's "Inferno" on drugs. "Mother Hitton's Littul
Kittons" is also a classic tale of attempted sabotage, one of the few SF
stories to give minks (yes, minks) a leading role. Unlike most
SF, his stories have a deep moral (though not preachy -- I hate preachy)
outlook: they are scattered with puns, allusions and allegories. I
suspect the nearest SF equivalent to Smith would be Philip K Dick, an
author I also admire, with elements of Olaf Stapleton mixed in.
It may be that people in the future will not be kept alive for
exactly 400 years by injections of stroon, an immortality drug produced
by enormous genetically-engineered sheep from the North Australian
colony of Norstrilia. It may also be that interstellar travel will
not be pioneered by lining spacecraft with layers of animals to
alleviate the effects of the Great Pain of Space. Even so, Smith will make you
consider these and other entertainingly weird possibilities.
Most of his sadly limited output was set in a bizarre but consistent
universe, culminating in the Instrumentality of Mankind: here's
a timeline.
Explore the Cordwainer Smith canon. You'll either love it or hate it.
Unfortunately, most of Smith's paperbacks are out of print, and "The
Rediscovery of Man: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cordwainer
Smith" (ISBN: 0915368560) seems only to be available in hardback.
Try your local library or secondhand book emporium.