I assume they will want to have more than one copy of this for backup purposes. Here is my analysis on their choices. The total data to be backup up (for the month) is taken as a lazy
1 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 gigabytes
Printed hardcopy. Many authorities recommend this as you do not need to worry about changes in data formats over time. For exact calculation, we would need to know the font they were planning to use and the character encoding. However, let's take a working assumption that they can cram 10KB of data onto an A4 sheet. That implies 259,200,000,000,000 pages. They will probably not want to use an inkjet printer if they use this solution and may, indeed, choose to acquire multiple printers and split the load. A single printer at 10 ppm would take approximately 50,000 years to complete the backup. On 70gm paper, it would weigh a little over two million tons. At any rate, this would certainly produce reams of output.
Diskettes. This was good enough for nearly everyone 15 years ago. It is curious that such a tried and trusted technique is no longer in fashion. I assume regular 3.5" 1.44MB diskettes, generally recognised as easier to handle than 5.25". We shall need around 1,800,000,000 diskettes. One drawback is the person changing the diskettes as each one filled up might become a little bored after a while. On the positive side, the backup will be quite a lot faster than the printed solution. Assuming about one diskette per minute, inclusive of changing disks, the backup could be complete in less than 3,500 years.
Now considered somewhat old fashioned, punch cards were once a mainstay of every programmer's personal backups. Like printed hardcopy, anyone familiar with the character encoding used, could read the data without needing any access to a computer. If we assume 80 column cards, we would need 32,400,000,000,000 cards. I would be somewhat concerned about the problem of getting this stack of cards back in the correct order if I dropped it. With a weight of about 30 million tons and stretching perhaps 6 million miles end to end, handling certainly would be challenging and an accident very possible.
Paper (punched) tape was the only alternative on the first computer I used, a basic early model Elliott 803 without the optional magnetic tape. If I recall correctly, you could manage about 10 characters per inch, so you would need a paper tape over 4,000,000,000 miles long. Hmmm, that would be silly. The other solutions are clearly better.
I am sure other options will be considered, but I just wanted to bring these up in case CERN had failed to consider them
The invasion was designed to spread liberty and democracy, as shown by the administration's statements before and during the invasion, by their utter shock at the widespread looting when they disbanded the Iraqi army, and by their continuing surprise at the armed resistance they met.
Sure. If the objective was to benefit a few individuals and corporations, they would have come straight out and said that. The public would have had no problem with the idea of spending hundreds of billions of dollars and accepting thousands of US deaths (along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths) to line the pockets of a small clique.
Amusingly, things would have been better if Iraq had been a Halliburton sock puppet. Texas oil men do not take kindly to pipelines and power plants being blown up, nor to commerce being disrupted.
While in the immediate aftermath of the invasion the Iraqi population and most of its infrastructure was left unprotected, the US made strenuous attempts to protect the Oil Ministry and its facilities. Most of the "civilian contractors" (what used to be called mercenaries) employed since have been doing their upmost to protect those facilities. When most of the population is against you, it is surprisingly difficult to prevent sabotage of remote facilities. Haliburton could not care less about the bulk of the power grid, which is the reason it is in complete ruins, and electric power generation is mostly left to local entrpreneurs.
Nowhere? I suspect the Kurds, marsh Arabs, Iraqi Olympic team, and a whole slew of others would disagree. Things are not really that bad, they're just getting their Wild West phase of development compressed into a few years.
The Kurds had been enjoying autonomy for many years before the 2003 invasion. From 2003 until early 2006, the situation for them was little changed from what it had been before. Recently, especially in the towns, they have been suffering from the same breakdown in security that now afflicts most of the rest of Iraq. The marsh Arabs suffered terrible persecution immediately following the first Gulf War (though it is not generally recognised that terrible massacres were also carried out by marsh Arabs against the general population). The West had no business encouraging the rebellion by the marsh Arabs, that led to massive reprisals, when unwilling to support the effort militarily. By 2003, those reprisals were long over. The environmental degredation was done, and has not been reversed since 2003. You are right about the Olympic team. Anything is better than being at the mercy of Udai Hussein. However, try to find a single quote from any national sports team member supportive of the US occupation. I can point you at many that are extremely critical.
As for your suggestion that the current mayhem is some kind of Wyatt Earp phase, I cannot believe anyone can be that deluded. Maybe your whole post was some kind of troll?
This means in no way that Muslims have any sort of monopoly on violence -- they're just willing to take their own lives.
The existence of the Muslim suicide bomber is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the Iran-Iraq war of the early 1980s, Iran was getting severely beaten by the superior Iraq army. Waves of suicide bombers were used in the defense of their country. It was more a nationalist than a religious act.
Prior to 1980, suicide bombings existed (for instance, among the Buddhist and Christian Viet Kong) albeit in lesser numbers than today.
Insofar as there is a pattern in the motivation of suicide bombers, it is almost always motivated by misplaced idealism. It is usually the act of someone who wishes to resist massive perceived injustice and sees no other way of doing it.
It should be no surprise that the "shock and awe" tactics of the US military creates suicide bombers. By emphasising the invincible nature of the US, when challenged in a conventional manner, it encourages the view that only extreme non-conventional actions can have results.
If people really want to understand the psyche of the suicide bomber, and escape popular and inaccurate stereotypes, they need to search for reliable research. Some does exist. See The Hard Truth About Suicide Bombers By Nichole Argo for a recent example.
All this is reasonable, except for one small detail. The anomolies occurred primarily in precincts that used voting machines. None of your theories suggest to me a good reason why voters should be less honest about their voting habits purely because they voted using machines.
You have also, incidentally, given a damn good description of the Bush 43 administration, who by historical standards are fringe radical hyper-leftists. No conservative would invade a barbarian land, with a woefully underfunded and understaffed army, and expect instant civilization.
I assume you are referring to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. There are several misconceptions here.
First, neither the occupation of Afghanistan or of Iraq had anything to do with creating "instant civilization", except as useful political spin to influence a mindless US electorate who have about as much knowledge of those countries as they do of the Eagle Nebula.
The action in Afghanistan was largely a knee jerk reaction to the existence of terrorist training camps there. The decision to invade to eliminate those was understandable, though in my view misguided. What was criminally negligent, having invaded, was the failure to make any effort to bring true security and development to the country. Unfortunately, for that country and for the world at large, the US had other priorities, which leads is on to...
The invasion of Iraq was designed to benefit a few individuals and corporations at the expense of everyone else. It is maddening to me that seemingly intelligent individuals can still believe any of the ludicrous justifications that were advanced. [Digression: the US has created a situation in Iraq now where there may actually be good reasons to stay; there were no good reasons for going in in the first place.] As usual, war creates tremendous opportunities for arms suppliers, and others providing services to the occupying forces (via what is typically a highly corrupt process). In Iraq, there was the additional incentive of a huge oil industry to divvy up. Those who benefitted did not have to bear the huge costs of the invasion, in both financial and human terms.
What was the system in Iraq that the invasion purported to replace? It was a fairly stable, dictatorial, secular system. For anyone who tried to involve themselves in politics, it was highly unpleasant. During periods of war, it was highly unpleasant for those forced to fight. For religious extremists, it was highly unpleasant. For the rest of the population, it was mostly fine in spite of years of war and economic sanctions. Any threat Iraq posed to the rest of the world had long been neutralized by 2003.
Since the invasion, Iraq has been changed from a relatively civilized society to an ideal breeding ground for extremists. All the terrorists and religious fanatics that were kept out of the country, or strictly controlled, prior to 2003 are now in the driving seat. In some cases, the US invited them in. Probably two million have fled the country, including over half of the most educated. Women, who less than five years ago enjoyed greater freedom than anywhere else in the region, are now little better off than their sisters in Afghanistan. Religious police prowl the streets, extremists man checkpoints, women working almost anywhere are risking their lives by doing so. The situation varies widely from area to area, but is nowhere better for the general population than prior to 2003.
You must provide the source code, on request, to anyone who received the product. You can elect only to distribute to customers, but any customer can distribute that code on to anyone else, and they in turn can pass it on. Thus, it is quite possible (even likely) that people who have not paid for it have a copy and are therefore entitled to ask for source code.
Full virtualization, as used in Xen, VMware and VirtualBox, has performance issues that are not yet well understood, but thought to revolve around dramatically increased L2 cache misses. I am not aware that any changes are in the works to fully resolve this.
Operating system virtualization, as used for instance in OpenVZ has far better performance characteristics. This is the way to go at the moment for efficient and low cost data center support of Linux. The problem is that all virtual environments must be using the same kernel, which makes it less useful for software testing.
It is true that Xen requires special hardware to legally run MS Windows. It is also better for performance, generally, to have such hardware. However, there is nothing stopping you from running Xen on pretty much any computer you are likely to own as long as the VMs are Linux based.
If your patent should be granted, other companies working in the same area after you submit the application will not jeopardize that in any way. In fact, these other companies become a major source of future license fees. Any venture capitalist worth his salt that can be convinced you have valid patents in areas of interest to large companies is going to be very interested. Problems exist only if the process of getting approval takes too long. Time, in this case, becomes very expensive.
You should be delighted by this initiative. It is voluntary for the patent applicant, but guarantees the application will be dealt with far faster should you opt in.
It may well be that WGA allows Linux/Wine on the basis that it is too difficult to check if a valid Windows is being used alongside it. It would not surprise me, though, if the test machine was dual boot and WGA properly validated the available Windows system.
WGA has become pretty sophisticated this year, as recently has OGA. I strongly suspect that the observed behavior is by design, though Microsoft may now choose to change it.
It is a fact that you will not be able to mix code distributed under GPLv2 without the "or later version" option and code licensed under GPLv3 in the same program. How much of a problem this turns out to be in practice is as yet unknown. However, it is not misinformation to point out that a real issue may exist.
The article quotes Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, as saying plants lack cognition and memory. Has this been definitively demonstrated? I seem to remember experiments 20, 30 years ago that suggested this might be untrue.
Also, GPL3 software can use GPL2 software without a problem
If the license says "GPL Version 2 or later, then you are correct. Some code does not have the "or later", including the Linux kernel as a whole (some pieces are also available under different licenses). The fact is that GPL3 and GPL2 are not compatible licenses. Much GPL2 code can be used with GPL3 only because it is licensed in a way that allows RMS to change the license. No GPL3 code can be inserted into GPL2 code. My opinions are very close to Mr Torvalds'. I think GPL3 is political, a knee jerk reaction to events in the market that RMS and some others are opposed to philosophically. It is a mistake.
I am wondering how this might effect travelers arriving in the US with such a phone. I would imagine only a vanishingly small minority would have any idea what semiconductors powered their phone. It would certainly be a shock to arrive and have your phone confiscated.
When you incorporate GPLv2 code (that does not state "or later") into your code, you must provide those to whom you distribute all the rights in the GPLv2 license. You cannot do that, when you incorporate the code into a GPLv3 program, as the GPLv3 license is more restrictive.
As long as the software you want to pick from is GPLv2 or later, that is fine. The problem is that, if you have GPLv3 code and want to incorporate some GPLv2 code into it, that will not be allowed. The biggest issue with GPLv3 is just that. It undoes the hard work of many years trying to harmonise the major OSS licenses and reintroduces incompatibility.
Superficially, this seems an interesting project. I think, though, the problems with managing open source software on Windows are going to be very different to those on Linux: possibly to the point where what you can achieve will be limited.
The first issue that occurs to me immediately is that Windows has no single suitable native package management system that you can hook onto. Because of this, program installations tend either to (i) include whatever prerequisites they need and check whether their installation is necessary; or (ii) list the prerequisites in the installation instructions and leave it up to the user to ensure they are satisfied. Now, you might say that the whole point of the project is to resolve this, but I think you are going to run into licensing problems when you try. Let's say a particular open source product relies on.NET Framework 2. Are you then going to include.NET Framework 2 in your repository? Are you going to download it from Microsoft, using Microsoft's Download Center as a kind of adjunct repository? Are you going to talk to Microsoft to see if they will cooperate in working out a solution? This seems hard.
I do think that a single starting point for finding quality open source solutions on Windows has merit. Right now there is a bewildering mass of products out there, and no easy way of sifting the gems from the dross. If nothing else, you might be able to provide a good menu of open source products that are deemed worthy of consideration.
If you want a state of the art games machine, Ubuntu is the wrong base anyway. Sure, the latest NVidia and ATI graphics cards are far more powerful, but the Intel cards have quite enough oomph for anything you will want to run on Linux desktop in practice, even Beryl.
I am personally delighted that Dell is offering good practical machines that should just work. People who buy these should end up as happy customers. In the long term, that is good for both Dell and Linux.
Microsoft figured out (via a combination of legal and illegal moves) how to ensure that consumer PCs shipped with MS Windows. They also ensured that the system gave a good first impression. Once the average user has used a system for a few days, they
cannot generally see the drawbacks of the system: they assume that the quirks and problems are just an inevitable part of computing;
do not want to learn something new.
In developing countries, if software piracy can be stamped out, there may be an economic incentive to use of Linux and other free (as in beer) products. In richer countries, the MS tax is not a serious issue (and, as implied above) users do not understand that the more serious economic effects of malware are a Windows only phenomenon.
Network director Phil Webb goes on to recommend that their customers install security software, along with telling them that they shouldn't call up to complain. One might suggest that they need to practice what they preach."
A few comments:
They almost certainly were using security software. The problem is that it is awfully difficult to judge effective security software from the much more common snake oil that is out there.
There is a decent chance that the breach was not the fault of the security software but some kind of human error. They probably made the common mistake of assuming all they had to do was install firewall, intrusion detection and anti-malware tools and they were magically fully protected.
This kind of event will probably become commonplace. There is a lot of money to be made, the crackers are technically more competent than much of the sysadmin community, and they only need to attack at the weakest points.
Slashdot Mirror
- Printed hardcopy. Many authorities recommend this as you do not need to worry about changes in data formats over time. For exact calculation, we would need to know the font they were planning to use and the character encoding. However, let's take a working assumption that they can cram 10KB of data onto an A4 sheet. That implies 259,200,000,000,000 pages. They will probably not want to use an inkjet printer if they use this solution and may, indeed, choose to acquire multiple printers and split the load. A single printer at 10 ppm would take approximately 50,000 years to complete the backup. On 70gm paper, it would weigh a little over two million tons. At any rate, this would certainly produce reams of output.
- Diskettes. This was good enough for nearly everyone 15 years ago. It is curious that such a tried and trusted technique is no longer in fashion. I assume regular 3.5" 1.44MB diskettes, generally recognised as easier to handle than 5.25". We shall need around 1,800,000,000 diskettes. One drawback is the person changing the diskettes as each one filled up might become a little bored after a while. On the positive side, the backup will be quite a lot faster than the printed solution. Assuming about one diskette per minute, inclusive of changing disks, the backup could be complete in less than 3,500 years.
- Now considered somewhat old fashioned, punch cards were once a mainstay of every programmer's personal backups. Like printed hardcopy, anyone familiar with the character encoding used, could read the data without needing any access to a computer. If we assume 80 column cards, we would need 32,400,000,000,000 cards. I would be somewhat concerned about the problem of getting this stack of cards back in the correct order if I dropped it. With a weight of about 30 million tons and stretching perhaps 6 million miles end to end, handling certainly would be challenging and an accident very possible.
- Paper (punched) tape was the only alternative on the first computer I used, a basic early model Elliott 803 without the optional magnetic tape. If I recall correctly, you could manage about 10 characters per inch, so you would need a paper tape over 4,000,000,000 miles long. Hmmm, that would be silly. The other solutions are clearly better.
I am sure other options will be considered, but I just wanted to bring these up in case CERN had failed to consider themAs for your suggestion that the current mayhem is some kind of Wyatt Earp phase, I cannot believe anyone can be that deluded. Maybe your whole post was some kind of troll?
Prior to 1980, suicide bombings existed (for instance, among the Buddhist and Christian Viet Kong) albeit in lesser numbers than today.
Insofar as there is a pattern in the motivation of suicide bombers, it is almost always motivated by misplaced idealism. It is usually the act of someone who wishes to resist massive perceived injustice and sees no other way of doing it.
It should be no surprise that the "shock and awe" tactics of the US military creates suicide bombers. By emphasising the invincible nature of the US, when challenged in a conventional manner, it encourages the view that only extreme non-conventional actions can have results.
If people really want to understand the psyche of the suicide bomber, and escape popular and inaccurate stereotypes, they need to search for reliable research. Some does exist. See The Hard Truth About Suicide Bombers By Nichole Argo for a recent example.
All this is reasonable, except for one small detail. The anomolies occurred primarily in precincts that used voting machines. None of your theories suggest to me a good reason why voters should be less honest about their voting habits purely because they voted using machines.
First, neither the occupation of Afghanistan or of Iraq had anything to do with creating "instant civilization", except as useful political spin to influence a mindless US electorate who have about as much knowledge of those countries as they do of the Eagle Nebula.
The action in Afghanistan was largely a knee jerk reaction to the existence of terrorist training camps there. The decision to invade to eliminate those was understandable, though in my view misguided. What was criminally negligent, having invaded, was the failure to make any effort to bring true security and development to the country. Unfortunately, for that country and for the world at large, the US had other priorities, which leads is on to ...
The invasion of Iraq was designed to benefit a few individuals and corporations at the expense of everyone else. It is maddening to me that seemingly intelligent individuals can still believe any of the ludicrous justifications that were advanced. [Digression: the US has created a situation in Iraq now where there may actually be good reasons to stay; there were no good reasons for going in in the first place.] As usual, war creates tremendous opportunities for arms suppliers, and others providing services to the occupying forces (via what is typically a highly corrupt process). In Iraq, there was the additional incentive of a huge oil industry to divvy up. Those who benefitted did not have to bear the huge costs of the invasion, in both financial and human terms.
What was the system in Iraq that the invasion purported to replace? It was a fairly stable, dictatorial, secular system. For anyone who tried to involve themselves in politics, it was highly unpleasant. During periods of war, it was highly unpleasant for those forced to fight. For religious extremists, it was highly unpleasant. For the rest of the population, it was mostly fine in spite of years of war and economic sanctions. Any threat Iraq posed to the rest of the world had long been neutralized by 2003.
Since the invasion, Iraq has been changed from a relatively civilized society to an ideal breeding ground for extremists. All the terrorists and religious fanatics that were kept out of the country, or strictly controlled, prior to 2003 are now in the driving seat. In some cases, the US invited them in. Probably two million have fled the country, including over half of the most educated. Women, who less than five years ago enjoyed greater freedom than anywhere else in the region, are now little better off than their sisters in Afghanistan. Religious police prowl the streets, extremists man checkpoints, women working almost anywhere are risking their lives by doing so. The situation varies widely from area to area, but is nowhere better for the general population than prior to 2003.
You must provide the source code, on request, to anyone who received the product. You can elect only to distribute to customers, but any customer can distribute that code on to anyone else, and they in turn can pass it on. Thus, it is quite possible (even likely) that people who have not paid for it have a copy and are therefore entitled to ask for source code.
I would be interested in knowing your assumptions, test streams and the hardware configuration. Several carefully executed benchmarks of real world scenarios that I have seen do not tally with what you are claiming. For instance, see Performance Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Server Consolidation and Diagnosing Performance Overheads in the Xen Virtual Machine Environment
Operating system virtualization, as used for instance in OpenVZ has far better performance characteristics. This is the way to go at the moment for efficient and low cost data center support of Linux. The problem is that all virtual environments must be using the same kernel, which makes it less useful for software testing.
It is true that Xen requires special hardware to legally run MS Windows. It is also better for performance, generally, to have such hardware. However, there is nothing stopping you from running Xen on pretty much any computer you are likely to own as long as the VMs are Linux based.
You should be delighted by this initiative. It is voluntary for the patent applicant, but guarantees the application will be dealt with far faster should you opt in.
WGA has become pretty sophisticated this year, as recently has OGA. I strongly suspect that the observed behavior is by design, though Microsoft may now choose to change it.
It is a fact that you will not be able to mix code distributed under GPLv2 without the "or later version" option and code licensed under GPLv3 in the same program. How much of a problem this turns out to be in practice is as yet unknown. However, it is not misinformation to point out that a real issue may exist.
The article quotes Susan Dudley, associate professor of biology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, as saying plants lack cognition and memory. Has this been definitively demonstrated? I seem to remember experiments 20, 30 years ago that suggested this might be untrue.
If the license says "GPL Version 2 or later, then you are correct. Some code does not have the "or later", including the Linux kernel as a whole (some pieces are also available under different licenses). The fact is that GPL3 and GPL2 are not compatible licenses. Much GPL2 code can be used with GPL3 only because it is licensed in a way that allows RMS to change the license. No GPL3 code can be inserted into GPL2 code. My opinions are very close to Mr Torvalds'. I think GPL3 is political, a knee jerk reaction to events in the market that RMS and some others are opposed to philosophically. It is a mistake.
I am wondering how this might effect travelers arriving in the US with such a phone. I would imagine only a vanishingly small minority would have any idea what semiconductors powered their phone. It would certainly be a shock to arrive and have your phone confiscated.
When you incorporate GPLv2 code (that does not state "or later") into your code, you must provide those to whom you distribute all the rights in the GPLv2 license. You cannot do that, when you incorporate the code into a GPLv3 program, as the GPLv3 license is more restrictive.
As long as the software you want to pick from is GPLv2 or later, that is fine. The problem is that, if you have GPLv3 code and want to incorporate some GPLv2 code into it, that will not be allowed. The biggest issue with GPLv3 is just that. It undoes the hard work of many years trying to harmonise the major OSS licenses and reintroduces incompatibility.
... to solve
n/t
The first issue that occurs to me immediately is that Windows has no single suitable native package management system that you can hook onto. Because of this, program installations tend either to (i) include whatever prerequisites they need and check whether their installation is necessary; or (ii) list the prerequisites in the installation instructions and leave it up to the user to ensure they are satisfied. Now, you might say that the whole point of the project is to resolve this, but I think you are going to run into licensing problems when you try. Let's say a particular open source product relies on .NET Framework 2. Are you then going to include .NET Framework 2 in your repository? Are you going to download it from Microsoft, using Microsoft's Download Center as a kind of adjunct repository? Are you going to talk to Microsoft to see if they will cooperate in working out a solution? This seems hard.
I do think that a single starting point for finding quality open source solutions on Windows has merit. Right now there is a bewildering mass of products out there, and no easy way of sifting the gems from the dross. If nothing else, you might be able to provide a good menu of open source products that are deemed worthy of consideration.
Good luck!
I am personally delighted that Dell is offering good practical machines that should just work. People who buy these should end up as happy customers. In the long term, that is good for both Dell and Linux.
- cannot generally see the drawbacks of the system: they assume that the quirks and problems are just an inevitable part of computing;
- do not want to learn something new.
In developing countries, if software piracy can be stamped out, there may be an economic incentive to use of Linux and other free (as in beer) products. In richer countries, the MS tax is not a serious issue (and, as implied above) users do not understand that the more serious economic effects of malware are a Windows only phenomenon.