It seems you are still using it or trying to use it, just like Slashdot, which is "playing favorites" all its lifetime. That's a bit strange for systems that have failed so miserably, isn't it? The other day I tried to become director of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I failed miserably at it, I could not even remove one of their editors from their seats. Failed experiment in my view. It has been failing for over a century by now.
I must admit that you can write pretty well. It's only after careful analysis and research that your article starts showing its true colors (brownish). Making you a very dangerous person to have conversations with. If you ever tried to submit to wikipedia, or tried to become an admin, they did a very good thing by blocking it.
Sounds like a border case that needs some testing. Of course, if you are up to it. Missing a single word in 900K does not seem to be much of a problem to me, especially if the 900K is all text. I mean, what are the chances of it actually happening?
If it would be able to power e-ink, it would create one of the weirdest turnarounds in history. A paper replacement powered by paper. We could burn the paper that has become obsolete to power the paper that is powering the e-ink sheets. Request: could somebody also create paper solar panels to power the devices after we run out of paper? Some paper based back-lighting would also be nice.
Maybe, but sometimes you get suboptimal systems. The software he is using might not scale well to these kind of client/server solutions. And even though you get wireless from cell phone companies nowadays, I would not call their service very reliable. I agree that a fix to store the critical data is needed. I'm just not sure CVS is a good solution for this. Backing up a database using file based backups is just horrible. I would rather go for some proprietary replication solution for the database. You can be pretty sure that removing redundancy using either diffs or checksums won't work (well).
CVS only knows about differences in plain text files. For a backup solution, I would consider it horribly broken. If you are going to use software for other things than it is intended to, you should really worry about reasons why it may fail. Sometimes there are good reasons for using a software system for other purposes than it is intended. But in this case I'm not so sure (redundancy would be a problem, renaming might be a problem etc etc).
Then it must be availability that got the other ones beaten. LaCie offers a 1TB drive, but it is 5.25" and that something different than 3.5". Let's just say I don't have great confidence in 5.25 drives anymore. I've tried to find some sellers for 1 TB drives, but Seagate is only listed a few times and does not seem to be available yet. Samsung did not even come up in the lists. So this drive might beat these other drives to the shops. And in the end, for us end consumers, that's what matters.
There was a discussion about S.M.A.R.T. some time ago, I think it was on slashdot. S.M.A.R.T. performance was not that great. But given the circumstances, if S.M.A.R.T. starts issuing warnings, it is definitely a good idea to start making backups. It might not fail yet, but there is definitely something wrong.
The big thing was that if S.M.A.R.T. does not say anything, it does not mean everything is OK. Your drive may still fail any instant. Then again, having the chance that it will report something out of the ordinary against no warning possibility at all... S.M.A.R.T. wins hands down, even though it is one of the most evil acronyms created in all times.
Except that it isn't. Sure, Sun has still a lot of control, but most decisions are made through the Java community process (JCP). IBM, one of the main competitors to Sun, is represented in quite quite a few JCP projects. If Sun would die, IBM would likely start to host the JCP projects; they've got way to much riding on the Java language to let its infrastructure die off.
Yeah, they should have used Java. Then again, the underlying JPEG libraries are still written in C++, if my information is still correct. So the wait is on for a rewrite in Java or maybe C#. You would not want a scripting language to do the JPEG decoding I suppose, that would bring the system performance down too much.
No, that's just one of the basic requirements for a standard. The others are, among others, readability, coverage (no doors left open), implementability, industry support, compatability with pre-existing standards. If possible, a standard should only rely on previous standards and not on proprietary standards and/or not-yet-finalized standards. Having some support for experts in the specific field that a standard is targeting would also be a good thing. There is probably a document out there that specifies all these requirements (or, more probably, many document of the various standardization organizations), but these are just a few.
Somehow I've got the feeling that MooXML breaks quite a few of these requirements. But that's just a hunch. If there are indeed direct references to Excel in MooXML, than it seems that it breaks quite a few of the basic requirements already.
Most of the time, VIA creates a board with a fan and one without. The one with fan use slightly faster CPU's: that's the price for more instructions/second. This is typed using a fully fanless system with a 1.2 GHz fanless. Completely silent, no moving parts *at all*. That is, the system crashed from my desktop PC some time ago, but having no *internally* moving parts probably helped it there as well.
The fortune database contains a good piece of advice about catching sharks:
So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark]. With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and -- I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
"Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks."
That depends. They are much quieter, much faster, no spin-up, less energy used, more reliable... I look forward to computers that run from flash - or Phase based memory. We'll keep media files on disk, that are spun down for most of their live. These drives should be build to have fast spinup time, low energy consumption and better reliability as well. No need to focus on performance for drives solely used for performance.
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions on crypto technology. Yeah, those government restrictions are getting really idiotic. Everybody in the world can do crypto nowadays guys. Wake up, you are destroying US based companies. Note that one of the bigger problems of open sourcing Java are those same restrictions. Sun really seems to be on the receiving end of those restrictions.
A crypto accelerator will do wonders for any server that needs to handle SSL. You can really get high performance if you put a hardware accelerator on any chip above 1 GHz. My C7 can do full SSL on 100Mbit with a truly slow processor, only because of the acceleration. No processor is going to match a hardware processor. That said, if you have a processor that is not fast on integer calculations, the benefits are twice as big.
"The third important change is a significant upgrade of the in-core, asynchronous cryptographic coprocessor. In Niagara 1, the crypto unit handled basic RSA/DSA public-key ciphers. The upgraded crypto unit in Niagara 2 handles just about any cipher that might be of interest, including RC4, AES, DES,and 3DES.It also handles MD-5 and SHA-1/256 hashes. Moreover, running at full core speed, it is designed to keep up with the two new,integrated 10Gb Ethernet ports, allowing encryption/decryption of packets to keep pace with the wire-speed flow of traffic off the network into memory, and out of memory into the network. The DMA engine in the crypto unit shares the core's crossbar port."
Now note that there will be 8 of these crypto-processors. This will be one of the most crypto-enabled CPU's we've seen in a while.
Besides having the information of the ethernet ports go directly into the processor, those processors now all have a fast crypto-unit in there. Think SSL acceleration. This can safe a lot of cost for hardware SSL accelerators - because you won't need them in front of your application server anymore. Of course, if you want to have the private server key really safe, you shouldn't put it in a general purpose CPU like a Niagara processor.
In my opinion, each and every computer should have at least a secure keystore with RSA and ECC cryptography (TPA modules have one), secure hash and 3DES/AES acceleration and a random number generator. The gains are just too high to ignore cryptography in current chips (~100:1 performance difference). For servers like the low clocked Niagara processors, they are a must to compete. It won't be long before AMD and Intel follow suit. VIA C7 processors are already equipped with hardware crypto acceleration.
"The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service."
Probably because they had too large a false acceptance rate (FAR). The thing is, with the technology in the article you use a special enrolling phase. If you already have someones head enrolled in good quality, it becomes much easier. Furthermore, unless the faces were linked to the card (which I highly doubt), they would have to do N:N comparisons. Anyone could be in front of the camera, and could be any one of xxx fraud suspects. With the technology in the article, the system has already identified the person, and the system is only used for 1:1 comparisons. Which are, say 1000 times easier to do.
Normally, these cameras are used to give the police a mugshot after the fact, although it would be a pretty stupid thief to be caught like that. Then again, petty theft thieves usually are.
"Why is this? Well for the sake of argument, let's suppose it costs £50 to create a duplicate of my chip and pin card that will work in any cash point."
If that PIN and chip card uses a asymmetric key, it's going to cost a lot more to make a copy, if it is indeed technically feasible. Of course, there are cards that use no encryption, or ones that use a single key for all cards, in which case it is easier to copy such a card. These chips have been specially designed to withhold attacks, and are generally supplied with both electric counter measures, light sensors, temperature sensors, you name it.
Of course, this does not go for cards using a magnetic stripe, I could make a copy of those cards for a few pounds each.
Over here in the Netherlands they take a looksy from the skies now and then (they take photographs and compare them with old ones). Somebody with 4 kids living in a small house installed a roof over their bicycle stand (6 bikes, this is NL). The bike stand was behind a hedge. Unfortunately it was made out of a metal sheet, and the plane had no problem spotting it at all in the sun. He was told to remove the new "shed" (they could not see the bikes). Obviously he responded immediately; he painted to top green. So get some chameleon colored paint and start working those barrels.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems you are still using it or trying to use it, just like Slashdot, which is "playing favorites" all its lifetime. That's a bit strange for systems that have failed so miserably, isn't it? The other day I tried to become director of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I failed miserably at it, I could not even remove one of their editors from their seats. Failed experiment in my view. It has been failing for over a century by now.
I must admit that you can write pretty well. It's only after careful analysis and research that your article starts showing its true colors (brownish). Making you a very dangerous person to have conversations with. If you ever tried to submit to wikipedia, or tried to become an admin, they did a very good thing by blocking it.
Sounds like a border case that needs some testing. Of course, if you are up to it. Missing a single word in 900K does not seem to be much of a problem to me, especially if the 900K is all text. I mean, what are the chances of it actually happening?
If it would be able to power e-ink, it would create one of the weirdest turnarounds in history. A paper replacement powered by paper. We could burn the paper that has become obsolete to power the paper that is powering the e-ink sheets. Request: could somebody also create paper solar panels to power the devices after we run out of paper? Some paper based back-lighting would also be nice.
Maybe, but sometimes you get suboptimal systems. The software he is using might not scale well to these kind of client/server solutions. And even though you get wireless from cell phone companies nowadays, I would not call their service very reliable. I agree that a fix to store the critical data is needed. I'm just not sure CVS is a good solution for this. Backing up a database using file based backups is just horrible. I would rather go for some proprietary replication solution for the database. You can be pretty sure that removing redundancy using either diffs or checksums won't work (well).
CVS only knows about differences in plain text files. For a backup solution, I would consider it horribly broken. If you are going to use software for other things than it is intended to, you should really worry about reasons why it may fail. Sometimes there are good reasons for using a software system for other purposes than it is intended. But in this case I'm not so sure (redundancy would be a problem, renaming might be a problem etc etc).
Then it must be availability that got the other ones beaten. LaCie offers a 1TB drive, but it is 5.25" and that something different than 3.5". Let's just say I don't have great confidence in 5.25 drives anymore. I've tried to find some sellers for 1 TB drives, but Seagate is only listed a few times and does not seem to be available yet. Samsung did not even come up in the lists. So this drive might beat these other drives to the shops. And in the end, for us end consumers, that's what matters.
There was a discussion about S.M.A.R.T. some time ago, I think it was on slashdot. S.M.A.R.T. performance was not that great. But given the circumstances, if S.M.A.R.T. starts issuing warnings, it is definitely a good idea to start making backups. It might not fail yet, but there is definitely something wrong.
The big thing was that if S.M.A.R.T. does not say anything, it does not mean everything is OK. Your drive may still fail any instant. Then again, having the chance that it will report something out of the ordinary against no warning possibility at all... S.M.A.R.T. wins hands down, even though it is one of the most evil acronyms created in all times.
Except that it isn't. Sure, Sun has still a lot of control, but most decisions are made through the Java community process (JCP). IBM, one of the main competitors to Sun, is represented in quite quite a few JCP projects. If Sun would die, IBM would likely start to host the JCP projects; they've got way to much riding on the Java language to let its infrastructure die off.
Funnypidia?
Yeah, they should have used Java. Then again, the underlying JPEG libraries are still written in C++, if my information is still correct. So the wait is on for a rewrite in Java or maybe C#. You would not want a scripting language to do the JPEG decoding I suppose, that would bring the system performance down too much.
No, that's just one of the basic requirements for a standard. The others are, among others, readability, coverage (no doors left open), implementability, industry support, compatability with pre-existing standards. If possible, a standard should only rely on previous standards and not on proprietary standards and/or not-yet-finalized standards. Having some support for experts in the specific field that a standard is targeting would also be a good thing. There is probably a document out there that specifies all these requirements (or, more probably, many document of the various standardization organizations), but these are just a few.
Somehow I've got the feeling that MooXML breaks quite a few of these requirements. But that's just a hunch. If there are indeed direct references to Excel in MooXML, than it seems that it breaks quite a few of the basic requirements already.
Most of the time, VIA creates a board with a fan and one without. The one with fan use slightly faster CPU's: that's the price for more instructions/second. This is typed using a fully fanless system with a 1.2 GHz fanless. Completely silent, no moving parts *at all*. That is, the system crashed from my desktop PC some time ago, but having no *internally* moving parts probably helped it there as well.
The fortune database contains a good piece of advice about catching sharks:
So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward
it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and --
I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in
the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and
I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our
heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're
unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water
up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the
opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of
our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all
the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers
cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen
these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked
into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
"Flash drives aren't going to replace hard disks in the near future as they are highly unlikely to be able to come close to the same size/cost ratio of hard disks."
That depends. They are much quieter, much faster, no spin-up, less energy used, more reliable... I look forward to computers that run from flash - or Phase based memory. We'll keep media files on disk, that are spun down for most of their live. These drives should be build to have fast spinup time, low energy consumption and better reliability as well. No need to focus on performance for drives solely used for performance.
http://www.opensparc.net/
They are openly discussing making the Niagara 2 available as open source as well, but note that there are some roadblocks such as the US government's restrictions on crypto technology. Yeah, those government restrictions are getting really idiotic. Everybody in the world can do crypto nowadays guys. Wake up, you are destroying US based companies. Note that one of the bigger problems of open sourcing Java are those same restrictions. Sun really seems to be on the receiving end of those restrictions.
A crypto accelerator will do wonders for any server that needs to handle SSL. You can really get high performance if you put a hardware accelerator on any chip above 1 GHz. My C7 can do full SSL on 100Mbit with a truly slow processor, only because of the acceleration. No processor is going to match a hardware processor. That said, if you have a processor that is not fast on integer calculations, the benefits are twice as big.
a ra2_reprint.pdf)
Now read this (source: http://www.sun.com/processors/niagara/M45_MPFNiag
"The third important change is a significant upgrade of the in-core, asynchronous cryptographic coprocessor. In Niagara 1, the crypto unit handled basic RSA/DSA public-key ciphers. The upgraded crypto unit in Niagara 2 handles just about any cipher that might be of interest, including RC4, AES, DES,and 3DES.It also handles MD-5 and SHA-1/256 hashes. Moreover, running at full core speed, it is designed to keep up with the two new,integrated 10Gb Ethernet ports, allowing encryption/decryption of packets to keep pace with the wire-speed flow of traffic off the network into memory, and out of memory into the network. The DMA engine in the crypto unit shares the core's crossbar port."
Now note that there will be 8 of these crypto-processors. This will be one of the most crypto-enabled CPU's we've seen in a while.
Besides having the information of the ethernet ports go directly into the processor, those processors now all have a fast crypto-unit in there. Think SSL acceleration. This can safe a lot of cost for hardware SSL accelerators - because you won't need them in front of your application server anymore. Of course, if you want to have the private server key really safe, you shouldn't put it in a general purpose CPU like a Niagara processor.
In my opinion, each and every computer should have at least a secure keystore with RSA and ECC cryptography (TPA modules have one), secure hash and 3DES/AES acceleration and a random number generator. The gains are just too high to ignore cryptography in current chips (~100:1 performance difference). For servers like the low clocked Niagara processors, they are a must to compete. It won't be long before AMD and Intel follow suit. VIA C7 processors are already equipped with hardware crypto acceleration.
Yeah, they tried to glue on the connectors, but it didn't work.
After seeing the video, I'm pretty sure that s-words might be more effective than this "bot".
"The Alliance and leicester trialled small webcam like devices on ATMs but for some reason took them out of service."
Probably because they had too large a false acceptance rate (FAR). The thing is, with the technology in the article you use a special enrolling phase. If you already have someones head enrolled in good quality, it becomes much easier. Furthermore, unless the faces were linked to the card (which I highly doubt), they would have to do N:N comparisons. Anyone could be in front of the camera, and could be any one of xxx fraud suspects. With the technology in the article, the system has already identified the person, and the system is only used for 1:1 comparisons. Which are, say 1000 times easier to do.
Normally, these cameras are used to give the police a mugshot after the fact, although it would be a pretty stupid thief to be caught like that. Then again, petty theft thieves usually are.
"Why is this? Well for the sake of argument, let's suppose it costs £50 to create a duplicate of my chip and pin card that will work in any cash point."
If that PIN and chip card uses a asymmetric key, it's going to cost a lot more to make a copy, if it is indeed technically feasible. Of course, there are cards that use no encryption, or ones that use a single key for all cards, in which case it is easier to copy such a card. These chips have been specially designed to withhold attacks, and are generally supplied with both electric counter measures, light sensors, temperature sensors, you name it.
Of course, this does not go for cards using a magnetic stripe, I could make a copy of those cards for a few pounds each.
Over here in the Netherlands they take a looksy from the skies now and then (they take photographs and compare them with old ones). Somebody with 4 kids living in a small house installed a roof over their bicycle stand (6 bikes, this is NL). The bike stand was behind a hedge. Unfortunately it was made out of a metal sheet, and the plane had no problem spotting it at all in the sun. He was told to remove the new "shed" (they could not see the bikes). Obviously he responded immediately; he painted to top green. So get some chameleon colored paint and start working those barrels.
Look at it at the bright side: it still saves up to two mine ponies.
If you do, you're a lunatic :)
That's just too funny. This site has USA even in the name, but:
:)
"The stock Delorean was armed with a 2.8 Liter foreign engine with about 130HP..."
So foreign is clearly not good enough, lets fix that:
"We've successfully installed a Mazda 3-rotor rotary engine into this car!"
That says it all for the US car industry, I guess