If by "business work" you mean spreadsheets and word processing, then you're correct.
However, most businesses have larger applications like payroll and benefits, financials, marketing, and others that they definitely want control over. Try convincing the average business owner to put customer data and marketing plans or product designs "out there" in the cloud and see how far you get.
It's easy to imagine ordinary work being done in a browser based application format, but instead of spreadsheets think automated check handling, and instead of a word processor imagine a writing marketing copy with images suitable for transmission to a print house.
I think most of the people saying "everything can run in the cloud" or similar don't have much experience doing anything but the basics on a computer, like filing taxes, playing games, or writing e-mails.
You missed one major point, specifically why the browser as a universal replacement for local apps will fail, and why more generally the idea of "everything in the cloud" will fail, despite it being quite a major fad among the management types currently.
Interactivity and control.
Until technology takes a giant leap and remote or network data access becomes exactly as fast as local bus data access, locally stored data will always be faster to access than remote data, so any program that requires access to more data than can be locally cached will run better on a local PC. Sure, all processing and the actual program can be located on a remote server and a window presented remotely, but in the case of some programs such as non linear video editors, this isn't a significant bandwidth savings.
Control is the big issue. With governments and other authorities becoming more and more intrusive on the net, and with no solid laws governing privacy of data held by a third party, right to privacy on the network itself, the relative reliability and security of network held data compared to local data, and simple paranoia, maintaining control of your computing resources will always be a must for a large portion of the computing population. So no cloud storage for some things, keep it on your local PC.
Computing resources have always followed a cycle of centralization and de-centralization. Corporations have always capitalized on this as the "coming thing". Managers have always believed them. Cloud computing and the apparent "trend" toward a generalized markup language that can empower every type of application in the world is just another tech trend that will eventually find a niche, but not completely replace other types of computing.
For an interesting comparison, look up and check out industry articles on Java when it was first gaining momentum... at one time we were all going to have local Java machines and all data and programs would be universal and stored online. That idea was actually closer than HTML5 to a generalized non local computing environment.
When I hear someone today say something like "We don't need to build out our data center, the cloud is coming" I have to avoid laughing.
HTML 5 is an improved markup language, but it's still just a markup language. The underlying concept of GET/PUT across the network limits its utility.
A central fixture of his sci-fi books was a race of aliens which had existed for millions of years and had gotten to the point of drowning in their own waste heat. The problem existed because cooling technologies all move heat around to cool a volume rather than actually absorb heat and transition it to another energy form. As their population grew and energy use with it, all the extra heat built up.
The aliens solved the problem by moving their planet away from their sun, and eventually out into space on its own, balancing the generated heat with radiative cooling, or transferring the heat to the universe at large.
This article is an interesting mental exercise, but as noted it projects the technology of today into a future world with greater needs, which is about as valid as a renaissance thinker from the 1500s deciding the world would end when today's population existed, because there would be not enough food for us all, and wars over food would extinct the human race.
Niven knew he was assuming that no technology would be developed that would actually absorb heat, and he wrote around that.
If we happen to discover a way that a device can produce negative heat numbers (assuming power generation, transmission, manufacturing heat, etc are accounted for) the heat death of the earth will never happen. The devil is in the details...
From my original post: "B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other"
That's all those are. All you can do is configure them statically, using tables. So as I said, you won't automatically get the best path to any given site, which is what you would have with BGP or a similar routing protocol that would work on home sized connections.
Don't get me wrong, mapping traffic to interfaces statically is handy, but it's a hack compared to a real multi-homing system.
Erik
PS: Slashdot, for the love of God step into the last decade and install a post editor with formatting. Manual HTML sucks.
If what you're looking for is A) Fail-over, so if one ISP or line is down you use the other or B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other, a dual WAN setup will work for you using one of the dual WAN setups people have mentioned. They're basically hacks that masquerade your desktop behind a public IP address from whichever provider you happen to be using at any moment. They don't allow asymmetric traffic (can't send packets out one ISP and receive via the other ISP) and they'll possibly screw up any security protocol or site that expects to see packets coming from a single IP and port address. This is handy, but only slightly more convenient than moving the cable yourself and re-issuing a DHCP request. Forget about aggregating bandwidth, you won't get that.
If you're thinking that hooking up both ISPs to a router will let you use whichever one is faster for any site when you click on it, you can't do that without a ton of work (and for the most part without being an ISP). The problem is that although a routing protocol exists on the global internet that would let your router figure out which path is best to each network prefix, to use it you have to have your own routing block (an aggregate of multiple network addresses) to announce to the world (which you can't get) and you have to have a router capable of holding and processing the global BGP table in real time... you don't have this.
If only all our home routers could speak a multi path routing protocol with low overhead, every single packet we sent would take the best path to its destination, all our computers would automatically fail over to other connections, we could add bandwidth by plugging in another wire, we could add and remove bandwidth in real time as needed, and we could migrate between internet providers without re-numbering our IP addresses. Things like mobile apps would be much easier to write.. no need to use a central server to pass data to a mobile, just send the packets to its IP and the routing protocol would send them on to wherever it's connected in the net.
I look forward to the day when the Internets evolve to permit multiple pathing for data in real time. Too bad technological development of Internet protocols seems to have slowed and become heavily political.
That entirely depends on the precision of the IQ number, doesn't it?
What if your IQ number is a float number with a non terminating non repeating decimal component? I suppose then people would have an infinite number of digits in their IQ. Maybe we could draw a correlation between the number of digits people mention when reporting their IQ and how anal they are?
It'd be nice to have a simple linux distro that could run on old hardware, say a spare pentium-III, and which would A) have a wi-fi access device attached (possibly with an external antenna) B) Act to firewall off/protect access to the owner's local resources, only allowing traffic of selected types and only communicating with the internet C) Log all peers, to provide a basic record of who used the access point D) Would form a mesh network with other devices of similar types, permitting peer to peer traffic passing while skipping internet use entirely.
As a bonus, have it limit traffic per device on a scheduled basis, so a given MAC had a weekly, monthly, or daily bandwidth limit, to keep the connection from being hogged by one guy (eg. cheap jerk of a neighbor). Set up the box to limit only guests, and not your own connectivity (subject to the security limits of wi-fi, of course).
Users take the distro, build it on an old or other low power box, attach a wi-fi device, and provide safe, free communications to your neighbors without them overrunning your own connection. Set the box up to mesh with its neighbors and permit the other access points to share your connectivity. If a lot of the boxes are near each other as in a metro area, then you have a "wireless internet" that's not tracked by any ISP or govt. agency. If you know where your "neighbors" with these devices are, then use cantennas and a spare wi-fi device to establish a point to point link as needed, to go beyond normal wi-fi range.
Finally, set up a web site where people can register their access points so folks can see where they are, and provide a pattern and manufacturing source for a standard "free wi-fi access" sign for the front yard, so maybe the cop$ will notice it and realize you're not the guy deserving the swat team.
Opening up your sole wi-fi internet access device to sharing is a nice gesture, but it can cause you enough trouble to stop wanting to do it no matter how nerd-friendly you are. An out of the box solution easy enough for the average guy with a spare machine to use would go a long way toward proliferating both free wi-fi and meshed "alternative" networks without the headaches.
It seems like a lot of people confuse the ability to cram this many servers into a "rack" with an energy efficient, "green" data center.
The thing is, even though it's about 5x the power density of a "normal" data center, all you're saving is space that more conventional servers would have taken, and maybe gaining a little efficiency in power at the cost of having to maintain all those mineral oil baths. You still have to supply those servers with network connections, potentially also external storage, power management and backups, and most importantly you have to get rid of all that heat. If you're using conventional chiller technology, that's what's taking up the bulk of the space and complexity, not the footprint of the servers themselves.
100kw of servers will dissipate (depending on model) about 56% of that power as heat, or 56kw, or about the same as 16 tons of chiller capacity. Assuming you're using your reduced server footprint to cram the building full of servers, then you can easily end up needing thousands of tons of cooling capacity, with the attendant cost and complexity of plumbing, plus a backup unit for 2N redundancy.
But you've saved a few square feet by using old school cooling techniques. Congratulations.
In that case, usually the parents of the child recognize that it's not a guaranteed conclusion that the child will become a famous athlete, if they are aware of the skill at all.
The major difference, however, is the potential impact on the world...mentally, a lot of people (in the US, anyway) categorize a brilliant child the same as other smart, famous people. Usually people who are famous because of hard work or luck, but who are seen as smart because that's their most outstanding attribute. Sloppy thinking like this leads to easily making a connection between intelligence as a cause of the effect of fame, fortune, and importance.
Apart from sports fans, most parents don't know the name of eg. the silver medal winners from the last olympics, but many of them can tell you who invented the airplane.
I always try to explain this in a way that doesn't mean anything to non nerds for some reason. My point of view is that he's like a DnD character that's rolled up with an 18 INT score. Sure, he'll have a lot of spellcasting ability, but he lacks the WIS to truly understand the subjects he's studying and why they're important. His other stats get dumped because people assume they'll just "develop" and he gets killed by the first kobold that comes along, or spends his life creating complicated ways to change rabbits into interior decorators, ignoring the fact that rabbits have no sense of style.
Too many children are held up as "savants" for doing things like this, which sucks for them. So much of what he could become is dependent on him having normal social and emotional development in addition to his math and logic skills, and being treated like this means he'll never get that.
More to the point, when was the last time you heard of a "savant" like this actually doing something worthwhile? The people who make significant contributions to humanity's knowledge typically do so because they work very hard, not because they're naturally intelligent. There's so much more to being a genius than being smart.
I love the idea of a virtual currency implemented with hard crypto. Bitcoin's concept is a step in the right direction.
But any programmer who uses IRC as the main method of locating peers for his virtual currency system has some serious issues in judgment, and I'm personally not willing to risk any money, virtual or otherwise, using his software or his crypto set-up. Since this is a monetary system, I'd want to be sure before use that A) It's secure B) It can be publically implemented without licensing or IP rules and C) Someone with knowledge of economics looks at it and builds in some future-proof planning, so if it really catches on and all internet users start using it it won't fall apart just as people are starting to trust it.
Now, when something similar comes along from a real crypto person like Bruce Schnier and gets defined in an RFC before implementation, then that'll be worth trying.
This is a common occurrence in many fields with a high technical bar. Usually, the person with the "plan" has a pretty high opinion of themselves, which may or may not be justified. I see a lot of "genius children" (labeled by their parents) with big ideas that just need "a few things" worked out to have their Invention built and make a ton of money for them and their parents.
To give an example from a nerd hobby forum, it's common in an amateur ROV group I frequent to get questions from new members, usually teenagers, saying something like the following: "I have a great ROV design that will dive to 5000 feet, be small enough for one person to carry and use, and will only cost $10,000. It can be used for (insert random phrase describing any "cool" ROV use here). I have the design almost done and I'm going to take it to various companies to get the manufacturing done (read as: try to get someone to buy my design and give me lots of royalties) and I just need details on a few things. First, can someone tell me how I can seal a motor against water getting in? Second, I plan on using outdoor extension cord cable with fiber optics inside for communications, can someone tell me where I can order this online? Third, I'm going to need a special caulk to seal the wires where they enter the hull of the ROV, where can I buy that in a small tube for under $10?"
Usually the person doing this has drawn up a couple pictures or mock-ups in a CAD program or even a modeler like Blender or Maya. They've usually picked a use for their ROV without understanding anything about how the use relates to design, specifications, or capabilities. If anything they've designed their model with superficial features that make it "work" for the use intended, like drawing in an arm with a sawblade on it "for cutting off damaged well heads". Note that I'm not talking about an actual design, they've just drawn a picture of a (possibly) cool looking ROV, spending as much time on the paint job as the shape.
The thing all the people that do this have in common is a very human attribute - they want to believe they are special, that they are geniuses, and that they will be able to make a living/get rich/get famous without having to do it the way "ordinary" people do, through education, luck, and hard work.
That's not a horrible fault, but usually they don't want to hear that the "great design" they have, no matter how detailed, is in fact the "easy" part of creating something like they want. They don't want to hear they're not a genius and that what they want isn't simple. They interpret you telling them that it isn't that simple the same way they'd interpret someone saying "I'm not smart enough to do what you're asking" or "We big industry guys don't like to listen to new ideas". Heaven help you if you try to actually produce a quote for the work they want you to do.
People like this are why the term "hubris" exists.
If it's a kid I try to encourage them to keep thinking great ideas, but to get some education in what they want to do. If they just won't listen, sometimes I just ignore them and let them find out on their own that they're dreaming.
The same thing works for non programmers designing software. They are great if they know they're designing a user interface or interaction, and that what they want may not be possible. That kind of perspective can really help a deep technical person produce a great product. If they're convinced they have a product ready to go and that all that needs to be done is write some code, it's the same Hubris. They probably won't listen. Just ignore them unless you have the patience to get them to understand (for example, if you're a social worker or a canonized saint).
It's always amusing when a new pundit discovers exactly how the Internet actually works.
Until they gain enough technical knowledge to be dangerous, they assume that the Internet is just as Hollywood portrays... A rock-solid utility run by the Government that only PhDs and arcanely skilled teenage geniuses can control or understand.
Then they discover just how "fragile" it is, and start telling the people who've been making it work all along that they need to straighten up and fly right, or else a major disaster is going to happen. Good thing they told us.
It's sad that they can't just say "Oh, I guess I didn't understand.". Instead they have to "take charge" of things because otherwise they'd have to accept their own irrelevance, or even (gasp) accept that despite their new-found expertise, they *still* don't really understand.
So straighten up, Cisco... it's obvious to this guy you don't know what you're doing. Fix that BGP thing and do it NOW, you hear him?
I know exactly what their positions are and whom they report to, thanks. I'm not unaware of who they are, I just believe different things about how much power and influence they have.
If you think they lead in any direction on their own, your thinking is kind of naive. Their jobs are to bring recommendations and direction from their departments to the president, bring his directives back down to their organizations, and give their organizations the political and resource support they need to do the actual work.
Despite the prestige and apparent power associated with their positions, they are the very definition of middle managers.
Mr. transportation secretary making a comment about this issue when he's obviously voicing his own beliefs is silly... it's just wishful thinking. There'd be a lot more news items about this if it was a serious direction DoT was taking, and even then they'd have to involve other organizations like the FCC, someone to represent the automakers, the ACLU for those citizens offended by their choice to use the phone in the car being taken away, etc.
Him stating that this will happen and expecting people to believe him because he's the sec. of transportation is like the secretary of the interior announcing that all national parks will become paintball courses. He'd be involved in the discussion, but it's obvious to anyone with one brain cell that he can't do it on his own and there's no way the necessary others would agree to it.
Functionally he's a middle manager. His department manages the various other departments related to transportation in the US.
He doesn't directly set policy or rules, he doesn't legally lobby for legislation to set rules, and the fact that he's only around for four years or (max) eight means the career govt. employees at the various agencies can stall and block him until someone else is appointed if they disagree with anything he does.
He's not where the rubber meets the road nor is he highly placed enough (despite the title) to set government direction. He's a go between for the actual leaders and the departments who actually do the work. All the power he has comes from talking to people to try to get them to do things. Hence, middle manager.
"Government official shoots off his mouth about his personal crusade, makes little sense"
Honestly... this guy, even if quoted correctly, is just saying what he'd do if he had absolute power over the law, because of his personal feelings on the subject. What he wants to do really doesn't matter. Despite the fact that he's apparently in exactly the right position to get this done, if you think about it he's basically a middle manager in a paralyzed government.
Does anyone remember when people in the US government at least tried to make an unbiased decision about whether a law or idea was good based on facts?
It seems like the kids of the Greatest Generation are destined to be one of the worst generations...
Heh... so I'm either depending on "magic", which won't work because magic doesn't exist, or I'm using a method that generates toxic waste, and therefore it won't work because I'll have disposal problems. Sounds a lot like you're looking for justification for a conclusion you've already reached, instead of the other way around. Just because you can't imagine how to do something doesn't mean it won't work.
Technology not invented yet isn't the same as magic, and as you note it isn't the same as "real world" technology... because it's NOT INVENTED YET. See how that works?
Specifically I was thinking of maybe using the nanoparticle sorting technologies that have been developed in chip size for materials analysis, or maybe a centrifuge based sorting process with the waste liquified. Maybe even building macro scale robotic sorting devices to separate waste at multiple scales. There are many, many approaches, and fortune awaits the first person who comes up with an economically viable one.
Also, there's nothing wrong with using a lot of energy, just like there's nothing inherently wrong with spending a lot of money, if the result is a net gain. If we remove more garbage (solid, liquid, and gas) from the world than we add, we're moving in the right direction.
Interesting... you're assuming a specific method of recycling then proceeding to poke holes in what you believe I'm suggesting. This is an excellent example of a "straw man" argument.
What I'm actually suggesting is a technology that isn't developed yet... machines that could separate any given item into its component parts with a high degree of accuracy and speed. This may mean a process where the first stage is "chop it into small bits" or it may not. There are other approaches.
Yes, it'll take energy. Just about everything does:)
.. build a machine that's capable of disassembling laptops (or other electronic waste) into its component materials for recycling.
Bonus: The technology would be worth millions, because there's many years of old electronic (and other) waste sitting around to be had for the taking, including in landfills and other locations. The problem with trash is that no one likes to separate out the organics from the recyclables from the re-usables. We humans don't even like to throw trash away in multiple places (like keeping a separate recycle bin and compost) so letting us be lazy and having the machines do the sorting is a big win.
Ultimately manufacturers must make sure their products and packaging are environmentally friendly as possible, of course. It would also be nice if they designed the products to be disassembled and reassembled, making repairs easier (repair instead of replace generates less waste).
It's probably unrealistic to expect products to be 100% landfill free through... new products take advantage of new materials and technologies, and the ability to dispose of something new cleanly always lags behind the ability to produce and use it...
It's hard to draw a line arbitrarily, given the varying skills of new graduates, but most folks coming out of the better business schools in the last 6-8 years have a good handle on what works in the Internet age.
Of course, it'll be years until enough of the old guard retire from officer positions in the really big media companies for the newer generation to get a chance to run things...
I'm pretty much convinced that the current generation of managers and corporate officers in media companies are just not capable of changing enough to forge a new business model in the internet age.
A while ago I would have predicted that they'd eventually have to give up their attempts to slow the change, or to find ways to keep their pay for content models working the same way, and eventually start experimenting to find something new or listen to their younger, more flexible peers.
Now, however, I'm thinking that they just can't change... change in their companies won't happen without a rollover of management, like in so many other organizations run by the "me" generation. They won't give up and they won't give in. They'll have to die off.
More to the point of the article, I predict if all news articles get charged for from the wire services, there'll be a period of rampant ignoring of the fee, followed by a period of cut and paste disguising of the origin of an article, or paraphrasing to hide a source, followed by independent sourcing of news from readers local to a story, and maybe eventually a new kind of news reporter, whose business model I don't know, but who travels the world collecting news to publish on the Internet.
Maybe in some part of all this we'll get back to unbiased, true news reporting and not political spin. I hope so.
"Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field, what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"
Answer: None. You're asking a bunch of people who presumably have IT experience to play armchair engineer and second guess the designers of embedded systems that are designed not only to record data on aircraft controls, time, and position, but to permit recovery of that data if the aircraft explodes, burns, falls into 2000 feet of water, then sits for a week. It's apples and oranges. Despite the fact that it seems like IT has rapidly advanced technology and the flight recorder tech is far behind, it's only a perception.
The true answer to "How could flight recorder tech be made better?" is both obvious and deceptive. It's easy for us to say things like "record all the controls, temperature, position of people, cockpit video, etc and live uplink it to the internet" and on the face of it have that seem like a good idea.
But probably very few of us here have experience or knowledge with the type of data that is useful in an accident investigation. Would cockpit video be more useful than audio? Other than allowing us to view people about to die or crash, it might not give us new information. It might be more useful to track flight controls and engine efficiency, or weather conditions, or the attitude of the flight attendants.
What problem are we trying to solve here? Just because technology can be "upgraded" doesn't mean it should be. Remember, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you are expert in is IT technology....
Get ahold of a few hundred small frameless hand mirrors, and epoxy putty them to the inside of the dish so they reflect on a mirror size target in the center.
You can either place a Stirling engine's hot section in the center or use it to solar cook just about anything, or even put another mirror there to reflect the light somewhere else where you lens it onto a high efficiency solar panel.
Despite the fact that they are involve the public more directly and more immediately than any democratic or community based voting or collective decision making system has in the past, internet sites where visitors decide on something still rely on honesty and impartial decision making (with respect to the purpose of the vote) by the voters in order to produce a non skewed result.
Like any voting process whose outcome is meant to reflect the "will of the people", voters must vote only once so everyone has an equal voice, and no voter must be unduly influenced by biased interests. To correctly reflect the views of everyone on the internet, a vote would have to include a significant random sample of internet users, which is impossible. Further, due to the nature of the Internet and web sites, even detecting a biased, stacked or invalid vote is nearly impossible.
While this is obvious to some, it's worth stating explicitly that just because a voting process takes place on the internet doesn't mean it's fair and balanced, and just because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean that it's true.
It can be a shock to those who believe humanity is a step away from an internet based golden age of online government where corrupt bureaucrats and overpaid staff are eliminated, but the internet is just a better way to communicate than we've had in the past. The value of communications has always depended on whom you are talking to:)
Slashdot Mirror
However, most businesses have larger applications like payroll and benefits, financials, marketing, and others that they definitely want control over. Try convincing the average business owner to put customer data and marketing plans or product designs "out there" in the cloud and see how far you get.
It's easy to imagine ordinary work being done in a browser based application format, but instead of spreadsheets think automated check handling, and instead of a word processor imagine a writing marketing copy with images suitable for transmission to a print house.
I think most of the people saying "everything can run in the cloud" or similar don't have much experience doing anything but the basics on a computer, like filing taxes, playing games, or writing e-mails.
Erik
You missed one major point, specifically why the browser as a universal replacement for local apps will fail, and why more generally the idea of "everything in the cloud" will fail, despite it being quite a major fad among the management types currently.
Interactivity and control.
Until technology takes a giant leap and remote or network data access becomes exactly as fast as local bus data access, locally stored data will always be faster to access than remote data, so any program that requires access to more data than can be locally cached will run better on a local PC. Sure, all processing and the actual program can be located on a remote server and a window presented remotely, but in the case of some programs such as non linear video editors, this isn't a significant bandwidth savings.
Control is the big issue. With governments and other authorities becoming more and more intrusive on the net, and with no solid laws governing privacy of data held by a third party, right to privacy on the network itself, the relative reliability and security of network held data compared to local data, and simple paranoia, maintaining control of your computing resources will always be a must for a large portion of the computing population. So no cloud storage for some things, keep it on your local PC.
Computing resources have always followed a cycle of centralization and de-centralization. Corporations have always capitalized on this as the "coming thing". Managers have always believed them. Cloud computing and the apparent "trend" toward a generalized markup language that can empower every type of application in the world is just another tech trend that will eventually find a niche, but not completely replace other types of computing.
For an interesting comparison, look up and check out industry articles on Java when it was first gaining momentum... at one time we were all going to have local Java machines and all data and programs would be universal and stored online. That idea was actually closer than HTML5 to a generalized non local computing environment.
When I hear someone today say something like "We don't need to build out our data center, the cloud is coming" I have to avoid laughing.
HTML 5 is an improved markup language, but it's still just a markup language. The underlying concept of GET/PUT across the network limits its utility.
Erik
A central fixture of his sci-fi books was a race of aliens which had existed for millions of years and had gotten to the point of drowning in their own waste heat. The problem existed because cooling technologies all move heat around to cool a volume rather than actually absorb heat and transition it to another energy form. As their population grew and energy use with it, all the extra heat built up.
The aliens solved the problem by moving their planet away from their sun, and eventually out into space on its own, balancing the generated heat with radiative cooling, or transferring the heat to the universe at large.
This article is an interesting mental exercise, but as noted it projects the technology of today into a future world with greater needs, which is about as valid as a renaissance thinker from the 1500s deciding the world would end when today's population existed, because there would be not enough food for us all, and wars over food would extinct the human race.
Niven knew he was assuming that no technology would be developed that would actually absorb heat, and he wrote around that.
If we happen to discover a way that a device can produce negative heat numbers (assuming power generation, transmission, manufacturing heat, etc are accounted for) the heat death of the earth will never happen. The devil is in the details...
Erik
From my original post: "B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other"
That's all those are. All you can do is configure them statically, using tables. So as I said, you won't automatically get the best path to any given site, which is what you would have with BGP or a similar routing protocol that would work on home sized connections.
Don't get me wrong, mapping traffic to interfaces statically is handy, but it's a hack compared to a real multi-homing system.
Erik
PS: Slashdot, for the love of God step into the last decade and install a post editor with formatting. Manual HTML sucks.
If what you're looking for is A) Fail-over, so if one ISP or line is down you use the other or B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other, a dual WAN setup will work for you using one of the dual WAN setups people have mentioned. They're basically hacks that masquerade your desktop behind a public IP address from whichever provider you happen to be using at any moment. They don't allow asymmetric traffic (can't send packets out one ISP and receive via the other ISP) and they'll possibly screw up any security protocol or site that expects to see packets coming from a single IP and port address. This is handy, but only slightly more convenient than moving the cable yourself and re-issuing a DHCP request. Forget about aggregating bandwidth, you won't get that.
If you're thinking that hooking up both ISPs to a router will let you use whichever one is faster for any site when you click on it, you can't do that without a ton of work (and for the most part without being an ISP). The problem is that although a routing protocol exists on the global internet that would let your router figure out which path is best to each network prefix, to use it you have to have your own routing block (an aggregate of multiple network addresses) to announce to the world (which you can't get) and you have to have a router capable of holding and processing the global BGP table in real time... you don't have this.
If only all our home routers could speak a multi path routing protocol with low overhead, every single packet we sent would take the best path to its destination, all our computers would automatically fail over to other connections, we could add bandwidth by plugging in another wire, we could add and remove bandwidth in real time as needed, and we could migrate between internet providers without re-numbering our IP addresses. Things like mobile apps would be much easier to write.. no need to use a central server to pass data to a mobile, just send the packets to its IP and the routing protocol would send them on to wherever it's connected in the net.
I look forward to the day when the Internets evolve to permit multiple pathing for data in real time. Too bad technological development of Internet protocols seems to have slowed and become heavily political.
Erik
How do you know the SIZEOF() my float?
Are you saying *your* computer doesn't have arbitrary precision floats? Step into the 25th century!
That entirely depends on the precision of the IQ number, doesn't it?
What if your IQ number is a float number with a non terminating non repeating decimal component? I suppose then people would have an infinite number of digits in their IQ. Maybe we could draw a correlation between the number of digits people mention when reporting their IQ and how anal they are?
It'd be nice to have a simple linux distro that could run on old hardware, say a spare pentium-III, and which would A) have a wi-fi access device attached (possibly with an external antenna) B) Act to firewall off/protect access to the owner's local resources, only allowing traffic of selected types and only communicating with the internet C) Log all peers, to provide a basic record of who used the access point D) Would form a mesh network with other devices of similar types, permitting peer to peer traffic passing while skipping internet use entirely.
As a bonus, have it limit traffic per device on a scheduled basis, so a given MAC had a weekly, monthly, or daily bandwidth limit, to keep the connection from being hogged by one guy (eg. cheap jerk of a neighbor). Set up the box to limit only guests, and not your own connectivity (subject to the security limits of wi-fi, of course).
Users take the distro, build it on an old or other low power box, attach a wi-fi device, and provide safe, free communications to your neighbors without them overrunning your own connection. Set the box up to mesh with its neighbors and permit the other access points to share your connectivity. If a lot of the boxes are near each other as in a metro area, then you have a "wireless internet" that's not tracked by any ISP or govt. agency. If you know where your "neighbors" with these devices are, then use cantennas and a spare wi-fi device to establish a point to point link as needed, to go beyond normal wi-fi range.
Finally, set up a web site where people can register their access points so folks can see where they are, and provide a pattern and manufacturing source for a standard "free wi-fi access" sign for the front yard, so maybe the cop$ will notice it and realize you're not the guy deserving the swat team.
Opening up your sole wi-fi internet access device to sharing is a nice gesture, but it can cause you enough trouble to stop wanting to do it no matter how nerd-friendly you are. An out of the box solution easy enough for the average guy with a spare machine to use would go a long way toward proliferating both free wi-fi and meshed "alternative" networks without the headaches.
Erik
It seems like a lot of people confuse the ability to cram this many servers into a "rack" with an energy efficient, "green" data center.
The thing is, even though it's about 5x the power density of a "normal" data center, all you're saving is space that more conventional servers would have taken, and maybe gaining a little efficiency in power at the cost of having to maintain all those mineral oil baths. You still have to supply those servers with network connections, potentially also external storage, power management and backups, and most importantly you have to get rid of all that heat. If you're using conventional chiller technology, that's what's taking up the bulk of the space and complexity, not the footprint of the servers themselves.
100kw of servers will dissipate (depending on model) about 56% of that power as heat, or 56kw, or about the same as 16 tons of chiller capacity. Assuming you're using your reduced server footprint to cram the building full of servers, then you can easily end up needing thousands of tons of cooling capacity, with the attendant cost and complexity of plumbing, plus a backup unit for 2N redundancy.
But you've saved a few square feet by using old school cooling techniques. Congratulations.
The major difference, however, is the potential impact on the world...mentally, a lot of people (in the US, anyway) categorize a brilliant child the same as other smart, famous people. Usually people who are famous because of hard work or luck, but who are seen as smart because that's their most outstanding attribute. Sloppy thinking like this leads to easily making a connection between intelligence as a cause of the effect of fame, fortune, and importance.
Apart from sports fans, most parents don't know the name of eg. the silver medal winners from the last olympics, but many of them can tell you who invented the airplane.
Erik
I always try to explain this in a way that doesn't mean anything to non nerds for some reason. My point of view is that he's like a DnD character that's rolled up with an 18 INT score. Sure, he'll have a lot of spellcasting ability, but he lacks the WIS to truly understand the subjects he's studying and why they're important. His other stats get dumped because people assume they'll just "develop" and he gets killed by the first kobold that comes along, or spends his life creating complicated ways to change rabbits into interior decorators, ignoring the fact that rabbits have no sense of style.
Too many children are held up as "savants" for doing things like this, which sucks for them. So much of what he could become is dependent on him having normal social and emotional development in addition to his math and logic skills, and being treated like this means he'll never get that.
More to the point, when was the last time you heard of a "savant" like this actually doing something worthwhile? The people who make significant contributions to humanity's knowledge typically do so because they work very hard, not because they're naturally intelligent. There's so much more to being a genius than being smart.
I love the idea of a virtual currency implemented with hard crypto. Bitcoin's concept is a step in the right direction.
But any programmer who uses IRC as the main method of locating peers for his virtual currency system has some serious issues in judgment, and I'm personally not willing to risk any money, virtual or otherwise, using his software or his crypto set-up. Since this is a monetary system, I'd want to be sure before use that A) It's secure B) It can be publically implemented without licensing or IP rules and C) Someone with knowledge of economics looks at it and builds in some future-proof planning, so if it really catches on and all internet users start using it it won't fall apart just as people are starting to trust it.
Now, when something similar comes along from a real crypto person like Bruce Schnier and gets defined in an RFC before implementation, then that'll be worth trying.
This is a common occurrence in many fields with a high technical bar. Usually, the person with the "plan" has a pretty high opinion of themselves, which may or may not be justified. I see a lot of "genius children" (labeled by their parents) with big ideas that just need "a few things" worked out to have their Invention built and make a ton of money for them and their parents.
To give an example from a nerd hobby forum, it's common in an amateur ROV group I frequent to get questions from new members, usually teenagers, saying something like the following: "I have a great ROV design that will dive to 5000 feet, be small enough for one person to carry and use, and will only cost $10,000. It can be used for (insert random phrase describing any "cool" ROV use here). I have the design almost done and I'm going to take it to various companies to get the manufacturing done (read as: try to get someone to buy my design and give me lots of royalties) and I just need details on a few things. First, can someone tell me how I can seal a motor against water getting in? Second, I plan on using outdoor extension cord cable with fiber optics inside for communications, can someone tell me where I can order this online? Third, I'm going to need a special caulk to seal the wires where they enter the hull of the ROV, where can I buy that in a small tube for under $10?"
Usually the person doing this has drawn up a couple pictures or mock-ups in a CAD program or even a modeler like Blender or Maya. They've usually picked a use for their ROV without understanding anything about how the use relates to design, specifications, or capabilities. If anything they've designed their model with superficial features that make it "work" for the use intended, like drawing in an arm with a sawblade on it "for cutting off damaged well heads". Note that I'm not talking about an actual design, they've just drawn a picture of a (possibly) cool looking ROV, spending as much time on the paint job as the shape.
The thing all the people that do this have in common is a very human attribute - they want to believe they are special, that they are geniuses, and that they will be able to make a living/get rich/get famous without having to do it the way "ordinary" people do, through education, luck, and hard work.
That's not a horrible fault, but usually they don't want to hear that the "great design" they have, no matter how detailed, is in fact the "easy" part of creating something like they want. They don't want to hear they're not a genius and that what they want isn't simple. They interpret you telling them that it isn't that simple the same way they'd interpret someone saying "I'm not smart enough to do what you're asking" or "We big industry guys don't like to listen to new ideas". Heaven help you if you try to actually produce a quote for the work they want you to do.
People like this are why the term "hubris" exists.
If it's a kid I try to encourage them to keep thinking great ideas, but to get some education in what they want to do. If they just won't listen, sometimes I just ignore them and let them find out on their own that they're dreaming.
The same thing works for non programmers designing software. They are great if they know they're designing a user interface or interaction, and that what they want may not be possible. That kind of perspective can really help a deep technical person produce a great product. If they're convinced they have a product ready to go and that all that needs to be done is write some code, it's the same Hubris. They probably won't listen. Just ignore them unless you have the patience to get them to understand (for example, if you're a social worker or a canonized saint).
It's always amusing when a new pundit discovers exactly how the Internet actually works.
Until they gain enough technical knowledge to be dangerous, they assume that the Internet is just as Hollywood portrays... A rock-solid utility run by the Government that only PhDs and arcanely skilled teenage geniuses can control or understand.
Then they discover just how "fragile" it is, and start telling the people who've been making it work all along that they need to straighten up and fly right, or else a major disaster is going to happen. Good thing they told us.
It's sad that they can't just say "Oh, I guess I didn't understand.". Instead they have to "take charge" of things because otherwise they'd have to accept their own irrelevance, or even (gasp) accept that despite their new-found expertise, they *still* don't really understand.
So straighten up, Cisco... it's obvious to this guy you don't know what you're doing. Fix that BGP thing and do it NOW, you hear him?
I know exactly what their positions are and whom they report to, thanks. I'm not unaware of who they are, I just believe different things about how much power and influence they have.
If you think they lead in any direction on their own, your thinking is kind of naive. Their jobs are to bring recommendations and direction from their departments to the president, bring his directives back down to their organizations, and give their organizations the political and resource support they need to do the actual work.
Despite the prestige and apparent power associated with their positions, they are the very definition of middle managers.
Mr. transportation secretary making a comment about this issue when he's obviously voicing his own beliefs is silly... it's just wishful thinking. There'd be a lot more news items about this if it was a serious direction DoT was taking, and even then they'd have to involve other organizations like the FCC, someone to represent the automakers, the ACLU for those citizens offended by their choice to use the phone in the car being taken away, etc.
Him stating that this will happen and expecting people to believe him because he's the sec. of transportation is like the secretary of the interior announcing that all national parks will become paintball courses. He'd be involved in the discussion, but it's obvious to anyone with one brain cell that he can't do it on his own and there's no way the necessary others would agree to it.
So, it's just one man shooting off his mouth.
He doesn't directly set policy or rules, he doesn't legally lobby for legislation to set rules, and the fact that he's only around for four years or (max) eight means the career govt. employees at the various agencies can stall and block him until someone else is appointed if they disagree with anything he does.
He's not where the rubber meets the road nor is he highly placed enough (despite the title) to set government direction. He's a go between for the actual leaders and the departments who actually do the work. All the power he has comes from talking to people to try to get them to do things. Hence, middle manager.
"Government official shoots off his mouth about his personal crusade, makes little sense"
Honestly... this guy, even if quoted correctly, is just saying what he'd do if he had absolute power over the law, because of his personal feelings on the subject. What he wants to do really doesn't matter. Despite the fact that he's apparently in exactly the right position to get this done, if you think about it he's basically a middle manager in a paralyzed government.
Does anyone remember when people in the US government at least tried to make an unbiased decision about whether a law or idea was good based on facts?
It seems like the kids of the Greatest Generation are destined to be one of the worst generations...
Heh... so I'm either depending on "magic", which won't work because magic doesn't exist, or I'm using a method that generates toxic waste, and therefore it won't work because I'll have disposal problems. Sounds a lot like you're looking for justification for a conclusion you've already reached, instead of the other way around. Just because you can't imagine how to do something doesn't mean it won't work.
Technology not invented yet isn't the same as magic, and as you note it isn't the same as "real world" technology... because it's NOT INVENTED YET. See how that works?
Specifically I was thinking of maybe using the nanoparticle sorting technologies that have been developed in chip size for materials analysis, or maybe a centrifuge based sorting process with the waste liquified. Maybe even building macro scale robotic sorting devices to separate waste at multiple scales. There are many, many approaches, and fortune awaits the first person who comes up with an economically viable one.
Also, there's nothing wrong with using a lot of energy, just like there's nothing inherently wrong with spending a lot of money, if the result is a net gain. If we remove more garbage (solid, liquid, and gas) from the world than we add, we're moving in the right direction.
Interesting... you're assuming a specific method of recycling then proceeding to poke holes in what you believe I'm suggesting. This is an excellent example of a "straw man" argument.
What I'm actually suggesting is a technology that isn't developed yet... machines that could separate any given item into its component parts with a high degree of accuracy and speed. This may mean a process where the first stage is "chop it into small bits" or it may not. There are other approaches.
Yes, it'll take energy. Just about everything does :)
Bonus: The technology would be worth millions, because there's many years of old electronic (and other) waste sitting around to be had for the taking, including in landfills and other locations. The problem with trash is that no one likes to separate out the organics from the recyclables from the re-usables. We humans don't even like to throw trash away in multiple places (like keeping a separate recycle bin and compost) so letting us be lazy and having the machines do the sorting is a big win.
Ultimately manufacturers must make sure their products and packaging are environmentally friendly as possible, of course. It would also be nice if they designed the products to be disassembled and reassembled, making repairs easier (repair instead of replace generates less waste).
It's probably unrealistic to expect products to be 100% landfill free through... new products take advantage of new materials and technologies, and the ability to dispose of something new cleanly always lags behind the ability to produce and use it...
Erik
It's hard to draw a line arbitrarily, given the varying skills of new graduates, but most folks coming out of the better business schools in the last 6-8 years have a good handle on what works in the Internet age.
Of course, it'll be years until enough of the old guard retire from officer positions in the really big media companies for the newer generation to get a chance to run things...
I'm pretty much convinced that the current generation of managers and corporate officers in media companies are just not capable of changing enough to forge a new business model in the internet age.
A while ago I would have predicted that they'd eventually have to give up their attempts to slow the change, or to find ways to keep their pay for content models working the same way, and eventually start experimenting to find something new or listen to their younger, more flexible peers.
Now, however, I'm thinking that they just can't change... change in their companies won't happen without a rollover of management, like in so many other organizations run by the "me" generation. They won't give up and they won't give in. They'll have to die off.
More to the point of the article, I predict if all news articles get charged for from the wire services, there'll be a period of rampant ignoring of the fee, followed by a period of cut and paste disguising of the origin of an article, or paraphrasing to hide a source, followed by independent sourcing of news from readers local to a story, and maybe eventually a new kind of news reporter, whose business model I don't know, but who travels the world collecting news to publish on the Internet.
Maybe in some part of all this we'll get back to unbiased, true news reporting and not political spin. I hope so.
"Recommendations by the NTSB to the FAA have gone unheeded for many years. With all of the technological advancements that we work with in the IT field, what sort of best practices could be brought forward in transit safety?"
Answer: None. You're asking a bunch of people who presumably have IT experience to play armchair engineer and second guess the designers of embedded systems that are designed not only to record data on aircraft controls, time, and position, but to permit recovery of that data if the aircraft explodes, burns, falls into 2000 feet of water, then sits for a week. It's apples and oranges. Despite the fact that it seems like IT has rapidly advanced technology and the flight recorder tech is far behind, it's only a perception.
The true answer to "How could flight recorder tech be made better?" is both obvious and deceptive. It's easy for us to say things like "record all the controls, temperature, position of people, cockpit video, etc and live uplink it to the internet" and on the face of it have that seem like a good idea.
But probably very few of us here have experience or knowledge with the type of data that is useful in an accident investigation. Would cockpit video be more useful than audio? Other than allowing us to view people about to die or crash, it might not give us new information. It might be more useful to track flight controls and engine efficiency, or weather conditions, or the attitude of the flight attendants.
What problem are we trying to solve here? Just because technology can be "upgraded" doesn't mean it should be. Remember, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If all you are expert in is IT technology....
Get ahold of a few hundred small frameless hand mirrors, and epoxy putty them to the inside of the dish so they reflect on a mirror size target in the center.
You can either place a Stirling engine's hot section in the center or use it to solar cook just about anything, or even put another mirror there to reflect the light somewhere else where you lens it onto a high efficiency solar panel.
Power and heat, cheap.
Despite the fact that they are involve the public more directly and more immediately than any democratic or community based voting or collective decision making system has in the past, internet sites where visitors decide on something still rely on honesty and impartial decision making (with respect to the purpose of the vote) by the voters in order to produce a non skewed result.
Like any voting process whose outcome is meant to reflect the "will of the people", voters must vote only once so everyone has an equal voice, and no voter must be unduly influenced by biased interests. To correctly reflect the views of everyone on the internet, a vote would have to include a significant random sample of internet users, which is impossible. Further, due to the nature of the Internet and web sites, even detecting a biased, stacked or invalid vote is nearly impossible.
While this is obvious to some, it's worth stating explicitly that just because a voting process takes place on the internet doesn't mean it's fair and balanced, and just because something is posted on the internet doesn't mean that it's true.
It can be a shock to those who believe humanity is a step away from an internet based golden age of online government where corrupt bureaucrats and overpaid staff are eliminated, but the internet is just a better way to communicate than we've had in the past. The value of communications has always depended on whom you are talking to :)
Erik