MAC address sure, since your device's MAC address isn't used after your packets reach the ISP's border. However, I invite you to try to establish a full duplex connection using a spoofed IP.
Now his point is that your MAC is irrelevant beyond your layer 2 link. OK, correct on ipv4.
However, what if you use ipv6 and RFC 2462 "Stateless Address Autoconfiguration" which basically picks your ipv6 address based on your MAC address. Wedging a 48 bit mac address into, say, a/28 of ipv4 space isn't going to work too well, but wedging a 48 bit mac address into a/64 LAN of ipv6 works pretty well.
Now the argument is that no matter which ISP you connect to, or which starbucks you connect to, etc, you can always correlate that large collection of 128 bit ipv6 addresses in a log by trashing the upper 64 bits and figuring out which 48 bit mac addresses map into the/64 ipv6 addresses.
Even worse, the top 24 bits of the mac define the device manufacturer, so no matter where you go in the world, people know you've got an apple, or whatever.
So, "your device's MAC address isn't used after your packets reach the ISP's border" isn't really true if your layer 3 address depends directly on your layer 2 address.
On the other hand, if instead of using your autoconfigured address, you fake or "spoof" some other random/64 on the LAN, then you can't be tracked. Now if you do this at work, your local net nanny is going to get all teed off that some "unknown" mac address is online, because look at that ipv6 address that doesnt match any known inventoried hardware MAC address.
You can insist that using a "fake" MAC is not spoofing, or whatever, but then you're getting into pointless naming games.
I heard, that instead of specifying addresses using hexadecimal digits 0-9 and A-F, some PHD wants to use 0-9 and A-Z. And the offshored helpdesk wants to use unicode characters instead of hexadecimal digits.
I bet there's a heck of a lot of spreadsheets and ip allocation thingys and map generation scripts and especially webpage javascript validation that won't tolerate "letters" in yer "IP addresses". Underlying OS and apps are generally OK at this point (I've been running ipv6 for many years from various tunnelbrokers)
However, I invite you to try to establish a full duplex connection using a spoofed IP.
I think you're new to ipv6 and are thinking in ipv4 terms.
At one site I have a tunnel from sixxs (because its dynamic) and another site I have a tunnel from tunnelbroker.net aka everyones favorite ISP he.net (which only works on static IPs, more or less)
At both sites I have a/48 of which I have a/64 assigned to my ethernet LAN. Based on various blah blah blah you can figure out my MAC address based on my ipv6 address.
You can also assign multiple arbitrary ipv6 addresses to an interface. One of my boxes has no less than 5 addresses. Its cheap and simple to load balance or whatever by moving the address to another machine later, if/as necessary.
So, yeah, no problemo, on my/64 ethernet at home I can spoof most any address I want inside that/64 and it'll work, aside from the 30 or so in 2**64 odds (actually somewhat worse...) of colliding with another machine.
There IS no 3rd generation touch at 8G, thats a 2nd gen Touch
Sure about that? Here's the model numbers for a 2G and a 3G 8 GB ipod.
Google for "ipod MC086LL" you get a thousand ads/reviews for the 8 GB 3G model. Just verified it on the About screen on my ipod in the Settings app.
There does exist a model MB528LL/A which is a 8 GB 2G model, which I do not own. Google for "ipod MB528LL/A" and you get a thousand ads/reviews for the 8 GB 2G model.
otherwise its a full iOS 4 device.
Well, OK, apple's marketing website disagrees, perhaps its too big to fit in memory, but one way or another, I guess I'll find out very soon...
It's not for all the iPhone and iPod touch models. The first generation is being left behind.
And brand new 8GB 3G touch owners are left behind also, as per apples website:
"iPod touch 3rd generation 32GB and 64GB (late 2009)"
Its a pity really... I wanted phone and PDA functionality, but didn't want to pay $3000 for the iphone experience, so I bought an $185 8G third gen touch and a $10/month pay as you go phone, I figure I get 99% of the functionality for about 20% of the price. Pity it can't be upgraded, but I don't think my end-user-experience would be much improved by the features, anyway.
The reason why healthcare insurance policies are counterintuitive to other insurances is to foster preventive care
Disagree. Very few people avoid preventative care in other insured areas. If I don't replace my sparking electrical wiring, the insurance co will buy me a new house when it burns down. Its a pain in the ass to crawl around on the ground and check my car tire pressure, and if I don't the insurance will buy me a new car when I flip it on the highway. I just don't see this happening.
Personally, I always thought paying for health care via real estate taxes was the fairest, rather than income. I live six blocks from the best neonatal care unit in my county, also had an excellent ER before it was invaded by illegals. I get better medical care, thus should pay more for it than my cousin running the sheep farm whom has a two hour drive to the nearest dumpy clinic. People are already used to the idea that my property tax is a bit higher than my farmer cousin's property tax, so no problem there. Peoples lifetime medical care budgets are spent almost exclusively at the start and end of their lives, and coincidentally, kids and seniors spend most of their time nearby home, coincidentally in the service area of their properties nearby hospital. Currently, my emergency room health care received depends almost solely on where I live when the problem occurs, not on my highly variable income, may as well codify that situation. You can use the same justifications for using real estate taxes to pay for primary education, as you use to pay for medical services, like on average everyone needs it so we may as well have everyone pay for it, we've decided culturally that no education / no medical care is unacceptable, community pride / real estate values / rental rates depend strongly on the services we provide our residents, etc.
On the down side it is getting harder and harder to find doctors who are cash-friendly.
You have a large enough sample size? Or maybe its a regional difference, type of thing?
Because of:
the overhead of dealing with 'insurance' companies can easily equal 50% of the bill.
there are some Drs around here that do not have space/whatever for new "insurance" patients but it seems like all Drs will take new "cash" patients.
Re:also: more doctors, less pay, more compassion.
on
What US Health Care Needs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
More than half of ostensibly qualified applicants every year are turned away.
One of the prime reasons I didn't go into medicine was the cost. Chose the I.T. field instead.
In retrospect, I wish I went into medicine. Instead of competing with a glut of "educated" "certified" "trained" personnel in IT, I'd have a "guaranteed" job as a Dr.
What fraction of people go into C.S., learn how to design compilers, databases, OS kernels, clusters, large scale BGP networks, etc, and then get stuck on the helpdesk, or if not underemployed, unemployed due to outsourcing?
On the other hand, it seems that approximately 100% of doctors whom learn how to suture wounds, on the job, believe it or not, actually get to suture wounds?
The level of underemployment in IT is so extreme, that there is a whole comic industry of making fun of the "peter principle" folks above them in management, the humor being that IT folks are so strongly underemployed that the concept of a "peter principle" line of work is hilarious to them. On the other hand, it seems like doctors actually get to do, what they trained to do, which must be pretty nice.
How about corporate officials making no more than 40 times the pay of the lowest-paid health worker?
End result, everyone below the payrate of cardiologist outsourced to temp agencies / contractors. Not sure what positive result you expect to obtain out of that, other than institutionalizing another expensive layer of management and middlemen between the workers and their income stream.
Any revenue by any middlemen whom add no medical value, or exist solely to subtract medical value, from patient care?
If they're not profitable they'll either raise costs or go out of business, so he really means "obscene corporations"
Maybe he means obscene as in culturally unacceptable, obscene like kiddie pr0n or eating household pets for dinner or working in the medical insurance racket, not obscene as in "they make more money than I think they should".
Ehmm, no, they don't. Unless you own a car that *must* have the engine running at all times, even when you're trying to replace the fuel lines.
Welcome to naval engineering. Pretty much the same as being a (diesel) car mechanic, except everything is bigger, which makes some things easier and some things harder.
I also have a cousin who's both a landlubber and a stationary diesel mechanic, and claims he does a remarkable amount of work on live engines. The very stereotypical situation of, we're having a power outage, the thing could barely start and its barely running, get out here and fix it quick. If you give an engine dual redundant (RAID 1?) fuel lines, fuel filters, check valves, and put a valve on each end of each fuel line, its really not so hard to replace the fuel lines, filters, etc, while its running. According to him, assuming you are intelligent enough to follow complicated and detailed procedures, being "environmentally correct" is much harder than actually doing the work, or maybe that is a description of the typical engine designer's priorities more so than the inherent nature of the work.
The liquid dessicant, a very strong aqueous solution of lithium chloride or sodium chloride
The dessicants are, compared to typical refrigerants like HCFCs, relatively benign on the environment.
Hah Hah Hah Hah. Maybe if you're a bacteria that lives in the dead sea. Everyone else would be screwed. Imagine the environmental costs of making everything in a house to naval ship standards (and this isn't a joke about "being full of sea men"). Imagine the environmental costs of every cheap pine wood stud or steel stud having to be replaced with something "seaproof" like teak or a good grade of marine stainless steel (not the stuff that cracks in chlorine). Imagine the environmental costs of replacing every electrical device within 6 months of purchase or having to run everything in stainless steel conduit so the inside of the house looks like the inside of a WWII submarine (which, personally, I think would be cool, but the average HGTV viewer would freak out, which is probably why I think it would be cool). It will leak and inevitably destroy everything in the house, at extreme environmental cost. But, hey, if it "saved" a hundred watts here and there, I guess thats just great.
Macs can magically replace themselves during the annual hardware replacement cycle
Ha ha. The average mac lasts significantly longer than the average employee. Average meaning Mr Spreadsheet optimizer, or Ms powerpoint tinkerer, or Mr document writer, not so much Mr CAD dude or Ms video editor.
I suppose if you worked at McDonalds the same situation could also exist with PCs where the average mean time between virus infestations would none the less be longer than the average length of employment.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn.
I've worked several jobs like that. Most of the benefits of contracting, combined with most of the benefits of full time employment. Frankly, having a boss that could understand what I'm doing, would creep me out a bit, after all these years (decades now) of accomplishing goals unsupervised, it would be like "too many chefs in the kitchen" type of feeling.
Well, now that you have ssh, and you can tunnel absolutely anything over ssh, I guess that part should read as "firewall modification" also, so to speak...
There is a genuine IT department by name, which is mostly extremely generic typical business IT support. The printer is broken again. Can you move this PC from the old cube to the new cube? You don't want to work there, except maybe for some plum spots at the top. They report to... like finance or something, as a cost center. Everyone in the company is their boss whenever something breaks.
Then there are IT-type people attached to certain departments to run specialized technical resources that are not found at every business office full of computers. They/we report to the boss of that department. Our boss is responsible for certain goals requiring specialized technical devices, and I support those devices. That's a very nice place to work. I have one boss.
We mostly treat other IT groups as almost separate companies, no teamwork allowed, but sometimes it happens anyway. For example, when I had some production gear living on IT's LAN, those SOBs statically double-assigned one of my server IP addresses to a printer (Personally, I think they were getting even for the time I wiped a IT PC that was "their property" for use as a temporary server). So, I went begging to yet another little team in a separate department that happened to run their own separate LAN and got access and IP space from them, so the general employees living in IT-land now have to access our production gear thru the firewall between the separate LANs.
The idea that I would pull cable for some secretary is about as ridiculous as the idea that a "generic cog in the IT machine" could support our specialized production gear. Most grunt laborers from IT probably wouldn't even know the acronyms much less how to install and repair the gear, and I have no idea how to change printer toner cartridges, and I like it that way.
So "Informational Technology" lives here both as a generic support team reporting up their own separate IT chain of command, and also as a widely distributed small team/individual basis reporting directly to their local manager.
I'm a bit mystified about chapter 8, which sounds a whole heck of a lot like "apt-get install mysql-server" for those whom can't apt-get.
From what little info I have, this software seems to summarize to a super complicated way to push data in and out of databases. The kind of thing normal people would whip up write-once-read-never-again perl scripts full of obscene regexes and mysterious one liners, but if you'd rather do it differently, here's this giant complicated system written in Java and XML with the verbosity of COBOL that'll do more or less the same thing, but more slowly and complicatedly, for people whom don't know what SQL is or even how to install mysql.
Somebody please P.R. me and explain what this thing is, or why I'd want it, or what in the world I'd do with it.
You italicized the wrong syllables. Should have said microcontroller as it can only parallelize separate hardware threads. You can't, for example, do more than eight software threads.
Here's a mixed model fail for an four person soccer video game:
one cog runs the video out (hardware, OK) one cog runs the sound out (hardware, OK) one cog each for each human player, reading each joystick or bluetoothed wiimote or whatever (hardware-ish, OK) one cog each for each computer controlled AI player (software, danger! danger! danger!)
That adds up to 10 cogs. And success or hard failure depends on a user configurable number of players due to inherent hardware architectural limitations.
A better architecture in this situation would be scrap the hardware accelerated threads and go pure software threading, since none of the threads (well, except video) are terribly computationally difficult.
Also note that lynxmotion sells numerous little robots with up to 32 little servos. Easy if your threads are done in software, not so easy if they are only done in hardware and you only get 8 or whatever.
Thats some mighty cool hardware. But I don't think you get my point. Its possible to write software where there is a clearly defined ultra hard permanent fixed limit to the number of threads and no fancy concurrent stuff is necessary between the thread. In that case hardware multi-cores like the propeller and the xmos look beautiful. For example my camcorder has one thread pulling bits off he CCD and stuffing them on the SD card, another thread updating the real time clock, and another thread running the zoom lens in and out. No big deal.
But, what if your thread design is linked to the UI? Simplest example, what if you tried to implement the UI for each automated worker unit in the "Civilization" game as a simultaneous thread, in which case it works great up to 8, or 32, or whatever but inevitably the user is gonna click "increment" when you're already maxed out at which time you get hard failure, kaboom. Actually the Civ example is terrible because all 32 settlers might simultaneously try to irrigate the same tile, because the hardware devices usually have little to no support for the hard parts of concurrency like mutex and race condition things, so they blow up. You didn't mention, and I didn't research if the xmos stuff supports that. Perhaps a real world example would be a hardware accelerated threaded webserver that is lightning fast until it reaches 8, or 32, or whatever simultaneous accesses, at which time it simply and completely fails, which may be completely unacceptable in some apps.
I've never heard anyone claim that polling is superior to servicing interrupts.
I can make a tight polling loop in single digit clock cycles. Some processors have extraordinarily long interrupt operations. The type that smacks the entire kitchen sink onto the stack before it'll look up the ISR address and jump to it, latencies at least an order of magnitude longer than the polling loop.
This doesn't just bite midrange procs trying to do ultra fast stuff like video overlay, it also bites ultra low power / ultra low speed procs. At 60 KHZ clock, you might be hard pressed to handle more than a couple thousand interrupts/sec but if you poll, that's a piece of cake.
Depends entirely on processor design and application. Arguably if the software guy "needs" to poll, that's evidence the hardware guy screwed up and/or the specs are simply unworkable.
Or in summary, polling has great latency response, interrupts have (relatively) terrible latency response, and everyone tries to design around that.
I'm somewhat familiar with the Propeller. Parallelizes quite well up to eight simultaneous tasks. Nineth? Well, turn back around and back to hell.
Its about on the level of saying, I've got eight tasks for my arduino, so since they're cheap enough, how about soldering in eight arduino chips. Laughable as this sounds on the surface, in an era of pic microcontroller that are cheaper than a can of soda, its not all that bad of an idea.
On the other hand, if you wanted to run K or M of threads, perhaps the worlds most demented DSP implementation, thats not going to scale so well.
Somehow, despite it "requiring" AI, for liability reasons, other than the most trivial of follow up issues, it'll probably end up 99% of the time as a semi-realtime nifty videoconference frontend for existing consulting nurses.
I would also anticipate some "self nursing". Rather than paying someone to glance at a sutured wound, have the patient photograph it with their cellphone and have a centralized nurse (and/or dr) review a stack of pictures at once. Rather than paying a nurse to stick a thermometer in the patients mouth (or, where ever) and wait for a result and record it, the phone might bug the patient to test himself and log his own result.
This idea of a personal universal electronic medical record is kind of interesting, compared to the corporate electronic medical records we are "sort of" seeing deployed.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of two separate arguments.
Lets look at the original posters claim
MAC address sure, since your device's MAC address isn't used after your packets reach the ISP's border. However, I invite you to try to establish a full duplex connection using a spoofed IP.
Now his point is that your MAC is irrelevant beyond your layer 2 link. OK, correct on ipv4.
However, what if you use ipv6 and RFC 2462 "Stateless Address Autoconfiguration" which basically picks your ipv6 address based on your MAC address. Wedging a 48 bit mac address into, say, a /28 of ipv4 space isn't going to work too well, but wedging a 48 bit mac address into a /64 LAN of ipv6 works pretty well.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2462.txt
Now the argument is that no matter which ISP you connect to, or which starbucks you connect to, etc, you can always correlate that large collection of 128 bit ipv6 addresses in a log by trashing the upper 64 bits and figuring out which 48 bit mac addresses map into the /64 ipv6 addresses.
Even worse, the top 24 bits of the mac define the device manufacturer, so no matter where you go in the world, people know you've got an apple, or whatever.
So, "your device's MAC address isn't used after your packets reach the ISP's border" isn't really true if your layer 3 address depends directly on your layer 2 address.
On the other hand, if instead of using your autoconfigured address, you fake or "spoof" some other random /64 on the LAN, then you can't be tracked. Now if you do this at work, your local net nanny is going to get all teed off that some "unknown" mac address is online, because look at that ipv6 address that doesnt match any known inventoried hardware MAC address.
You can insist that using a "fake" MAC is not spoofing, or whatever, but then you're getting into pointless naming games.
doesen't IPv6 drop some of need for VPN?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Mandatory_network_layer_security
IPSec is mandatory for "full ipv6 support", and of course almost no one uses it.
Its kind of like saying having https webservers removes all need for VPNs. Well, not exactly.
But then the ISP need to do there part and give you more then 1 ip.
I'm not aware of any tunnelbroker whom won't give you a /48 for your LAN, at this time. ISPs, being ISPs, will find a way to F it all up, I'm sure.
I heard, that instead of specifying addresses using hexadecimal digits 0-9 and A-F, some PHD wants to use 0-9 and A-Z. And the offshored helpdesk wants to use unicode characters instead of hexadecimal digits.
I bet there's a heck of a lot of spreadsheets and ip allocation thingys and map generation scripts and especially webpage javascript validation that won't tolerate "letters" in yer "IP addresses". Underlying OS and apps are generally OK at this point (I've been running ipv6 for many years from various tunnelbrokers)
However, I invite you to try to establish a full duplex connection using a spoofed IP.
I think you're new to ipv6 and are thinking in ipv4 terms.
At one site I have a tunnel from sixxs (because its dynamic) and another site I have a tunnel from tunnelbroker.net aka everyones favorite ISP he.net (which only works on static IPs, more or less)
At both sites I have a /48 of which I have a /64 assigned to my ethernet LAN. Based on various blah blah blah you can figure out my MAC address based on my ipv6 address.
You can also assign multiple arbitrary ipv6 addresses to an interface. One of my boxes has no less than 5 addresses. Its cheap and simple to load balance or whatever by moving the address to another machine later, if/as necessary.
So, yeah, no problemo, on my /64 ethernet at home I can spoof most any address I want inside that /64 and it'll work, aside from the 30 or so in 2**64 odds (actually somewhat worse...) of colliding with another machine.
There IS no 3rd generation touch at 8G, thats a 2nd gen Touch
Sure about that? Here's the model numbers for a 2G and a 3G 8 GB ipod.
Google for "ipod MC086LL" you get a thousand ads/reviews for the 8 GB 3G model. Just verified it on the About screen on my ipod in the Settings app.
There does exist a model MB528LL/A which is a 8 GB 2G model, which I do not own. Google for "ipod MB528LL/A" and you get a thousand ads/reviews for the 8 GB 2G model.
otherwise its a full iOS 4 device.
Well, OK, apple's marketing website disagrees, perhaps its too big to fit in memory, but one way or another, I guess I'll find out very soon...
It's not for all the iPhone and iPod touch models. The first generation is being left behind.
And brand new 8GB 3G touch owners are left behind also, as per apples website:
"iPod touch 3rd generation 32GB and 64GB (late 2009)"
Its a pity really... I wanted phone and PDA functionality, but didn't want to pay $3000 for the iphone experience, so I bought an $185 8G third gen touch and a $10/month pay as you go phone, I figure I get 99% of the functionality for about 20% of the price. Pity it can't be upgraded, but I don't think my end-user-experience would be much improved by the features, anyway.
I don't think it obscene if a business profits from recycling the organs in your corpse.
You must be more trusting of the businessmen that run the medical industry than... almost anyone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest
The reason why healthcare insurance policies are counterintuitive to other insurances is to foster preventive care
Disagree. Very few people avoid preventative care in other insured areas. If I don't replace my sparking electrical wiring, the insurance co will buy me a new house when it burns down. Its a pain in the ass to crawl around on the ground and check my car tire pressure, and if I don't the insurance will buy me a new car when I flip it on the highway. I just don't see this happening.
Personally, I always thought paying for health care via real estate taxes was the fairest, rather than income. I live six blocks from the best neonatal care unit in my county, also had an excellent ER before it was invaded by illegals. I get better medical care, thus should pay more for it than my cousin running the sheep farm whom has a two hour drive to the nearest dumpy clinic. People are already used to the idea that my property tax is a bit higher than my farmer cousin's property tax, so no problem there. Peoples lifetime medical care budgets are spent almost exclusively at the start and end of their lives, and coincidentally, kids and seniors spend most of their time nearby home, coincidentally in the service area of their properties nearby hospital. Currently, my emergency room health care received depends almost solely on where I live when the problem occurs, not on my highly variable income, may as well codify that situation. You can use the same justifications for using real estate taxes to pay for primary education, as you use to pay for medical services, like on average everyone needs it so we may as well have everyone pay for it, we've decided culturally that no education / no medical care is unacceptable, community pride / real estate values / rental rates depend strongly on the services we provide our residents, etc.
On the down side it is getting harder and harder to find doctors who are cash-friendly.
You have a large enough sample size? Or maybe its a regional difference, type of thing?
Because of:
the overhead of dealing with 'insurance' companies can easily equal 50% of the bill.
there are some Drs around here that do not have space/whatever for new "insurance" patients but it seems like all Drs will take new "cash" patients.
More than half of ostensibly qualified applicants every year are turned away.
One of the prime reasons I didn't go into medicine was the cost. Chose the I.T. field instead.
In retrospect, I wish I went into medicine. Instead of competing with a glut of "educated" "certified" "trained" personnel in IT, I'd have a "guaranteed" job as a Dr.
What fraction of people go into C.S., learn how to design compilers, databases, OS kernels, clusters, large scale BGP networks, etc, and then get stuck on the helpdesk, or if not underemployed, unemployed due to outsourcing?
On the other hand, it seems that approximately 100% of doctors whom learn how to suture wounds, on the job, believe it or not, actually get to suture wounds?
The level of underemployment in IT is so extreme, that there is a whole comic industry of making fun of the "peter principle" folks above them in management, the humor being that IT folks are so strongly underemployed that the concept of a "peter principle" line of work is hilarious to them. On the other hand, it seems like doctors actually get to do, what they trained to do, which must be pretty nice.
How about corporate officials making no more than 40 times the pay of the lowest-paid health worker?
End result, everyone below the payrate of cardiologist outsourced to temp agencies / contractors. Not sure what positive result you expect to obtain out of that, other than institutionalizing another expensive layer of management and middlemen between the workers and their income stream.
Please define " Obscene corporate profits ".
Any revenue by any middlemen whom add no medical value, or exist solely to subtract medical value, from patient care?
If they're not profitable they'll either raise costs or go out of business, so he really means "obscene corporations"
Maybe he means obscene as in culturally unacceptable, obscene like kiddie pr0n or eating household pets for dinner or working in the medical insurance racket, not obscene as in "they make more money than I think they should".
Ehmm, no, they don't. Unless you own a car that *must* have the engine running at all times, even when you're trying to replace the fuel lines.
Welcome to naval engineering. Pretty much the same as being a (diesel) car mechanic, except everything is bigger, which makes some things easier and some things harder.
I also have a cousin who's both a landlubber and a stationary diesel mechanic, and claims he does a remarkable amount of work on live engines. The very stereotypical situation of, we're having a power outage, the thing could barely start and its barely running, get out here and fix it quick. If you give an engine dual redundant (RAID 1?) fuel lines, fuel filters, check valves, and put a valve on each end of each fuel line, its really not so hard to replace the fuel lines, filters, etc, while its running. According to him, assuming you are intelligent enough to follow complicated and detailed procedures, being "environmentally correct" is much harder than actually doing the work, or maybe that is a description of the typical engine designer's priorities more so than the inherent nature of the work.
The liquid dessicant, a very strong aqueous solution of lithium chloride or sodium chloride
The dessicants are, compared to typical refrigerants like HCFCs, relatively benign on the environment.
Hah Hah Hah Hah. Maybe if you're a bacteria that lives in the dead sea. Everyone else would be screwed. Imagine the environmental costs of making everything in a house to naval ship standards (and this isn't a joke about "being full of sea men"). Imagine the environmental costs of every cheap pine wood stud or steel stud having to be replaced with something "seaproof" like teak or a good grade of marine stainless steel (not the stuff that cracks in chlorine). Imagine the environmental costs of replacing every electrical device within 6 months of purchase or having to run everything in stainless steel conduit so the inside of the house looks like the inside of a WWII submarine (which, personally, I think would be cool, but the average HGTV viewer would freak out, which is probably why I think it would be cool). It will leak and inevitably destroy everything in the house, at extreme environmental cost. But, hey, if it "saved" a hundred watts here and there, I guess thats just great.
Macs can magically replace themselves during the annual hardware replacement cycle
Ha ha. The average mac lasts significantly longer than the average employee. Average meaning Mr Spreadsheet optimizer, or Ms powerpoint tinkerer, or Mr document writer, not so much Mr CAD dude or Ms video editor.
I suppose if you worked at McDonalds the same situation could also exist with PCs where the average mean time between virus infestations would none the less be longer than the average length of employment.
The good thing about working for her is that she didn't understand what I did, and didn't particularly care to learn.
I've worked several jobs like that. Most of the benefits of contracting, combined with most of the benefits of full time employment. Frankly, having a boss that could understand what I'm doing, would creep me out a bit, after all these years (decades now) of accomplishing goals unsupervised, it would be like "too many chefs in the kitchen" type of feeling.
Well, now that you have ssh, and you can tunnel absolutely anything over ssh, I guess that part should read as "firewall modification" also, so to speak...
He have distributed IT here.
There is a genuine IT department by name, which is mostly extremely generic typical business IT support. The printer is broken again. Can you move this PC from the old cube to the new cube? You don't want to work there, except maybe for some plum spots at the top. They report to ... like finance or something, as a cost center. Everyone in the company is their boss whenever something breaks.
Then there are IT-type people attached to certain departments to run specialized technical resources that are not found at every business office full of computers. They/we report to the boss of that department. Our boss is responsible for certain goals requiring specialized technical devices, and I support those devices. That's a very nice place to work. I have one boss.
We mostly treat other IT groups as almost separate companies, no teamwork allowed, but sometimes it happens anyway. For example, when I had some production gear living on IT's LAN, those SOBs statically double-assigned one of my server IP addresses to a printer (Personally, I think they were getting even for the time I wiped a IT PC that was "their property" for use as a temporary server). So, I went begging to yet another little team in a separate department that happened to run their own separate LAN and got access and IP space from them, so the general employees living in IT-land now have to access our production gear thru the firewall between the separate LANs.
The idea that I would pull cable for some secretary is about as ridiculous as the idea that a "generic cog in the IT machine" could support our specialized production gear. Most grunt laborers from IT probably wouldn't even know the acronyms much less how to install and repair the gear, and I have no idea how to change printer toner cartridges, and I like it that way.
So "Informational Technology" lives here both as a generic support team reporting up their own separate IT chain of command, and also as a widely distributed small team/individual basis reporting directly to their local manager.
I'm a bit mystified about chapter 8, which sounds a whole heck of a lot like "apt-get install mysql-server" for those whom can't apt-get.
From what little info I have, this software seems to summarize to a super complicated way to push data in and out of databases. The kind of thing normal people would whip up write-once-read-never-again perl scripts full of obscene regexes and mysterious one liners, but if you'd rather do it differently, here's this giant complicated system written in Java and XML with the verbosity of COBOL that'll do more or less the same thing, but more slowly and complicatedly, for people whom don't know what SQL is or even how to install mysql.
Somebody please P.R. me and explain what this thing is, or why I'd want it, or what in the world I'd do with it.
After all, it's a microcontroller
You italicized the wrong syllables. Should have said microcontroller as it can only parallelize separate hardware threads. You can't, for example, do more than eight software threads.
Here's a mixed model fail for an four person soccer video game:
one cog runs the video out (hardware, OK)
one cog runs the sound out (hardware, OK)
one cog each for each human player, reading each joystick or bluetoothed wiimote or whatever (hardware-ish, OK)
one cog each for each computer controlled AI player (software, danger! danger! danger!)
That adds up to 10 cogs. And success or hard failure depends on a user configurable number of players due to inherent hardware architectural limitations.
A better architecture in this situation would be scrap the hardware accelerated threads and go pure software threading, since none of the threads (well, except video) are terribly computationally difficult.
Also note that lynxmotion sells numerous little robots with up to 32 little servos. Easy if your threads are done in software, not so easy if they are only done in hardware and you only get 8 or whatever.
Thats some mighty cool hardware. But I don't think you get my point. Its possible to write software where there is a clearly defined ultra hard permanent fixed limit to the number of threads and no fancy concurrent stuff is necessary between the thread. In that case hardware multi-cores like the propeller and the xmos look beautiful. For example my camcorder has one thread pulling bits off he CCD and stuffing them on the SD card, another thread updating the real time clock, and another thread running the zoom lens in and out. No big deal.
But, what if your thread design is linked to the UI? Simplest example, what if you tried to implement the UI for each automated worker unit in the "Civilization" game as a simultaneous thread, in which case it works great up to 8, or 32, or whatever but inevitably the user is gonna click "increment" when you're already maxed out at which time you get hard failure, kaboom. Actually the Civ example is terrible because all 32 settlers might simultaneously try to irrigate the same tile, because the hardware devices usually have little to no support for the hard parts of concurrency like mutex and race condition things, so they blow up. You didn't mention, and I didn't research if the xmos stuff supports that. Perhaps a real world example would be a hardware accelerated threaded webserver that is lightning fast until it reaches 8, or 32, or whatever simultaneous accesses, at which time it simply and completely fails, which may be completely unacceptable in some apps.
I've never heard anyone claim that polling is superior to servicing interrupts.
I can make a tight polling loop in single digit clock cycles. Some processors have extraordinarily long interrupt operations. The type that smacks the entire kitchen sink onto the stack before it'll look up the ISR address and jump to it, latencies at least an order of magnitude longer than the polling loop.
This doesn't just bite midrange procs trying to do ultra fast stuff like video overlay, it also bites ultra low power / ultra low speed procs. At 60 KHZ clock, you might be hard pressed to handle more than a couple thousand interrupts/sec but if you poll, that's a piece of cake.
Depends entirely on processor design and application. Arguably if the software guy "needs" to poll, that's evidence the hardware guy screwed up and/or the specs are simply unworkable.
Or in summary, polling has great latency response, interrupts have (relatively) terrible latency response, and everyone tries to design around that.
It's got 8 cores
How well does it handle the 9th thread? How well does the assembly code handle mutexs and race conditions?
working with the Propeller is like advancing to the varsity squad.
Hand the "Varsity eight person rowing team" a ninth oar, sit back and watch the fun?
I'm somewhat familiar with the Propeller. Parallelizes quite well up to eight simultaneous tasks. Nineth? Well, turn back around and back to hell.
Its about on the level of saying, I've got eight tasks for my arduino, so since they're cheap enough, how about soldering in eight arduino chips. Laughable as this sounds on the surface, in an era of pic microcontroller that are cheaper than a can of soda, its not all that bad of an idea.
On the other hand, if you wanted to run K or M of threads, perhaps the worlds most demented DSP implementation, thats not going to scale so well.
consulting nurse
Somehow, despite it "requiring" AI, for liability reasons, other than the most trivial of follow up issues, it'll probably end up 99% of the time as a semi-realtime nifty videoconference frontend for existing consulting nurses.
I would also anticipate some "self nursing". Rather than paying someone to glance at a sutured wound, have the patient photograph it with their cellphone and have a centralized nurse (and/or dr) review a stack of pictures at once. Rather than paying a nurse to stick a thermometer in the patients mouth (or, where ever) and wait for a result and record it, the phone might bug the patient to test himself and log his own result.
This idea of a personal universal electronic medical record is kind of interesting, compared to the corporate electronic medical records we are "sort of" seeing deployed.