So you can have hot-swappable bricks running in an enterprise environment. You wouldn't let your entire factory be dependent on the reliability of a single RCX block, now would you?
Writing a non-OS copy file is trivial, though. Take the input file and while (!EOF()) or however your system does it, write the input data to another file. I mean it's really a comp-sci 101 type program. It doesn't even touch the Clipboard API. Simply put, if it can be read, it can be copied.
The way to get around people reading it and copying it is to build DRM into the filesystem, like we really want that in Linux.
I thought about it, and there is one way to sort of do that in Linux. Create a group for your priviliged program. That priviliged program is allowed to access some directory that the user can't, since it runs logged on as a member of that group. Of course, nobody else has access to that group's directory.
You should hear my mom bitch about the lack of RAM in the secretaries' computers in her workplace. The secretaries usually have to open up hundred-meg Excel spreadsheets and with 128 megs of RAM it takes forever, since the working set of pages has exceeded the amount of physical RAM in the machines. The secretaries really need something more in the 512 meg range.
That is more of IBM's fault for choosing the chips that they did than Microsoft's fault for not writing a virtual machine on top of IBM's choice. Because of the choice of processor and associated chips, Microsoft's hands were tied. Yeah, in retrospect, having more than one maskable interrupt level would be nice, but that would have meant more pins into the CPU and a redo of the bus controller. The I/O was for the most part memory mapped, so they had to sacrifice memory to be able to interact with the outside world. When Gates talked about 640k, it was because he had to shove all the other stuff into the upper 384k of his address space.
Yes, we can go through the whole damn mess and find all sorts of ways to save a bit of space. There's easily 128k of crap that in retrospect wasn't needed, but Bill Gates didn't have any Slashdotters around who would kindly look into the future for him, so he made a decision and went with it. You'd still mock him if he said that 768k is enough for anybody. Blame Intel's 20 bits of address space should be enough for anyone attitude instead.
Game programmers really did their best not to play nice with the OS, and since there wasn't any memory protection, DOS couldn't do anything about it. In order to save a couple of instructions, game programmers simply redid OS services and just made sure to not let the OS do anything while they had the memory nice and mangled. Put in multiprogramming, and of course, all of the old games won't work anymore.
I look at it, and I don't see something much more convenient than the current generation of things. From what it looks like, it's a high-powered PDA. In fact, it's almost the same size as my Zire 71, although maybe a bit longer and 50% wider. It's got a higher resolution screen, which is always nice, and it has more memory. The processor is a bit slower, and it's meant to run a much bigger OS than the Zire 71. Those limitations really mean to me that this isn't much more than a powerful PDA.
I don't see why hard drives aren't magnetically floated above their bearings. Put an induction motor in that baby and reduce your friction problems to a whole lot less. Heck, you can even get it fast enough that the platter will rip itself apart, and have very little friction. 100,000 RPM HDDs anybody? Or am I forgetting something fairly profound. Please, enlighten me.
Well, let's take a look at what we're talking about. Suppose we're trying to push an SD70MAC, which produces 6000 hp at around 1800 RPM. First things first, if you want a manual transmission, this involves the mother of all clutches. Otherwise, it involves the mother of all torque converters and a truly massive set of planetary gears. Neither is very pretty. Next up, you have to get the power to what can be at least sixteen drive wheels. Oh, and they're on pivoting bogies in some cases, which makes drive shafts much more fun. Finally, you have to have an engine with a wide powerband, and the engine won't spend most of its time running most efficiently. This is because in a manual transmission, the wheels rotate at a constant multiple of the rotation rate of the engine. If the wheels are stopped, so is the engine, unless you're depressing the clutch.
The reason for having electric drive is simple once you realize the previous facts. First, there's simply a direct shaft from the engine to the alternator or generator (Trains can be both AC and DC). That means no gears at all, and no clutch or torque converter. The wires from our generator can run to the drive motors in any manner that they wish. Finally, they connect to the wheels directly, with no gearing. Note that the speed that the engine is turning is completely independent of the speed of the wheels. This allows improved efficiency, and it lets you have any torque at zero velocity. Furthermore, note that we also have maximum torque starting out, and trains really need it when someone decides to save money by putting fewer engines on a larger consist. Even though it suffers from all the inefficiency of the two conversions, it can always run at the engine's sweet spot. However, the fuel efficiency isn't as big of a problem as it seems. Once a train is rolling, they need very little power to keep it going. The fuel that is used in the engines is also not the kind of stuff that you would put in your car, or your tractor for that matter. It's like high-sulfur 30 weight, and it costs less than any other petroleum product short of road tar.
Current cars are a million times more reliable than they were back in the good old days when people had cars falling apart at 100,000 miles. The first Dodge Hemi produced about as much power as a modern straight-four. Hell, nowadays we think that a car should at a minimum be able to do 0-60 in fewer than 10 seconds. That's from new technology making your car go faster. We've gotten rid of solid rear axles, which is a good couple-hundred pounds there. It's old, it's reliable, but it's too damn heavy for everything but SUVs.
Frankly, hardware failure in electronics is close to nonexistant compared to any mechanical system. If you don't go out and use brand X electrolytic capacitors, you've eliminated one of the bigger problems facing electronics today. The big thing that I would worry about in something like drive-by-wire is that the software is badly written. Other than that, I'd trust it about as much as I trust current mechanical systems.
One can always add registers and L1 cache when they've got transistors to burn. I won't be suprised when in the future we can run an entire emulator of some retro system simply using L1. However, being able to do multiple things at once always comes in handy. Note that since Quicksort can be written recursively, you can split it between processors, and each one has a disjoint working set. Furthermore, with multiple cores, you can do things that were computationally infeasible before. AI typically involves a whole bunch of searching for an optimal solution, and anything that speeds up searching makes your life a hundred times easier. Finally, remember that anything that speeds up Gnome or KDE is worth your money.
Well, I can't believe that I'm suggesting this, but back in the good old days, CDs were put in caddies. In fact, the best way I could see the holographic ones working is to have each in a permanent caddy or cartridge. You can protect it from scratches, fingerprints, and dust. It would certainly make them easier to handle, although more expensive and bulkier.
I like to go back and tweak my sentences in midstream. Sometimes I forget that I was doing, and I stop typing at some point to put the thought that just came to me in a more appropriate spot. If you ever see a run-on sentence in my writing, I will guarantee you that there's an extra capital letter in there. Grammar checker at least catches that problem and the occasional syntax error. The one thing that I really have seen it barf on, which is why I don't use it for anything other than run-on sentences, is subject-verb agreement. Christ, it sucks. I'm sorry, Christs it suck. See, it does come in handy:)
That requires that you find another program that has the same size as the first program, has the same hash as the first program, and does what you want while acting like the original program in every way other than that. Frankly, that's insane. While I don't doubt that such a program exists, finding it would be pretty much impossible, since there are 2 to the number of bits in the gcc file possible files of that size, and very, very few of them are valid gcc compilers. I'll be generous and assume that you've found one. Great. Too bad someone found some bug that only the truly depraved would ever think of (probably involving pointer arithmetic with function pointers), and oh, they made a new version with a different size and checksum.
I thought that it was in July or so, which is about opposite January. In March it would still be a bit chilly, but not as cold as I implied.
As for any place that's midwinter in September, I'd say that the South Pole fits that definition in my book, where Winter is any weather below 50 F. It's been like that down there for the past few thousand years. That is just my subtropical definition of winter.
In Sydney, the weather was much cooler. Remember that the seasons are reversed when you go south of the Equator. They were, for all intents and purposes running in mid-winter. If they tried wearing that stuff in Greece, they'd overheat, and if they were truly stupid enough to wear it in Atlanta, they would have died from heatstroke.
I've always had problems learning the command line arguments and the commands to the various Linux programs. It's not that I have problems with any one program, but keeping track of the various commands for every last friggin' text editior that my programs demand that I have can be frustrating. emacs and vi aren't my cuppa tea, but ed, sed, awk, gedit and a dozen other text editors get on my nerves. If I ever need something like sed, I'll just write a python script. If I ever need ed, then I'm switching to Longhorn.
What I'd like is for every Linux app to work together in perfect harmony and not set up in packages with truly demented dependencies. Frankly, I'm willing to bet that within the next five years, some idiot is going to make some text editor that requires that the Everything metapackage be installed.
I remember looking through a how to program in Java book in one of the series, but God, did that have problems. For the love of Jesus, don't make your class containing the main method implement Runnable and then pass an instance of itself to the main method to run in a thread. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should. I mean, hell, you can pour salt in your eyes all damn day long, but should you?
That's a DSL modem and a Cable modem built in. In only the most perverse situations will someone have all three ports used. More likely, they're just going to sit there, unused, and costing someone at least $20 a piece. In any case it's stupid, and as the article notes, the console will be expensive enough in design that an extra $40-$50 dollars is really going to hurt their bottom line. If they sell a million 2-year subscriptions, then they'll pull in $720 million dollars. However, with this, we're looking at $40 million dollars just on parts that almost nobody's going to use. Howabout just taking those out and mailing me half of the money? It'll do ya about as much good.
Quick combinatorics, folks. There are 2^8,388,608 different 1 MB files. If we digest it into a 2048 bit file, then we have created a function from a set of order 2^8,388,608 to a set of order 2^2,048. That means that there are on average 2^8,386,560 different 1 MB files that will create our 2,048 bit hash.
What this means for passwords is simple. People don't decrypt your password and compare it to a stored copy. They hash it, and then store the hash. When you log in, they hash your attempt, and if the hashes match, then the assumption is that the passwords matched, and you are let in. Hashes are very difficult to reverse, which is why they are used. The chances of two passwords producing the same hash is 1/2^2048. However, either one can be substituted for the other. We just trust in the extreme unlikelyness that two passwords would have the same hash and go on our merry ways.
Now suppose that someone has the hash of your password. They may be extremely unlikely to find your password, but they can find something just as good, if a bit unwieldly, since there's no guarantee that the substitute password is just as short as yours. If you don't mind a million character password, then there are likely about 2^8,386,560 passwords that will spoof yours.
I'm an environmentalist, but I think PV cells aren't the way to go. For a cheaper alternative on a large scale, I was thinking of solar powered heat engines. Basically, you use the sun to get a working fluid nice and hot, and then use it in a steam turbine, a stirling engine, or something of the sort. This can run an alternator as big as you want, so inverters aren't needed. Not nearly as many chemicals are involved as making PV cells, and I see people claiming stuff around 28% efficiency.
Furthermore, it isn't required to just use solar panels. Windmills are usable in areas where the sun doesn't shine all day long. Combine the two and you'll have adequate power most of the time.
Dealing with fluctuations is something that we'd just have to engineer in. Partly, we have to deal with it by spreading things out so that all of our power generation isn't concentrated at one point. 10,000 windmills and solar panels across the countryside are much less variable in total than they are by themselves. Insurance companies make profits every day by spreading things out. That's how any workable future system will have to be.
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So you can have hot-swappable bricks running in an enterprise environment. You wouldn't let your entire factory be dependent on the reliability of a single RCX block, now would you?
As long as her cabinet is nice smooth hot grits.
The way to get around people reading it and copying it is to build DRM into the filesystem, like we really want that in Linux.
I thought about it, and there is one way to sort of do that in Linux. Create a group for your priviliged program. That priviliged program is allowed to access some directory that the user can't, since it runs logged on as a member of that group. Of course, nobody else has access to that group's directory.
You should hear my mom bitch about the lack of RAM in the secretaries' computers in her workplace. The secretaries usually have to open up hundred-meg Excel spreadsheets and with 128 megs of RAM it takes forever, since the working set of pages has exceeded the amount of physical RAM in the machines. The secretaries really need something more in the 512 meg range.
When the recovery chutes won't deploy, the only creative thing that a human can do is flap their arms really quickly.
Yes, we can go through the whole damn mess and find all sorts of ways to save a bit of space. There's easily 128k of crap that in retrospect wasn't needed, but Bill Gates didn't have any Slashdotters around who would kindly look into the future for him, so he made a decision and went with it. You'd still mock him if he said that 768k is enough for anybody. Blame Intel's 20 bits of address space should be enough for anyone attitude instead.
Game programmers really did their best not to play nice with the OS, and since there wasn't any memory protection, DOS couldn't do anything about it. In order to save a couple of instructions, game programmers simply redid OS services and just made sure to not let the OS do anything while they had the memory nice and mangled. Put in multiprogramming, and of course, all of the old games won't work anymore.
I look at it, and I don't see something much more convenient than the current generation of things. From what it looks like, it's a high-powered PDA. In fact, it's almost the same size as my Zire 71, although maybe a bit longer and 50% wider. It's got a higher resolution screen, which is always nice, and it has more memory. The processor is a bit slower, and it's meant to run a much bigger OS than the Zire 71. Those limitations really mean to me that this isn't much more than a powerful PDA.
I might also want a mirrored table in the first place.
I don't see why hard drives aren't magnetically floated above their bearings. Put an induction motor in that baby and reduce your friction problems to a whole lot less. Heck, you can even get it fast enough that the platter will rip itself apart, and have very little friction. 100,000 RPM HDDs anybody? Or am I forgetting something fairly profound. Please, enlighten me.
The reason for having electric drive is simple once you realize the previous facts. First, there's simply a direct shaft from the engine to the alternator or generator (Trains can be both AC and DC). That means no gears at all, and no clutch or torque converter. The wires from our generator can run to the drive motors in any manner that they wish. Finally, they connect to the wheels directly, with no gearing. Note that the speed that the engine is turning is completely independent of the speed of the wheels. This allows improved efficiency, and it lets you have any torque at zero velocity. Furthermore, note that we also have maximum torque starting out, and trains really need it when someone decides to save money by putting fewer engines on a larger consist. Even though it suffers from all the inefficiency of the two conversions, it can always run at the engine's sweet spot. However, the fuel efficiency isn't as big of a problem as it seems. Once a train is rolling, they need very little power to keep it going. The fuel that is used in the engines is also not the kind of stuff that you would put in your car, or your tractor for that matter. It's like high-sulfur 30 weight, and it costs less than any other petroleum product short of road tar.
Current cars are a million times more reliable than they were back in the good old days when people had cars falling apart at 100,000 miles. The first Dodge Hemi produced about as much power as a modern straight-four. Hell, nowadays we think that a car should at a minimum be able to do 0-60 in fewer than 10 seconds. That's from new technology making your car go faster. We've gotten rid of solid rear axles, which is a good couple-hundred pounds there. It's old, it's reliable, but it's too damn heavy for everything but SUVs. Frankly, hardware failure in electronics is close to nonexistant compared to any mechanical system. If you don't go out and use brand X electrolytic capacitors, you've eliminated one of the bigger problems facing electronics today. The big thing that I would worry about in something like drive-by-wire is that the software is badly written. Other than that, I'd trust it about as much as I trust current mechanical systems.
They just figured that if they could survive that, they could survive England losing the 2006 World Cup.
God bless you.
One can always add registers and L1 cache when they've got transistors to burn. I won't be suprised when in the future we can run an entire emulator of some retro system simply using L1. However, being able to do multiple things at once always comes in handy. Note that since Quicksort can be written recursively, you can split it between processors, and each one has a disjoint working set. Furthermore, with multiple cores, you can do things that were computationally infeasible before. AI typically involves a whole bunch of searching for an optimal solution, and anything that speeds up searching makes your life a hundred times easier. Finally, remember that anything that speeds up Gnome or KDE is worth your money.
Well, I can't believe that I'm suggesting this, but back in the good old days, CDs were put in caddies. In fact, the best way I could see the holographic ones working is to have each in a permanent caddy or cartridge. You can protect it from scratches, fingerprints, and dust. It would certainly make them easier to handle, although more expensive and bulkier.
I like to go back and tweak my sentences in midstream. Sometimes I forget that I was doing, and I stop typing at some point to put the thought that just came to me in a more appropriate spot. If you ever see a run-on sentence in my writing, I will guarantee you that there's an extra capital letter in there. Grammar checker at least catches that problem and the occasional syntax error. The one thing that I really have seen it barf on, which is why I don't use it for anything other than run-on sentences, is subject-verb agreement. Christ, it sucks. I'm sorry, Christs it suck. See, it does come in handy :)
That requires that you find another program that has the same size as the first program, has the same hash as the first program, and does what you want while acting like the original program in every way other than that. Frankly, that's insane. While I don't doubt that such a program exists, finding it would be pretty much impossible, since there are 2 to the number of bits in the gcc file possible files of that size, and very, very few of them are valid gcc compilers. I'll be generous and assume that you've found one. Great. Too bad someone found some bug that only the truly depraved would ever think of (probably involving pointer arithmetic with function pointers), and oh, they made a new version with a different size and checksum.
As for any place that's midwinter in September, I'd say that the South Pole fits that definition in my book, where Winter is any weather below 50 F. It's been like that down there for the past few thousand years. That is just my subtropical definition of winter.
In Sydney, the weather was much cooler. Remember that the seasons are reversed when you go south of the Equator. They were, for all intents and purposes running in mid-winter. If they tried wearing that stuff in Greece, they'd overheat, and if they were truly stupid enough to wear it in Atlanta, they would have died from heatstroke.
What I'd like is for every Linux app to work together in perfect harmony and not set up in packages with truly demented dependencies. Frankly, I'm willing to bet that within the next five years, some idiot is going to make some text editor that requires that the Everything metapackage be installed.
I remember looking through a how to program in Java book in one of the series, but God, did that have problems. For the love of Jesus, don't make your class containing the main method implement Runnable and then pass an instance of itself to the main method to run in a thread. Just because you can doesn't mean that you should. I mean, hell, you can pour salt in your eyes all damn day long, but should you?
That's a DSL modem and a Cable modem built in. In only the most perverse situations will someone have all three ports used. More likely, they're just going to sit there, unused, and costing someone at least $20 a piece. In any case it's stupid, and as the article notes, the console will be expensive enough in design that an extra $40-$50 dollars is really going to hurt their bottom line. If they sell a million 2-year subscriptions, then they'll pull in $720 million dollars. However, with this, we're looking at $40 million dollars just on parts that almost nobody's going to use. Howabout just taking those out and mailing me half of the money? It'll do ya about as much good.
Well, you'd get a string that maps to the same hash. The chances of it being a real email address is pretty close to no chance in hell.
What this means for passwords is simple. People don't decrypt your password and compare it to a stored copy. They hash it, and then store the hash. When you log in, they hash your attempt, and if the hashes match, then the assumption is that the passwords matched, and you are let in. Hashes are very difficult to reverse, which is why they are used. The chances of two passwords producing the same hash is 1/2^2048. However, either one can be substituted for the other. We just trust in the extreme unlikelyness that two passwords would have the same hash and go on our merry ways.
Now suppose that someone has the hash of your password. They may be extremely unlikely to find your password, but they can find something just as good, if a bit unwieldly, since there's no guarantee that the substitute password is just as short as yours. If you don't mind a million character password, then there are likely about 2^8,386,560 passwords that will spoof yours.
Furthermore, it isn't required to just use solar panels. Windmills are usable in areas where the sun doesn't shine all day long. Combine the two and you'll have adequate power most of the time.
Dealing with fluctuations is something that we'd just have to engineer in. Partly, we have to deal with it by spreading things out so that all of our power generation isn't concentrated at one point. 10,000 windmills and solar panels across the countryside are much less variable in total than they are by themselves. Insurance companies make profits every day by spreading things out. That's how any workable future system will have to be.