5 to 40 terminals. More than 2000 systems in use outside the Bell System (as it was back then). More than 100 user utilities (Emacs probably has lisp versions of more than that now).
Oh, and PWB "allows up to 48 programmers to simultaneously create and maintain software for many computer applications." Think about that next time you do an anonCVS update of your favorite program!
The Digital Bits, which is a DVD news site (and therefore IMHO a more likely source for DVD news than AICN), claims to have actual Lucasfilm inside information (rather than just a "we don't have a release date" comment from an un-named source). These guys are part of the "Star Wars on DVD" campaign and have managed to get contacts with LFL as part of that.
In particular, their Rumor Mill page says that there won't be any Star Wars DVDs in 2000; they're currently hearing 1Q 2001 for Phantom Menace and "very tentative plans" for the original trilogy for the 2001 holiday season.
You will note that this doesn't actually conflict with AICN's latest--there's no real release date yet--though it certainly conflicts with what "some guy at Suncoast" said in the original AICN article.
(As for his credibility, if a mall store employee told me the sun would be rising in the east tomorrow, I'd be checking the other horizon.:-)
Because she's a great example of the dangers of poor cryptography. If using a 40-bit browser were likely to get you beheaded, you'd be more concerned about the quality of your crypto, wouldn't you?
Linux will thrive by offering open access, not through a too-strict demand that every part of the Linux infrastructure be opened, Love said.
Perhaps by allowing, I don't know, closed-source drivers or applications to be used along with the open parts of Linux, the way they already are?
Open source does not necessarily mean non-proprietary, Love contended. Users who make changes to software such as the Gimp image manipulation software must publish those changes under various open-source licenses, but the mere fact that there is a license obliging users to share code means that someone has set proprietary parameters on the use of the software.
Oof course, the GPL doesn't require you to publish your changes if you don't distribute your changes. So a company that uses the Gimp internally can make whatever changes they want without having to contribute them back...and that's fine.
(It's fine because they'll eventually get sick of either having to port their changes to each new version or keep running an old version, so they'll contribute them to save themselves the extra work.)
This is interesting, but even if it turns out that they can be found (or built), there may be problems. If they can be moved, you can turn one into a time machine (giving causality the finger) by accelerating one end to relativistic speeds and taking it on a trip, as noted in the actual paper (but ignored by both the New Scientist and BBC articles).
A reasonable SF treatment of this particular idea is in Robert Forward's Timemaster. The characters make cardboard look 3D, and the prose isn't the most beautiful, but the main hook is the physics speculation--and Forward does that quite well.
Actually, it doesn't take "a
long time". I measure "long time" in days. RAID reconstruction doesn't take more than a few hours -- usually less than 4hrs even on 70G drives.
Granted. My point was to note that it does take time, and during that time you no longer have the redundancy that you were planning to have; it's a window of vulnerability, and the length of the window goes up with the size of the disks involved. I wasn't trying to make people think that you're running for a week while the parity is recalculated (unless your RAID controller is a Z-80 or 6502 or something like that:-).
You
can setup more than one parity segment.
On some systems, yes. Depends on your RAID hardware/software setup...and of course that simply raises the cost (in hardware, power for hardware, space for hardware...) by another increment. At some point you start using mirroring instead.
RAID is not a substitute for backups. RAID only limits your exposure to downtime due to drive failures. There are many other things that can, and do, fail.
Exactly. Many people, not all of them salespeople or PHBs, seem to think that RAID is a magic wand that protects your data from all evil. Don't I wish....
Another possibility is RAID will become common, allowing the easy use of multiple drives.
The problem is that RAID (at level 3 and/or 5) just lets you use more space for one big volume without taking as much of a risk as you otherwise would. Instead, you take a performance hit relative to "RAID 0" (striping--which, not being redundant, should really be called AID:-).
The catch is that the larger the disks in your RAID 3/5 RAIDset, the longer your window of vulnerability when (not if) one fails. Remember, the idea of RAID is that if one disk goes bad, you can reconstruct the data using the parity blocks from all the other drives. That was fine in the days of 2GB drives, but it takes a long time to reconstruct 36GB or more of data, even if you have a dedicated hardware RAID controller. (Even an 18GB disk takes a while.)
If a second disk fails during this time (and it's more likely to, since you're now hitting it heavily to read off all the blocks you need to recalculate the missing disk with), you're hosed.
Also, RAID doesn't protect you from software. Directory corruption or an accidental rm/newfs will result in you having a nicely protected, redundant copy of your useless or empty filesystem.
"RAID 10" or RAID 1+0 or whatever the marketers are calling it is just striping across mirror pairs; that requires twice as many disks as you'd otherwise need for the same amount of storage, but it does give you reliability without the same level of speed hit.
(Yes, folks, the faster/better/cheaper trio is still pick two. Just ask the Mars Polar Lander team.)
It is so "US" centric that American companies think that they have the right to almost exclusive use of.com,.org,.net, and the rest of the world should have to have to append their country code.
Well, the UK still doesn't bother to put their country's name on their postage stamps. I guess that's the snail-mail equivalent, right?
Plus, Celera is using our (PE Biosystems) 3700 DNA Analyzer (fully automated, unattended operation 24 hours per day), whereas the Human Genome Project mostly use our older 377 DNA Sequencer, which requires manual reloading of samples after each run (every 2-3 hours).
I work at one of the US HGP centers. Our 377s are long gone. Detection is a room full of >100 ABI 3700s....
As for your 3-month lag period, we aim for a 24-hour lag period.:-)
We can even estimate how long a system such as distributed.net would take to do it, actually doing it adds nothing whatsoever to the debate
Actually, it does. The EFF's building (and publishing the plans for) Deep Crack did more to show legislators and other non-techies the ridiculous nature of low limits on key lengths than any amount of mathematical discussion or mentions of Moore's Law ever could. Think of it as a great big clue stick.
("What? For $250K anyone can build a box that will break bank encryption in a day?" "Well, it'd cost less now, because the design is already done." "How can we fix this?" "Raise the key lengths.")
We should have a special Beanie Award for longest use of the term "recent" to describe an event. (Maybe as part of a special story on the upcoming anniversary of "recent" events?)
(Oh, and guys? The features box still says that "Voting has begun" for the Beanie Awards. This is true. WWII has begun, but it has also ended; as, I presume, has the Beanie Awards voting period.)
After having been through the INS process, I have to say I have a new found respect for the IRS.
There's one thing to remember about the INS. It is the only government agency that knows that you can't vote, which of course means that you can't write your Congressman. Even the fairly unpopular IRS has that holding them back.
I also have a Kensington Saddlebag and like it. It's not a really good backpack; the straps aren't all that well designed and it tends to wiggle more than I'd like (it needs a waist strap), but it has a nice shoulder strap for "tote bag" style use and the grab handle is a real handle, not just a loop of webbing to hurt your hand with. It's great for doing the "short connection mad dash" at airports.
It does hold a fair amount of stuff; spare batteries, CD portfolio, etc.
Note that there are two versions, one with black trim and one with ugly brown trim. The picture on Kensington's website will give you the idea. (CompUSA only carried the ugly brown one last time I checked...typical.)
Oh Jonny, you should have seen it live - it's just not the same on tv, you know.
The whole "live vs. TV" thing reminds me of a USENIX keynote in 1994 (the summer conference in Boston). Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) was the speaker, and the keynote was being sent over the Internet MBONE (multicast networking).
He made a point of saying that the people watching on the Internet were getting "the exact same experience" as those of us physically present.
Of course, they weren't. The actual speech was pre-recorded, and shown on projection screens at the conference as it was being sent over the MBONE. Meanwhile, he was standing on the stage performing magic tricks while his recorded image gave the speech.
With his usual comic timing, the words "exact same experience" were replayed right when he was doing a fire-eating demonstration or something similarly spectacular.
That was one of the best USENIX keynotes I've seen, if not the best.
When was the last time you heard of a Republican get in trouble with the Republican Party for saying something controversial?
Bill Weld, formerly the Republican governor of Massachusetts (not known for its strong Republican leanings), was nominated--by a Democratic president--for the position of ambassador to Mexico.
He didn't get it, because fellow Republicans blocked him for not being sufficiently anti-drug for their taste; now he's a novelist and private-practice lawyer.
Their biggest problem is their lack of speed in getting anything done.
Yeah, I've been bitten by that. CSC for the Mac and Tru64 Unix clients took a while to arrive compared to the Wintel/Linux/etc CSC clients. Of course, dcypher only has clients for the x86 architecture on 3 OSes...guess they don't want my cycles.
As for seti@Home, they haven't exactly avoided similar problems either. Complaints about duplicated blocks and un-optimized client code for their project have been posted on/. before.
From the rumors I heard, Intel engineers would be selling their grandmothers to only be using 30 watts. I'll look for the hard numbers, but I've heard _70_ when they run the things at full speed.
And a G3/400 laptop--the whole thing--only has a 45W power adapter. That'll run the hard drive, the DVD-ROM drive, the processor, the screen, the screen backlighting, the speakers, any external bus-powered USB devices...and charge the battery. All at once.
Oh, and it'll also let you slow the processor down to extend battery life; you know, like that amazing new feature Intel's announced they'll have Real Soon Now?
Admittedly, that's the G3 instead of the G4, but even if the G4 itself is using twice as much power as the G3, you'd need what, a 60W adapter?
If this does go into effect, install times for non-RBOC xDSL service should also go down. After all, do you think the Bells currently have an incentive to speed up the installation of extra pairs for their competitors?
But if they don't have the excuse of "oh, gotta find a qualified pair" or "that neighborhood's low on pairs", they may be stuck doing the install rather than saying "but you know we can give you DSL on your existing pair".
Essentially, scientist are "reverse engineering" DNA. If we were smart, we'd have DNA put into the public domain.
Unsurprisingly, that's exactly what the public Human Genome Project is doing. Wellcome Trust, by the way, is putting their money where their mouth is; they fund the Sanger Centre which is doing part of the HGP work (along with several sites in the US).
Disclaimer: I work at one of the US sites, but I'm not a biologist, just a sysadmin. The head of my center compares patenting the human genome to patenting the periodic table; yeah, that would have really boosted chemistry....
Actually, it's a registered trademark. I took a photo of the sign when I was there (USENIX conference in Monterey), and the exact text is:
Lone Cypress[r]
a trademark of quality Lone Cypress is the corporate logo and trademark of Pebble Beach Company. As such, the use of the tree's image is regulated by law. Photographs or art renderings of the Lone Cypress for commercial or promotional purporsses cannot be taken or created without written permission from Pebble Beach Company. Photographs and art renderings for personal use only are welcomed.
So, if we get Celera to sequence the Lone Cypress, who wins?:-)
There's no Peanut Reader for any platform except the Palm...which means you either get a Palm or run a Palm emulator on your desktop--and you can't run a Palm emulator until you have a Palm ROM, which you get either by buying a Palm and using a ROM reader, or signing up for the development program and going through a bunch of rigamarole to get it.
Or by buying the 2nd Edition PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, which comes with a CD-ROM including not only the emulator, but also licensed copies of the ROMs for various PalmOS versions. (Oh, and lots of Palm software including many e-texts.)
Much cheaper than even a used Palm if you just want to see what one might be like, and if you do buy one you have a nice book too!
f you don't like the rules of the foreign work agreements then either 1) become a US ciziten, or 2) return to your home country. Its that simple.
It's not "simple". The INS has a pretty long backlog for citizenship applications, and it's not exactly like getting a driver's license once you do get through the backlog. Even getting a green card isn't exactly trivial.
I'm not sure what any of the USs dual citizenship policies are with foreign countries.
Work permit problems are not limited to the U.S. Basically everyone wants to give their citizens the advantage.
The European Union rules (see Europa) are much more open than the NAFTA rules are, though. An Irish citizen can legally live in France and commute to Germany without any legal problems in getting work permits, residence permits, and the like.
Folks, THIS CODE IS NOT ANCIENT HISTORY! Its what, a few decades old, at best. And yet, its treated as an ancient artifact. A relic of long bygone days.
"Long bygone days" when we were still landing men on the moon. (Interesting that this came up so soon after the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing, eh?)
The thing to remember is that computing's pace of change is an aberration compared to most other technologies (like the space program). We don't have hyperspace travel. We don't have manned interplanetary travel. We don't even have the capability to do a lunar mission these days! The computing equivalent would be having dumped Unix and its progeny in the dustbin, leaving the last two Unix machines ever built as museum pieces displayed at two of the national Computing Centers where they now use some really neat looking (and "reusable") minicomputers that can communicate with each other as fast as 9600bps (the bandwidth equivalent of low Earth orbit) or maybe even 57600bps (geosynch) with the right boosters.
Depressed yet?
Don't be. At least computing is that exception; it gives us an interesting, useful field that changes daily (just read/. to see how much it changes). Yes, too much change can be overwhelming--but the lack of change can be stifling. There may not be a middle ground, either (this isn't Goldilocks and the Three Bears).
Slashdot Mirror
5 to 40 terminals. More than 2000 systems in use outside the Bell System (as it was back then). More than 100 user utilities (Emacs probably has lisp versions of more than that now).
Oh, and PWB "allows up to 48 programmers to simultaneously create and maintain software for many computer applications." Think about that next time you do an anonCVS update of your favorite program!
The Digital Bits, which is a DVD news site (and therefore IMHO a more likely source for DVD news than AICN), claims to have actual Lucasfilm inside information (rather than just a "we don't have a release date" comment from an un-named source). These guys are part of the "Star Wars on DVD" campaign and have managed to get contacts with LFL as part of that.
In particular, their Rumor Mill page says that there won't be any Star Wars DVDs in 2000; they're currently hearing 1Q 2001 for Phantom Menace and "very tentative plans" for the original trilogy for the 2001 holiday season.
You will note that this doesn't actually conflict with AICN's latest--there's no real release date yet--though it certainly conflicts with what "some guy at Suncoast" said in the original AICN article.
(As for his credibility, if a mall store employee told me the sun would be rising in the east tomorrow, I'd be checking the other horizon. :-)
Because she's a great example of the dangers of poor cryptography. If using a 40-bit browser were likely to get you beheaded, you'd be more concerned about the quality of your crypto, wouldn't you?
Perhaps by allowing, I don't know, closed-source drivers or applications to be used along with the open parts of Linux, the way they already are?
Oof course, the GPL doesn't require you to publish your changes if you don't distribute your changes. So a company that uses the Gimp internally can make whatever changes they want without having to contribute them back...and that's fine.
(It's fine because they'll eventually get sick of either having to port their changes to each new version or keep running an old version, so they'll contribute them to save themselves the extra work.)
The original New Scientist article is online, as is the full paper which has much more content.
This is interesting, but even if it turns out that they can be found (or built), there may be problems. If they can be moved, you can turn one into a time machine (giving causality the finger) by accelerating one end to relativistic speeds and taking it on a trip, as noted in the actual paper (but ignored by both the New Scientist and BBC articles).
A reasonable SF treatment of this particular idea is in Robert Forward's Timemaster. The characters make cardboard look 3D, and the prose isn't the most beautiful, but the main hook is the physics speculation--and Forward does that quite well.
Granted. My point was to note that it does take time, and during that time you no longer have the redundancy that you were planning to have; it's a window of vulnerability, and the length of the window goes up with the size of the disks involved. I wasn't trying to make people think that you're running for a week while the parity is recalculated (unless your RAID controller is a Z-80 or 6502 or something like that :-).
On some systems, yes. Depends on your RAID hardware/software setup...and of course that simply raises the cost (in hardware, power for hardware, space for hardware...) by another increment. At some point you start using mirroring instead.
Exactly. Many people, not all of them salespeople or PHBs, seem to think that RAID is a magic wand that protects your data from all evil. Don't I wish....
The problem is that RAID (at level 3 and/or 5) just lets you use more space for one big volume without taking as much of a risk as you otherwise would. Instead, you take a performance hit relative to "RAID 0" (striping--which, not being redundant, should really be called AID :-).
The catch is that the larger the disks in your RAID 3/5 RAIDset, the longer your window of vulnerability when (not if) one fails. Remember, the idea of RAID is that if one disk goes bad, you can reconstruct the data using the parity blocks from all the other drives. That was fine in the days of 2GB drives, but it takes a long time to reconstruct 36GB or more of data, even if you have a dedicated hardware RAID controller. (Even an 18GB disk takes a while.)
If a second disk fails during this time (and it's more likely to, since you're now hitting it heavily to read off all the blocks you need to recalculate the missing disk with), you're hosed.
Also, RAID doesn't protect you from software. Directory corruption or an accidental rm/newfs will result in you having a nicely protected, redundant copy of your useless or empty filesystem.
"RAID 10" or RAID 1+0 or whatever the marketers are calling it is just striping across mirror pairs; that requires twice as many disks as you'd otherwise need for the same amount of storage, but it does give you reliability without the same level of speed hit.
(Yes, folks, the faster/better/cheaper trio is still pick two. Just ask the Mars Polar Lander team.)
Well, the UK still doesn't bother to put their country's name on their postage stamps. I guess that's the snail-mail equivalent, right?
I work at one of the US HGP centers. Our 377s are long gone. Detection is a room full of >100 ABI 3700s....
As for your 3-month lag period, we aim for a 24-hour lag period. :-)
Well, they call it FireWire Target Disk Mode instead. But it's in there!
Actually, it does. The EFF's building (and publishing the plans for) Deep Crack did more to show legislators and other non-techies the ridiculous nature of low limits on key lengths than any amount of mathematical discussion or mentions of Moore's Law ever could. Think of it as a great big clue stick.
("What? For $250K anyone can build a box that will break bank encryption in a day?" "Well, it'd cost less now, because the design is already done." "How can we fix this?" "Raise the key lengths.")
We should have a special Beanie Award for longest use of the term "recent" to describe an event. (Maybe as part of a special story on the upcoming anniversary of "recent" events?)
(Oh, and guys? The features box still says that "Voting has begun" for the Beanie Awards. This is true. WWII has begun, but it has also ended; as, I presume, has the Beanie Awards voting period.)
There's one thing to remember about the INS. It is the only government agency that knows that you can't vote, which of course means that you can't write your Congressman. Even the fairly unpopular IRS has that holding them back.
I also have a Kensington Saddlebag and like it. It's not a really good backpack; the straps aren't all that well designed and it tends to wiggle more than I'd like (it needs a waist strap), but it has a nice shoulder strap for "tote bag" style use and the grab handle is a real handle, not just a loop of webbing to hurt your hand with. It's great for doing the "short connection mad dash" at airports.
It does hold a fair amount of stuff; spare batteries, CD portfolio, etc.
Note that there are two versions, one with black trim and one with ugly brown trim. The picture on Kensington's website will give you the idea. (CompUSA only carried the ugly brown one last time I checked...typical.)
The whole "live vs. TV" thing reminds me of a USENIX keynote in 1994 (the summer conference in Boston). Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller) was the speaker, and the keynote was being sent over the Internet MBONE (multicast networking).
He made a point of saying that the people watching on the Internet were getting "the exact same experience" as those of us physically present.
Of course, they weren't. The actual speech was pre-recorded, and shown on projection screens at the conference as it was being sent over the MBONE. Meanwhile, he was standing on the stage performing magic tricks while his recorded image gave the speech.
With his usual comic timing, the words "exact same experience" were replayed right when he was doing a fire-eating demonstration or something similarly spectacular.
That was one of the best USENIX keynotes I've seen, if not the best.
Bill Weld, formerly the Republican governor of Massachusetts (not known for its strong Republican leanings), was nominated--by a Democratic president--for the position of ambassador to Mexico.
He didn't get it, because fellow Republicans blocked him for not being sufficiently anti-drug for their taste; now he's a novelist and private-practice lawyer.
Yeah, I've been bitten by that. CSC for the Mac and Tru64 Unix clients took a while to arrive compared to the Wintel/Linux/etc CSC clients. Of course, dcypher only has clients for the x86 architecture on 3 OSes...guess they don't want my cycles.
As for seti@Home, they haven't exactly avoided similar problems either. Complaints about duplicated blocks and un-optimized client code for their project have been posted on /. before.
And a G3/400 laptop--the whole thing--only has a 45W power adapter. That'll run the hard drive, the DVD-ROM drive, the processor, the screen, the screen backlighting, the speakers, any external bus-powered USB devices...and charge the battery. All at once.
Oh, and it'll also let you slow the processor down to extend battery life; you know, like that amazing new feature Intel's announced they'll have Real Soon Now?
Admittedly, that's the G3 instead of the G4, but even if the G4 itself is using twice as much power as the G3, you'd need what, a 60W adapter?
If this does go into effect, install times for non-RBOC xDSL service should also go down. After all, do you think the Bells currently have an incentive to speed up the installation of extra pairs for their competitors?
But if they don't have the excuse of "oh, gotta find a qualified pair" or "that neighborhood's low on pairs", they may be stuck doing the install rather than saying "but you know we can give you DSL on your existing pair".
Unsurprisingly, that's exactly what the public Human Genome Project is doing. Wellcome Trust, by the way, is putting their money where their mouth is; they fund the Sanger Centre which is doing part of the HGP work (along with several sites in the US).
Disclaimer: I work at one of the US sites, but I'm not a biologist, just a sysadmin. The head of my center compares patenting the human genome to patenting the periodic table; yeah, that would have really boosted chemistry....
Actually, it's a registered trademark. I took a photo of the sign when I was there (USENIX conference in Monterey), and the exact text is:
So, if we get Celera to sequence the Lone Cypress, who wins? :-)
Or by buying the 2nd Edition PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide , which comes with a CD-ROM including not only the emulator, but also licensed copies of the ROMs for various PalmOS versions. (Oh, and lots of Palm software including many e-texts.)
Much cheaper than even a used Palm if you just want to see what one might be like, and if you do buy one you have a nice book too!
It's not "simple". The INS has a pretty long backlog for citizenship applications, and it's not exactly like getting a driver's license once you do get through the backlog. Even getting a green card isn't exactly trivial.
I'm not sure what any of the USs dual citizenship policies are with foreign countries.Use the Web, Luke. The US Dual Citizenship FAQ is out there.
The European Union rules (see Europa) are much more open than the NAFTA rules are, though. An Irish citizen can legally live in France and commute to Germany without any legal problems in getting work permits, residence permits, and the like.
"Long bygone days" when we were still landing men on the moon. (Interesting that this came up so soon after the 30th anniversary of Apollo 11's landing, eh?)
The thing to remember is that computing's pace of change is an aberration compared to most other technologies (like the space program). We don't have hyperspace travel. We don't have manned interplanetary travel. We don't even have the capability to do a lunar mission these days! The computing equivalent would be having dumped Unix and its progeny in the dustbin, leaving the last two Unix machines ever built as museum pieces displayed at two of the national Computing Centers where they now use some really neat looking (and "reusable") minicomputers that can communicate with each other as fast as 9600bps (the bandwidth equivalent of low Earth orbit) or maybe even 57600bps (geosynch) with the right boosters.
Depressed yet?
Don't be. At least computing is that exception; it gives us an interesting, useful field that changes daily (just read /. to see how much it changes). Yes, too much change can be overwhelming--but the lack of change can be stifling. There may not be a middle ground, either (this isn't Goldilocks and the Three Bears).