I'm continually amazed at the amount of Hype this technology seems to foster. Why the vendors don't just explain it in plain english is beyond me.
WiMax is a FIXED, POINT TO POINT multiple access protocol for backhaul, NOT end users. It's intended for linking 300 foot towers with line of sight to each other over a Metropolitan Area.
It's NOT something you're going to use for your laptop, or cellphone, or even at home. You're not going to buy a Linksys WiMax router any time soon.
I'll bite... it's not the users, or the software, it's the security model!
Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows all run programs as the user, there is no way to run an untrusted application, that that is the heart of the problem. You can talk all you want about Windows vs Linux, but you need to step back and look at the big picture.
ACL based security is fine if you never need new code, and manage to kill all the bugs in the existing code... but of course that's impossible.
Capability based security models make it possible to set up systems to run any cool new thing, and be reasonably certain it won't take everything out. Some folks might object that Capability based systems are vaporware, and they'd be right... but at least the path is clear.
That explains why I'm running the latest version of Office, etc... oh... wait... I'm not.
You're right... some people will buy into it, and some people won't.
If I just spent $5000 on a computer and a monitor, I'd be pissed as hell if things weren't as sharp as a tack. I'd take it back, and spread the word.
Market forces won't let this one stick. People need lee-way, something that DRM systems don't do, so they are forced to go around them. Once that's done, they keep going around them.
--Mike-- Capitalism sees Capitolism as damage, and routes around it
Different power levels: They are obviously using more power than the unamplified WiFi gear, otherwise they'd need bigger recieve dishes
They aren't using 802.11, so it's apples vs oranges
They didn't have to have one end at (near?) DefCon in Las Vegas, so they have far different terrain.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but what's the big deal? If you want to talk distance records, my personal opinion is that the record to beat is about 250,000 miles, with full NTSC video. It was set way back in 1969, with a very large audience in attendance. That was a giant leap for mankind!
Cost is a relative thing, if you can manage the server yourself, and avoid the expense of a new administrator, it helps. The cost of the software is just one part of the picture.
The 16 Gb limit hurt me hard once upon a time, and it snuck up on me... the Enterprise version doesn't have it, so we upgraded. It does truely suck to have that artificial limit, I agree.
Mail servers retry, so you aren't likely to lose email unless you're down for a day or more. If people are relying on email as a reliable mode of messaging, they need to be educated. Email is like a post card, store and forward, it's not reliable, never has been, never will be.
For a small shop with limited IT staff, it may be that Exchange truly is the best option. You have to weigh the costs and risks against your business objectives.
At the risk of buring a hole through my asbestos firewall: Have you considered Microsoft Exchange and Outlook? It has a very rich feature, can be accessed via a Web form, and Microsoft makes things pretty darn easy to administer.
There are other requirements for any mail solution you'll ignore at your peril:
Backups - Make them and test them
Virus Scanner - Even a Linux house needs to worry about Macro Virii, etc.
Spam Filter - Sometimes comes with the virus scanner
Firewall - You need one anyway, make sure it's not based on the same OS as your server
Data center environment, such as cooling, conditioned power, physical security are all good things to have
Now, on with the math. First, we figure out how many samples we're going to possibly accomodate, as an address space:
Total surface area (21.0 cm * 29.7 cm * 10 E^12) * 1 Sample / cm^2 --> 623,700,000,000,000 Samples
This results in a 50 bit address space, if we were able to just sequentially number the samples. Since we have to work with what we're given, lets just assume we can get by with 256 bits/sample.
This results in the need to store (256 bits sample) * (1 byte / 8 bits) * (21 cm * 29.7 cm / document) * (1 sample / cm^2) --> 19958.4 bytes/ document.
So, in order for this to work we need to store about 20k/page. In order to authenticate documents, your stored database would be approximately 20 Gigabytes/ million documents, and indexing isn't going to help much.
That's a lot of work, and it seems to me it would be quicker, easier, and far more efficient in general to store duplicates of the originals in a secure location.
We need to follow NASA's own description of it... return to flight, and develop an aircraft hybrid to lift things up to the top of the atmosphere, then boost into space from there.
With good old fashioned flight, there is a hell of a lot less stress on components, and the option to fly back home is a lot less dangerous. The flying option also means we get away from the world of one-use rocket components, and into the far safer world of aviation.
We need to dump the solid rocket booster strap-on. It's expensive, dangerous, and toxic as hell. It smells too much like pork barrel as well.
Last but not least, put an experienced engineer in charge.
Passport merely proved what we already know, nobody trusts Microsoft for other stuff. We windows users have learned to trust Windows Update, for example. It does not, however, disprove anything.
In posting your comment, you had to assert an identity Dachannien (617929). We all assert identity all the time when we present a username password pair. We all have a large number of accounts to manage, which is just one set of identity assertions.
The username/password pair is an identity, usable with one web site or system. There is no way you can share that pair between sites with any degree of security. An identity system, properly executed, would allow you to make assertions between systems, without compromising that pair.
It's going to require a lot of work, there will be bugs, but it's a necessity, looking around for an invention to mother. When it does happen, it's going to seem obvious in retrospect, as it seemingly happens over night.
While the average user might not realize it yet, we need a standard for federated identity, and we need it yesterday.
When I read the fine article, I happened to find myself agreeing, fairly strongly, with Mr Dvorak.
We're all being creative, we want credit, fame and fortune for our efforts. We all object strongly to someone else taking the credit, without having done any work of their own to add to it.
The copyright system is a crude tradeoff to try to reward creative effort. It works, somewhat, but we want a better set of tools.
The GPL, BSD license, CC, and numerous other license are all the result of efforts to provide a those tools. They all involve tradeoffs, but are positive on the whole.
What Mr Dvorak had the audacity to state publicly, is that the "NonCommerical" licenses which seem to be popular, might not be a good idea in the long run.
I don't have $34BN revenue stream like M$, but I find myself in the same exact spot as them when someone chooses to use the NoCC options. I might take their cool picture, and use it along with others, and add years worth of work to get it all perfect... but if I decide to sell the result for a buck, I just violated the license. There needs to be a better middle ground.
Commercial/NonCommercial is an artificial distiction that should be considered harmful.
It's interesting to note that the Creative Commons website itself, uses the CC:BY license, which DOES allow commercial derivatives.
We already have our traffic sniffed by Carnivore, Echelon, and who knows what else. Does it really matter that the folks at Comverse Infosys really get one more point to sniff our data?
Well, if we're going to fragment the name space, lets at least be consistent about it. We'll get rid of all of the 3 letter TLDs (MIL, EDU, COM, NET, ORG, GOV, INT, etc.) and put everything where it belongs, in a country. So slashdot.org becomes slashdot.org.us, like it should have been all along.
Image formats: It appears that TIF is currently the gold standard in terms of archival storage of documents. JPEG2000 will be the way to go, once it becomes commonplace.
Document Indexing/File Organization: A Wiki is the proper tool for this job, in my opinion. It makes it very easy to edit, and hyperlinking is instictive. You can easily attach documents to pages, you can usually export the whole thing as a directory tree. Most Wiki software also keeps track of all of the versions of a page, so you can worry less about making bad mistakes.
I've used both MoinMoin, which is a traditional web based Wiki, and WikiDpad, which is an IDE environment for Windows that does Wiki-like things. Both of these programs are open source, Python based applications.
You also might want to check out ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software, which stores thumbnails of images in a database (including SQL backends), along with keywords and user fields. It can help you as well.
From the article: "It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever."
I was quite disappointed... I expected something new that I could actually use... oh well.
So, these guys optimized a variable frequency drive system for an electric car envirnonment. Variable frequency drives have been in common industrial use since the 1970's.
Variable frequency drive systems provide for more efficient use of a polyphase induction motor. Induction motors have no permanent magnets, and rely on the use of currents induced by a rotating magnetic field into a conductive rotor.
I've been googling for far too long, but I knew I'd seen this before... and I found it... at Chorus Motors, which is a polyphase variably switched drive system.
We're all suffering from the Von Neuman bottle-neck. We've all had pipe-dreams of a new, much more efficient way of doing things. I had mine back in 1981-1982, and I call it the BitGrid, your name and specifics may vary, but it's probably also non Von Neuman.
If you can express the algorithms you need in a non-serial form, and get them to operate in a data-flow or other architecture which can operate on all of the data at the same time, you can really kick up your compute performance.
Of course, as long as people stick with the stupid requirement that you must be able to program it in C++ (or Java), you'll never get there.
Really big computing tasks just don't want to get squeezed down to the flow into and back out of a single serial set of instructions. It's that simple.
A good friend of mine does service for Auto Dealers. They had a similar situation with critical data on a CD. He took the CD, went out to the body shop, put some buffing compound on it, buffed it up, rinsed, and it was as good as new.
Letting a company go out of business because they don't understand the basics of the technology speaks volumes about the loss of American Inginuity.
Amen, brother. The risk-reward ratio is way too low on this one. Basically, they're asking for a technological innovation on par with the light bulb, and they want to give a prize less than the lab assistants wages necessary to even seriously look at the problem for 10 years.
Slashdot Mirror
WiMax is a FIXED, POINT TO POINT multiple access protocol for backhaul, NOT end users. It's intended for linking 300 foot towers with line of sight to each other over a Metropolitan Area.
It's NOT something you're going to use for your laptop, or cellphone, or even at home. You're not going to buy a Linksys WiMax router any time soon.
Ugh!
--Mike--
Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows all run programs as the user, there is no way to run an untrusted application, that that is the heart of the problem. You can talk all you want about Windows vs Linux, but you need to step back and look at the big picture.
ACL based security is fine if you never need new code, and manage to kill all the bugs in the existing code... but of course that's impossible.
Capability based security models make it possible to set up systems to run any cool new thing, and be reasonably certain it won't take everything out. Some folks might object that Capability based systems are vaporware, and they'd be right... but at least the path is clear.
--Mike--
That explains why I'm running the latest version of Office, etc... oh... wait... I'm not. You're right... some people will buy into it, and some people won't.
Market forces won't let this one stick. People need lee-way, something that DRM systems don't do, so they are forced to go around them. Once that's done, they keep going around them.
--Mike--
Capitalism sees Capitolism as damage, and routes around it
- Different power levels: They are obviously using more power than the unamplified WiFi gear, otherwise they'd need bigger recieve dishes
- They aren't using 802.11, so it's apples vs oranges
- They didn't have to have one end at (near?) DefCon in Las Vegas, so they have far different terrain.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but what's the big deal? If you want to talk distance records, my personal opinion is that the record to beat is about 250,000 miles, with full NTSC video. It was set way back in 1969, with a very large audience in attendance. That was a giant leap for mankind!--Mike--
The 16 Gb limit hurt me hard once upon a time, and it snuck up on me... the Enterprise version doesn't have it, so we upgraded. It does truely suck to have that artificial limit, I agree.
Mail servers retry, so you aren't likely to lose email unless you're down for a day or more. If people are relying on email as a reliable mode of messaging, they need to be educated. Email is like a post card, store and forward, it's not reliable, never has been, never will be.
For a small shop with limited IT staff, it may be that Exchange truly is the best option. You have to weigh the costs and risks against your business objectives.
--Mike--
Bring it on!
Six months on the market, and the flood of RMAs, and the tidal wave of backlash when customers figure this out, will quickly correct this foolishness.
--Mike--
There are other requirements for any mail solution you'll ignore at your peril:
- Backups - Make them and test them
- Virus Scanner - Even a Linux house needs to worry about Macro Virii, etc.
- Spam Filter - Sometimes comes with the virus scanner
- Firewall - You need one anyway, make sure it's not based on the same OS as your server
- Data center environment, such as cooling, conditioned power, physical security are all good things to have
- Backups - Make some more, test them again
--Mike--- 1 sample for every cm^2 of document
- A4 sized documents.
- Capability to register up to 1 trillion documents
</ASSUME>Now, on with the math. First, we figure out how many samples we're going to possibly accomodate, as an address space:
Total surface area (21.0 cm * 29.7 cm * 10 E^12) * 1 Sample / cm^2 --> 623,700,000,000,000 Samples
This results in a 50 bit address space, if we were able to just sequentially number the samples. Since we have to work with what we're given, lets just assume we can get by with 256 bits/sample.
This results in the need to store (256 bits sample) * (1 byte / 8 bits) * (21 cm * 29.7 cm / document) * (1 sample / cm^2) --> 19958.4 bytes/ document.
So, in order for this to work we need to store about 20k/page. In order to authenticate documents, your stored database would be approximately 20 Gigabytes/ million documents, and indexing isn't going to help much.
That's a lot of work, and it seems to me it would be quicker, easier, and far more efficient in general to store duplicates of the originals in a secure location.
--Mike--
With good old fashioned flight, there is a hell of a lot less stress on components, and the option to fly back home is a lot less dangerous. The flying option also means we get away from the world of one-use rocket components, and into the far safer world of aviation.
We need to dump the solid rocket booster strap-on. It's expensive, dangerous, and toxic as hell. It smells too much like pork barrel as well.
Last but not least, put an experienced engineer in charge.
--Mike--
In posting your comment, you had to assert an identity Dachannien (617929). We all assert identity all the time when we present a username password pair. We all have a large number of accounts to manage, which is just one set of identity assertions.
The username/password pair is an identity, usable with one web site or system. There is no way you can share that pair between sites with any degree of security. An identity system, properly executed, would allow you to make assertions between systems, without compromising that pair.
It's going to require a lot of work, there will be bugs, but it's a necessity, looking around for an invention to mother. When it does happen, it's going to seem obvious in retrospect, as it seemingly happens over night.
While the average user might not realize it yet, we need a standard for federated identity, and we need it yesterday.
--Mike--
We're all being creative, we want credit, fame and fortune for our efforts. We all object strongly to someone else taking the credit, without having done any work of their own to add to it.
The copyright system is a crude tradeoff to try to reward creative effort. It works, somewhat, but we want a better set of tools.
The GPL, BSD license, CC, and numerous other license are all the result of efforts to provide a those tools. They all involve tradeoffs, but are positive on the whole.
What Mr Dvorak had the audacity to state publicly, is that the "NonCommerical" licenses which seem to be popular, might not be a good idea in the long run.
I don't have $34BN revenue stream like M$, but I find myself in the same exact spot as them when someone chooses to use the NoCC options. I might take their cool picture, and use it along with others, and add years worth of work to get it all perfect... but if I decide to sell the result for a buck, I just violated the license. There needs to be a better middle ground.
Commercial/NonCommercial is an artificial distiction that should be considered harmful. It's interesting to note that the Creative Commons website itself, uses the CC:BY license, which DOES allow commercial derivatives.
--Mike--
--Mike--
Amen brother, someone mod this up!
--Mike--
--Mike--
Document Indexing/File Organization: A Wiki is the proper tool for this job, in my opinion. It makes it very easy to edit, and hyperlinking is instictive. You can easily attach documents to pages, you can usually export the whole thing as a directory tree. Most Wiki software also keeps track of all of the versions of a page, so you can worry less about making bad mistakes.
I've used both MoinMoin, which is a traditional web based Wiki, and WikiDpad, which is an IDE environment for Windows that does Wiki-like things. Both of these programs are open source, Python based applications.
You also might want to check out ThumbsPlus by Cerious Software, which stores thumbnails of images in a database (including SQL backends), along with keywords and user fields. It can help you as well.
--Mike--
--Mike--
Those who do not learn history, are doomed to repeat it
The moderation system is better than Anarchy, but leaves lots of room for improvement.
--Mike--
"It may sound strange to call superfluidity at 50 nanokelvin high-temperature superfluidity, but what matters is the temperature normalized by the density of the particles," Ketterle said. "We have now achieved by far the highest temperature ever."
I was quite disappointed... I expected something new that I could actually use... oh well.
--Mike--
Variable frequency drive systems provide for more efficient use of a polyphase induction motor. Induction motors have no permanent magnets, and rely on the use of currents induced by a rotating magnetic field into a conductive rotor.
I've been googling for far too long, but I knew I'd seen this before... and I found it... at Chorus Motors, which is a polyphase variably switched drive system.
--Mike--
If you can express the algorithms you need in a non-serial form, and get them to operate in a data-flow or other architecture which can operate on all of the data at the same time, you can really kick up your compute performance.
Of course, as long as people stick with the stupid requirement that you must be able to program it in C++ (or Java), you'll never get there.
Really big computing tasks just don't want to get squeezed down to the flow into and back out of a single serial set of instructions. It's that simple.
--Mike--
Letting a company go out of business because they don't understand the basics of the technology speaks volumes about the loss of American Inginuity.
--Mike--
Cheep, Cheep, Cheep.
--Mike--
--Mike--