The solution to all this is to produce "open-source maps". OpenStreetMap has made a start (although they don't appear to have got very far yet).
Mapping would seem to be the ideal open-source type application - it's inherently distributed, so lots of people can work on it in parallel. You don't have to worry about dividing up the workload - each contributor can simply map the area around themselves.
Unlike coding, which is a specialised skill (even more so for things like the Linux kernel), mapping is easy for anyone to do - just go and stand on street corners with a GPS and note the co-ordinates and the names of the streets.
The only thing holding back "open source mapping" is the need to have a GPS unit (you could do mapping by other methods, but realistically, GPS mapping is the most straightforward).
However, if mobile phone companies start to include GPS units in their handsets, then we could be all set for an open-source mapping revolution.
Well, they had a go at Jon Johansen of decss fame, didn't they? The MPAA's jurisdiction certainly doesn't cover Norway - he wasn't even breaking any laws there - but that didn't stop them trying. Just the potential costs of defending even a bogus lawsuit may well be enough to get someone to comply.
Years ago (early 90s?) there was a lot of talk about "wafer computing", but it never seemed to come to anything. Maybe now we'll see it take off.
When manufactufing chips, they're done so in wafers. Then the wafer is cut up into its component parts, and each part is sealed in its own case. It would seem to be more efficient to just stick the whole damn wafer in a single case.
It would give a whole new meaning to "pizza box server", as the wafer and case would closely match the size of a pizza and box, respectively.
But the point is that Hibernate shuts down immediately after creating the disk file. I want to snapshot the system immediately after a clean boot, then keep working. Then subsequent "boots" would return me to that "just booted" state. With hibernate you are restored to the "used" state.
Is it really necesary to "boot" a computer at all?
When you boot, a whole bunch of programs are loaded into RAM. Since these will be spread all over the disc, the time taken to load all this stuff will be far greater than just the sum of the bytes divided by the disc's maximum transfer rate.
In addition, most of these programs will then need to initialise themselves, requiring yet more time.
The point I'm getting at is that, having gone through all this, the end result is pretty much the same every time - you end up with the same programs loaded, initialised in the same way.
So why not just dump the final result from RAM to disc as a single snapshot file?
Obviously the use of snapshot files for suspend/resume is well established, but the crucial difference is that these create the snapshot just before you suspend, so it's going to be different every time, and besides, by that point you'll no longer have a "clean boot" configuration. Instead, I'm suggesting creating the file immediately after the boot process has completed.
Then the "boot process" from cold would simply involve loading this snapshot into memory in one go.
I can see one potential problem - the computer won't be set up *exactly* the same after different reboots, but surely there *is* a lot of commonality? The bits that change could be configured after the snapshot has loaded.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, because I haven't seen this anywhere, but what?
Wouldn't it in fact be preferable just to have a bunch of cardboard over your head, rather than several tons of bricks and rubble, when the roof collapses in a hurricane?
Same sort of argument for lightning; when it causes a wall to explode by turning trapped water into steam, I'd rather have bits of cardboard exploding around me than pieces of wood or rubble.
Why are all DVDs sold in the UK widescreen only? It would be trivial to encode the information onto the disc to produce a pan-scan version on demand. For this reason alone I often prefer watching things on VHS on my non-widescreen TV.
Complaint duly fired off to complaints@national-lottery.co.uk. If we complain in large numbers to such websites, maybe they'll get the message.
Subject: Website not working properly
Why does your website not work properly with all web browsers? When trying to log in, I get an error message telling me that only Internet Explorer and Netscape are supported.
I find it highly ironic that, in order to gain access to the secure area, you are forced to use Internet Explorer, a piece of software that's absolutely riddled with security flaws, and has been the subject of numerous security scares over the last few years.
The whole point of the web is that it shouldn't matter what web browser the user is using - as long as the website obeys the standards, it'll all just work.
Would you put up with a tv channel that could only be received on say, Sony TVs?
How about fixing your website so that it supports the web standards (and hence, all web browsers), like most of the other web sites in the world?
The crucial difference is that when Adams introduced anything new, he went to extraordinary lengths to make sure it was just right and, crucially, extremely funny. We know that he went through countless revisions of all his work, attempting to get it "just so".
Now we've got some unknown twit messing with the details for no good reason. If I wanted to see the musings of this nobody, I would have bought their books instead.
Changing the details from those established by the original author just for the hell of it is WRONG, especially when the original author isn't able to protest.
How would the LOTR movies have fared if they'd just decided to, oh I don't know, make all the hobbits 7 feet tall, say? Just for the hell of it? How many very pissed off people would that have resulted in?
Yeah, and DaSani was laughed out of the UK because it turned out that it was actually less safe than the tap-water it was made from. The "purification" processs unwittingly added carcinogenic processes (the ozone they treated with the water turned the bromine they added into the carcinogenic bromate). And to think that people were prepared to pay for that crap...
So just have it detect a sudden jump in brighness levels. Or detect that the new lightsource is of a single frequency. Or both. Or make the ambient brightness its baseline.
And, nitpicking aside, if you're flying straight at the sun, you probably want to darken the windows anyway, don't you?
How about some sort of fast-acting photochromic coating instead? So that it's transparent most of the time, but darkens when hit by laser (or any very bright) light.
I don't know when this policy was implemented, but it didn't happen for me. They re-created the bug at their end while I was on the phone. To their credit, they did find a work-around, but that's not the point - I wouldn't have called in the first place if the bug wasn't there.
I was supposed to get 5 support calls with the software - don't know the exact nature of the deal - someone else in the company did the purchasing.
For the first 5 calls, everything went as planned, but on call number 6 I was told that I'd used up my 5 calls, even though one of them had been for this bug (and yes, I kept a careful count, and was the only programmer in the company making support calls).
I guess I should have checked at the end of the "bug" call that it wouldn't count as one of the 5.
Yep, I once found a bug in Access and dialled the support line to check. Turned out that yes, it was a genuine bug, and yes, that was one of my alloted support calls used up.
What a great scheme - I pay for debugging their software.
Because they're often implemented as a link to another site - by means of a tiny, or hidden, graphic.
Good riddance to them I say - how many times have you gone to a webpage and had it mostly loaded, but then the browser sits and waits ages to load the off-site component?
I'm guessing that they might be planning to block off-site images, as can already be done in other browsers (ie: the "load images from originating web site only" option in Firefox).
It's somewhat ambiguous, but I believe that the article you refer to states that it's actually the African elephant that weighs up to 7500kg, and that Indian elephants are smaller than African elephants, so could be expected to weigh less.
Encarta puts Indian elephants at "up to 5000kg" and Britannica put the weight of an Indian elephant at "around 5500kg".
The record about the heaviest elephant ever does check out though at Guinness, so I suppose it's quite possible that an exceptional Indian elephant could have reached 8 tons.
The executioner was a state elephant named Hawai which weighed just over eight tons...
Sheesh, what was this elephant made of; concrete? AFAIK, african elephants (which are bigger) top out at about 4 tons, so this elephant must have been made out of something pretty dense. Maybe they draped it in lead plates for effect?
You could have say 5 tethers, anchored in a pentagon shape on the ground, where the sides of the pentagon are maybe 100km long. Same sort or arrangement at the top - they all connect to the same asteroid, just a little distance apart.
If any one tether is destroyed, the rest will be enough to hold things together until the broken one is replaced.
Meanwhile, under normal conditions, you have 5 times the capacity.
Yes I know it'll cost more, but if you want redundancy, you gotta pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to all this is to produce "open-source maps". OpenStreetMap has made a start (although they don't appear to have got very far yet).
Mapping would seem to be the ideal open-source type application - it's inherently distributed, so lots of people can work on it in parallel. You don't have to worry about dividing up the workload - each contributor can simply map the area around themselves.
Unlike coding, which is a specialised skill (even more so for things like the Linux kernel), mapping is easy for anyone to do - just go and stand on street corners with a GPS and note the co-ordinates and the names of the streets.
The only thing holding back "open source mapping" is the need to have a GPS unit (you could do mapping by other methods, but realistically, GPS mapping is the most straightforward).
However, if mobile phone companies start to include GPS units in their handsets, then we could be all set for an open-source mapping revolution.
Wow, a mattress that can post to Slashdot!
Well, they had a go at Jon Johansen of decss fame, didn't they? The MPAA's jurisdiction certainly doesn't cover Norway - he wasn't even breaking any laws there - but that didn't stop them trying. Just the potential costs of defending even a bogus lawsuit may well be enough to get someone to comply.
I didn't know about the Trilogy debacle, although as I said, wafer computing never seemed to come to anything.
You say that it's a nightmare getting CPUs, memory, etc on the same wafer and wired up, but what I was suggesting is a wafer of, say, processors only.
So the wafer could be tested after manufacturing, and then sold as an X core processor, depending on how many working processor cores were found.
Essentially, I'm just taking the topic of this thread to its logical conclusion - processors that have so many cores they take up the whole wafer.
Years ago (early 90s?) there was a lot of talk about "wafer computing", but it never seemed to come to anything. Maybe now we'll see it take off.
When manufactufing chips, they're done so in wafers. Then the wafer is cut up into its component parts, and each part is sealed in its own case. It would seem to be more efficient to just stick the whole damn wafer in a single case.
It would give a whole new meaning to "pizza box server", as the wafer and case would closely match the size of a pizza and box, respectively.
But the point is that Hibernate shuts down immediately after creating the disk file. I want to snapshot the system immediately after a clean boot, then keep working. Then subsequent "boots" would return me to that "just booted" state. With hibernate you are restored to the "used" state.
Is it really necesary to "boot" a computer at all?
When you boot, a whole bunch of programs are loaded into RAM. Since these will be spread all over the disc, the time taken to load all this stuff will be far greater than just the sum of the bytes divided by the disc's maximum transfer rate.
In addition, most of these programs will then need to initialise themselves, requiring yet more time.
The point I'm getting at is that, having gone through all this, the end result is pretty much the same every time - you end up with the same programs loaded, initialised in the same way.
So why not just dump the final result from RAM to disc as a single snapshot file?
Obviously the use of snapshot files for suspend/resume is well established, but the crucial difference is that these create the snapshot just before you suspend, so it's going to be different every time, and besides, by that point you'll no longer have a "clean boot" configuration. Instead, I'm suggesting creating the file immediately after the boot process has completed.
Then the "boot process" from cold would simply involve loading this snapshot into memory in one go.
I can see one potential problem - the computer won't be set up *exactly* the same after different reboots, but surely there *is* a lot of commonality? The bits that change could be configured after the snapshot has loaded.
Maybe I'm missing something obvious, because I haven't seen this anywhere, but what?
Wouldn't it in fact be preferable just to have a bunch of cardboard over your head, rather than several tons of bricks and rubble, when the roof collapses in a hurricane?
Same sort of argument for lightning; when it causes a wall to explode by turning trapped water into steam, I'd rather have bits of cardboard exploding around me than pieces of wood or rubble.
Why are all DVDs sold in the UK widescreen only? It would be trivial to encode the information onto the disc to produce a pan-scan version on demand. For this reason alone I often prefer watching things on VHS on my non-widescreen TV.
Complaint duly fired off to complaints@national-lottery.co.uk. If we complain in large numbers to such websites, maybe they'll get the message.
Subject: Website not working properly
Why does your website not work properly with all web browsers? When trying to log in, I get an error message telling me that only Internet Explorer and Netscape are supported.
I find it highly ironic that, in order to gain access to the secure area, you are forced to use Internet Explorer, a piece of software that's absolutely riddled with security flaws, and has been the subject of numerous security scares over the last few years.
The whole point of the web is that it shouldn't matter what web browser the user is using - as long as the website obeys the standards, it'll all just work.
Would you put up with a tv channel that could only be received on say, Sony TVs?
How about fixing your website so that it supports the web standards (and hence, all web browsers), like most of the other web sites in the world?
Regards
The crucial difference is that when Adams introduced anything new, he went to extraordinary lengths to make sure it was just right and, crucially, extremely funny. We know that he went through countless revisions of all his work, attempting to get it "just so".
Now we've got some unknown twit messing with the details for no good reason. If I wanted to see the musings of this nobody, I would have bought their books instead.
Changing the details from those established by the original author just for the hell of it is WRONG, especially when the original author isn't able to protest.
How would the LOTR movies have fared if they'd just decided to, oh I don't know, make all the hobbits 7 feet tall, say? Just for the hell of it? How many very pissed off people would that have resulted in?
Rather remarkably, the Death Star does actually appear to be in orbit around Saturn, but it's not Titan, it's Mimas.
Yeah, and DaSani was laughed out of the UK because it turned out that it was actually less safe than the tap-water it was made from. The "purification" processs unwittingly added carcinogenic processes (the ozone they treated with the water turned the bromine they added into the carcinogenic bromate). And to think that people were prepared to pay for that crap...
So just have it detect a sudden jump in brighness levels. Or detect that the new lightsource is of a single frequency. Or both. Or make the ambient brightness its baseline.
And, nitpicking aside, if you're flying straight at the sun, you probably want to darken the windows anyway, don't you?
How about some sort of fast-acting photochromic coating instead? So that it's transparent most of the time, but darkens when hit by laser (or any very bright) light.
I don't know when this policy was implemented, but it didn't happen for me. They re-created the bug at their end while I was on the phone. To their credit, they did find a work-around, but that's not the point - I wouldn't have called in the first place if the bug wasn't there.
I was supposed to get 5 support calls with the software - don't know the exact nature of the deal - someone else in the company did the purchasing.
For the first 5 calls, everything went as planned, but on call number 6 I was told that I'd used up my 5 calls, even though one of them had been for this bug (and yes, I kept a careful count, and was the only programmer in the company making support calls).
I guess I should have checked at the end of the "bug" call that it wouldn't count as one of the 5.
Indeed. I liked the "As long as they're using it, MS is going to keep making it better" quote.
I guess it must take more that 7 years to implement the correct display of PNGs...
How do they get away with spouting these blatant lies in public?
Yep, I once found a bug in Access and dialled the support line to check. Turned out that yes, it was a genuine bug, and yes, that was one of my alloted support calls used up.
What a great scheme - I pay for debugging their software.
Because they're often implemented as a link to another site - by means of a tiny, or hidden, graphic.
Good riddance to them I say - how many times have you gone to a webpage and had it mostly loaded, but then the browser sits and waits ages to load the off-site component?
I'm guessing that they might be planning to block off-site images, as can already be done in other browsers (ie: the "load images from originating web site only" option in Firefox).
You mean "Don't Panic" surely...
It's somewhat ambiguous, but I believe that the article you refer to states that it's actually the African elephant that weighs up to 7500kg, and that Indian elephants are smaller than African elephants, so could be expected to weigh less.
Encarta puts Indian elephants at "up to 5000kg" and Britannica put the weight of an Indian elephant at "around 5500kg".
The record about the heaviest elephant ever does check out though at Guinness, so I suppose it's quite possible that an exceptional Indian elephant could have reached 8 tons.
From the crushing by elephant article:
The executioner was a state elephant named Hawai which weighed just over eight tons...
Sheesh, what was this elephant made of; concrete? AFAIK, african elephants (which are bigger) top out at about 4 tons, so this elephant must have been made out of something pretty dense. Maybe they draped it in lead plates for effect?
Simple - have more than one tether.
You could have say 5 tethers, anchored in a pentagon shape on the ground, where the sides of the pentagon are maybe 100km long. Same sort or arrangement at the top - they all connect to the same asteroid, just a little distance apart.
If any one tether is destroyed, the rest will be enough to hold things together until the broken one is replaced.
Meanwhile, under normal conditions, you have 5 times the capacity.
Yes I know it'll cost more, but if you want redundancy, you gotta pay for it.
And Turing was from London...
Maybe for the same reason it's hard to make big LCD monitors - it gets proportionately harder to produce a display without flaws.