This type of story should go into a category for snake oil, novelties and pseudo-science. Geez, people have been promoting 200mpg carburators since the dawn of the automobile.
I hate to say it, but if Novell's Suse distros don't get more stable, this isn't going to happen. I'm running Suse 9.3 and have experienced so many bugs and problems. Flash doesn't work at all within Konqueror. Sound doesn't work with Flash within Firefox or Mozilla. Things crash. Even Vim crashes when I try to use it with SVN. There are performance problems. It ships with a beta version of OpenOffice.org which is not stable. This is all with a stock installation of 9.3. I've been using Suse since version 9.0 and 9.3 is the least stable I have ever used. Anyone who tries this out is going to be disappointed.
I have just now downloaded OpenSuse 10. I'll install it and hope to see some improvements.
If Novell / Suse wants to get real desktop adoption, these are the things they need to do:
The system needs to be more stable. Take a deep breath, slow down on the new features, and make it stable.
THERE SHOULD BE ONLY ONE APPLICATION FOR EVERY TASK! This is so obvious and people have been saying it for years. On my Suse 9.3, if I want to control the volume, I go to Multimedia -> Volume control and I see NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS, all of which work or don't work to varying degrees, and none of which are simple and easy to use and understand. That's crazy. That's on drugs. That's lame. Say whatever you want about how great Linux is but if my desktop has NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS that is horrific. I bring up volume control, but the same problem exists in all the other application categories, but volume control is by far the worst offender. If users want to go crazy and install a dozen different word processors, fine, let them do it, but the default installation should have ONE and exactly ONE application in every category.
There needs to be a good media player that is well-integrated and WORKS. I should be able to pop in a DVD which I got from Blockbuster and play it, with GUI controls, subtitles, everything, with no messing around. I should be able to go to CNN.com and look at video, with no messing around.
The first two items are not rocket science. They're not technology problems. They are management problems. Someone who is a technical manager high up in Novell should lay down the law on these two issues and make them happen. Say to the dev team, "If you think that such-and-such should be the ONE application for such-and-such task, make your case, and we'll have a decision process and at the end we'll pick one, and go with it."
The media player part is more difficult because it's wrapped up in all kinds of legal licensing problems. They need to solve these problems. They are solvable with money, lawyers and time. Guess what, time to do it Novell!
I would start with Apache James. This is a 100% pure Java mail engine. Why Java, you ask? It's so easy to modify it because it's based on plug-ins, just like Java Servlets. So if you decide that you need database-backed user ID storage, you can do that. If there's no plug-in that does it, you can write your own. If you need clustered mail storage, you could write a plug-in to do that. You can run it on Linux, Solaris or Windows Server.
Also you can be sure there will never be buffer overflows or similar security problems.
I'm sure you know this, but you're going to need a clusterable technology. You need to have multiple redundant servers for this kind of load. Much better to be able to handle load by adding cheap PC-hardware servers than basing it on one huge server. James would let you build that if you want to.
Of course, James only makes sense if you're a Java type of person.
Next fall, meaning, realisticly, the end of '06. Maybe they'll get one flight in '06. Given that the shuttle will be grounded forever in '10, that gives them three more years of flying, barring any other accidents, safety problems, or any other mishaps. So all the billions of dollars they spent to get the shuttle ready for flight again are going to to buy them... how many flights? If all goes well, they will probably get about three flights a year, which means about ten more flights in the entire shuttle program? And if it doesn't all go perfectly, they might have one flight left (ie, if there's a serious safety problem on the Fall '06 flight).
Is this a good way to spend money? If it were my money, rather than having spent it return to flight for a program which is almost dead, I would have spent it on something with a future. Rather than trying to patch up a system which never came close to delivering on its promises I would have spent it on a new system, that learned from the mistakes of the old system.
Ok, some of the basic steps are the same. Uranium is going to be about 0.7% U235 on Mars, just like it is on Earth, because all the uranium in the solar system was probably formed at the same time, so it has all decayed at the same rate. So you start with the same basic problem: you need to sort out the U235 from the U238. Not easy to do.
But on Mars it's a lot easier than on Earth. First, safety is not as much of a concern. If you have a big radioactive spill on Earth, you've caused a lot of problems. On Mars, well, no one is drinking the groundwater anyway and the whole place is already uninhabited. So that greatly simplifies your factory.
Second, you don't need to run on 100% uranium fuel. Here on Earth, no one wants to generate plutonium for reactors because of proliferation fears (founded or not). On Mars, proliferation is not a concern. Anyone who has the technology to get to Mars should be able to build atomic weapons fairly easily, and atomic explosives will probably be needed for engineering work, so spending time worrying about proliferation on Mars is silly.
The good thing about being free to burn plutonium is that it's easy to make plutonium from the left-over depleted uranium. All you need is a big neutron flux, pump that through the depleted uranium, and you get plutonium fuel.
What this means is that on Earth, you need to mine 140 tons of uranium metal to get one ton of U235, which is the only kind that works as fuel. On Mars, you mine 140 tons of uranium metal, extract the 1 ton of U235, and use that to convert the remaining 139 tons of U238 to plutonium. We can't do that on Earth for political / military reasons, but we can do it on Mars.
So yeah, many of the same problems remain, but the whole process of going from uranium ore to energy would be a lot simpler on Mars.
Once you have a basic reactor going (enough to generate fuel) you can start lifting your raw uranium ore into Mars orbit. It's a lot easier to get off the surface of Mars than it is to get off of Earth. Then you refine it in orbit, where you can be as unsafe and messy as you want, you blast all the waste products into the sun, and you send back down your refined U235 or plutonium fuel rods.
Ok, in all these proposals for mining Mars and the asteroids, they talk about looking for water, carbon, building materials, etc. It seems like the most important thing they should be looking for is uranium (or thorium). Yes, you need water to make fuel and oxygen, but you can't get fuel from water without power. Same with all the other projects. How are you going to run mining equipment, provide power for the habitations, etc?
Also if you can find extraterrestrial (not from Earth) fissionable material (uranium or thorium) that means you can avoid the risks and expense of having to launch it. A lot of people get upset if there's a proposal to launch a 100kg RTG. Well, to power a mining colony, they will need a lot more than 100kg of fission fuel. What kind of public reaction would there be to the proposal of launching several tons of uranium? It would be much better if they could dig it up on Mars and use it on Mars.
Some of the terraforming projects require moving asteroids of ice to Mars. Again, the only way you can do that is with a nuclear-powered mass driver on the asteroid, and it would be nice to not have to launch that much uranium from Earth.
So when my company starts its Mars base, the first thing we're going to do is find the uranium, and then we'll sell electricity, H2 and O2 to all the other companies that want to (effectively) sell dirt and water. I suspect there's a lot better markup on electricity than there is on dirt and water.
I assume there is uranium on Mars, but I've never heard of anyone looking for it or discussing it. It seems to me that if there are no extraterrestrial sources of uranium, that's going to be a big problem for colonization of space, because it really will take thousands of tons of uranium to provide all the power that's going to be needed for serious mining and fuel production. And no, solar power is not going to work for this. Mining and fuel production requires too much power for solar to be a realistic option. For any activities beyond Mars, solar gets even less realistic. As long as solar is the power source, power is going to be a very tight limiting factor, whereas if you've got a few hundred tons of uranium, power will not be the limiting factor.
Also I wonder if uranium would make a good radiation shield? It seems like DU would be quite effective for that?
The good news is that if you set up a reactor on one of Mars' moons or on an asteroid or in Mars orbit, you can make it enormous and not need any real containment structures. If the uranium is available, it might be much cheaper to build extraterrestrial reactors than it is on Earth.
When you have a situation where 99% of the sites on the net have upgraded, you have two basic options:
Keep on supporting them forever.
Stop supporting them and force them to upgrade.
#2 is usually the right thing to do. It's especially right in this case. Every single line of code that processes remote user input (ie, every line of SSL and any other web server code) could potentially contain a security vulnerability. Developers are not actively working on this antique code so bugs will be left there, perhaps forever. If you're looking for holes, abandoned code is a good place to look. This is similar to the Linux vulnerability not long ago where there was some obscure bug in the processing of a.out files that let binaries escalate. Well, we don't use a.out format anymore. We use ELF format and have for years, so no one was paying attention to that antique code. It should have been removed from the kernel, but it wasn't.
The second issue is that OpenSSL is maintained by volunteers. I'd rather have them working to make a small set of features perfect, instead of wasting time on dead code that almost no one is using. Would you rather have the GCC crew working on improving Java or Fortran support?
It sounds like it's using urine as an electrolyte. That's like a "potato battery", which again is just using the potato as an electrolyte, and is not getting any power from it.
---------------- mobile search - try it on your phone
We waste so much on the shuttle, and it gives back so little. It seems like 50% of the space time in this return-to-flight mission was spent worrying about if the shuttle would make it back to Earth in one piece, and now the shuttle is grounded AGAIN. And the shuttle is going to be retired forever in 2010, so if they're lucky (and have no accidents) they're going to get another dozen flights out of it... and at the end all the repairs, redesigns, safety checks, etc, will all come to nothing because the whole thing is getting scrapped.
Put the shuttles in a museum!
The Earth is set up so that chemical rockets and just barely escape the Earth's gravity. If the Earth were just a bit more massive, we wouldn't have any space program at all. The point is, rockets are only marginally workable.
There are two ways we can go on space: One is the utilitarian way, which means satellites to do useful things for us Earthlings. The other way to go is space exploration where we expand our understanding of the solar system and our presence within it.
The utilitarian view of space is something we can achieve easily with chemical power sources. We have done some great things with chemical power for exploration, but it is also becoming a handicap.
If we want to do much more than the utilitarian use, we need to work on nuclear propulsion. There are so many ideas, including ion thrusters, gas core reactors and many others, with advantages and disadvantages.
-------------- mobile search - try it on your phone!
If you really want to do it right, use an HTML parser to extract the content, and then re-render it. That's exactly what our mobile search engine does to convert web pages to mobile pages. It's non-trivial stuff. The advantage of doing it is that you do end up with clean, uniform HTML (or WML or XHTML in our case).
Some future version of Tomcat should have built-in content parsing in its filters so that filter writers could write simple filters to transform content in a meaningful way. But I haven't seen that as a proposal anywhere.
If I use a Linux box as my broadband router, is that a regulated device? What I'm wondering is, where does this law stop? If there is a Linux distro that is specifically designed as a "broadband router on a CD", would that fall under the regulation? What if I have a broadband card plugged directly into my computer? Is the broadband card the device, or is the whole computer the device? What about if the broadband card does everything in drivers which are part of the kernel?
Even regular consumer devices like Linksys routers are running Linux, so that makes me wonder if the changes have to be hardware or software changes. It's my impression that on a Linksys router, basically everything important is done in software, so I don't see how this could be implemented in hardware.
And obviously, if this means that Linksys routers need to have a patched kernel, will they have to be locked in some way to prevent changes to the kernel? What about the GPL? If the backdoor is implemented as a part of the kernel, and then that kernel is redistributed, then the backdoor code would need to be published, right?
Back in the days when everything was hardware, regulations like this would be cleanly enforceable, but now that the work is done almost entirely in software, it's a mess.
From the post: While splitting water to get hydrogen and oxygen is not new, this product will likely make the technology more accessible to the masses and might hopefully show that hydrogen is a more attractive fuel than petroleum-based fuels.
No, what this shows is that hydrogen is simply a derivative of fossil fuels, and is in fact an extremely expensive, inefficient and almost useless way to store and transport energy.
Let's see, we start with huge lumps of coal, convert them to steam, convert the steam to electricity, and then use the electricity to make hydrogen which (in a fuel cell) we can convert back to electricity. Energy is lost at every step along the way. In particular, compressing the hydrogen from atmospheric pressure to storage tank pressure loses about HALF the total energy, so even if the fuel cell is 100% efficient, you've still lost HALF the energy you started with.
But commercial hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis. It's produced from natural gas and steam. So let's see, we start with natural gas, a product which has the following properties:
Cheap
Easy to store and transport with widely available equipment
Can run through cheap, widely available engines
Fairly clean burning (compared to diesel)
High energy density in compressed tanks
and we convert that to hydrogen which has the following properties:
Very very expensive
Very difficult to store. The only real-world proven way to store it at a high density is to liquify it. That will never be a practical option outside of aerospace industry
Can be burned in regular engines, with regular engine efficiency, or can be burned in extremely expensive fuel cells. There is no realistic possibility of fuel cells becoming cost competitive in the foreseeable future.
Low energy-density for real-world storage (compressed tanks, etc). Fuel cell cars have a range of less than 200 miles usually.
Oh, and it's clean burning! Finally after all the bad things about H2 we come to one good thing!
It makes the whole global warming and oil dependency problems worse becomes it takes so much energy is wasted in the process of converting fossil fuels into hydrogen.
The one thing that could help is that you can make hydrogen from clean nuclear energy and from clean solar energy, but given that hydrogen electrolysis is not cost-competitive with even cheap fossil fuel electricity, why should it be cost competitive with much more expensive solar electricity?
I regret that our government is involved in subsidizing this whole boondoggle, but I have no worries that it will continue in the long-term. Some small improvements in lithium batteries, and some reasonable production economy in lithium batteries will make electric cars competitive with plain old ICE cars, and the hydrogen fuel research pork programs will shrivel up and die.
"/bin/sh has been associated with security problems in the Unix world since the early 70s. Most Unix/Linux security situations arise when an unauthorized user gets access to the/bin/sh process. Fedora Core 5, due out in October, will not include this dangerous executable. Instead users will control the system through the advanced Gnome windowing system and will be able to develop object-oriented network-transparent applications in the MONO framework."
My guess is that employers' main motives for banning after-hours employee "fraternization" are to a) inhibit forming unions and b) if sexual harassment occurs after-hours, the employer could have legal risks from it. Employers might not see any up-side to after-hours "fraternization" and there are some clearly-visible down-sides (for the employer).
Workers in IT (esp. programmers) spend long and irregular hours, socialize with eachother, and exchange ideas. That's just the culture of it. I somehow doubt that the employers who pushed for this decision are specifically thinking about their IT staff. "These are not the droids they are looking for" basically.
I hope the shuttle comes home safe and then gets parked in a museum. The problem here is that the heat shields are exposed to stress during both launch and entry. All other spacecraft have a heat shield that is only used one way or the other way, and then is disposed of. It's a bit much for me to want to reuse something that has to be exposed to the rigors of launch and then reentry and then be reused. I'm glad that it has worked as many times as it has in the past but this does not seem like a safe design and does not seem like the right thing to use to protect astronauts. The heat shielding is the one part of the shuttle that has no redundancy; if tiles are lost in critical places, the shuttle disintegrates.
It also seems like they have spent a large fraction of their space-time on this mission simply making sure the shuttle is fit to return to Earth, rather than doing useful space work. The shuttle was sold on the promise of routine, cheap, quick flights to space, and we have something that flies so irregularly that it's hard to even say how often it flies (once a year or less?). It's such a bucket of bolts that astronauts then have to spend half their time just inspecting it for damage while they're in orbit. NASA should not be putting astronauts at risk in a ship like this. NASA should be spending its budget on programs that have a future, rather than programs which have been a dead end for a long time.
I have a friend who is smart, but not a real "computers guy". He was at my house and needed to borrow a computer. I only have Linux computers here, and so he tried it and was impressed. He could do everything he needed to do under Suse without any problems: access his mail, access the Web, access Excel spreadsheets (with OpenOffice), etc. Except for one thing: he couldn't play video clips, and when he got his laptop, he said, "I'll use Windows on this so I can play video." That's all. Otherwise he would use Linux.
I am very experienced with Linux and computers in general and I still can't get Windows Media video to work properly on this, and the only DVD playback I have is through MPlayer and I still can't get a GUI working on MPlayer.
What I had to go through to get this far: Download and compile MPlayer. Ok, that's no problem and it plays DVDs. Download and install the Windows codecs pack. Now MPlayer (still with no GUI) can play WMV. That's great. Xine (KDE's preferred video player) can't detect these Windows codecs, even though I put them in/usr/lib/win32, which is where they're supposed to be. So no integrated desktop playback; if I want to play a clip, I download it, save it, open up a console window, and point MPlayer at it. I tried to get MPlayer to compile with --gui-enabled so at least I could have a front-end for it. No luck; it can't find gtk2+ development libraries. I tried to install them and couldn't find them anywhere that MPlayer could find them. I also tried to install a dvddecss lib where Xine could find it so Xine could play encrypted (standard) movie DVDs. Again, nothing I could do worked.
Mind you, this is all with Suse 9.3, the latest and greatest. All of this stuff is supposed to be worked out by now. I can get it to just barely work, with no desktop integration and no GUI, and I'm an experienced and knowledgable user. What are other people supposed to do, just use their imagination?
Oh and the situation is even worse with Flash. In my previous Suse installations, Flash worked fine in Konqueror. Now with Suse 9.3, I get a crash when Konqueror tries to render a page with Flash, so I have to use Moz or Firefox to view it, and guess what, those have problems working with KDE's sound system so I might not get sound with my Flash.
I realize that there are legal problems with codecs and DVDs and whatever. Before Linux is ever going to get consumer-level acceptance, these problems need to be solved, or worked around. A solution would be to get a commercially-developed Linux media player that a) integrates with the desktop and b) works and c) package that with the distro. A work-around would be to make up a media player installer that you just click on, it downloads whatever it needs from non-US sites, and it does all the stuff, and it WORKS.
I'm happy to pay for Linux distros (I think I paid almost $100 for Suse 9.3 pro). If they have to tack on another $10 or $20 to include a solid, well-integrated working media player, they need to do it.
All the other apps are more than good enough right now. OOo is a good consumer-level (and biz level) replacement for MS Office. Firefox is better than IE. All that is lacking is multimedia playback.
The device detection problem is a big one. Tim is right on this. URLs are how we identify sites that we want to go to, not how we identify content. There should be one URL for all content types and the site should do the right thing for the device.
That's a complicated problem. There are about 1,000 different mobile devices currently in use. Keeping track of them, and the different types of content they need, is tough.
Most devices can handle one of four different types of content:
Full HTML: desktop computers, etc
Mobile XHTML: newer phones
WML: older or mid-range phones
cHTML: DoCoMo i-mode phones in Japan
Within these four basic types, there are still more questions:
Screen size: How big should images be
Image types: PNG, GIF, JPEG, or WBMP?
Media types: can it play videos, etc?
Java types: MIDP1, MIDP2, DoJa, or perhaps even J2SE?
There's no way to make this work without some specialized software help. One tool is the free open-source WURFL. Another tool is, of course, our own DeviceSource and Mobile Web Module.
Creating another domain shifts more work to users (in the form of marketing the other URL, remembering it, using it). Users shouldn't have to do work. Tools should do work.
Anyway, if Slashdot ever wants to get a license to our software to have a mobile Slashdot you can read on the phone, contact us: info@chiralsoftware.net.
As long as we're using unsafe languages to handle untrusted data, we will keep having these problemss.
Zlib itself contains 8000 lines of code. Not very big, is it? It's been around for years and is widely used, so in theory a lot of people have been able to look at it. And yet, after all these years, they are still finding buffer overflows in these 8000 lines of code.
Zlib was not written by monkeys. It was written by very smart, experienced coders. And yet somehow they are not able to write 8000 lines of code without multiple serious buffer overflows.
As long as code like this is written in C we're going to have these problems.
Saying, "there's a critical buffer overflow in a library written in C" is as newsworthy as saying "when I bang my head against the wall I get a headache."
It seems like they need to produce not just positrons, but full anti-atoms. Positrons all have the same (positive) charge so containing them is hard because they repulse eachother. An anti-atom (ie, positrons oribiting around anti-protons) would be neutral and could even be formed into a solid. This solid could then be suspended. So even if they can generate lots of positrons they still need to generate anti-protons to go with them.
Also, energy released from antimatter annihilation doesn't come out in a very usable form. From this article it looks like most of the energy comes out as neutrinos. Space is full of neutrinos zipping around, but they're pretty useless for energy because they don't interact with matter to any significant degree.
It sounds wonderful to have some bit of matter that can be fully converted to energy but I think we'll have commercial fusion power sooner than this can happen.
Maybe they could figure out how to make smaller, safer fission reactors for these types of missions? Maybe they could focus on fuel efficiency, perhaps even making small breeder reactors for space use?
ICMP flaw #1 on Linux: it's in the kernel
on
Examining ICMP Flaws
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
We don't put HTTP servers in the kernel. We don't put SMB (Samba) servers in the kernel. We don't put FTP servers in the kernel. We don't put SSH servers in the kernel. We don't have SMTPD (mail) servers in the kernel. Why do we still have ICMP servers in the kernel? The traditional (lame) excuse for putting things like NFS in the kernel is for performance (this is nonsense; if it were true, shouldn't Apache HTTPD be a kernel module?) But ICMP isn't a high-bandwidth or high-performance service. It should be running as an ordinary user process, not root, and especially not as a kernel process.
As much as we make jokes about how bad it is to have a web browser integrated into the kernel in Windows, it's as bad or worse (for the same reasons) to have all these network servers integrated into the Linux kernel. If I were getting them out of there I would start with ones that have no business at all being there, such as ICMP.
Doesn't this whole thing seem like a waste? The shuttles will be permanently grounded in 2010 because its flight certification will expire, and it is generally agreed that it would be ridiculously expensive to get it re-certified. We're half-way through 2005, so they have 4.5 years left of flying. It seems like they have a tough time getting more than a few flights a year out of them. So, being optimistic, they might get another fifteen flights out of these shuttles. They have so far lost aprox. one in fifty flights, so there's a real chance that one of these fifteen (optimistic) flights might not even make which would a) be a tragic and senseless loss of life and b) terminate the program immediately, meaning we get even fewer than fifteen flights out of it.
Does any of this make financial sense? The shuttle was sold on the premise that it would be... a shuttle, ie, something that makes routine flights and therefore makes it cheap to get big things up into orbit. The goal was to have each shuttle able to fly every couple of weeks. The reality has been far from that, and it can only get things into low orbits, and it's insanely expensive and dangerous. Rather than fixing these safety problems, wouldn't it have made more sense to just put these things in a museum and get some big off-the-shelf Russian rocket certified for lifting humans?
I guess my question is, why are they dragging out the misery and financial waste that is the shuttle program?
Stealth startups are bad for one obvious reason, which is that they prevent getting customer feedback about the product and they delay getting the product out into the market. That's a good enough reason to never do a "stealth startup".
But there's a second and even more important reason why stealth startups are foolish. It shows that the management has delusions of grandeur. It shows arrogance, self-importance and being out of touch with the real situation. The real situation of a startup is trying to do R&D and marketing and sales starting from nothing and trying to do it on the tightest budget possible. That's the reality. The delusion that these "stealth startup" guys fall into is that what they are doing is as magnificent as discovering the Philosopher's Stone, and therefore the normal rules of business and finance don't apply. These guys are doomed.
--------------- Mobile web applications
They may cost $300, which may be the price threshold for ubiquitous home consumer electronics, but they're still five to ten times more difficult to use. What's a firewall? Why do computers get viruses? What's a service pack? What's a folder/directory? Why are there so many folders on my computer? What is a file? What is a drivers and why do I need one? When you think of it in those terms, you'll see, the PC is far from being ready to be a ubiquitous piece of home electronics.
No, the PC will never catch up with the mobile phone.
We have quite a few old (non-functioning) inkjets, computers, etc, sitting around here. I know that Office Depot used to have a program where they would accept that kind of equipment for recycling but that program is no longer. What's the right thing to do? I looked around on the net and found some companies that specialize in hauling away equipment but they do it in large quantities, and won't pick up just one or two pieces. What am I supposed to do? I assume dumping it in the trash is not the right thing, but I can't find any other options, other than leaving it in a closet, which is what I'm trying to stop doing. I'm happy to pay $10 or $20 or whatever to get this stuff recycled correctly, but I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for a hauling company and I also don't want to spend two hours driving around LA to find some place that will accept it for recycling. Surely there is a solution here?
First, it seems like KDE/Qt has more momentum than GTK on the desktop. Qt apps look better and are more integrated with eachother. Suse is the dominant desktop Linux distro and Suse is KDE-oriented. I'm glad that Java is going to be using native GTK for rendering, but what I would really like to see is native Qt. Maybe they could create some kind of interface to make it easier to plug in different rendering systems? Maybe they could open source Java and let the community take care of it? Maybe they don't care because desktop Linux is only about 5% of the market anyway? But still, it's something I would like to see.
The second thing they need is a "SwingLite", or some easier way to do common things. For example, it is very common to need a text field that allows the user to enter a number, but not text. Should be easy, right? This is the code I have to use to do it:
The above example, involving two different factory classes to just get the field to accept integers only, puts a high burden of knowledge on the programmer, and Swing is full of stuff like that. It's great that the power is there because I can write my own hierarchy of text formatting factories and objects that enforces correctly-entered Sandhi rules, but that doesn't come up very often, and what does come up very often is having to enter a plain old number, date, currency value, that kind of thing. And I'm just using this one example, but this kind of over-design is all over the place in Swing.
The final problem that they have is putting emphasis on plugable look and feel. Application developers shouldn't get to decide the look and feel of their apps. That should be determined by the desktop environment. Pluggable look and feel is not a feature; it is a bug. It should be deprecated and removed.
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I have just now downloaded OpenSuse 10. I'll install it and hope to see some improvements.
If Novell / Suse wants to get real desktop adoption, these are the things they need to do:
- The system needs to be more stable. Take a deep breath, slow down on the new features, and make it stable.
- THERE SHOULD BE ONLY ONE APPLICATION FOR EVERY TASK! This is so obvious and people have been saying it for years. On my Suse 9.3, if I want to control the volume, I go to Multimedia -> Volume control and I see NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS, all of which work or don't work to varying degrees, and none of which are simple and easy to use and understand. That's crazy. That's on drugs. That's lame. Say whatever you want about how great Linux is but if my desktop has NINE DIFFERENT VOLUME CONTROL APPLICATIONS that is horrific. I bring up volume control, but the same problem exists in all the other application categories, but volume control is by far the worst offender. If users want to go crazy and install a dozen different word processors, fine, let them do it, but the default installation should have ONE and exactly ONE application in every category.
- There needs to be a good media player that is well-integrated and WORKS. I should be able to pop in a DVD which I got from Blockbuster and play it, with GUI controls, subtitles, everything, with no messing around. I should be able to go to CNN.com and look at video, with no messing around.
The first two items are not rocket science. They're not technology problems. They are management problems. Someone who is a technical manager high up in Novell should lay down the law on these two issues and make them happen. Say to the dev team, "If you think that such-and-such should be the ONE application for such-and-such task, make your case, and we'll have a decision process and at the end we'll pick one, and go with it."The media player part is more difficult because it's wrapped up in all kinds of legal licensing problems. They need to solve these problems. They are solvable with money, lawyers and time. Guess what, time to do it Novell!
Also you can be sure there will never be buffer overflows or similar security problems.
I'm sure you know this, but you're going to need a clusterable technology. You need to have multiple redundant servers for this kind of load. Much better to be able to handle load by adding cheap PC-hardware servers than basing it on one huge server. James would let you build that if you want to.
Of course, James only makes sense if you're a Java type of person.
Is this a good way to spend money? If it were my money, rather than having spent it return to flight for a program which is almost dead, I would have spent it on something with a future. Rather than trying to patch up a system which never came close to delivering on its promises I would have spent it on a new system, that learned from the mistakes of the old system.
But on Mars it's a lot easier than on Earth. First, safety is not as much of a concern. If you have a big radioactive spill on Earth, you've caused a lot of problems. On Mars, well, no one is drinking the groundwater anyway and the whole place is already uninhabited. So that greatly simplifies your factory.
Second, you don't need to run on 100% uranium fuel. Here on Earth, no one wants to generate plutonium for reactors because of proliferation fears (founded or not). On Mars, proliferation is not a concern. Anyone who has the technology to get to Mars should be able to build atomic weapons fairly easily, and atomic explosives will probably be needed for engineering work, so spending time worrying about proliferation on Mars is silly.
The good thing about being free to burn plutonium is that it's easy to make plutonium from the left-over depleted uranium. All you need is a big neutron flux, pump that through the depleted uranium, and you get plutonium fuel.
What this means is that on Earth, you need to mine 140 tons of uranium metal to get one ton of U235, which is the only kind that works as fuel. On Mars, you mine 140 tons of uranium metal, extract the 1 ton of U235, and use that to convert the remaining 139 tons of U238 to plutonium. We can't do that on Earth for political / military reasons, but we can do it on Mars.
So yeah, many of the same problems remain, but the whole process of going from uranium ore to energy would be a lot simpler on Mars.
Once you have a basic reactor going (enough to generate fuel) you can start lifting your raw uranium ore into Mars orbit. It's a lot easier to get off the surface of Mars than it is to get off of Earth. Then you refine it in orbit, where you can be as unsafe and messy as you want, you blast all the waste products into the sun, and you send back down your refined U235 or plutonium fuel rods.
Also if you can find extraterrestrial (not from Earth) fissionable material (uranium or thorium) that means you can avoid the risks and expense of having to launch it. A lot of people get upset if there's a proposal to launch a 100kg RTG. Well, to power a mining colony, they will need a lot more than 100kg of fission fuel. What kind of public reaction would there be to the proposal of launching several tons of uranium? It would be much better if they could dig it up on Mars and use it on Mars.
Some of the terraforming projects require moving asteroids of ice to Mars. Again, the only way you can do that is with a nuclear-powered mass driver on the asteroid, and it would be nice to not have to launch that much uranium from Earth.
So when my company starts its Mars base, the first thing we're going to do is find the uranium, and then we'll sell electricity, H2 and O2 to all the other companies that want to (effectively) sell dirt and water. I suspect there's a lot better markup on electricity than there is on dirt and water.
I assume there is uranium on Mars, but I've never heard of anyone looking for it or discussing it. It seems to me that if there are no extraterrestrial sources of uranium, that's going to be a big problem for colonization of space, because it really will take thousands of tons of uranium to provide all the power that's going to be needed for serious mining and fuel production. And no, solar power is not going to work for this. Mining and fuel production requires too much power for solar to be a realistic option. For any activities beyond Mars, solar gets even less realistic. As long as solar is the power source, power is going to be a very tight limiting factor, whereas if you've got a few hundred tons of uranium, power will not be the limiting factor.
Also I wonder if uranium would make a good radiation shield? It seems like DU would be quite effective for that?
The good news is that if you set up a reactor on one of Mars' moons or on an asteroid or in Mars orbit, you can make it enormous and not need any real containment structures. If the uranium is available, it might be much cheaper to build extraterrestrial reactors than it is on Earth.
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- Keep on supporting them forever.
- Stop supporting them and force them to upgrade.
#2 is usually the right thing to do. It's especially right in this case. Every single line of code that processes remote user input (ie, every line of SSL and any other web server code) could potentially contain a security vulnerability. Developers are not actively working on this antique code so bugs will be left there, perhaps forever. If you're looking for holes, abandoned code is a good place to look. This is similar to the Linux vulnerability not long ago where there was some obscure bug in the processing of a.out files that let binaries escalate. Well, we don't use a.out format anymore. We use ELF format and have for years, so no one was paying attention to that antique code. It should have been removed from the kernel, but it wasn't.The second issue is that OpenSSL is maintained by volunteers. I'd rather have them working to make a small set of features perfect, instead of wasting time on dead code that almost no one is using. Would you rather have the GCC crew working on improving Java or Fortran support?
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mobile search - try it on your phone
Put the shuttles in a museum!
The Earth is set up so that chemical rockets and just barely escape the Earth's gravity. If the Earth were just a bit more massive, we wouldn't have any space program at all. The point is, rockets are only marginally workable.
There are two ways we can go on space: One is the utilitarian way, which means satellites to do useful things for us Earthlings. The other way to go is space exploration where we expand our understanding of the solar system and our presence within it.
The utilitarian view of space is something we can achieve easily with chemical power sources. We have done some great things with chemical power for exploration, but it is also becoming a handicap.
If we want to do much more than the utilitarian use, we need to work on nuclear propulsion. There are so many ideas, including ion thrusters, gas core reactors and many others, with advantages and disadvantages.
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mobile search - try it on your phone!
Some future version of Tomcat should have built-in content parsing in its filters so that filter writers could write simple filters to transform content in a meaningful way. But I haven't seen that as a proposal anywhere.
Even regular consumer devices like Linksys routers are running Linux, so that makes me wonder if the changes have to be hardware or software changes. It's my impression that on a Linksys router, basically everything important is done in software, so I don't see how this could be implemented in hardware.
And obviously, if this means that Linksys routers need to have a patched kernel, will they have to be locked in some way to prevent changes to the kernel? What about the GPL? If the backdoor is implemented as a part of the kernel, and then that kernel is redistributed, then the backdoor code would need to be published, right?
Back in the days when everything was hardware, regulations like this would be cleanly enforceable, but now that the work is done almost entirely in software, it's a mess.
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No, what this shows is that hydrogen is simply a derivative of fossil fuels, and is in fact an extremely expensive, inefficient and almost useless way to store and transport energy.
Let's see, we start with huge lumps of coal, convert them to steam, convert the steam to electricity, and then use the electricity to make hydrogen which (in a fuel cell) we can convert back to electricity. Energy is lost at every step along the way. In particular, compressing the hydrogen from atmospheric pressure to storage tank pressure loses about HALF the total energy, so even if the fuel cell is 100% efficient, you've still lost HALF the energy you started with.
But commercial hydrogen is not produced by electrolysis. It's produced from natural gas and steam. So let's see, we start with natural gas, a product which has the following properties:
- Cheap
- Easy to store and transport with widely available equipment
- Can run through cheap, widely available engines
- Fairly clean burning (compared to diesel)
- High energy density in compressed tanks
and we convert that to hydrogen which has the following properties:- Very very expensive
- Very difficult to store. The only real-world proven way to store it at a high density is to liquify it. That will never be a practical option outside of aerospace industry
- Can be burned in regular engines, with regular engine efficiency, or can be burned in extremely expensive fuel cells. There is no realistic possibility of fuel cells becoming cost competitive in the foreseeable future.
- Low energy-density for real-world storage (compressed tanks, etc). Fuel cell cars have a range of less than 200 miles usually.
- Oh, and it's clean burning! Finally after all the bad things about H2 we come to one good thing!
- It makes the whole global warming and oil dependency problems worse becomes it takes so much energy is wasted in the process of converting fossil fuels into hydrogen.
The one thing that could help is that you can make hydrogen from clean nuclear energy and from clean solar energy, but given that hydrogen electrolysis is not cost-competitive with even cheap fossil fuel electricity, why should it be cost competitive with much more expensive solar electricity?I regret that our government is involved in subsidizing this whole boondoggle, but I have no worries that it will continue in the long-term. Some small improvements in lithium batteries, and some reasonable production economy in lithium batteries will make electric cars competitive with plain old ICE cars, and the hydrogen fuel research pork programs will shrivel up and die.
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mobile search
Workers in IT (esp. programmers) spend long and irregular hours, socialize with eachother, and exchange ideas. That's just the culture of it. I somehow doubt that the employers who pushed for this decision are specifically thinking about their IT staff. "These are not the droids they are looking for" basically.
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It also seems like they have spent a large fraction of their space-time on this mission simply making sure the shuttle is fit to return to Earth, rather than doing useful space work. The shuttle was sold on the promise of routine, cheap, quick flights to space, and we have something that flies so irregularly that it's hard to even say how often it flies (once a year or less?). It's such a bucket of bolts that astronauts then have to spend half their time just inspecting it for damage while they're in orbit. NASA should not be putting astronauts at risk in a ship like this. NASA should be spending its budget on programs that have a future, rather than programs which have been a dead end for a long time.
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mobile search - coming soon
I am very experienced with Linux and computers in general and I still can't get Windows Media video to work properly on this, and the only DVD playback I have is through MPlayer and I still can't get a GUI working on MPlayer.
What I had to go through to get this far: Download and compile MPlayer. Ok, that's no problem and it plays DVDs. Download and install the Windows codecs pack. Now MPlayer (still with no GUI) can play WMV. That's great. Xine (KDE's preferred video player) can't detect these Windows codecs, even though I put them in /usr/lib/win32, which is where they're supposed to be. So no integrated desktop playback; if I want to play a clip, I download it, save it, open up a console window, and point MPlayer at it. I tried to get MPlayer to compile with --gui-enabled so at least I could have a front-end for it. No luck; it can't find gtk2+ development libraries. I tried to install them and couldn't find them anywhere that MPlayer could find them. I also tried to install a dvddecss lib where Xine could find it so Xine could play encrypted (standard) movie DVDs. Again, nothing I could do worked.
Mind you, this is all with Suse 9.3, the latest and greatest. All of this stuff is supposed to be worked out by now. I can get it to just barely work, with no desktop integration and no GUI, and I'm an experienced and knowledgable user. What are other people supposed to do, just use their imagination?
Oh and the situation is even worse with Flash. In my previous Suse installations, Flash worked fine in Konqueror. Now with Suse 9.3, I get a crash when Konqueror tries to render a page with Flash, so I have to use Moz or Firefox to view it, and guess what, those have problems working with KDE's sound system so I might not get sound with my Flash.
I realize that there are legal problems with codecs and DVDs and whatever. Before Linux is ever going to get consumer-level acceptance, these problems need to be solved, or worked around. A solution would be to get a commercially-developed Linux media player that a) integrates with the desktop and b) works and c) package that with the distro. A work-around would be to make up a media player installer that you just click on, it downloads whatever it needs from non-US sites, and it does all the stuff, and it WORKS.
I'm happy to pay for Linux distros (I think I paid almost $100 for Suse 9.3 pro). If they have to tack on another $10 or $20 to include a solid, well-integrated working media player, they need to do it.
All the other apps are more than good enough right now. OOo is a good consumer-level (and biz level) replacement for MS Office. Firefox is better than IE. All that is lacking is multimedia playback.
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mobile search - coming soon
The device detection problem is a big one. Tim is right on this. URLs are how we identify sites that we want to go to, not how we identify content. There should be one URL for all content types and the site should do the right thing for the device.
That's a complicated problem. There are about 1,000 different mobile devices currently in use. Keeping track of them, and the different types of content they need, is tough.
Most devices can handle one of four different types of content:
- Full HTML: desktop computers, etc
- Mobile XHTML: newer phones
- WML: older or mid-range phones
- cHTML: DoCoMo i-mode phones in Japan
Within these four basic types, there are still more questions:- Screen size: How big should images be
- Image types: PNG, GIF, JPEG, or WBMP?
- Media types: can it play videos, etc?
- Java types: MIDP1, MIDP2, DoJa, or perhaps even J2SE?
There's no way to make this work without some specialized software help. One tool is the free open-source WURFL. Another tool is, of course, our own DeviceSource and Mobile Web Module.Creating another domain shifts more work to users (in the form of marketing the other URL, remembering it, using it). Users shouldn't have to do work. Tools should do work.
Anyway, if Slashdot ever wants to get a license to our software to have a mobile Slashdot you can read on the phone, contact us: info@chiralsoftware.net.
Zlib itself contains 8000 lines of code. Not very big, is it? It's been around for years and is widely used, so in theory a lot of people have been able to look at it. And yet, after all these years, they are still finding buffer overflows in these 8000 lines of code.
Zlib was not written by monkeys. It was written by very smart, experienced coders. And yet somehow they are not able to write 8000 lines of code without multiple serious buffer overflows.
As long as code like this is written in C we're going to have these problems.
Saying, "there's a critical buffer overflow in a library written in C" is as newsworthy as saying "when I bang my head against the wall I get a headache."
Also, energy released from antimatter annihilation doesn't come out in a very usable form. From this article it looks like most of the energy comes out as neutrinos. Space is full of neutrinos zipping around, but they're pretty useless for energy because they don't interact with matter to any significant degree.
It sounds wonderful to have some bit of matter that can be fully converted to energy but I think we'll have commercial fusion power sooner than this can happen.
Maybe they could figure out how to make smaller, safer fission reactors for these types of missions? Maybe they could focus on fuel efficiency, perhaps even making small breeder reactors for space use?
As much as we make jokes about how bad it is to have a web browser integrated into the kernel in Windows, it's as bad or worse (for the same reasons) to have all these network servers integrated into the Linux kernel. If I were getting them out of there I would start with ones that have no business at all being there, such as ICMP.
Does any of this make financial sense? The shuttle was sold on the premise that it would be... a shuttle, ie, something that makes routine flights and therefore makes it cheap to get big things up into orbit. The goal was to have each shuttle able to fly every couple of weeks. The reality has been far from that, and it can only get things into low orbits, and it's insanely expensive and dangerous. Rather than fixing these safety problems, wouldn't it have made more sense to just put these things in a museum and get some big off-the-shelf Russian rocket certified for lifting humans?
I guess my question is, why are they dragging out the misery and financial waste that is the shuttle program?
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WAP server software
But there's a second and even more important reason why stealth startups are foolish. It shows that the management has delusions of grandeur. It shows arrogance, self-importance and being out of touch with the real situation. The real situation of a startup is trying to do R&D and marketing and sales starting from nothing and trying to do it on the tightest budget possible. That's the reality. The delusion that these "stealth startup" guys fall into is that what they are doing is as magnificent as discovering the Philosopher's Stone, and therefore the normal rules of business and finance don't apply. These guys are doomed.
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Mobile web applications
No, the PC will never catch up with the mobile phone.
We have quite a few old (non-functioning) inkjets, computers, etc, sitting around here. I know that Office Depot used to have a program where they would accept that kind of equipment for recycling but that program is no longer. What's the right thing to do? I looked around on the net and found some companies that specialize in hauling away equipment but they do it in large quantities, and won't pick up just one or two pieces. What am I supposed to do? I assume dumping it in the trash is not the right thing, but I can't find any other options, other than leaving it in a closet, which is what I'm trying to stop doing. I'm happy to pay $10 or $20 or whatever to get this stuff recycled correctly, but I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars for a hauling company and I also don't want to spend two hours driving around LA to find some place that will accept it for recycling. Surely there is a solution here?
First, it seems like KDE/Qt has more momentum than GTK on the desktop. Qt apps look better and are more integrated with eachother. Suse is the dominant desktop Linux distro and Suse is KDE-oriented. I'm glad that Java is going to be using native GTK for rendering, but what I would really like to see is native Qt. Maybe they could create some kind of interface to make it easier to plug in different rendering systems? Maybe they could open source Java and let the community take care of it? Maybe they don't care because desktop Linux is only about 5% of the market anyway? But still, it's something I would like to see.
The second thing they need is a "SwingLite", or some easier way to do common things. For example, it is very common to need a text field that allows the user to enter a number, but not text. Should be easy, right? This is the code I have to use to do it:
That's just wrong. I should be able to say:or maybe:The above example, involving two different factory classes to just get the field to accept integers only, puts a high burden of knowledge on the programmer, and Swing is full of stuff like that. It's great that the power is there because I can write my own hierarchy of text formatting factories and objects that enforces correctly-entered Sandhi rules, but that doesn't come up very often, and what does come up very often is having to enter a plain old number, date, currency value, that kind of thing. And I'm just using this one example, but this kind of over-design is all over the place in Swing.The final problem that they have is putting emphasis on plugable look and feel. Application developers shouldn't get to decide the look and feel of their apps. That should be determined by the desktop environment. Pluggable look and feel is not a feature; it is a bug. It should be deprecated and removed.
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Educational software