NAT is the best way in general for networks to attach to the internet because it creates a "protected" zone
For example; Joe Bonehead buys a "Comcast self-install kit" from Best Buy and whatever cable modem he's told he needs. Typically, in the IPv4 case, he ends up with a RFC1918 address on his computer, courtesy of the default DHCP service configuration provided by the modem. The host can not be reached from the outside before initiating traffic. Given his unpatched, unfirewalled computer(s) this is a good thing. If he sticks to sites that don't exploit vulnerabilities and his virus scanner cleans up the emails he can go a long time without getting owned. In the IPv6 case he gets a public IP address routable from the world. Some number of seconds later the box(es) are spam zombies.
Imagine this; the IETF, rather than dismissing your point, embraces it and publishes default firewall guidelines for IPv6 firewalls ("IETF Inside")? The truth is that IPv4+NAT does not provide better security than a properly configured IPv6 firewall, yet we know that the world, left to its own devices will blunder into IPv6 with the indifference IPv4+NAT is protecting us from.
It's the IETF's own fault. They perceive a clear delineation between protocols and policies and the thought that firewall policy needs to be coupled with IPv6 just never registers. The fact is that people with the clout and budgets to change the Internet would embrace a firewall standard published by a credible, independent organization such as the IETF. If an OS Vendor, firewall appliance manufacturer or ISP could claim "IETF IPv6 Firewall Compliance," every auditor and his dog would make it mandatory faster than you could swap out your 2500 series Cisco router.
The IETF's inability to leverage this opportunity is not surprising. It's a purely technical organization with no mechanism to market its ideas. I think a little marketing savvy would go a long way.
Add *.wmf and *.emf to your adblock filters (I presume if you browse with Windows you're using Firefox and Adblock, otherwise...) These formats hardly ever appear on the web. If you see one, it's probably an exploit.
An example I've seen mentioned concerns the.xxx domain. Apparently 'they' decided not to permit this being created.
Sometimes people claim it's difficult to do business from non-western countries with existing Registrars. I suppose if you don't have a credit card that 'just works' or you claim to live someplace 'they' can't detect in their database it could complicate things. Usually people can register domains with 'local' registrars, to whom ICANN has delegated control of top-level domains.
I imagine there are issues when dealing with 'rouge states' (Iran, N. Korea, etc.) or individuals the US has problems with.
I suspect that non-US businesses probably are at a disadvantage when confronting US businesses in domain disputes.
Does any of this justify the hysteria we've seen from the EU? Hell if I know.
I've used exactly the non-aggregate expressions in the SELECT clause.
This is non-optional. Something is either an aggregate expression or it isn't, so why are we expected to explain this in the statement? Probably because aggregates aren't 'first class' in terms of SQL. Aggregates are functions.
Can you give an example where it would be something else? I too would like GROUP BY DEFAULT or somesuch.
This is my idea:
SELECT a, b, c AGGREGATE x, y, z FROM foo
GROUP BY vanishes. Non-aggregates expressions are valid only in SELECT while aggregate expressions are valid only in AGGREGATE. Less ambiguous and no redundant expressions. Easier to use also; comment out the AGGREGATE clause and you've got a basic statement. Quickly remove group tuple elements with comments.
Other ideas:
Binary aggregate functions: OR(), for example. Clever techniques using these can eliminate lumps of code elsewhere. Example, given the values 1, 1, 5, 1, aggregate OR() yields 5, aggregate AND() yields 1. Very useful for analysis of 'detail' rows that have individual states.
Reorder the basic clauses: FROM should be first.
Eliminate HAVING: This is redundant with subselects.
This will be a case study in IP law. How many patents will appear covering each and every aspect of Ajax as developers reinvent techniques long since commonplace in pre-web software? I'm usually not pessimistic but given recent evidence (Blackberry, Eolas, etc) it's pretty clear that patenting trivial techniques, regardless of prior art, is effective.
How will a new platform emerge when its components are owned by multiple licensors? The answer is obvious; Microsoft (or Google, Canopy, etc) will buy them all and own the whole enchilada. Don't count on any Open Source implementations escaping the IP lawyers this time around.
omission of the Why certainly colours this article
This is selective scrutiny. The Why behind opposition to so-call 'Campaign Finance Reform' is rooted in Free Speech. You're conditioned to attribute this opposition to a desire to protect corruption through influence peddling but, believe it or not, the non-wealthy on the other side really do believe that McCain-Feingold is damage. I doubt that particular Why would have ever occurred to you when evaluating a typical MSM scree about 'wealthy special interest' opposition to Campaign Finance Reform.
It appears the article poster favours websites/blogs which are covert mouthpieces of a particular interest group spouting dubious facts
A non-liberal slant in a Slashdot article is such a rare occurrence that you think you're in bizarro world. What does this tell you about the slant present in all of the other stuff?
Critical Thinking
You're flattering yourself. That you are oblivious to the possibility that the bill is entirely self consistent while attempting to both compromise Campaign Finance Reform and explicitly exempt bloggers from regulation is evidence of a deep bias that precludes any Critical Thinking.
It's just us morons doing our level best to fuck up the world for you Critical Thinkers.
What ticks off a telecom is that the prices for packets are so darn *cheap*
Lots of companies charge people to move packets. One company has, apparently, been listening to what amounts to a 'prophet' and been convinced there is a big pot of gold waiting to be looted. As a result he is being propelled to ever greater heights by those who want a piece.
It is astonishing to imagine this guy has emerged onto the scene with this balderdash. There must be some seriously ignorant board members involved. Stuff like this makes me find common cause with activists. Reality has clearly not yet impinged on these people.
This is why the vestiges of the old phone system must die. It is populated by people who really believe this guy.
the only option is to impose filtering
Hey, if the packets don't inherently have enough value to keep me in Yachts, I'll screw around with them until they do!
Filtering isn't a real option either. Despite the hysterical headline of this post (Ma Bell is back, yada yada) the truth is that there are too many alternatives available to bandwidth consumers.
My advice: shutdown as many voice land-lines as you can. The sooner these twits are deprived of their only real profit center the less damage they will do.
When shortcuts were invented for Win95 the Win32 API should have been built to treat a shortcut as the object it pointed to. That way they would have had real working links up front. Now they are going to be stuck with two types of link which work in different ways.
Windows is finally implementing true file system path aliases. This is not ambiguous with Shortcuts.
'Shortcuts' are more than just an encoded path. 'Hotkeys' can be associated, 'starting directory' can be designated, arbitrary icons assigned, etc. The *nix analogy is found in any contemporary X Windows GUI shell (Gnome, KDE, etc.) with their various dot file structures defining menus and/or launch parameters for GUI applications.
Windows had the GUI application metadata 'link' first and got symlinks second. *nix got symlinks first and then blundered into Shortcuts (doomed to forever lack a uniform manifestation.) I think this just highlights the different priorities of the platforms.
Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
Interesting question. Let us consider a simplified universal payroll system and see where this goes. I'll stipulate roughly 200 million US payroll employees and 52 pay periods. Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period. The necessary software doesn't exist to accommodate the payroll requirements for every conceivable employment situation, but we'll just pretend it does.
You'll need 41 TiB of storage on day one. Each day you'll need to perform 28.5e6 payroll calculations generating 29.2 GiB of new data.
The storage requirements alone are going to blow your hardware budget. It's understood the data will need reliable storage, so a rack of 82 500 GB SATA drives won't do (with a new drive added every 16 days.) Lets factor in 25% storage overhead for (poor) redundancy. We need just over a hundred 500 GB drives. Storage at this scale will inevitably result in SAN or some such technology, so you'll need some storage switches. The storage hardware will consume many times the power of your AMD64.
Data will have to arrive via some network. Payroll is an aggregate calculation of many different forms of detail data. Lets say the time sheets, vacation requests, etc. represent 10 times the volume of the result. You'll need to handle 292 GiB of inbound (we'll assume outbound is negligible) data per day. That's 2 DS1s running at capacity at all times. You'll need redundant switching hardware for this. Also, we're taking for granted that fraction of Internet capacity necessary to move this data; it's not really free, after all.
Computational load is much harder to estimate without an accurate model of typical payroll calculations. I'll use my experience with OLAP consolidations. 2.4GHz Xeon will compute an 8 GiB cube in 45 minutes. This time is mostly (95%) spent in the CPU. Its also far simpler than payroll, consisting mostly of simple aggregates and hash calculations. Lets throw a factor of 3 at this to cover the extra computation necessary for payroll. We'll need 8.2 hours of CPU time per day. That seems quite feasible for an AMD64 CPU.
There is no wiggle room in the above estimates. No backups, no test system, no fail over. In the real world batch computation is highly synchronous, so you need a lot of spare network and compute capacity. You're doing a lot of co-processing here; the CPUs running the SAN switches and routers are all essential to the process, so you can't give all the credit to the AMD64 CPU. The interesting thing is that communications and storage are the real power hogs.
Disclaimer: To call the above 'back of a napkin' is probably flattery.
this resistance is independent of its length, which means that Ohm's law does not apply
What does Omn's Law have to do with length? While the resistance of a "ballistic" conductor may be constant regardless of length, it's still not zero... Omn's Law would still be applicable.
What is simply amazing? At this point we some handwaving about "emphasis on integration and circuit design." Projections from venture capital PowerPoint presentations tend not to pan out in production units. This looks like Transmeta II, except they are aiming lower.
There aren't any homebrew drones at 79,000 feet. There won't be any homebrew drones at that altitude in the foreseeable future (aside from the odd ex-dot-com billionaire hobbyist with a benign ballistic rocket.) This is the very top of the mesosphere. The only entities that operate in this regime are nation-state militaries, and it's non-trivial even for them. If any such nation is busy shooting down your balloons you'll have other things on your mind, so it's not a problem.
Anyhow, for consumer broadband the whole idea is nonsense. People won't pay the cost necessary to maintain the system. Militaries and emergency services might appreciate the means to blanket an area with secure broadband, however. Relaying real-time telemetry, audio and video is hard in a combat zone. Bandwidth was a major problem for the US military in both gulf conflicts.
Why football (both kinds,) baseball, basketball, hockey, etc? Why do auto manufacturers sink millions into F1? Most of their customers are oblivious to it. Yet year after year teams have budgets.
We keep score. We measure each other, both individuals and aggregates, incessantly. This is not new, surprising or unique to space. It has nothing to do with space specifically. We compete. Space exploration happens to be one of the more benign methods of competition we've managed to invent.
On any given day you're likely to witness the Times quibble about billions 'wasted' in space. In the very same column the next day you'll read about how far we lag the Chinese as they accomplish another mission. Sniping at NASA budgets is easy. It isn't easy to discover you really are second rate.
I almost hit some construction worker with his "SLOW" sign
Look into getting the 'personal' variant of this. A certain percentage of drivers slaughter a number of construction workers every year. Be sure you can survive the consequences reasonably whole.
Wow! I wished for my digital camera.
Your expectations of construction crews are out of phase with the reality of ex-cons and 'illegal immigrant' day workers that may not have intended to return to the site in the morning. Factor this into your driving.
Another example was in Bellevue, WA
...the state of Illinois... Their warning practices...
That's a strange comparison. 'Way north' of Peoria, Illinois (I presume as there are several... Peorii) is a long way from a notoriously small place. I cant quite figure out which city you might have been near at that point because the available maps are ambiguous. Bellevue, Washington however, is a densely populated area. Is it really your expectation that Bellevue post signs on every major thoroughfare for forty miles in every direction for every on-going construction event?
Until then I'd sort of figured left side ramps were artifacts and had been deemed dangerous and obsolete.
Road design is a function of cost. Left side exits exist when making the same exit on the right would cost some fraction of a Sagen more. Regardless, you are expected navigate such a path safely. This isn't 'Pave the Earth (tm)' and you don't get to blast around with indifference. If your familiarity with an area is so limited that you don't know the relevant road patterns in the dark without signs, you should be sober, wide awake and terrified.
I could go on, but I wonder how many accidents and deaths could be prevented...
Please don't. Instead, hop plane ticket to France, rent a car and go for a spin. If you survive you will likely be reduced to tears so go alone and spare someone the drama. Upon return you will confidently race down any paved road in the US like a native.
(Disclaimer: a competent French driver is better than a competent US driver. As a US driver I understand this as objective fact. No harm, no foul, mkay?)
Ok, your turn; key '7' is the Mark XI Slashdot Flamethrower.
So I wonder if any of this will really matter, as it would likely be easily worked around?
You can safely ignore it. The EU can't dismiss ICANN and it can't 'break' the Internet for US users, or anyone else that chooses to ignore this nonsense.
You have a file with a list of root servers. Europe can't make you change it in any way. Europe can't shut down the servers in that list.
They could monkey around with networks that exist within their sovereign control. For example; they could mandate that their ISPs block access to ICANN root servers in favor of their own. Unless the new servers were somehow capable of emulating the content of ICANN servers almost perfectly (in which case ICANN is effectively still in control,) this won't happen because their own subjects would revolt. The same is true for practically anything else they consider attempting; if the EU mob wakes up one morning and the Internet is broke, the EU mob will un-break it rapidly.
Perhaps the ultimate solution is to create resolvers that can handle alternative collections of root servers. Assign weights to each collection and attempt resolution starting with the highest weighted set. Obviously you'll want ICANN servers at the top, and any others you choose to include after. Iran or China can then establish all the roots they want and you can include or exclude them as necessary.
As far as whether any of the EU's concerns have a basis is reality, here is all you need to know:
> dig palestine-info.info
;; ANSWER SECTION: palestine-info.info. 86400 IN A 213.42.17.48
;; AUTHORITY SECTION: palestine-info.info. 86072 IN NS ns.palestine-info.info.
Wave 'hi' to Hamas, resolving via US DOC funded ICANN roots.
But how can that be when there's no definition of 'journalist'?
A constitution should be short and obscure. - Napoleon
Such definitions are not provided. In an ideal world you elect representatives with sufficient honor to not require precise definitions.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Given no clear means of delineating who is or is not covered by the above, I claim everyone belongs. That includes reporters that quote anonymous sources, rich interests that want to run campaign adds and bloggers that want to disseminate their stuff. What is a 'blog' if not a peaceable assembly?
Why do we need a definition, or a 'shield' law? On one hand we want to hang a politician for his press leaks and on the other hand we don't want people thrown under a bus for information. If Rove walks because the DOJ can't compel some 'journalist' to give up names then so be it. Stop throwing reporters in jail.
Liberals take care; most of whatever stretching you do to the word 'press' to get your way is probably also applicable to 'militia'.
Only if you need to go fast. If, instead, you go slowly then it's not a problem. 70,000km at 10km/h is about 291 days. Presumably once a general alignment is achieved many systems can be analyzed with only small changes.
Hydrazine isn't the only available means of propulsion. This looks like a great application for an ion drive. The small thrust and easily controlled throttle would make frequent, precise alignment maneuvers easier than it might be with traditional thrusters. Ion drives also have an order of magnitude greater fuel efficiency.
Griffin has solutions. NASA must yet go through the motions (congressional hearings, etc.) The intent is, however, easily discerned. It's called Safe, Simple and Soon and Griffin is hell bent on building it. He is also a talented politician and knows better than to let his agendas show too much. Don't be misled; he is uncompromising Planetary Society material, and if he can fire a bureaucrat he will. NASA's bureaucrats are busy hiding at the moment.
This is intended. While Apollo was impressive it wasn't sustainable. During the high point of the moon landings nearly all of NASA's budget was consumed by Apollo, and it was a large budget.
Griffin, and the whole Planetary Society crowd, have a new vision. They want sustainable interplanetary exploration. Their definition of sustainable is simple and pragmatic; a sustainable system is one that fits within future budgets.
You see, NASA gets a budget every year. Sometimes more, sometimes less. If your plans fit within that curve regardless of political whims, you get to continue your missions.
Naturally this means progress must be slower. It also means progress will occur and continue as long as desired.
about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M.
I wish I had the wit to ridicule this properly. Note the care taken to distinguish between plain or peanut M&Ms...
Unfortunately, the images are (not) being served from another server entirely; tivac.com, which is now also slashdotted... Here are the images linked through Coral.
Perhaps we'll be able to count you onboard then. Look here:
"The NASA brass is considering reworking the Prometheus program to develop a nuclear reactor to serve those purposes."
That "NASA brass" bit is Griffin. The existing Prometheus program is an attempt to design a nuclear propulsion system. Griffin is, right now, redirecting funds for Prometheus to the US Navy. Why the Navy? Because they are really good at building and operating small nuclear power plants and Griffin wants to put one on the moon! Permanent habitation of the moon.
the study suggests that the most efficient scheme for lunar exploration would involve sending a spacecraft non-stop to the Moon's surface, and then back again
This conclusion is probably 100% accurate. Direct shots are, in general, probably more efficient. Efficiency, however, is not the only criteria.
Griffin's plans involve launching large interplanetary payloads into LEO to which a manned CEVs are docked prior to interplanetary injection. The very large benefit of this design is crew safety. The mass goes up using immense, dripping wet, snarling 100t+ boosters. People go up in small, simple, reliable systems.
Rockets fail frequently. Dramatic detonations on the pad, missed orbits due to failed stages, etc. Why are most people oblivious to this? Because there are no people on board when it happens.
NASA has got to stop killing astronauts. Griffin intends to launch people using the simplest, safest system he can come up with. That intention will probably lead to something other than enormous non-stop direct flight vehicles.
would actually increase mission safety, by decreasing the number of critical maneuvers required, such as orbital rendezvous and docking
There have been a lot of rendezvous and docking maneuvers in space and no one has yet been killed as a result. Mir was almost lost due to a fender bender with a Soyuz, but that's as close as it has gotten. I question the risk value assigned to these events in this analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
NAT is the best way in general for networks to attach to the internet because it creates a "protected" zone
For example; Joe Bonehead buys a "Comcast self-install kit" from Best Buy and whatever cable modem he's told he needs. Typically, in the IPv4 case, he ends up with a RFC1918 address on his computer, courtesy of the default DHCP service configuration provided by the modem. The host can not be reached from the outside before initiating traffic. Given his unpatched, unfirewalled computer(s) this is a good thing. If he sticks to sites that don't exploit vulnerabilities and his virus scanner cleans up the emails he can go a long time without getting owned. In the IPv6 case he gets a public IP address routable from the world. Some number of seconds later the box(es) are spam zombies.
Imagine this; the IETF, rather than dismissing your point, embraces it and publishes default firewall guidelines for IPv6 firewalls ("IETF Inside")? The truth is that IPv4+NAT does not provide better security than a properly configured IPv6 firewall, yet we know that the world, left to its own devices will blunder into IPv6 with the indifference IPv4+NAT is protecting us from.
It's the IETF's own fault. They perceive a clear delineation between protocols and policies and the thought that firewall policy needs to be coupled with IPv6 just never registers. The fact is that people with the clout and budgets to change the Internet would embrace a firewall standard published by a credible, independent organization such as the IETF. If an OS Vendor, firewall appliance manufacturer or ISP could claim "IETF IPv6 Firewall Compliance," every auditor and his dog would make it mandatory faster than you could swap out your 2500 series Cisco router.
The IETF's inability to leverage this opportunity is not surprising. It's a purely technical organization with no mechanism to market its ideas. I think a little marketing savvy would go a long way.
Add *.wmf and *.emf to your adblock filters (I presume if you browse with Windows you're using Firefox and Adblock, otherwise...) These formats hardly ever appear on the web. If you see one, it's probably an exploit.
An example I've seen mentioned concerns the .xxx domain. Apparently 'they' decided not to permit this being created.
Sometimes people claim it's difficult to do business from non-western countries with existing Registrars. I suppose if you don't have a credit card that 'just works' or you claim to live someplace 'they' can't detect in their database it could complicate things. Usually people can register domains with 'local' registrars, to whom ICANN has delegated control of top-level domains.
I imagine there are issues when dealing with 'rouge states' (Iran, N. Korea, etc.) or individuals the US has problems with.
I suspect that non-US businesses probably are at a disadvantage when confronting US businesses in domain disputes.
Does any of this justify the hysteria we've seen from the EU? Hell if I know.
I've used exactly the non-aggregate expressions in the SELECT clause.
This is non-optional. Something is either an aggregate expression or it isn't, so why are we expected to explain this in the statement? Probably because aggregates aren't 'first class' in terms of SQL. Aggregates are functions.
Can you give an example where it would be something else? I too would like GROUP BY DEFAULT or somesuch.
This is my idea:
SELECT a, b, c
AGGREGATE x, y, z
FROM foo
GROUP BY vanishes. Non-aggregates expressions are valid only in SELECT while aggregate expressions are valid only in AGGREGATE. Less ambiguous and no redundant expressions. Easier to use also; comment out the AGGREGATE clause and you've got a basic statement. Quickly remove group tuple elements with comments.
Other ideas:
Binary aggregate functions: OR(), for example. Clever techniques using these can eliminate lumps of code elsewhere. Example, given the values 1, 1, 5, 1, aggregate OR() yields 5, aggregate AND() yields 1. Very useful for analysis of 'detail' rows that have individual states.
Reorder the basic clauses: FROM should be first.
Eliminate HAVING: This is redundant with subselects.
This will be a case study in IP law. How many patents will appear covering each and every aspect of Ajax as developers reinvent techniques long since commonplace in pre-web software? I'm usually not pessimistic but given recent evidence (Blackberry, Eolas, etc) it's pretty clear that patenting trivial techniques, regardless of prior art, is effective.
How will a new platform emerge when its components are owned by multiple licensors? The answer is obvious; Microsoft (or Google, Canopy, etc) will buy them all and own the whole enchilada. Don't count on any Open Source implementations escaping the IP lawyers this time around.
omission of the Why certainly colours this article
This is selective scrutiny. The Why behind opposition to so-call 'Campaign Finance Reform' is rooted in Free Speech. You're conditioned to attribute this opposition to a desire to protect corruption through influence peddling but, believe it or not, the non-wealthy on the other side really do believe that McCain-Feingold is damage. I doubt that particular Why would have ever occurred to you when evaluating a typical MSM scree about 'wealthy special interest' opposition to Campaign Finance Reform.
It appears the article poster favours websites/blogs which are covert mouthpieces of a particular interest group spouting dubious facts
A non-liberal slant in a Slashdot article is such a rare occurrence that you think you're in bizarro world. What does this tell you about the slant present in all of the other stuff?
Critical Thinking
You're flattering yourself. That you are oblivious to the possibility that the bill is entirely self consistent while attempting to both compromise Campaign Finance Reform and explicitly exempt bloggers from regulation is evidence of a deep bias that precludes any Critical Thinking.
It's just us morons doing our level best to fuck up the world for you Critical Thinkers.
What ticks off a telecom is that the prices for packets are so darn *cheap*
Lots of companies charge people to move packets. One company has, apparently, been listening to what amounts to a 'prophet' and been convinced there is a big pot of gold waiting to be looted. As a result he is being propelled to ever greater heights by those who want a piece.
It is astonishing to imagine this guy has emerged onto the scene with this balderdash. There must be some seriously ignorant board members involved. Stuff like this makes me find common cause with activists. Reality has clearly not yet impinged on these people.
This is why the vestiges of the old phone system must die. It is populated by people who really believe this guy.
the only option is to impose filtering
Hey, if the packets don't inherently have enough value to keep me in Yachts, I'll screw around with them until they do!
Filtering isn't a real option either. Despite the hysterical headline of this post (Ma Bell is back, yada yada) the truth is that there are too many alternatives available to bandwidth consumers.
My advice: shutdown as many voice land-lines as you can. The sooner these twits are deprived of their only real profit center the less damage they will do.
When shortcuts were invented for Win95 the Win32 API should have been built to treat a shortcut as the object it pointed to. That way they would have had real working links up front. Now they are going to be stuck with two types of link which work in different ways.
Windows is finally implementing true file system path aliases. This is not ambiguous with Shortcuts.
'Shortcuts' are more than just an encoded path. 'Hotkeys' can be associated, 'starting directory' can be designated, arbitrary icons assigned, etc. The *nix analogy is found in any contemporary X Windows GUI shell (Gnome, KDE, etc.) with their various dot file structures defining menus and/or launch parameters for GUI applications.
Windows had the GUI application metadata 'link' first and got symlinks second. *nix got symlinks first and then blundered into Shortcuts (doomed to forever lack a uniform manifestation.) I think this just highlights the different priorities of the platforms.
Who among us doubts that one AMD64 with a few gigs of RAM could, if programmed properly, calculate the payroll for the entire USA every night?
Interesting question. Let us consider a simplified universal payroll system and see where this goes. I'll stipulate roughly 200 million US payroll employees and 52 pay periods. Lets say individuals require 200 KiB of storage (historical deductions, contributions, etc. necessary for YTD results,) and generate 1 KiB of storage each period. The necessary software doesn't exist to accommodate the payroll requirements for every conceivable employment situation, but we'll just pretend it does.
You'll need 41 TiB of storage on day one. Each day you'll need to perform 28.5e6 payroll calculations generating 29.2 GiB of new data.
The storage requirements alone are going to blow your hardware budget. It's understood the data will need reliable storage, so a rack of 82 500 GB SATA drives won't do (with a new drive added every 16 days.) Lets factor in 25% storage overhead for (poor) redundancy. We need just over a hundred 500 GB drives. Storage at this scale will inevitably result in SAN or some such technology, so you'll need some storage switches. The storage hardware will consume many times the power of your AMD64.
Data will have to arrive via some network. Payroll is an aggregate calculation of many different forms of detail data. Lets say the time sheets, vacation requests, etc. represent 10 times the volume of the result. You'll need to handle 292 GiB of inbound (we'll assume outbound is negligible) data per day. That's 2 DS1s running at capacity at all times. You'll need redundant switching hardware for this. Also, we're taking for granted that fraction of Internet capacity necessary to move this data; it's not really free, after all.
Computational load is much harder to estimate without an accurate model of typical payroll calculations. I'll use my experience with OLAP consolidations. 2.4GHz Xeon will compute an 8 GiB cube in 45 minutes. This time is mostly (95%) spent in the CPU. Its also far simpler than payroll, consisting mostly of simple aggregates and hash calculations. Lets throw a factor of 3 at this to cover the extra computation necessary for payroll. We'll need 8.2 hours of CPU time per day. That seems quite feasible for an AMD64 CPU.
There is no wiggle room in the above estimates. No backups, no test system, no fail over. In the real world batch computation is highly synchronous, so you need a lot of spare network and compute capacity. You're doing a lot of co-processing here; the CPUs running the SAN switches and routers are all essential to the process, so you can't give all the credit to the AMD64 CPU. The interesting thing is that communications and storage are the real power hogs.
Disclaimer: To call the above 'back of a napkin' is probably flattery.
this resistance is independent of its length, which means that Ohm's law does not apply
What does Omn's Law have to do with length? While the resistance of a "ballistic" conductor may be constant regardless of length, it's still not zero... Omn's Law would still be applicable.
This is simply amazing
What is simply amazing? At this point we some handwaving about "emphasis on integration and circuit design." Projections from venture capital PowerPoint presentations tend not to pan out in production units. This looks like Transmeta II, except they are aiming lower.
Linux apps in your Windows environment.
CoLinux
rouges sends a homebrew drone
There aren't any homebrew drones at 79,000 feet. There won't be any homebrew drones at that altitude in the foreseeable future (aside from the odd ex-dot-com billionaire hobbyist with a benign ballistic rocket.) This is the very top of the mesosphere. The only entities that operate in this regime are nation-state militaries, and it's non-trivial even for them. If any such nation is busy shooting down your balloons you'll have other things on your mind, so it's not a problem.
Anyhow, for consumer broadband the whole idea is nonsense. People won't pay the cost necessary to maintain the system. Militaries and emergency services might appreciate the means to blanket an area with secure broadband, however. Relaying real-time telemetry, audio and video is hard in a combat zone. Bandwidth was a major problem for the US military in both gulf conflicts.
Why football (both kinds,) baseball, basketball, hockey, etc? Why do auto manufacturers sink millions into F1? Most of their customers are oblivious to it. Yet year after year teams have budgets.
We keep score. We measure each other, both individuals and aggregates, incessantly. This is not new, surprising or unique to space. It has nothing to do with space specifically. We compete. Space exploration happens to be one of the more benign methods of competition we've managed to invent.
On any given day you're likely to witness the Times quibble about billions 'wasted' in space. In the very same column the next day you'll read about how far we lag the Chinese as they accomplish another mission. Sniping at NASA budgets is easy. It isn't easy to discover you really are second rate.
I almost hit some construction worker with his "SLOW" sign
...the state of Illinois ... Their warning practices...
Look into getting the 'personal' variant of this. A certain percentage of drivers slaughter a number of construction workers every year. Be sure you can survive the consequences reasonably whole.
Wow! I wished for my digital camera.
Your expectations of construction crews are out of phase with the reality of ex-cons and 'illegal immigrant' day workers that may not have intended to return to the site in the morning. Factor this into your driving.
Another example was in Bellevue, WA
That's a strange comparison. 'Way north' of Peoria, Illinois (I presume as there are several... Peorii) is a long way from a notoriously small place. I cant quite figure out which city you might have been near at that point because the available maps are ambiguous. Bellevue, Washington however, is a densely populated area. Is it really your expectation that Bellevue post signs on every major thoroughfare for forty miles in every direction for every on-going construction event?
Until then I'd sort of figured left side ramps were artifacts and had been deemed dangerous and obsolete.
Road design is a function of cost. Left side exits exist when making the same exit on the right would cost some fraction of a Sagen more. Regardless, you are expected navigate such a path safely. This isn't 'Pave the Earth (tm)' and you don't get to blast around with indifference. If your familiarity with an area is so limited that you don't know the relevant road patterns in the dark without signs, you should be sober, wide awake and terrified.
I could go on, but I wonder how many accidents and deaths could be prevented...
Please don't. Instead, hop plane ticket to France, rent a car and go for a spin. If you survive you will likely be reduced to tears so go alone and spare someone the drama. Upon return you will confidently race down any paved road in the US like a native.
(Disclaimer: a competent French driver is better than a competent US driver. As a US driver I understand this as objective fact. No harm, no foul, mkay?)
Ok, your turn; key '7' is the Mark XI Slashdot Flamethrower.
You can safely ignore it. The EU can't dismiss ICANN and it can't 'break' the Internet for US users, or anyone else that chooses to ignore this nonsense.
You have a file with a list of root servers. Europe can't make you change it in any way. Europe can't shut down the servers in that list.
They could monkey around with networks that exist within their sovereign control. For example; they could mandate that their ISPs block access to ICANN root servers in favor of their own. Unless the new servers were somehow capable of emulating the content of ICANN servers almost perfectly (in which case ICANN is effectively still in control,) this won't happen because their own subjects would revolt. The same is true for practically anything else they consider attempting; if the EU mob wakes up one morning and the Internet is broke, the EU mob will un-break it rapidly.
Perhaps the ultimate solution is to create resolvers that can handle alternative collections of root servers. Assign weights to each collection and attempt resolution starting with the highest weighted set. Obviously you'll want ICANN servers at the top, and any others you choose to include after. Iran or China can then establish all the roots they want and you can include or exclude them as necessary.
As far as whether any of the EU's concerns have a basis is reality, here is all you need to know:Wave 'hi' to Hamas, resolving via US DOC funded ICANN roots.
It's short, but damn if it isn't 'insightful'.
But how can that be when there's no definition of 'journalist'?
A constitution should be short and obscure. - Napoleon
Such definitions are not provided. In an ideal world you elect representatives with sufficient honor to not require precise definitions.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Given no clear means of delineating who is or is not covered by the above, I claim everyone belongs. That includes reporters that quote anonymous sources, rich interests that want to run campaign adds and bloggers that want to disseminate their stuff. What is a 'blog' if not a peaceable assembly?
Why do we need a definition, or a 'shield' law? On one hand we want to hang a politician for his press leaks and on the other hand we don't want people thrown under a bus for information. If Rove walks because the DOJ can't compel some 'journalist' to give up names then so be it. Stop throwing reporters in jail.
Liberals take care; most of whatever stretching you do to the word 'press' to get your way is probably also applicable to 'militia'.
which means a lot of hydrazine
Only if you need to go fast. If, instead, you go slowly then it's not a problem. 70,000km at 10km/h is about 291 days. Presumably once a general alignment is achieved many systems can be analyzed with only small changes.
Hydrazine isn't the only available means of propulsion. This looks like a great application for an ion drive. The small thrust and easily controlled throttle would make frequent, precise alignment maneuvers easier than it might be with traditional thrusters. Ion drives also have an order of magnitude greater fuel efficiency.
come up with an viable, alternative solutions
Griffin has solutions. NASA must yet go through the motions (congressional hearings, etc.) The intent is, however, easily discerned. It's called Safe, Simple and Soon and Griffin is hell bent on building it. He is also a talented politician and knows better than to let his agendas show too much. Don't be misled; he is uncompromising Planetary Society material, and if he can fire a bureaucrat he will. NASA's bureaucrats are busy hiding at the moment.
This is intended. While Apollo was impressive it wasn't sustainable. During the high point of the moon landings nearly all of NASA's budget was consumed by Apollo, and it was a large budget.
Griffin, and the whole Planetary Society crowd, have a new vision. They want sustainable interplanetary exploration. Their definition of sustainable is simple and pragmatic; a sustainable system is one that fits within future budgets.
You see, NASA gets a budget every year. Sometimes more, sometimes less. If your plans fit within that curve regardless of political whims, you get to continue your missions.
Naturally this means progress must be slower. It also means progress will occur and continue as long as desired.
about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M.
I wish I had the wit to ridicule this properly. Note the care taken to distinguish between plain or peanut M&Ms...
Unfortunately, the images are (not) being served from another server entirely; tivac.com, which is now also slashdotted... Here are the images linked through Coral.
contacts.png (long lines make slashcode happy)
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I would only agree with it if it were permanent.
Perhaps we'll be able to count you onboard then. Look here:
"The NASA brass is considering reworking the Prometheus program to develop a nuclear reactor to serve those purposes."
That "NASA brass" bit is Griffin. The existing Prometheus program is an attempt to design a nuclear propulsion system. Griffin is, right now, redirecting funds for Prometheus to the US Navy. Why the Navy? Because they are really good at building and operating small nuclear power plants and Griffin wants to put one on the moon! Permanent habitation of the moon.
the study suggests that the most efficient scheme for lunar exploration would involve sending a spacecraft non-stop to the Moon's surface, and then back again
This conclusion is probably 100% accurate. Direct shots are, in general, probably more efficient. Efficiency, however, is not the only criteria.
Griffin's plans involve launching large interplanetary payloads into LEO to which a manned CEVs are docked prior to interplanetary injection. The very large benefit of this design is crew safety. The mass goes up using immense, dripping wet, snarling 100t+ boosters. People go up in small, simple, reliable systems.
Rockets fail frequently. Dramatic detonations on the pad, missed orbits due to failed stages, etc. Why are most people oblivious to this? Because there are no people on board when it happens.
NASA has got to stop killing astronauts. Griffin intends to launch people using the simplest, safest system he can come up with. That intention will probably lead to something other than enormous non-stop direct flight vehicles.
would actually increase mission safety, by decreasing the number of critical maneuvers required, such as orbital rendezvous and docking
There have been a lot of rendezvous and docking maneuvers in space and no one has yet been killed as a result. Mir was almost lost due to a fender bender with a Soyuz, but that's as close as it has gotten. I question the risk value assigned to these events in this analysis.