Which is only partially true... but lets face facts, there is a TONNE of old doco out there that'll depend on outdated AU measurements, so for decades astronomers will still be going "which AU unit are they using" (something engineers still deal with on a daily basis)
I dont mind the naming conventions, they dont bother me in the least, let the marketing boys have their fun...
What i find a much larger irritation though (and im looking you here ubuntu) is when os's cross bread names and numbers. I remember numbers. At home i have every version of ubuntu since 10.04 and most version of fedora since 10, some are virtual some are physical. Everytime i go to do something to one of my ubuntu boxes that revolves around software i almost always end up doing the same thing: what is the name of version 10.04 (11.04, 11.10, 10.10, 12.04, etc) cause of the half-witted way ubuntu use version names and number interchangeably. This is something fedora (or redhat based os's) has gotten very right.
its really not hard to figure out (either go see wikipedia or whatever), but its one of my pet irritations with ubuntu - cross-breading of names and numbers in frustrating ways. When im trying to figure out "ok, i need this bit of software over here" and its in a ppa and theres a complex set of tasks im gunna need to perform (or ever just a case of doing the same thing on several boxes at once) i really dont ALSO want to have to decode names and numbers at the same time - its just adding a layer of "heres something else you can get wrong buddy" to the whole equation and i think ubuntu really should rethink that scheme (though obviously their not going to).
(this is a re-post because i didnt realise i wasnt logged in the first time i posted)
Personally, i didnt and still dont understand the nerd-crowd fascination with the rpi. As a guy who's been into arm tech for years the rpi was a step backwards in every way bar one: its cheap enough for anyone to afford. But as far as what the rpi is, the reasons for a nerd owning such a device are non-existent IMHO. I own too many little arm dev boards and arm-based hackable devices and prior to the rpi there was many sub-100$ boards with significantly more grunt. However, even prior to the existence of the rpi there were a10 (and similar) based boards for only twice the price. So for nerds, why bother with an rpi? its way too under-powered for almost any purpose to the point of being a waste of money.... HOWEVER, as a tech for countries or people for which the price of an rpi is "affordable" piece of tech, i think its brilliant, and for that purpose alone i support it whole-heartedliy - but i wouldnt own one, its useless to me. What i mean by that though is that i would happy pay 3x the price of the rpi to own one of the several a10 based boards on the basis that it would also pay for an rpi + delivery for someone who cant afford such a thing.
Sure they're "twice the price", but for many people thats still spare change in reality. In alot of cases people pay that much a month for their phone contracts, internet access, filling their car with petrol - add your own.
There are many taxes i hate to pay (the microsoft tax for example), but someone who sold me a decent a10 based board (or something similar with a 1g/1g cpu/ram combo), i'd pay for that + the rpi cost for someone else to own the rpi, gladly too. I dont really get why rpi didnt do that (aside from the difficulty of developing two boards though they could have partnered with someone for this) because it would have made alot of sense to me, "buy this awesome board for yourself so someone less fortunate can own a much smaller/simpler one" and do it so that whatever that "awesome board" is, you could develop software for that which would also be rpi compatible..
The point of 3d printers... make no mistake, within the next 10 years 3d printers will bring about the downfall of some very heavy industries.
Yes, right now they're limited, most people who would build such a thing (and i am one) are going to print things in (not that cheap) plastic but we already have printers capable of printing many different types of materials (including conductive) and in 5 years, those reprap's will be something there will be very big lawsuits over. Much like the digital media industry, the industry will have to cope with the change, they might win a few lawsuits, but they'll ultimately have to adapt. Consider what a 3d printer will give you in a couple of years:
- glasses (possibly even the lenses for them) - fixtures (lights, power points, cases, things that other things hang on - this list is endless) - crockery (plates, etc - theres no reason you could extrude a clay or clay substitute thats safe to eat off/drink from) - Phone cases - its hard to actually come up with a decent list thats compelling cause its just so wide ranging
With a minor amount of electronics, you can add to this: - phone docks, keyboards, stands of so many different varieties, control devices....
Who'll benefit form this? The people who get on board... the guys who go "hmm, im just gunna make a iphone dock interface you can print an object around rather then making an entire iphone dock" - thats the industry of the future boys - selling electronics that you put inside objects people can 3d print... there isnt one yet, but mark my works, and heed this well as a prediction - in 10 years, this will be a major (or at least up-and-coming) industry. We'll even see a regulation and dmca like laws come into effect.
But look around you and take a SERIOUS look at the things around you and think, how many of these items could be printed? you'll be blown away by the things you could easily replace with something you can print yourself. The sad fact is people dont really notice until you have one, then you look around and see a whole bunch of industries destined for the scrap heap as people start printing their own items rather then running down the shops to pick one up.
sitting in front of me, i look and i think "my mouse, my keyboard, my glasses, my 3 hard drive cases, my phone stands, my mouse pad, my cup and the spoon thats in it. all my pens (sans ink)... i could go on".
The point is, the point people miss, isnt that 3d printing an object is in any way, shape or form more economical then buying the mass-produced equivalent. The point is that i can "have it now" (and have it my way)... much of what we do now and what the internet provided (and what content producers have fought hard to stop) is the "have it now" philosophy. Thanks to scale, prices of printing an object will go down, very far down. PLA and ABS (the main things people tend to use with the repraps) arent cheap, but that'll change. 3d printing isnt about "hey, new mass manufacturing process" cause its just not economical at that and never will be, its about not needing one in the first place, if everyone has a 3d printer (or access to one), whos going to make phone cases when people can just print their own?. The secondary point is you can build things you just cant buy or easily make or you can take a phone case and customise it. I dont know how many times i've wanted a lather or a router or whatever and even then thought "i probably wont be able to make it anyway"... well now i can and easily.
So right now you can do one of two things, look at 3d printing and see its potential or go "meh" and you'll miss out (even if missing out is simply the opportunity of being involved), but i believe that 3d printing will be one of the biggest and most disruptive techs to hit the world and when it does hit with full force it'll be one of the most important things we'll see - possibly even more important then computing. My point is make no mistake, what 3d printing can and will do will change life as we know it in
To me, personally what the 'pi has always represented is a arduino replacement and hence while i'm very into arm and tech in general, i've never really been able to get into it given that its only got 256mb of ram. For a while i had this idea in my head of building a vps style system out of small arm boards and the 'pi just isnt going to cut it. The CPU in the thing is probably decent for some applications but there just not enough ram.
Calxeda are now doing just that (with hp) and now dell are getting into it too, but they're taking it to the high end of the spectrum. Personally i think this is where these little mini-pc's can fit. 1g of ram, 1.5ghz cpu, size of a thumb drive (ok a bit bigger than that). Sure they're 3x the price, but its 3x25$ In fairness what the 'pi's original goals are intended to achieve makes it idea for that application, but to the techo geek in me, its just not quite been able to raise my excitement.
actually this is even true on the general consumer focused firewall/routers you get down the shop for $50. Take the tp-link tl-wr1043nd (http://www.tp-link.com.au/products/details/?categoryid=238&model=TL-WR1043ND) internally its a 6-port switch, entirely asic driven, and programmed from the os (if your running openwrt you can run swconfig and play with the switch config). the switch does vlaning, and everything you expect from a basic switch. So everything layer 2 is done in asics...
One of the ports on the switch (the 6th) is directly connected to the linux OS sitting inside and the switch treats the linux os as just another connection.
Layer 3 however on these devices *IS* however driven by the linux OS inside, firewalling, routing, etc. On enterprise kit, alot of that is also moved into asic form and provided purely in silicon as well.
while this is true, theres a fundamental difference between a linux box with a 4-port quad card and say a cisco or juniper with 4 1 gig network ports. The primary purpose of the OS (bsd or linux) on these devices is to: 1) store configuration 2) provide a management interface 3) program asics
if, for example you took a whitebox, shoved two quad-port 1gig network cards in it and installed junos on it, it would be nothing like an srx210 - same port count, even same capabilities, but what you dont have is a bunch of asics that drive the network, and this is very fundamentally different. On these devices, the underlying os doesnt actually provide alot of the firewalling or routing capabilities and none of the switching, this is all handed off to dedicated hardware and the underlying os just provides a way of programming that in.
Dont try and beat companies for switching with linux grade equipment - there just isnt a good reason to. I love junos, screenos and ios - they kick arse... I also like what huawei do (they are a little cheaper, but at the switching side, they're very good). I've been doing networking for 15 years as a job and i've been doing linux since '92.
However, im also very VERY keen on linux at the routing side... I've even written my own firewall/routing software for linux. At the layer 3, linux has one advantage cisco, juniper (screenos and junos), and basically everyone else cannot give you - adaptability. just about any 1ru server capable of supporting either 8 1gbps nics (2x4 pci-e) or 2-4 10gbps nics (either 1x2 or 2x2 pci-e) is fantastic. Modern cpu's and busses really dont change much between vendors, only generation so you shouldn't really be bothered looking for "which has the best bus" cause they all do (dell, ibm, hp, it doesnt matter). If you can get a server with a serial lom (not just a network-connected web-gui based piece of nastyness (because you DO want oob management) you'll be laughing. Generally speaking, most x86 hardware will have around the same life expectancy as dedicated hardware and by that i mean if you get a dell server with redundant power supplies and so forth, it'll have about the same uptime as a juniper srx650 with dual power supplies. The one thing you'll probably miss out on is hot-swap-ability.
Now you plug that machine into your switch, etherchannel and vlan trunk it to your server and you have an amazing device. What you do with it then is entirely up to you, and this is generally the harder decision then the hardware - what you'll put on it. You can go with a real bit of firewall gui (such as vyatta) or you can do something far more interesting - i recommend devil linux personally as its the most flexible of the lot without being a bitch to maintain (as in, centos, ubuntu, fedora, whatever - not good choices for networking equipment cause there is alot of config to manage at the machine side - very bad for networking). One reason i say i dont like most firewall distro's in linux is that they tend to limit you and if your going to do this, go get a juniper netscreen/srx, they're just not that expensive (there is one exception to this, and thats openwrt, it runs on x86 and has almost every component a normal linux distro has). Its also worth avoiding harddrives (except if your going to put a network cache in there) and there are good options out there for doing just that.
Linux's most valuable asset is its abilities to do unbelievably fantastic things at the network layer and then be adapted easily. With vendor enterprise kit you'll get ipv4, ipv6, routing protocols (isis, ospf, bgp, rip and add eigrp for cisco) policy based routing, some network serivces (dhcp, ra's, etc) add firewall/loadbalancing/vpn depending on the device. With linux you get all this and a hell of a lot more in one device, it is well worth your time checking out the younger and more intresting routing protocols (like babel, oslr, etc etc, theres a few) - the fun is bringing it all together.
There is one downside to all this, too many options and alot to learn. Do you want a network device that will do: 1) policy based routing 2) ipv4 and 6 firewalling 3) load balancing 4) routing protocols 5) vpn'ing
1+2 come from the same place, so you'll be quite ok with that, the rest though is up to you, each has 15 different options from 15 different ppl and it takes some experimenting to know which is best for you. You'll also find none of them will configure or look anything like one another so you will be learning 4 very distinctly different software stacks with 4 very distinctly different configuration paradigms.
Personally, i dont see that as an issue for myself - in an organisation it can be a bit harder.
Its an interesting point, and while this is comedy, it also happens to be roughly true on occasion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM go to about 1:05 in the video.
Yes minister was a good series, pity they didnt make more
as in, second hand/older ipad really aint that expensive, and you'll be hard pressed to find anything that'll beat it for price... cheap chinese android tablet is really the only other option... you might get a laptop (netbook style one) for cheap, but probably not much cheaper... its a pretty low price point to start with imho.
The other problem is that you may find trying to protect anything is going to be the hard part (or perhaps expensive/tedious) rather then the device itself.
By that I mean saying that you could "get a cheap tablet and stick some plexiglass in front of it" sounds easy in practice, but not if you dont have the right tools. Personally i'd consider one of the older 10" android tablets and just put it out of reach - of course out of reach (For those with kids) often means "challenge" for child and can result in some truely god like resourcefulness on the part of the child.
Its quite possible, however, that theres an app on the android market that'll lockout an android tablets control surfaces (im pretty sure i've seen something like this).. im not sure if the same exists on the ipad, but maybe thats the way to go?
Not sure what GAME uk's demise means for the australian game line, but i keep wondering how they *STAY* in business. They are consistently higher then everyone else simply for price.
Consider their biggest competitor in the retail market is probably a place called JB hifi, and in shopping centers they're often so close (physically) together that you can see the big tags advertising their price for games (Specially up coming and new release ones). Yet, GAME au's prices are always more expensive.
When they go out of business in AU, I will not be supprised. I've bought games from them (but only second hand ones, and at most 3 - typically jbhifi is cheaper for those as well). But AU's model can be summed up in 3 links:
I personally find "fanciful" names for servers a little on the poor-judgement side of admin and they can lead to some regrettable situations when theres any real number of servers. We use dns to separate by location and network i.e. vlan.loc.domain.com, though vlan is a name, not a numeric. Then the server name defines its role in life. We dont generally mutli-purpose any server, though if we do it'll get a cname. Most things also have cnames to define roles as well.
for eg, lxweb001.dmz.sing.domain.com (linux web server 1 in the dmz network, in singapore), which might also be known as web001.dmz.sing.domain.com but if its a globally relavent server, it might also be web001.domain.com. It might also have a cname like web001.japn.domain.com meaning it also serves web content for japan, etc etc.
We never re-purpose servers (as in, web->dns) without rebuilds
That is the most bizarre set of stats i've ever read....
I cant understand why they would think the PERCENTAGE of the workforce for s&e would be on the increase? That just baffles me.
Its like, checkout people, the number you have is dependent on the number of retail places around, which is dependant on the population, and hence its probably always going to be relatively fixed (as a percentage). At the moment, that might be on the decrease cause of automated human-less checkouts, but the driving force behind checkout people is the size of your population.
I cant think of anything in the last decade that would propel more ppl (as a percentage) to enter either science or engineering. Any factor that might cause it is probably going to be offset by something else, ultimately if everyone started getting into science and engineering, who's gunna be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, etc etc.
How that even begins to relate to "less innovation" baffles me even more because 5% of the population is a considerable number of people and innovation itself tends to be sporadic and driven by individuals (and then implemented by large armies of kill robots). Ultimately even 5% is an ever increasing number of people (given population growth).
I keep looking at the clock wondering if its april 1st, cause I really cant understand how they think "Ideally, the S&E workforce -- it numbers more than 7.6 million workers -- would be expanding as a percentage of the labor force. That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers." is a remotely valid assumption. Again, given population growth, "That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers" that is actually happening if your holding at 5%.
Truly bizarre, its like someone misunderstood the different between what a percentage is and an absolute figure.
More to the point (at least in australia) the cost of "fixing" someone is significant for the government and they also consider people to be an "investment" - as in "we spent heaps educating you to year 12, now you owe us".
The point being of course is that they dont want you doing anything that can either cost them money or kill their investment...
actually, just to reply to my own post... if i were doing this, what i would do is have an app that locked the tablet to only itself (pretty simple), then have a hard coded set of settings for wifi access and a content server it connected to (all provided by the application)... from the content server i would be able to then unlock the tablet, but to be safe, i'd also add a key combo that unlocked it too (like vol up, vol up, vol down, power power, etc, something complex).
I'd pick the cheapest tablet you can get (that'll support your content), then farm off the app coding to one of the many freelancing sites to do what you need..
tbh, this is a pretty simple thing to do on android - completely locking a tablet isnt hard, and completely locking the content isnt hard either. You could then have various external mechanisms for unlocking them again (via bluetooth, wifi, usb, etc).. as an android coder, i wouldnt think this would take more then a couple of hours personally.
If your determined to do it yourself, stackoverflow is a good place to start looking for ideas on how its achieved.
I always wanted to make my own unlock screen for android, but you cant do that, you have to code an entire launcher which is annoying.
What i wanted in an unlock though was for 3 buttons to come up on the screen in some random locations and have to click them all in order... slide to unlock just annoys me personally.
So i just skimmed it... however i'd find it hard to believe that such a thing is provable to any real extent. There are just too many other factors to play with when trying to apply such a broad brush.
simply put, the language you speak often dictates who you listen too, us here in AU, and no doubt in canada are greatly influenced by what happens in the US - though it wasnt always that way for us (AU) prior to the internet. There were certainly influences, but now those influences are faster and more prevalent. As such, AU'ers themselves are also less healthy, more fat, and more likely to spend money then they were say 50 years ago - yet we still spoke the same language.
Thats a pretty simple example, but in AU, alot of a social infrastruture has changed to be more like the US - AU used to provide much of its services by govt owned facilities - these days the reverse is true, and this impacts health care, so people without money are less healthy (perhaps).
My ultimate point being that today there are just too many other factors at work that could have larger impacts then simply the language you think and any proof derived from such would probably be easily flawed. My humble opinion anyway.
...All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.
But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.
All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?
Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.
But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.
Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.
I cant help thinking of that simpsons episode with the lizard, which ate the pidgeon, and they got out of control, so they brang in something else.. etc etc...
This is already what Australia is like. Someone brang in rabbits, cane toads, snakes, etc etc... then they brang in something else to combat such things... the only thing ends up suffering in the long run is the native wild life and our ecosystem as a whole.
Australian researchers (or anyone) should be shot in the head when they do the following: 1) consider introducing a new species of anything to this country 2) consider modifying an existing species DNA and introducing that into the country.
I have faith in science, but morons are morons. Anyone who cant learn from the mistakes of the past needs to be locked up or put down so they cant do any damage - they really are cretins. Oh, "but we know more now?"... your a moron if you actually believe you understand an ecosystem well enough that you can predict the implications of adding a new species of anything to it, being able to control it in the long run or actually measure whats going on when it does get into your ecosystem.
Your an even bigger moron if you think you'll have a endless pit of money from either the government or some other body that will allow you to have the kind of control you need to police such a move for the foreseeable future.
I really wish people like this professor would just cease to exist, they're bad for the planet and our species as a whole. I dont mind if they sit there researching the crap out of anything, but until they can prove they actually understand an eco system in its entirety and the government gets behind them with such a huge wad of cash they can prove they'll have the ability to remain in control, they should be locked in a cage somewhere.
You can just already see the future of something like this: "turns out that elephant feases combine with a local australian-only plant to produce a toxic substance that is now leaching into our water supply - we must now evacuate australia - thanks for coming".... and then much later from the same professor "oh, we didnt quite take that into account".
Theres a simple quote who's origins i forget (think it was bjarne stroustrup) that goes "there are those languages that people complain about, and those that people dont use".
Sadly, the more people who use language, the more you generate hate, and php is one of the most widely used in existence.
PHP has alot going for it: - its an elegant language - its quite quick to write almost anything in - its generally quite fast - theres bucket loads of people using it, so finding solutions to problems is easy - lots of different frameworks if you need them - tonnes of api support. - almost every web host supports it. - the number of people using it generally just helps the code base, bugs get found and dealt with, etc etc etc.
The only reason to switch to another language comes down to the goals your trying to achieve, which aren't really stated. Generally speaking you could achieve any type of web content in any language to an extent. There are few languages that have the support for api's that php does, thats for sure. Perl is probably the only one that beats it in terms of "i want to connect to from my web code".
But it depends also on what you had in mind in terms of switching to. - Java is a reasonably nice language, very well supported (by vendors) and scales well, but requires significant development time and quite a decent amount of grunt - forces you to abstract your work ad infinitum but sometimes thats a good thing. Lots of different api's, though mileage varies greatly. - Dot-net i personally find to be somewhat on the buggy side, but again, well supported and well used - often forces you down an MVC framework path, which i dont like. - Python's probably a better language generally, but for web coding, you get caught up in the basics with python around choosing frameworks and so forth and later if you find the framework you choose wasnt that great, then its re-code time cause frameworks generally dont have easy migration options. My main annoyance with python is that learning python tends to diverge a fair bit from helping you with other languages (i.e. learning python wont help you with c/c#/c++/java/etc). - Ruby has similar traits to python - you get caught up in the frameworks, the language is nice but doesn't translate easily to other languages.
There are other options, but personally, stick with the top three if its your first coding exercise for content - php, java, dot.net
Slashdot Mirror
slackware -> sls -> yggdrasil -> redhat -> mandrake -> debian -> gentoo -> fedora + redhat + centos + ubuntu
I dont remember the exact order.... and the last four are what i use currently (all of them)
For some reason the first thing i thought of was this:
http://xkcd.com/927/
Which is only partially true... but lets face facts, there is a TONNE of old doco out there that'll depend on outdated AU measurements, so for decades astronomers will still be going "which AU unit are they using" (something engineers still deal with on a daily basis)
I dont mind the naming conventions, they dont bother me in the least, let the marketing boys have their fun...
What i find a much larger irritation though (and im looking you here ubuntu) is when os's cross bread names and numbers. I remember numbers. At home i have every version of ubuntu since 10.04 and most version of fedora since 10, some are virtual some are physical. Everytime i go to do something to one of my ubuntu boxes that revolves around software i almost always end up doing the same thing: what is the name of version 10.04 (11.04, 11.10, 10.10, 12.04, etc) cause of the half-witted way ubuntu use version names and number interchangeably. This is something fedora (or redhat based os's) has gotten very right.
its really not hard to figure out (either go see wikipedia or whatever), but its one of my pet irritations with ubuntu - cross-breading of names and numbers in frustrating ways. When im trying to figure out "ok, i need this bit of software over here" and its in a ppa and theres a complex set of tasks im gunna need to perform (or ever just a case of doing the same thing on several boxes at once) i really dont ALSO want to have to decode names and numbers at the same time - its just adding a layer of "heres something else you can get wrong buddy" to the whole equation and i think ubuntu really should rethink that scheme (though obviously their not going to).
(this is a re-post because i didnt realise i wasnt logged in the first time i posted)
Personally, i didnt and still dont understand the nerd-crowd fascination with the rpi. As a guy who's been into arm tech for years the rpi was a step backwards in every way bar one: its cheap enough for anyone to afford. But as far as what the rpi is, the reasons for a nerd owning such a device are non-existent IMHO. I own too many little arm dev boards and arm-based hackable devices and prior to the rpi there was many sub-100$ boards with significantly more grunt. However, even prior to the existence of the rpi there were a10 (and similar) based boards for only twice the price. So for nerds, why bother with an rpi? its way too under-powered for almost any purpose to the point of being a waste of money.... HOWEVER, as a tech for countries or people for which the price of an rpi is "affordable" piece of tech, i think its brilliant, and for that purpose alone i support it whole-heartedliy - but i wouldnt own one, its useless to me. What i mean by that though is that i would happy pay 3x the price of the rpi to own one of the several a10 based boards on the basis that it would also pay for an rpi + delivery for someone who cant afford such a thing.
Sure they're "twice the price", but for many people thats still spare change in reality. In alot of cases people pay that much a month for their phone contracts, internet access, filling their car with petrol - add your own.
There are many taxes i hate to pay (the microsoft tax for example), but someone who sold me a decent a10 based board (or something similar with a 1g/1g cpu/ram combo), i'd pay for that + the rpi cost for someone else to own the rpi, gladly too. I dont really get why rpi didnt do that (aside from the difficulty of developing two boards though they could have partnered with someone for this) because it would have made alot of sense to me, "buy this awesome board for yourself so someone less fortunate can own a much smaller/simpler one" and do it so that whatever that "awesome board" is, you could develop software for that which would also be rpi compatible..
Personally, if theres anything i would be targetting to run this on, its not the q, its the mk802 https://www.miniand.com/
The point of 3d printers... make no mistake, within the next 10 years 3d printers will bring about the downfall of some very heavy industries.
Yes, right now they're limited, most people who would build such a thing (and i am one) are going to print things in (not that cheap) plastic but we already have printers capable of printing many different types of materials (including conductive) and in 5 years, those reprap's will be something there will be very big lawsuits over. Much like the digital media industry, the industry will have to cope with the change, they might win a few lawsuits, but they'll ultimately have to adapt. Consider what a 3d printer will give you in a couple of years:
- glasses (possibly even the lenses for them)
- fixtures (lights, power points, cases, things that other things hang on - this list is endless)
- crockery (plates, etc - theres no reason you could extrude a clay or clay substitute thats safe to eat off/drink from)
- Phone cases
- its hard to actually come up with a decent list thats compelling cause its just so wide ranging
With a minor amount of electronics, you can add to this:
- phone docks, keyboards, stands of so many different varieties, control devices....
Who'll benefit form this? The people who get on board... the guys who go "hmm, im just gunna make a iphone dock interface you can print an object around rather then making an entire iphone dock" - thats the industry of the future boys - selling electronics that you put inside objects people can 3d print... there isnt one yet, but mark my works, and heed this well as a prediction - in 10 years, this will be a major (or at least up-and-coming) industry. We'll even see a regulation and dmca like laws come into effect.
But look around you and take a SERIOUS look at the things around you and think, how many of these items could be printed? you'll be blown away by the things you could easily replace with something you can print yourself. The sad fact is people dont really notice until you have one, then you look around and see a whole bunch of industries destined for the scrap heap as people start printing their own items rather then running down the shops to pick one up.
sitting in front of me, i look and i think "my mouse, my keyboard, my glasses, my 3 hard drive cases, my phone stands, my mouse pad, my cup and the spoon thats in it. all my pens (sans ink)... i could go on".
The point is, the point people miss, isnt that 3d printing an object is in any way, shape or form more economical then buying the mass-produced equivalent. The point is that i can "have it now" (and have it my way)... much of what we do now and what the internet provided (and what content producers have fought hard to stop) is the "have it now" philosophy. Thanks to scale, prices of printing an object will go down, very far down. PLA and ABS (the main things people tend to use with the repraps) arent cheap, but that'll change. 3d printing isnt about "hey, new mass manufacturing process" cause its just not economical at that and never will be, its about not needing one in the first place, if everyone has a 3d printer (or access to one), whos going to make phone cases when people can just print their own?. The secondary point is you can build things you just cant buy or easily make or you can take a phone case and customise it. I dont know how many times i've wanted a lather or a router or whatever and even then thought "i probably wont be able to make it anyway"... well now i can and easily.
So right now you can do one of two things, look at 3d printing and see its potential or go "meh" and you'll miss out (even if missing out is simply the opportunity of being involved), but i believe that 3d printing will be one of the biggest and most disruptive techs to hit the world and when it does hit with full force it'll be one of the most important things we'll see - possibly even more important then computing. My point is make no mistake, what 3d printing can and will do will change life as we know it in
To me, personally what the 'pi has always represented is a arduino replacement and hence while i'm very into arm and tech in general, i've never really been able to get into it given that its only got 256mb of ram. For a while i had this idea in my head of building a vps style system out of small arm boards and the 'pi just isnt going to cut it. The CPU in the thing is probably decent for some applications but there just not enough ram.
Calxeda are now doing just that (with hp) and now dell are getting into it too, but they're taking it to the high end of the spectrum. Personally i think this is where these little mini-pc's can fit. 1g of ram, 1.5ghz cpu, size of a thumb drive (ok a bit bigger than that). Sure they're 3x the price, but its 3x25$ In fairness what the 'pi's original goals are intended to achieve makes it idea for that application, but to the techo geek in me, its just not quite been able to raise my excitement.
actually this is even true on the general consumer focused firewall/routers you get down the shop for $50. Take the tp-link tl-wr1043nd (http://www.tp-link.com.au/products/details/?categoryid=238&model=TL-WR1043ND) internally its a 6-port switch, entirely asic driven, and programmed from the os (if your running openwrt you can run swconfig and play with the switch config). the switch does vlaning, and everything you expect from a basic switch. So everything layer 2 is done in asics...
One of the ports on the switch (the 6th) is directly connected to the linux OS sitting inside and the switch treats the linux os as just another connection.
Layer 3 however on these devices *IS* however driven by the linux OS inside, firewalling, routing, etc. On enterprise kit, alot of that is also moved into asic form and provided purely in silicon as well.
while this is true, theres a fundamental difference between a linux box with a 4-port quad card and say a cisco or juniper with 4 1 gig network ports. The primary purpose of the OS (bsd or linux) on these devices is to:
1) store configuration
2) provide a management interface
3) program asics
if, for example you took a whitebox, shoved two quad-port 1gig network cards in it and installed junos on it, it would be nothing like an srx210 - same port count, even same capabilities, but what you dont have is a bunch of asics that drive the network, and this is very fundamentally different. On these devices, the underlying os doesnt actually provide alot of the firewalling or routing capabilities and none of the switching, this is all handed off to dedicated hardware and the underlying os just provides a way of programming that in.
Dont try and beat companies for switching with linux grade equipment - there just isnt a good reason to. I love junos, screenos and ios - they kick arse... I also like what huawei do (they are a little cheaper, but at the switching side, they're very good). I've been doing networking for 15 years as a job and i've been doing linux since '92.
However, im also very VERY keen on linux at the routing side... I've even written my own firewall/routing software for linux. At the layer 3, linux has one advantage cisco, juniper (screenos and junos), and basically everyone else cannot give you - adaptability. just about any 1ru server capable of supporting either 8 1gbps nics (2x4 pci-e) or 2-4 10gbps nics (either 1x2 or 2x2 pci-e) is fantastic. Modern cpu's and busses really dont change much between vendors, only generation so you shouldn't really be bothered looking for "which has the best bus" cause they all do (dell, ibm, hp, it doesnt matter). If you can get a server with a serial lom (not just a network-connected web-gui based piece of nastyness (because you DO want oob management) you'll be laughing. Generally speaking, most x86 hardware will have around the same life expectancy as dedicated hardware and by that i mean if you get a dell server with redundant power supplies and so forth, it'll have about the same uptime as a juniper srx650 with dual power supplies. The one thing you'll probably miss out on is hot-swap-ability.
Now you plug that machine into your switch, etherchannel and vlan trunk it to your server and you have an amazing device. What you do with it then is entirely up to you, and this is generally the harder decision then the hardware - what you'll put on it. You can go with a real bit of firewall gui (such as vyatta) or you can do something far more interesting - i recommend devil linux personally as its the most flexible of the lot without being a bitch to maintain (as in, centos, ubuntu, fedora, whatever - not good choices for networking equipment cause there is alot of config to manage at the machine side - very bad for networking). One reason i say i dont like most firewall distro's in linux is that they tend to limit you and if your going to do this, go get a juniper netscreen/srx, they're just not that expensive (there is one exception to this, and thats openwrt, it runs on x86 and has almost every component a normal linux distro has). Its also worth avoiding harddrives (except if your going to put a network cache in there) and there are good options out there for doing just that.
Linux's most valuable asset is its abilities to do unbelievably fantastic things at the network layer and then be adapted easily. With vendor enterprise kit you'll get ipv4, ipv6, routing protocols (isis, ospf, bgp, rip and add eigrp for cisco) policy based routing, some network serivces (dhcp, ra's, etc) add firewall/loadbalancing/vpn depending on the device. With linux you get all this and a hell of a lot more in one device, it is well worth your time checking out the younger and more intresting routing protocols (like babel, oslr, etc etc, theres a few) - the fun is bringing it all together.
There is one downside to all this, too many options and alot to learn. Do you want a network device that will do:
1) policy based routing
2) ipv4 and 6 firewalling
3) load balancing
4) routing protocols
5) vpn'ing
1+2 come from the same place, so you'll be quite ok with that, the rest though is up to you, each has 15 different options from 15 different ppl and it takes some experimenting to know which is best for you. You'll also find none of them will configure or look anything like one another so you will be learning 4 very distinctly different software stacks with 4 very distinctly different configuration paradigms.
Personally, i dont see that as an issue for myself - in an organisation it can be a bit harder.
Its an interesting point, and while this is comedy, it also happens to be roughly true on occasion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLhFXkvugLM go to about 1:05 in the video.
Yes minister was a good series, pity they didnt make more
as in, second hand/older ipad really aint that expensive, and you'll be hard pressed to find anything that'll beat it for price... cheap chinese android tablet is really the only other option... you might get a laptop (netbook style one) for cheap, but probably not much cheaper... its a pretty low price point to start with imho.
The other problem is that you may find trying to protect anything is going to be the hard part (or perhaps expensive/tedious) rather then the device itself.
By that I mean saying that you could "get a cheap tablet and stick some plexiglass in front of it" sounds easy in practice, but not if you dont have the right tools. Personally i'd consider one of the older 10" android tablets and just put it out of reach - of course out of reach (For those with kids) often means "challenge" for child and can result in some truely god like resourcefulness on the part of the child.
Its quite possible, however, that theres an app on the android market that'll lockout an android tablets control surfaces (im pretty sure i've seen something like this).. im not sure if the same exists on the ipad, but maybe thats the way to go?
Not sure what GAME uk's demise means for the australian game line, but i keep wondering how they *STAY* in business. They are consistently higher then everyone else simply for price.
Consider their biggest competitor in the retail market is probably a place called JB hifi, and in shopping centers they're often so close (physically) together that you can see the big tags advertising their price for games (Specially up coming and new release ones). Yet, GAME au's prices are always more expensive.
When they go out of business in AU, I will not be supprised. I've bought games from them (but only second hand ones, and at most 3 - typically jbhifi is cheaper for those as well). But AU's model can be summed up in 3 links:
http://www.game.com.au/diablo-iii/pc-games/DIABLO3PC
http://www.jbhifionline.com.au/game/pc-games/diablo-3/654000
http://www.game-lane.com.au/pc-mac-games/2782-diablo-iii-3-pc.html
To me, in AU, its not "how did they go out of business" its "how do they stay alive?".
I personally find "fanciful" names for servers a little on the poor-judgement side of admin and they can lead to some regrettable situations when theres any real number of servers. We use dns to separate by location and network i.e. vlan.loc.domain.com, though vlan is a name, not a numeric. Then the server name defines its role in life. We dont generally mutli-purpose any server, though if we do it'll get a cname. Most things also have cnames to define roles as well.
for eg, lxweb001.dmz.sing.domain.com (linux web server 1 in the dmz network, in singapore), which might also be known as web001.dmz.sing.domain.com but if its a globally relavent server, it might also be web001.domain.com. It might also have a cname like web001.japn.domain.com meaning it also serves web content for japan, etc etc.
We never re-purpose servers (as in, web->dns) without rebuilds
That is the most bizarre set of stats i've ever read....
I cant understand why they would think the PERCENTAGE of the workforce for s&e would be on the increase? That just baffles me.
Its like, checkout people, the number you have is dependent on the number of retail places around, which is dependant on the population, and hence its probably always going to be relatively fixed (as a percentage). At the moment, that might be on the decrease cause of automated human-less checkouts, but the driving force behind checkout people is the size of your population.
I cant think of anything in the last decade that would propel more ppl (as a percentage) to enter either science or engineering. Any factor that might cause it is probably going to be offset by something else, ultimately if everyone started getting into science and engineering, who's gunna be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, etc etc.
How that even begins to relate to "less innovation" baffles me even more because 5% of the population is a considerable number of people and innovation itself tends to be sporadic and driven by individuals (and then implemented by large armies of kill robots). Ultimately even 5% is an ever increasing number of people (given population growth).
I keep looking at the clock wondering if its april 1st, cause I really cant understand how they think "Ideally, the S&E workforce -- it numbers more than 7.6 million workers -- would be expanding as a percentage of the labor force. That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers." is a remotely valid assumption. Again, given population growth, "That would mean U.S. companies are increasing their use of S&E workers" that is actually happening if your holding at 5%.
Truly bizarre, its like someone misunderstood the different between what a percentage is and an absolute figure.
More to the point (at least in australia) the cost of "fixing" someone is significant for the government and they also consider people to be an "investment" - as in "we spent heaps educating you to year 12, now you owe us".
The point being of course is that they dont want you doing anything that can either cost them money or kill their investment...
actually, just to reply to my own post... if i were doing this, what i would do is have an app that locked the tablet to only itself (pretty simple), then have a hard coded set of settings for wifi access and a content server it connected to (all provided by the application)... from the content server i would be able to then unlock the tablet, but to be safe, i'd also add a key combo that unlocked it too (like vol up, vol up, vol down, power power, etc, something complex).
I'd pick the cheapest tablet you can get (that'll support your content), then farm off the app coding to one of the many freelancing sites to do what you need..
tbh, this is a pretty simple thing to do on android - completely locking a tablet isnt hard, and completely locking the content isnt hard either. You could then have various external mechanisms for unlocking them again (via bluetooth, wifi, usb, etc).. as an android coder, i wouldnt think this would take more then a couple of hours personally.
If your determined to do it yourself, stackoverflow is a good place to start looking for ideas on how its achieved.
I always wanted to make my own unlock screen for android, but you cant do that, you have to code an entire launcher which is annoying.
What i wanted in an unlock though was for 3 buttons to come up on the screen in some random locations and have to click them all in order... slide to unlock just annoys me personally.
So i just skimmed it... however i'd find it hard to believe that such a thing is provable to any real extent. There are just too many other factors to play with when trying to apply such a broad brush.
simply put, the language you speak often dictates who you listen too, us here in AU, and no doubt in canada are greatly influenced by what happens in the US - though it wasnt always that way for us (AU) prior to the internet. There were certainly influences, but now those influences are faster and more prevalent. As such, AU'ers themselves are also less healthy, more fat, and more likely to spend money then they were say 50 years ago - yet we still spoke the same language.
Thats a pretty simple example, but in AU, alot of a social infrastruture has changed to be more like the US - AU used to provide much of its services by govt owned facilities - these days the reverse is true, and this impacts health care, so people without money are less healthy (perhaps).
My ultimate point being that today there are just too many other factors at work that could have larger impacts then simply the language you think and any proof derived from such would probably be easily flawed. My humble opinion anyway.
Kewl, so all you need to do to hide things is apparently swallow them?
In Australia we have two huge problems that need solving - paranoia and a willingness of our government to spy on everything we do.
How the internet firewall didnt get rolled out is a mystery to me (even though in part it did manage to make a small appearance in a different form).
...All the sudden the thought of ET's finding us isn't so far fetched.
I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.
But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.
All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?
Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.
But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.
Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.
More introduced species in australia.
I cant help thinking of that simpsons episode with the lizard, which ate the pidgeon, and they got out of control, so they brang in something else.. etc etc...
This is already what Australia is like. Someone brang in rabbits, cane toads, snakes, etc etc... then they brang in something else to combat such things... the only thing ends up suffering in the long run is the native wild life and our ecosystem as a whole.
Australian researchers (or anyone) should be shot in the head when they do the following:
1) consider introducing a new species of anything to this country
2) consider modifying an existing species DNA and introducing that into the country.
I have faith in science, but morons are morons. Anyone who cant learn from the mistakes of the past needs to be locked up or put down so they cant do any damage - they really are cretins. Oh, "but we know more now?" ... your a moron if you actually believe you understand an ecosystem well enough that you can predict the implications of adding a new species of anything to it, being able to control it in the long run or actually measure whats going on when it does get into your ecosystem.
Your an even bigger moron if you think you'll have a endless pit of money from either the government or some other body that will allow you to have the kind of control you need to police such a move for the foreseeable future.
I really wish people like this professor would just cease to exist, they're bad for the planet and our species as a whole. I dont mind if they sit there researching the crap out of anything, but until they can prove they actually understand an eco system in its entirety and the government gets behind them with such a huge wad of cash they can prove they'll have the ability to remain in control, they should be locked in a cage somewhere.
You can just already see the future of something like this:
"turns out that elephant feases combine with a local australian-only plant to produce a toxic substance that is now leaching into our water supply - we must now evacuate australia - thanks for coming".... and then much later from the same professor "oh, we didnt quite take that into account".
If you like php, use it.
Theres a simple quote who's origins i forget (think it was bjarne stroustrup) that goes "there are those languages that people complain about, and those that people dont use".
Sadly, the more people who use language, the more you generate hate, and php is one of the most widely used in existence.
PHP has alot going for it:
- its an elegant language
- its quite quick to write almost anything in
- its generally quite fast
- theres bucket loads of people using it, so finding solutions to problems is easy
- lots of different frameworks if you need them
- tonnes of api support.
- almost every web host supports it.
- the number of people using it generally just helps the code base, bugs get found and dealt with, etc etc etc.
The only reason to switch to another language comes down to the goals your trying to achieve, which aren't really stated. Generally speaking you could achieve any type of web content in any language to an extent. There are few languages that have the support for api's that php does, thats for sure. Perl is probably the only one that beats it in terms of "i want to connect to from my web code".
But it depends also on what you had in mind in terms of switching to.
- Java is a reasonably nice language, very well supported (by vendors) and scales well, but requires significant development time and quite a decent amount of grunt - forces you to abstract your work ad infinitum but sometimes thats a good thing. Lots of different api's, though mileage varies greatly.
- Dot-net i personally find to be somewhat on the buggy side, but again, well supported and well used - often forces you down an MVC framework path, which i dont like.
- Python's probably a better language generally, but for web coding, you get caught up in the basics with python around choosing frameworks and so forth and later if you find the framework you choose wasnt that great, then its re-code time cause frameworks generally dont have easy migration options. My main annoyance with python is that learning python tends to diverge a fair bit from helping you with other languages (i.e. learning python wont help you with c/c#/c++/java/etc).
- Ruby has similar traits to python - you get caught up in the frameworks, the language is nice but doesn't translate easily to other languages.
There are other options, but personally, stick with the top three if its your first coding exercise for content - php, java, dot.net