Boinc is more than just an updated Seti@Home, it's a generic delivery platform for distributed projects. That means you, yes you, can develope a BOINC app. Just gather some people to run it for you and compute away without needing any approval from the guys at Berkeley. Basically the participants enter a project URL into the BOINC application, the program then downloads your code and the crunching begins. BOINC handles all the network, workunit, results, distribution, security, versioning etc. issues for you.
Participants can even choose to split their resources among several projects, say, Seti@Home and Folding@Home. Another thing that will also be used in the new Seti@Home is that you can have clients participating in the same project working on completely different computation sets. For example, clients that have proven themselves to have a fast workunit turnaround time and a long history of participating and that have a gigabyte or more of RAM can be given special tasks that would normally be impossible because of the high number of griefers on the net.
Around the 14.4kbps days I couldn't have imagined having several Mbps connectivity to a single workstation without winning the lottery. Yet here I am, pulling down 4.7GB Linux ISOs in around a hour like nobody's business. It's absolutely inevitable that there will 24Mbps, 100Mbps etc. consumer grade connectivity. Just look at Japan or Sweden. It might seem a long time away, but it'll get here, and it will change everything when it comes to online delivery. Imagine the Internet Movie Database, with every single movie featuring a little "watch this" link, delivering a smooth 20Mbps or more feed to any screen in your house, instantly.
10 million dollars... What, did Nasa organize a little fund collection around the water cooler amongst employees or something?
Stop pussyfooting around, how about a billion dollars for the first commercial moon mission. Or maybe a couple hundred million for the first commercial reusable orbiter. NASA would blow through a billion just in administrative costs for designing something to replace the shuttle. And stop subsidizing payload launches, companies aren't going to develop alternatives while you're basically offering launches for half cost backed by the government. NASA should be driving new space development, not acting as a transport firm. Basically, after you've something a couple of times it's no longer ground breaking and should be spun off into the free market and new frontiers should be sought.
I suspect the reason I don't watch the new Star Treks is the same as many others. I simply don't care what happens, nothing seems to progress, they go places and kill people and I don't care! Everything is neatly wrapped up in a single episode, if we're lucky we get a two-parter. Whoopie...
The networks put out this lukewarm tripe because figure that's what their couchpotato public wants. But it's obviously not working, since the ratings are at an all time low. So give me epic adventure for a change. Don't plan your show to go on and on without direction, give it a clear beginning, a solid middle and most importantly, an kick-ass WOW end. If your crappy episode ends in the same state it began in, you've basically just wasted forty minutes of my time! Kill a few main characters, not because they want a different gig, but because it makes sense for the story arc. Blow up some planets, live a little. Whenever a scriptwriter suggest timetravel as a plot device, fire the bastard. And I totally agree with the poster above who said the original series was cool because it challenged conventions in its time. If you're not pissing someone off, you're doing it wrong.
It's amazing what a small private company can do with just 20 million dollars. Hopefully this will open up the market for suborbital flights in the future, at the very least it's an example of how to go about getting your permits and really start doing private space business.
But what it really goes to show is that what we need is more of these innovative competitions and less half-billion dollar shuttle launches. Image if the government and private sector came together to offer the prize of, say, 200 million for the "X2" prize to the first private orbital fligt. And then later on a cool billion dollars to the first private moon mission. It would still be a bargain! A 747 plane costs around 200 million, and even a billion won't get NASA far these days (*cough, x33, chough*). A billion will get you a single B2 bomber, how many more of those do we need? Imagine all that money fueled into milestone driven private development.
But the best part is, if you're a teen now or in your early twenties, you could one day be working in the space industry! Maybe not as an astronaut, but as a mission planer, technician, sysadmin or accountant:)
It's not an either/or choice, Openswan can in fact directly use the kernel IPsec modules in 2.6. But Openswan is a whole lot more too, it provides all the userland tools and higher level functionality that makes using IPsec easier and more powerful. There exists other Linux IPsec toolchains, but right now Openswan seems to have the most momentum.
With other major Linux vendors (well, vendor) seemingly moving more and more toward closing their software...
Look, we all know which company you're thinking of, and I'm telling you you're completely misinformed. Can you please let me know some of the supposed closed programs this evil company is distributing, because the last time I checked it was all open source. Somehow the bashers always forget this detail...
This is the comany that is afraid to include mp3 support for being non-free, right? The company that pays Alax Cox, Arjan van de Ven, Dave Jones, Jeff Garzik, Warren Togami, Roland McGrath, Guy Streeter and many more to hack the kernel? In fact, if I'm not mistaken this company has more kernel hackers than IBM and Novell combined (read a kernel changelog lately)? I'd list some GNOME developers that works for this beast of a company, but let's just say outside Ximian they're the #1 employer here as well (cough, Havoc Pennington, Alexandre Oliva *cough*). And all that money and effort they pour into Freedesktop.org and X.org, that's just to lock you in, right?
That company? Am I forgetting something... ? Oh yeah, they pretty much alone funded NPTL development for 2.6, backported it to 2.4 not only for their paying customers but their free version too. I guess they're pretty much the defacto maintainers of GCC and glibc these days too, but other than that, what have they ever given us?
Google Social Networking
on
Gmail in the News
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Google is giving out GMail invites like candy at the moment, you can get anywhere from 3-10 invites every other day or so (at least I do). Of course every invite you use is recorded, since it adds the inviters address to the invitees contact list automatically. With this by-invitation-only strategy they've managed to drum up an amazing amount of hype and discussion on blogs, mailing lists and message boards all over the net. Of course it also helps that GMail, in it's true Google-like fashion, is pretty damn good. That means there's a high demand for it, it's the latest in-thing and you don't want to be left out.
So, with everyone inviting their friends, who in turn invite their friends and so on, Google is sitting on a gold-mine that would make any data-miner drool. They've probably got the biggest social networking dataset ever compiled right now. I'm just thankful it's Google and not Hotmail or Yahoo. As someone else already said, the 1GB storage is just a gimmick, it's the Google brand that matters.
This actually got me curious, in what sort of situation could the local folders be used? I can't really think of any... I have a mix of multiple IMAP and POP accounts in Thunderbird and I've never felt the need to try out the local folders. In fact they just take up space in the left pane that I'd rather see my long list of newsgroups use.
I'm guessing you have to manually drag and drop messages there from your actual accounts, but who would actually bother doing that? Or, perhaps in Linux a local MTA can deliver mail to the user's home directory and use these folders, but then why would we be seeing these in Windows too?
It's done on a per server basis. Open up Tools->Account Settings, look under "Compositioning & Addressing" and uncheck "Compose messages in HTML format".
Note that if you don't use any of the HTML controls, even if you're in HTML editing mode, Thunderbird is smart enough to send the message as regular plain text.
Well, Microsoft can at least claim credit for running the show over at the special olympics. The reboot frequency seems to be hovering around 9 days on average. But please don't call IIS unstable, it's simply uptime challenged.
The 2.6.xx revisions have no bearing at all on when the 3.0.0 or 2.7.0 trees will get created. The quick turn around times are due to many factors; the new versioning and source control procedures put in place for 2.6 naturally encourage a more rapid pace while elimating the "did my patch make it into Linus's tree?" problems of yesteryear, which in turn has people submitting more, perhaps smaller, patches in a very rapid fashion. The 2.6 kernel is also right now being developed by more developers than ever, until the 2.7 branch gets spun all the efforts are basically focused on this single tree, timely releases keep code divergence down and hopefully prevents 20kloc ALSA merges from happening.
What, are you afraid they're suddenly going to run out of numbers for the 2.6.xx branch?;) Hint: after 2.6.99 comes 2.6.100. With vendor kernels you can't say where in the 2.6 branch you are anyway, when you're running 2.6.6-1.423 it's can be anywhere between 2.6.6 and 2.6.10 feature and security wise.
The whole idea of having some content exclusive to only parts of the world is just stupid. It really shows the media companies are living in some bizarro alternate marketplace where a bigger audience is not preferable over control. Apple should try to bring everyone together in a single gigantic music hub. I want to listen to what the Japanese market listens to, the UK indie scene, Swedish garage bands, etc. Right now iTunes is simply your local music store in digital form but it could be so much more!
Why not simply go the full mile? I want every music track, movie, tv-show and computer game ever produced, and I've got an attention span of about 30 seconds so you better hurry up. Sell to me dammit, I've got cash! It's the inevitable conlcusion to all of this, being able to queue up that one funny episode from your fav sitcom from Poland from the 80's, and having it instantly. The money the media companies could be making is a magnitude greater than what they get today, by truly selling on a global level absolutely everything they've got in their dusty archives and all future productions. It's ultimate distribution channel so if it can be digitized and sold it should.
Sigh, something tells me they'd rather just work on DRM and new region encoding schemes.
Slashdot Mirror
Boinc is more than just an updated Seti@Home, it's a generic delivery platform for distributed projects. That means you, yes you, can develope a BOINC app. Just gather some people to run it for you and compute away without needing any approval from the guys at Berkeley. Basically the participants enter a project URL into the BOINC application, the program then downloads your code and the crunching begins. BOINC handles all the network, workunit, results, distribution, security, versioning etc. issues for you.
Participants can even choose to split their resources among several projects, say, Seti@Home and Folding@Home. Another thing that will also be used in the new Seti@Home is that you can have clients participating in the same project working on completely different computation sets. For example, clients that have proven themselves to have a fast workunit turnaround time and a long history of participating and that have a gigabyte or more of RAM can be given special tasks that would normally be impossible because of the high number of griefers on the net.
My bandwidth history goes something like this:
2400bps (my first modem), 9600bps, 14400bps, 56kbps (or ~46kbps), 512kbps, 2Mbps, 10Mbps (today).
Around the 14.4kbps days I couldn't have imagined having several Mbps connectivity to a single workstation without winning the lottery. Yet here I am, pulling down 4.7GB Linux ISOs in around a hour like nobody's business. It's absolutely inevitable that there will 24Mbps, 100Mbps etc. consumer grade connectivity. Just look at Japan or Sweden. It might seem a long time away, but it'll get here, and it will change everything when it comes to online delivery. Imagine the Internet Movie Database, with every single movie featuring a little "watch this" link, delivering a smooth 20Mbps or more feed to any screen in your house, instantly.
10 million dollars... What, did Nasa organize a little fund collection around the water cooler amongst employees or something?
Stop pussyfooting around, how about a billion dollars for the first commercial moon mission. Or maybe a couple hundred million for the first commercial reusable orbiter. NASA would blow through a billion just in administrative costs for designing something to replace the shuttle. And stop subsidizing payload launches, companies aren't going to develop alternatives while you're basically offering launches for half cost backed by the government. NASA should be driving new space development, not acting as a transport firm. Basically, after you've something a couple of times it's no longer ground breaking and should be spun off into the free market and new frontiers should be sought.
I suspect the reason I don't watch the new Star Treks is the same as many others. I simply don't care what happens, nothing seems to progress, they go places and kill people and I don't care! Everything is neatly wrapped up in a single episode, if we're lucky we get a two-parter. Whoopie...
The networks put out this lukewarm tripe because figure that's what their couchpotato public wants. But it's obviously not working, since the ratings are at an all time low. So give me epic adventure for a change. Don't plan your show to go on and on without direction, give it a clear beginning, a solid middle and most importantly, an kick-ass WOW end. If your crappy episode ends in the same state it began in, you've basically just wasted forty minutes of my time! Kill a few main characters, not because they want a different gig, but because it makes sense for the story arc. Blow up some planets, live a little. Whenever a scriptwriter suggest timetravel as a plot device, fire the bastard. And I totally agree with the poster above who said the original series was cool because it challenged conventions in its time. If you're not pissing someone off, you're doing it wrong.
It's amazing what a small private company can do with just 20 million dollars. Hopefully this will open up the market for suborbital flights in the future, at the very least it's an example of how to go about getting your permits and really start doing private space business.
:)
But what it really goes to show is that what we need is more of these innovative competitions and less half-billion dollar shuttle launches. Image if the government and private sector came together to offer the prize of, say, 200 million for the "X2" prize to the first private orbital fligt. And then later on a cool billion dollars to the first private moon mission. It would still be a bargain! A 747 plane costs around 200 million, and even a billion won't get NASA far these days (*cough, x33, chough*). A billion will get you a single B2 bomber, how many more of those do we need? Imagine all that money fueled into milestone driven private development.
But the best part is, if you're a teen now or in your early twenties, you could one day be working in the space industry! Maybe not as an astronaut, but as a mission planer, technician, sysadmin or accountant
At least 5 of the top 10 systems are running Linux, starting at number two with Thunder at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The others are IBM BlueGene/L clusters at places #4 and #8, Tungsten at NCSA at #5, MPP2 at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at #9, and probably also the Dawning 4000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center as #10, though I'm not 100% sure about this last one.
It's not an either/or choice, Openswan can in fact directly use the kernel IPsec modules in 2.6. But Openswan is a whole lot more too, it provides all the userland tools and higher level functionality that makes using IPsec easier and more powerful. There exists other Linux IPsec toolchains, but right now Openswan seems to have the most momentum.
With other major Linux vendors (well, vendor) seemingly moving more and more toward closing their software...
Look, we all know which company you're thinking of, and I'm telling you you're completely misinformed. Can you please let me know some of the supposed closed programs this evil company is distributing, because the last time I checked it was all open source. Somehow the bashers always forget this detail...
This is the comany that is afraid to include mp3 support for being non-free, right? The company that pays Alax Cox, Arjan van de Ven, Dave Jones, Jeff Garzik, Warren Togami, Roland McGrath, Guy Streeter and many more to hack the kernel? In fact, if I'm not mistaken this company has more kernel hackers than IBM and Novell combined (read a kernel changelog lately)? I'd list some GNOME developers that works for this beast of a company, but let's just say outside Ximian they're the #1 employer here as well (cough, Havoc Pennington, Alexandre Oliva *cough*). And all that money and effort they pour into Freedesktop.org and X.org, that's just to lock you in, right?
That company? Am I forgetting something... ? Oh yeah, they pretty much alone funded NPTL development for 2.6, backported it to 2.4 not only for their paying customers but their free version too. I guess they're pretty much the defacto maintainers of GCC and glibc these days too, but other than that, what have they ever given us?
Google is giving out GMail invites like candy at the moment, you can get anywhere from 3-10 invites every other day or so (at least I do). Of course every invite you use is recorded, since it adds the inviters address to the invitees contact list automatically. With this by-invitation-only strategy they've managed to drum up an amazing amount of hype and discussion on blogs, mailing lists and message boards all over the net. Of course it also helps that GMail, in it's true Google-like fashion, is pretty damn good. That means there's a high demand for it, it's the latest in-thing and you don't want to be left out.
So, with everyone inviting their friends, who in turn invite their friends and so on, Google is sitting on a gold-mine that would make any data-miner drool. They've probably got the biggest social networking dataset ever compiled right now. I'm just thankful it's Google and not Hotmail or Yahoo. As someone else already said, the 1GB storage is just a gimmick, it's the Google brand that matters.
This actually got me curious, in what sort of situation could the local folders be used? I can't really think of any... I have a mix of multiple IMAP and POP accounts in Thunderbird and I've never felt the need to try out the local folders. In fact they just take up space in the left pane that I'd rather see my long list of newsgroups use.
I'm guessing you have to manually drag and drop messages there from your actual accounts, but who would actually bother doing that? Or, perhaps in Linux a local MTA can deliver mail to the user's home directory and use these folders, but then why would we be seeing these in Windows too?
It's done on a per server basis. Open up Tools->Account Settings, look under "Compositioning & Addressing" and uncheck "Compose messages in HTML format".
Note that if you don't use any of the HTML controls, even if you're in HTML editing mode, Thunderbird is smart enough to send the message as regular plain text.
Well, Microsoft can at least claim credit for running the show over at the special olympics. The reboot frequency seems to be hovering around 9 days on average. But please don't call IIS unstable, it's simply uptime challenged.
The 2.6.xx revisions have no bearing at all on when the 3.0.0 or 2.7.0 trees will get created. The quick turn around times are due to many factors; the new versioning and source control procedures put in place for 2.6 naturally encourage a more rapid pace while elimating the "did my patch make it into Linus's tree?" problems of yesteryear, which in turn has people submitting more, perhaps smaller, patches in a very rapid fashion. The 2.6 kernel is also right now being developed by more developers than ever, until the 2.7 branch gets spun all the efforts are basically focused on this single tree, timely releases keep code divergence down and hopefully prevents 20kloc ALSA merges from happening.
;) Hint: after 2.6.99 comes 2.6.100. With vendor kernels you can't say where in the 2.6 branch you are anyway, when you're running 2.6.6-1.423 it's can be anywhere between 2.6.6 and 2.6.10 feature and security wise.
What, are you afraid they're suddenly going to run out of numbers for the 2.6.xx branch?
Sort of, it'll definitely fix the local DoS bug, but it won't give you 2.6.7 (yet). Red Hat patched the bug some days ago already.
You can keep up to date regarding regular updates and security errata at Fedoranews.org FC2 updates page.
The whole idea of having some content exclusive to only parts of the world is just stupid. It really shows the media companies are living in some bizarro alternate marketplace where a bigger audience is not preferable over control. Apple should try to bring everyone together in a single gigantic music hub. I want to listen to what the Japanese market listens to, the UK indie scene, Swedish garage bands, etc. Right now iTunes is simply your local music store in digital form but it could be so much more!
Why not simply go the full mile? I want every music track, movie, tv-show and computer game ever produced, and I've got an attention span of about 30 seconds so you better hurry up. Sell to me dammit, I've got cash! It's the inevitable conlcusion to all of this, being able to queue up that one funny episode from your fav sitcom from Poland from the 80's, and having it instantly. The money the media companies could be making is a magnitude greater than what they get today, by truly selling on a global level absolutely everything they've got in their dusty archives and all future productions. It's ultimate distribution channel so if it can be digitized and sold it should.
Sigh, something tells me they'd rather just work on DRM and new region encoding schemes.