There's a whole lot of deep security and programming thought that goes into most of Meredith and Dan's papers (I don't know the other two authors), so while I haven't read this one yet, I'm expecting good things from it. Go check out the whole "weird machines" security discussion.
Also, I've got a closet full of ties, most of which I haven't worn this millennium, so hey, why not:-)
Yeah, that's becoming really annoying for a lot of newer systems. One of the good things about the RPi and Beaglebone Black is that both of them have HDMI connectors for the video, uSDHC storage, and USB for other I/O (SATA would be nice as well, but USB gets the job done.)
The RPi's GPU may not be the top gaming rig out there, but it's fast enough to play 1080p television. For me, that's fast enough that sometime soon I'm going to get around to getting one and hooking it up to my TV, probably to run XBMC as well as using it as a home file server. The interesting alternative would have been the Beaglebone Black, but it looks like the BBB's GPU is more limited, and can only do 1080 at a really low frame rate. (And of course now the BBB seems to be sold out and backordered - it does have a better CPU.)
Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.
At least National Public Radio has the excuse that they're directly funded by the government (and "viewers like you", and grants from Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, some recent movie, etc.) - it was 10 years after Gitmo before I first heard them use the T-word in a news story; before that it had only been guests on Terry Gross's interview shows (and Terry herself.)
Don't let the right-wingers tell you that either of these are "liberal" media.
Technically, "humans and other great apes":-) But not other primates, even the lesser apes. This stuff is really recent, which makes its activities especially strange.
Yes, there's a Javascript slider widget moving itself next to the article. I don't have speakers connected to my office computer, and since it's April 1 I assume that if I do turn on the sound, I'll find that Slashdot is just playing a short audio clip of Rick Astley....
If you sell light bulbs, you'd rather make your profit on the part people are likely to replace soon than the part they don't change very often. People are much more willing to replace a light bulb themselves than a light fixture mounted on a wall (which might require an electrician in some places, might only get replaced during a decorating change such as repainting the bathroom, and which probably still works fine, as opposed to the old incandescent bulb that burned out.)
Yes, this adds a lot of complex control circuitry to your lightbulb - a microcontroller ($0.50 will get you 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs, and there are probably ARM CPUs for under $1 by now), and some kind of radio or sound or light sensor for signalling (also no more than a few bucks), and a 1/N share of the cost of the remote control (which only needs to cost more than $5 because a $200 home automation system needs a fancy GUI and lots of user interface development.)
I might very well want to set different light bulbs in different rooms to different colors, to coordinate with the paint colors and the lighting needs of the various activities we use those rooms for. I'm not in their target market demographic, but having recently had to pick paint colors for my living room and seen how radically any color we tried changed depending on the lighting (direct/indirect sunlight, different kinds of incandescents, compact fluorescents, and cheap LEDs) and even depending on the color of adjacent walls/furniture - human color vision is an amazingly weird and twisty system - I can see that some people might very well want to have their lighting change its behaviour based on time of day.
On the other hand, I'm definitely in the target market for a cheap LED replacement for 150-watt incandescents, and for that matter for 100-watt; most of the cheap LED market is still for the 40-to-60-watt incandescent replacement.
I've lost a light switch before. My apartment has a hallway with switches at both ends, one of which was at the natural location for a laundry-sorting table by the washing machine. Stuff gradually accumulated, hiding the switch that we didn't use much anyway. At one point, the light stopped working, and when replacing the bulb didn't help, I was getting ready to tear apart the switch box to replace that one and another that was occasionally flaky, and then I remembered the other switch - which had gotten pushed to an intermediate position between up and down.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise, but just because Silicon Valley is libertarian-leaning, that doesn't mean that the government-run airports in San Jose, San Francisco, or Oakland are libertarian. Of course, even if they were libertarian-run, they might still view taxi service to/from the airport as a profit center, but San Francisco airport in particular is much more likely to restrict access by services that compete with city-medallion taxis.
I'd strongly recommend that they start selling enough now to pay off their hardware and debts in the first couple of months. Maybe gamble on keeping half the take for future appreciation, but if they're mining it this fast they ought to nail down their initial stake quickly in case the Bitcoin ecosystem colllapses.
The Grinnell Beowulf A group of students at Grinnell College recently did a translation of Beowulf as a project. It's online, and worth reading, and has good notes along with their translation.
The first platforms I used with X Windows were a Sun-3 and a 386/25, usually with about 4MB of RAM (some of our Sun boxes had 8MB, and if you wanted to use NeWS instead of X you definitely needed 8. It's possible that the 386 had less RAM than that.)
Sure, the Feds also put a good bit of money into medicine and basic research and even social sciences, but the largest driver of US scientific research and development over the last five or more decades has been the military, either directly or indirectly (e.g. research into computers not only drives military use of computers, aircraft builders (for the military) and NASA (for the missile programs) funded a lot of computer and mathematical research.) We've gotten some useful spinoffs from it (like the internet and GPS and Tang freezedried orange juice), but it's taken a lot of scientists away from doing medical research, energy efficiency, or other things that should have been higher social priorities. Some of that airplane development has been dual-use, since a 747 to haul passengers is a lot like a military cargo plane or an older slower bomber, but a lot of it has diverted people and money that could have been making the world a better place into the military.
Bush 2 didn't "keep tax cuts in place" - he significantly cut taxes on the richest 20%, and the Congressional Republicans have made keeping those cuts in place one of their highest priorities even under Obama and the 2008 supermajority. That means that when the debts Bush ran up come due, the middle class will have a much larger share of the spending than they would have had.
(As a Baby Boomer myself, I'll preface this with the obligatory "Fuck you, get off my lawn, my generation spent our lives paying taxes for our parents' generation's Social Security and more taxes paying for their wars". Now that that's over with, I've got a more serious point to make.)
There's a significant demographic change between the Boomers' Parents' Generation, who generally had 4 kids, and the Boomers and later generations who've mostly had 2 or fewer, which means that the population's getting a lot older on average, and as the boomers retire (which they're starting to), there'll be a lot more retired non-working people than workers, even after the levels of immigration that are politically likely in the US, Japan, and Europe. That doesn't just affect Social Security and Medicare:
- Pensions, for those of us who had that kind of job, are paid for by some combination of profits invested by the companies we worked for. There's less profit being made by fewer workers.
- Stocks and bonds owned by retired people (or their pension funds) - fewer workers per investor, so they'll be making less profit on investment capital.
- Interest on savings - fewer workers paying mortgages or loans per dollar of savings, so interest rates will be lower.
- other effects like that.
Some of that will be balanced by Boomers not being able to afford to retire, or retiring later. But have no fear, the Democrats say that the Social Security Trust Fund will have plenty of money until 2036, when the middle of the Boomers turn 80, too old to go back to work at Walmart, as long as the government is fiscally responsible from now until then.
Another big problem with medical care is that the Boomer generation had a lot of doctors, who are starting to retire, and at least in the US, medical schools haven't had the capacity to crank out enough graduates to replace them. (Should have been one of Obama's first priorities, since it's a really-long-lead-time change to build up medical school capacities.) And the improving economies in India and China mean that while they are starting to train more doctors, they're also starting to be able to afford to hire them in-country for people who haven't had real medical care before, instead of having them all come here to make money.
Yeah, there can be problems delivering medicines to people by drone, such as theft of the product near the delivery point, but you can reduce some of that by having video cameras in the drone.
Of course, this being San Francisco, the obvious "medicine" that'll be delivered is weed.
You've got to set an IP address somehow. Typing a MAC address into your DHCP server isn't a cool way to do it, and you need an address that you know from the outside, not just an address the device can use to talk to servers it already knows about.
The equipment I've been using recently added a front-panel LCD/pushbutton mechanism that lets you set the IP address; previous versions of the hardware required you to either log in with an RS232 console that got a shell prompt or else use a VGA monitor and keyboard (and stupidly, the default on some versions of it required you to use the VGA/keyboard to tell the device to use the serial console.)
And while almost all the rest of the administration gets done using a web GUI, the system (which ran a custom Linux) didn't have an X server, so you typically needed to bring a VGA monitor and keyboard AND a laptop; the current versions let you do a bit more from CLI, so that's slightly less annoying.
But if you want to reimage the box (which you have to do for major version upgrades), ALMOST all of the steps can be done via the serial console. Except for the one step in the middle, where the box remembers its IP address settings but forgets that you were using a serial console instead of VGA, so you still need to have a technician onsite with a VGA, instead of being able to use a modem.
Lots of books are out of print that were printed since the publishing industry went to digital production systems. That fiction book that's more than a year old and wasn't selling well? It's not coming out on dead trees again, but they've got it in Word. Older books may be in older formats, but even if they're proprietary formats, extracting the text (for books without pictures) isn't that hard.
It's a problem with publishing rights and contracts and publishers' predictions about profitability.
And even with books that require scanning, Dover Books did surprisingly good business for years selling fuzzy images of out-of-copyright books; these days it wouldn't be too hard to OCR and reimage most of them, but alternatively bits are cheap enough these days that they could be available in image formats instead of OCR.
Bluetooth is dead - Netcraft\\\\\\\ I've seen his tomb - he's buried in Roskilde Cathedral. It's about 30km west of Copenhagen, but you can get there with the Copenhagen city transit pass, and don't need to burn a trip on your railpass. Good museum of Viking ships there, which they'd found sunk in the harbor.
Sure, they're nowhere near as smart as elephants, but my cats generally know when I'm up to something, whether that's something that could be used to talk me into giving them treats, or something that might get them locked up into the bathroom and maybe shoved in a box and taken to the vet. One of my cats is better at figuring out treats, and usually pretty dumb about being herded somewhere, while the other one's better at figuring out potential bad stuff, but most cats have at least some clue.
Metadata about you is unimportant and can be obtained by an NSA/FBI/DEA/police/dog-catcher letter saying "please".
Metadata about the NSA is CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY NOFORN BURN-BEFORE-READING SOURCES AND METHODS that COULD TELL TERRORISTS HOW TO KILL YOUR MAMA and needs to be protected from anybody untrusted, like you, or journalists, or the American public, or the Congresscritters that set their budget.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a whole lot of deep security and programming thought that goes into most of Meredith and Dan's papers (I don't know the other two authors), so while I haven't read this one yet, I'm expecting good things from it. Go check out the whole "weird machines" security discussion.
Also, I've got a closet full of ties, most of which I haven't worn this millennium, so hey, why not :-)
Yeah, that's becoming really annoying for a lot of newer systems. One of the good things about the RPi and Beaglebone Black is that both of them have HDMI connectors for the video, uSDHC storage, and USB for other I/O (SATA would be nice as well, but USB gets the job done.)
The RPi's GPU may not be the top gaming rig out there, but it's fast enough to play 1080p television. For me, that's fast enough that sometime soon I'm going to get around to getting one and hooking it up to my TV, probably to run XBMC as well as using it as a home file server. The interesting alternative would have been the Beaglebone Black, but it looks like the BBB's GPU is more limited, and can only do 1080 at a really low frame rate. (And of course now the BBB seems to be sold out and backordered - it does have a better CPU.)
Bifocals would let you see either IR or regular colors. Add photo-sensitive gray to the regular part....
Cowards. They're not willing to call it what it is, because they're still the Establishment Media, and don't want to lose access to the government people who are their big information sources.
At least National Public Radio has the excuse that they're directly funded by the government (and "viewers like you", and grants from Exxon, Archer Daniels Midland, some recent movie, etc.) - it was 10 years after Gitmo before I first heard them use the T-word in a news story; before that it had only been guests on Terry Gross's interview shows (and Terry herself.)
Don't let the right-wingers tell you that either of these are "liberal" media.
Technically, "humans and other great apes" :-) But not other primates, even the lesser apes. This stuff is really recent, which makes its activities especially strange.
Yes, there's a Javascript slider widget moving itself next to the article. I don't have speakers connected to my office computer, and since it's April 1 I assume that if I do turn on the sound, I'll find that Slashdot is just playing a short audio clip of Rick Astley....
If you sell light bulbs, you'd rather make your profit on the part people are likely to replace soon than the part they don't change very often. People are much more willing to replace a light bulb themselves than a light fixture mounted on a wall (which might require an electrician in some places, might only get replaced during a decorating change such as repainting the bathroom, and which probably still works fine, as opposed to the old incandescent bulb that burned out.)
Yes, this adds a lot of complex control circuitry to your lightbulb - a microcontroller ($0.50 will get you 8-bit and 16-bit CPUs, and there are probably ARM CPUs for under $1 by now), and some kind of radio or sound or light sensor for signalling (also no more than a few bucks), and a 1/N share of the cost of the remote control (which only needs to cost more than $5 because a $200 home automation system needs a fancy GUI and lots of user interface development.)
I might very well want to set different light bulbs in different rooms to different colors, to coordinate with the paint colors and the lighting needs of the various activities we use those rooms for. I'm not in their target market demographic, but having recently had to pick paint colors for my living room and seen how radically any color we tried changed depending on the lighting (direct/indirect sunlight, different kinds of incandescents, compact fluorescents, and cheap LEDs) and even depending on the color of adjacent walls/furniture - human color vision is an amazingly weird and twisty system - I can see that some people might very well want to have their lighting change its behaviour based on time of day.
On the other hand, I'm definitely in the target market for a cheap LED replacement for 150-watt incandescents, and for that matter for 100-watt; most of the cheap LED market is still for the 40-to-60-watt incandescent replacement.
I've lost a light switch before. My apartment has a hallway with switches at both ends, one of which was at the natural location for a laundry-sorting table by the washing machine. Stuff gradually accumulated, hiding the switch that we didn't use much anyway. At one point, the light stopped working, and when replacing the bulb didn't help, I was getting ready to tear apart the switch box to replace that one and another that was occasionally flaky, and then I remembered the other switch - which had gotten pushed to an intermediate position between up and down.
It shouldn't be much of a surprise, but just because Silicon Valley is libertarian-leaning, that doesn't mean that the government-run airports in San Jose, San Francisco, or Oakland are libertarian. Of course, even if they were libertarian-run, they might still view taxi service to/from the airport as a profit center, but San Francisco airport in particular is much more likely to restrict access by services that compete with city-medallion taxis.
If it's too far-fetched to be from The Onion, it must be a real headline. Because comedy is supposed to make sense.
I'd strongly recommend that they start selling enough now to pay off their hardware and debts in the first couple of months. Maybe gamble on keeping half the take for future appreciation, but if they're mining it this fast they ought to nail down their initial stake quickly in case the Bitcoin ecosystem colllapses.
The Grinnell Beowulf A group of students at Grinnell College recently did a translation of Beowulf as a project. It's online, and worth reading, and has good notes along with their translation.
The first platforms I used with X Windows were a Sun-3 and a 386/25, usually with about 4MB of RAM (some of our Sun boxes had 8MB, and if you wanted to use NeWS instead of X you definitely needed 8. It's possible that the 386 had less RAM than that.)
Sure, the Feds also put a good bit of money into medicine and basic research and even social sciences, but the largest driver of US scientific research and development over the last five or more decades has been the military, either directly or indirectly (e.g. research into computers not only drives military use of computers, aircraft builders (for the military) and NASA (for the missile programs) funded a lot of computer and mathematical research.) We've gotten some useful spinoffs from it (like the internet and GPS and Tang freezedried orange juice), but it's taken a lot of scientists away from doing medical research, energy efficiency, or other things that should have been higher social priorities. Some of that airplane development has been dual-use, since a 747 to haul passengers is a lot like a military cargo plane or an older slower bomber, but a lot of it has diverted people and money that could have been making the world a better place into the military.
Bush 2 didn't "keep tax cuts in place" - he significantly cut taxes on the richest 20%, and the Congressional Republicans have made keeping those cuts in place one of their highest priorities even under Obama and the 2008 supermajority. That means that when the debts Bush ran up come due, the middle class will have a much larger share of the spending than they would have had.
(As a Baby Boomer myself, I'll preface this with the obligatory "Fuck you, get off my lawn, my generation spent our lives paying taxes for our parents' generation's Social Security and more taxes paying for their wars". Now that that's over with, I've got a more serious point to make.)
There's a significant demographic change between the Boomers' Parents' Generation, who generally had 4 kids, and the Boomers and later generations who've mostly had 2 or fewer, which means that the population's getting a lot older on average, and as the boomers retire (which they're starting to), there'll be a lot more retired non-working people than workers, even after the levels of immigration that are politically likely in the US, Japan, and Europe. That doesn't just affect Social Security and Medicare:
Some of that will be balanced by Boomers not being able to afford to retire, or retiring later. But have no fear, the Democrats say that the Social Security Trust Fund will have plenty of money until 2036, when the middle of the Boomers turn 80, too old to go back to work at Walmart, as long as the government is fiscally responsible from now until then.
Another big problem with medical care is that the Boomer generation had a lot of doctors, who are starting to retire, and at least in the US, medical schools haven't had the capacity to crank out enough graduates to replace them. (Should have been one of Obama's first priorities, since it's a really-long-lead-time change to build up medical school capacities.) And the improving economies in India and China mean that while they are starting to train more doctors, they're also starting to be able to afford to hire them in-country for people who haven't had real medical care before, instead of having them all come here to make money.
So yeah, dude, we're all doomed.
Yeah, there can be problems delivering medicines to people by drone, such as theft of the product near the delivery point, but you can reduce some of that by having video cameras in the drone.
Of course, this being San Francisco, the obvious "medicine" that'll be delivered is weed.
You've got to set an IP address somehow. Typing a MAC address into your DHCP server isn't a cool way to do it, and you need an address that you know from the outside, not just an address the device can use to talk to servers it already knows about.
The equipment I've been using recently added a front-panel LCD/pushbutton mechanism that lets you set the IP address; previous versions of the hardware required you to either log in with an RS232 console that got a shell prompt or else use a VGA monitor and keyboard (and stupidly, the default on some versions of it required you to use the VGA/keyboard to tell the device to use the serial console.)
And while almost all the rest of the administration gets done using a web GUI, the system (which ran a custom Linux) didn't have an X server, so you typically needed to bring a VGA monitor and keyboard AND a laptop; the current versions let you do a bit more from CLI, so that's slightly less annoying.
But if you want to reimage the box (which you have to do for major version upgrades), ALMOST all of the steps can be done via the serial console. Except for the one step in the middle, where the box remembers its IP address settings but forgets that you were using a serial console instead of VGA, so you still need to have a technician onsite with a VGA, instead of being able to use a modem.
The article said that after Bangalore the alarms got handled in Minneapolis. Can't complain about rightshoring with that.
Lots of books are out of print that were printed since the publishing industry went to digital production systems. That fiction book that's more than a year old and wasn't selling well? It's not coming out on dead trees again, but they've got it in Word. Older books may be in older formats, but even if they're proprietary formats, extracting the text (for books without pictures) isn't that hard.
It's a problem with publishing rights and contracts and publishers' predictions about profitability.
And even with books that require scanning, Dover Books did surprisingly good business for years selling fuzzy images of out-of-copyright books; these days it wouldn't be too hard to OCR and reimage most of them, but alternatively bits are cheap enough these days that they could be available in image formats instead of OCR.
Bluetooth is dead - Netcraft\\\\\\\
I've seen his tomb - he's buried in Roskilde Cathedral. It's about 30km west of Copenhagen, but you can get there with the Copenhagen city transit pass, and don't need to burn a trip on your railpass. Good museum of Viking ships there, which they'd found sunk in the harbor.
Sure, they're nowhere near as smart as elephants, but my cats generally know when I'm up to something, whether that's something that could be used to talk me into giving them treats, or something that might get them locked up into the bathroom and maybe shoved in a box and taken to the vet. One of my cats is better at figuring out treats, and usually pretty dumb about being herded somewhere, while the other one's better at figuring out potential bad stuff, but most cats have at least some clue.
Metadata about you is unimportant and can be obtained by an NSA/FBI/DEA/police/dog-catcher letter saying "please".
Metadata about the NSA is CLASSIFIED NATIONAL SECURITY NOFORN BURN-BEFORE-READING SOURCES AND METHODS that COULD TELL TERRORISTS HOW TO KILL YOUR MAMA and needs to be protected from anybody untrusted, like you, or journalists, or the American public, or the Congresscritters that set their budget.
It's really not that hard, citizen!