I'd agree with this, but for me, the new website design has lost the 'wow' factor.
When I first joined the seti@home project, their website produced amazing statistics like 'number of years cpu time in the last 24hrs'.
I found that absolutely fantastic, and made me feel that I was contributing to something really big.
Their new website design shows you how many 'credits' your account has scored, but not what the project overall has achieved in terms of raw cpu power. Personally I find this kind of disappointing. I didn't join the project to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in the biggest compute project the world has ever seen.
I must admit that I've been less motivated to keep my seti processing machines updated.
In fact, I don't think I have bothered to install the seti processor on any of my recent machines.
Out of interest, would you accept an applicant who wanted to telework ?
I used to work in commercial IT in the UK, but almost nowhere was prepared to consider teleworking or flexible hours.
In my experience, a lot of commercial IT roles involve a huge heap of office politics and bureaucracy that date back to the 1970s.
I quit commercial IT and joined an academic project as a software developer.
So did many of the other people on our team.
We now have a team of very skilled developers and an excellent project manager, all of whom telework from home.
We use a lot of the same tools and techniques that open source projects use to keep everyone on a distributed team working together on the same page.
I don't think any of us would want to go back to commercial world.
And copyright protection is not a producer right either then.
Which would make all the current open source licenses worthless.
Let them spend their own money on trying to devise methods to prevent competitors from copying off their idea.
So only large corporations with deep pockets would be able to claim and enforce ownership of their intellectual property ?
Bit tough on the small band who happened to write a nice catchy song.
Why should a record label sign a recording deal with them if they could just take it and give it to one of their own artists ?
Bit tough on the developer community who create a cool new application.
Why should a large software company contribute anything back to the community if they can just take the code and fold it into their own system ?
Digital technologies, such as CD and DVD players, have increased
A) the speed at which sound travels
B) the quality of sound you can hear
C) the range of frequencies you can hear
D) the loudness of sound which can be produced
Digital technologies, such as CD and DVD players, have increased [fill in blank] compared to what !?
What happens if the user stores their multimedia content on a file server, and then tries to play them on a laptop by streaming the data across the local network ?
... The hard-coded limit was short-sighted with respect to today's systems...
On our home network we have a file server with a large RAID array connected to a GigaBit ethernet switch.
All our images, audio and video files on the server, and we view them on our desktop or laptop machines.
None of this is specialist equipment.
By your logic ("it is what you call it") all the Native-Americans should be citizens of India, right?
No, it is the other way round. I'm suggesting we use the right name to describe things, so more like "call it what it actually is" than "it is what you call it".
The people you describe as Native-Americans aren't from India, they are American, so we shouldn't call them Indians. That is a name imposed on them by the European colonists. They had perfectly good names for themselves before we invaded, we just ignored them.
The word "Indian" was an invention of Christopher Columbus, who erroneously thought that he had arrived in the East Indies. The misnomer remains, and has served to imagine a kind of racial or cultural unity for the autochthonous peoples of the Americas. The unitary idea of "Indians" was not one shared by most indigenous peoples, who saw themselves as diverse. Europeans however have not until recently acknowledged the scope and variety of indigenous American populations, but largely found it more convenient to talk about Indigenous Americans as a single fairly homogeneous group.
ps
everyone thinks they're an expert on Language
Most definately not - Apologies if my comments are naive, I freely admit that I'm not an expert.
However, I am a native of England.
Did I miss the memo where the English who migrated to America suddenly lost their "magical English essence" which apparently comes from being on the soil where the language originally evolved?
I think the name kind of gives you a clue here... 'English' as in 'the language of the people of England' (or more specifically 'the language of the King/Queen of England'*).
It is sort of like an open source project.
When you break away from the group and establish your own project, you loose the modification rights over the original code base.
If you want to take the basis of the language and evolve a new fork, called say 'American', then go for it.
* Yes, the Scots, Welsh and Irish have their own distinct languages too, but history says that the King who won was the King of England**.
** This was not necessarily a GoodThing(TM).
Mugshot looks very very interesting, not so much because of what it provides, but because of who is behind it....
From the Mugshot FAQ page : http://mugshot.org/faq/
14. How does Mugshot relate to Red Hat?
Two of Red Hat's core values are collaboration and freedom. Mugshot is an experiment in applying Red Hat's philosophy of collaboration and freedom to new types of content, beyond software and source code.
and
15. How does Mugshot benefit Red Hat?
Technology developed in the Mugshot project may be incorporated into current and future Red Hat products and services. For example, Red Hat may incorporate live social experiences into Red Hat's client products, or offer commercial services around future versions of the Mugshot software.
There are not yet any formal plans to incorporate Mugshot into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Core distributions.
.... which means RedHat gets lots and lots of useful data about who talks to who, how often, and what tools they use.
But we do have to be concerned with software compatability, and that I think was the GP's main point. All of those other ISAs failed to dominate -- even when there were actual performance implications! -- simply because they were not x86 and hence didn't run the majority of software.
Yes, software compatability has been an issue, up to now. But could this change as open source systems gain more market share ?
In the past, a new architecture had to wait until Microsoft released a version of Windows for it and a significant number of other commercial software packages were ported before people would start to use it.
With open source, as soon as a new architecture is available someone, somewhere, immediately tries to get Linux running on it.
Once someone gets the core C compilers and OS running then most, if not all, of the other open source applications become available on the new architecture.
If a chip manufacturer created a new architecture that had a significant performance gain over the current systems, and helped three or four of the major Linux distros to create a port that demonstrated a significant performance gain for server side applications (web servers or database servers etc). Would this be enough to entice data centers to adopt the new architecture ?
There are other issues.
It would need more than one chip manufacturer and more than one motherboard manufacturer involved before people would take it seriously.
None of the major data centers would want to adopt a platform that tied them to a single supplier.
Unit price would be another. Low volume production would mean that the new systems would more expensive.
I know this isn't going to happen any time soon, but does the adoption of open source software remove one of the barriers.
Just how much money is involved in evaluating, buying, deploying and now investigating these machines ?
The main reason cited for moving to electronic voting is that manual counting methods are too slow or inacurate.
My own hunch would be that if we took even half the ammount of money that has been wasted on these machines and spent it on researching ways to improve the speed and accuracy of the existing manual counting methods, we would have a better system that would be both secure and clear for everyone to understand.
Interesting, but it depends on what they are searching for.
They could be searches for 'the latest Microsoft software', and 'the latest Ubuntu release'.
In which case, more searches means an increase in interest, which is good for Ubuntu.
Or, they could be searching for 'how to fix Microsoft [component]' and 'how to get Ubuntu [component] to work'
In which case, fewer searches means fewer problems, which is good for Microsoft.
A system built from Transputers could indeed be configured to have
a plurality of processors, any one of said processors operative as a master processor
and adding a Transputer link switch to the system could enable
said master processor including means for generating interconnection switch configuration control signals
and the Transputer link switch would probably qualify as
a communication bus for interconnecting each of said processors, for exchange of at least control and synchronization information among each of said processors;
but a standard Transputer system had separate memory for each CPU, and so wouldn't match
an interconnection switch coupled to each of said processors and each of said multi-access memory modules, and responsive to said interconnection switch control signals from said master processor, for selectively interconnecting any one or more of said processors with one or more of said multi-access memory modules, and whereby any one of said multi-access memory modules is exclusively interconnected to only one of said processors during any given phase of processing;
You could build one of these using Transputers by adding some custom hardware, but I don't know of any Transputer systems available at the time that implemented shared memory.
Once a laptop gets infected, could it spread accross a wireless network that the laptop is connected to ?
All the machines connected to a public wireless access point will probably be on the same subnet.
Sort of like the early viri that were spread by floppy disk, they required a human carrier to transfer an infected disk from one machine to another.
This one requires a human carrier to transfer an infected laptop from one network to another.
There's a catch. If these particles escape into the environment, their very smallness means they could have as yet unknown and possibly damaging effects. You might inhale or swallow them, or they could collect on the skin. They could then be carried to major organs such as the heart, liver and even the brain. The consequences of all this are still not clear, but following past health disasters caused by substances such as PCBs and asbestos, the prospect has stirred concern among governments and scientists alike.
The idea behind chameleon liquid looks great, but perhaps we should check to see what it does to the environment before we start to use it for everything.
... this country has been against a national ID card for decades...
Just checking, is this the same place that has decided that anyone who wants to visit has to supply a full set of fingerprints and retina scan before they let you in ?
... so what use is complaining if you have to buy their products anyway?
I don't think anyone has to.
There are a few specialist applications that are only available for Microsoft Windows, but even then, more and more of these are either being ported or replaced.
The change won't happen overnight, but gradually more and more people are installing alternatives, Mac or Ubuntu on the desktop/laptop and Unix or Linux on servers.
When I meet someone who is having problems with the restrictions in Windows or Microsoft Office, I point them to the OpenSource alternatives.
As more and more people start to use the alternative tools, more and more documents will be available in the free (as in speech) formats.
I work on an international project, collaborating with scientists and developers from all over the world.
When I write a document and publish it on our project wiki, I no longer bother to supply a Word.doc version.
The document itself is published as an OpenOffice document, and I provide a PDF version for people who don't have OpenOffice.
I have never been asked to supply a Word version.
It won't happen over night, but in a few years time (I hope) it will be the norm to email or publish documents in one of the open formats, and gradually the requirement to use Microsoft Office "because everyone else does" will deminish.
At which point, schools, universities, businesses and ordinary users will be free to choose which software they use based on how well it does the job.
Of course, it might not turn out this way, and Microsoft will (understandably) try everything they can to protect their current position.
So it is upto us to keep watching for tricks, FUD, underhand lobbying and dodgy patent agreements to make sure things turn out alright in the end.
I don't want to trivialise your recent troubles. You have my sympathy, and I hope that the burglary didn't cause you too much grief.
However, you seem to be suggesting that GoogleMaps StreetView may make us more vulnerable to crime.
... if a burglar wanted to case a street he or she would have to physically go to that street and take photographs and notes...
Now, all that person has to do is go to Google's street views.... to case out the most vulnerable homes on practically every street in San Francisco
This would only really work if GoogleMaps had a search term for find vulnerable houses, or more specifically find vulnerable houses with valuable contents.
Without that, the potential burglar would still have to scan through thousands and thousands of (not that detailed) images looking for clues.
A very boring and probably fruitless task (after several hours of browsing they may find a house with a vulnerable looking door, but the Google images won't tell them about the dog that barks every time someone approaches)
Daft idea I know, but could the StreetView also be useful for investigating crime too ?
If the StreetView has enough information in it to be useful for criminals to case a street, could it also be useful to the police in looking for clues to investigate a crime ? Say the police took a list of the 100 most recent burglaries and put them into GoogleMaps, could they use the images to try to find for common features of the houses ?
As I said, a daft idea and probably not that useful, but the point I'm trying to make is that GoogleMaps StreeView is yet another useful tool [full stop].
One that can be used for both good and bad things.
Both the criminal and the police would probably get better information by visiting the street in question, but if it makes things easier for criminals to plan a crime, then it could also be equally useful for the police to investigate the crime.
Question is, do we want to restrict something that the rest of us find useful because perhaps some people may also find it useful to plan crimes too ?
If so, then you might as well ban the whole internet thing... and printed street maps, and address books... because criminals probably find those useful too.
.. it wouldn't need to be rewritten - just recompiled with a suitable compiler.
Will things change as more people move to using OpenSource software on production systems.
If the entire source code for your server, database, webserver and applications are all available, then recompiling for a different platform becomes possible.
I know Joe public (or Jane sysadmin) wouldn't want to do this, but the Linux world has lots of keen techies and someone would attempt it.
As far as you being the owner of the network and allowing guest access to others visiting I think the first thing to do would be to corral the visiting machines off in their own VLAN and have it be treated as an external network by all your stuff. Sure they may be able to use your pipe to the world (again, push em through your firewall/proxy), but at least your stuff will treat them like the potentially dirty foreigners they are
Yep, that protects your internal systems from attack by nasty things on visitors laptops while still allowing visitors to access their home systems.
However, to the outside world, any spam sent from the visitors laptops appers to come from your network.
From the article:
Steven Swick, an IT engineer with American Electric Power, said the stock spam came from a bot-infected computer belonging to a contractor at one of its power generator plants
.. checking personal email from work should be on the top 10 things of "you aren't allowed to use the corporate network for this"..
I can understand why you would say that. However, what about external visitors to your site ?
A large part of my job involves visiting other university departments and conferences, email (and Jabber IM) contact with my home department is vital for being able to respond to questions and problems raised by the people that I meet. Which is why I'm there in the first place.
I'm not suggesting that you should allow unrestricted outbound access. Obviously, any spam sent by a visitors laptop would appear to come from your network, which is a bad thing. What I'm looking for is suggestions on how to handle the problem without preventing visitors access to the external tools that they need.
My own solution is to run linux on my laptop (reducing the probability that it would be a spam sender in the first place) and using a ssh tunnel to route any emails that I do send via the mail server at my home institute (so any spam it did send would appear to come from my home institute, not from the site that I'm visiting). If I can't access my department account, then I fall back to using my GMail account.
However, this isn't a generic solution for two reasons.
A lot of sites won't allow guest machines (particularly laptops on a wireless network) to use ssh to connect to a remote system
I know enough technical stuff to set this up. Normal users (those most probable to have a spam sending laptop) probably wouldn't
So, has anyone got any practical suggestions on how to setup a system that allows guest machines to access their (legitimate work related) external email (and IM chat) systems from within a host network without leaving the host network open to being labelled a spam sender ?
It depends on who you are trying to communicate to.
Like the parent post, I find email or text easier to than face to face communication.
So, if you want to sell your idea / product to me, then well written technical documentation will get a much better reception than a talkative salesman.
In fact, a sales talk from someone in a suit is the best way to put me off.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd agree with this, but for me, the new website design has lost the 'wow' factor.
When I first joined the seti@home project, their website produced amazing statistics like 'number of years cpu time in the last 24hrs'. I found that absolutely fantastic, and made me feel that I was contributing to something really big.
Their new website design shows you how many 'credits' your account has scored, but not what the project overall has achieved in terms of raw cpu power. Personally I find this kind of disappointing. I didn't join the project to earn 'credits', I joined to participate in the biggest compute project the world has ever seen.
I must admit that I've been less motivated to keep my seti processing machines updated. In fact, I don't think I have bothered to install the seti processor on any of my recent machines.
Out of interest, would you accept an applicant who wanted to telework ?
I used to work in commercial IT in the UK, but almost nowhere was prepared to consider teleworking or flexible hours.
In my experience, a lot of commercial IT roles involve a huge heap of office politics and bureaucracy that date back to the 1970s.
I quit commercial IT and joined an academic project as a software developer. So did many of the other people on our team.
We now have a team of very skilled developers and an excellent project manager, all of whom telework from home.
We use a lot of the same tools and techniques that open source projects use to keep everyone on a distributed team working together on the same page.
I don't think any of us would want to go back to commercial world.
So only large corporations with deep pockets would be able to claim and enforce ownership of their intellectual property ?
Bit tough on the small band who happened to write a nice catchy song. Why should a record label sign a recording deal with them if they could just take it and give it to one of their own artists ?
Bit tough on the developer community who create a cool new application. Why should a large software company contribute anything back to the community if they can just take the code and fold it into their own system ?
Digital technologies, such as CD and DVD players, have increased [fill in blank] compared to what !?
What happens if the user stores their multimedia content on a file server, and then tries to play them on a laptop by streaming the data across the local network ?
On our home network we have a file server with a large RAID array connected to a GigaBit ethernet switch. All our images, audio and video files on the server, and we view them on our desktop or laptop machines. None of this is specialist equipment.
No, it is the other way round. I'm suggesting we use the right name to describe things, so more like "call it what it actually is" than "it is what you call it".
The people you describe as Native-Americans aren't from India, they are American, so we shouldn't call them Indians. That is a name imposed on them by the European colonists. They had perfectly good names for themselves before we invaded, we just ignored them.
From Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_of _the_Americas
ps
Most definately not - Apologies if my comments are naive, I freely admit that I'm not an expert.However, I am a native of England.
I think the name kind of gives you a clue here ... 'English' as in 'the language of the people of England' (or more specifically 'the language of the King/Queen of England'*).
It is sort of like an open source project. When you break away from the group and establish your own project, you loose the modification rights over the original code base. If you want to take the basis of the language and evolve a new fork, called say 'American', then go for it.
* Yes, the Scots, Welsh and Irish have their own distinct languages too, but history says that the King who won was the King of England**.
** This was not necessarily a GoodThing(TM).
From the Mugshot FAQ page : http://mugshot.org/faq/ and
Yes, software compatability has been an issue, up to now. But could this change as open source systems gain more market share ?
In the past, a new architecture had to wait until Microsoft released a version of Windows for it and a significant number of other commercial software packages were ported before people would start to use it.
With open source, as soon as a new architecture is available someone, somewhere, immediately tries to get Linux running on it. Once someone gets the core C compilers and OS running then most, if not all, of the other open source applications become available on the new architecture.
If a chip manufacturer created a new architecture that had a significant performance gain over the current systems, and helped three or four of the major Linux distros to create a port that demonstrated a significant performance gain for server side applications (web servers or database servers etc). Would this be enough to entice data centers to adopt the new architecture ?
There are other issues. It would need more than one chip manufacturer and more than one motherboard manufacturer involved before people would take it seriously. None of the major data centers would want to adopt a platform that tied them to a single supplier.
Unit price would be another. Low volume production would mean that the new systems would more expensive.
I know this isn't going to happen any time soon, but does the adoption of open source software remove one of the barriers.
Just how much money is involved in evaluating, buying, deploying and now investigating these machines ?
The main reason cited for moving to electronic voting is that manual counting methods are too slow or inacurate.
My own hunch would be that if we took even half the ammount of money that has been wasted on these machines and spent it on researching ways to improve the speed and accuracy of the existing manual counting methods, we would have a better system that would be both secure and clear for everyone to understand.
Interesting, but it depends on what they are searching for.
They could be searches for 'the latest Microsoft software', and 'the latest Ubuntu release'. In which case, more searches means an increase in interest, which is good for Ubuntu.
Or, they could be searching for 'how to fix Microsoft [component]' and 'how to get Ubuntu [component] to work' In which case, fewer searches means fewer problems, which is good for Microsoft.
No, each Transputer had its own separate memory, and functioned like a standard CPU.
Quoting from the patent : http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?u=%2Fnet ahtml%2Fsrchnum.htm&Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&r= 1&l=50&f=G&d=PALL&s1=5056000.PN.&OS=PN/5056000&RS= PN/5056000
A system built from Transputers could indeed be configured to have
and adding a Transputer link switch to the system could enable and the Transputer link switch would probably qualify as but a standard Transputer system had separate memory for each CPU, and so wouldn't matchYou could build one of these using Transputers by adding some custom hardware, but I don't know of any Transputer systems available at the time that implemented shared memory.
Once a laptop gets infected, could it spread accross a wireless network that the laptop is connected to ?
All the machines connected to a public wireless access point will probably be on the same subnet.
Sort of like the early viri that were spread by floppy disk, they required a human carrier to transfer an infected disk from one machine to another.
This one requires a human carrier to transfer an infected laptop from one network to another.
From the article:
Article in last weeks New Scientist about nano technology: http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/nanot echnology/mg19526121.400-the-great-nanotech-gamble .html
(abstract only)
The idea behind chameleon liquid looks great, but perhaps we should check to see what it does to the environment before we start to use it for everything.
PC/104 (4" square) http://tlb.org/ttds-pc104.htmll
Pico-ITX (3.9" x 2.8") http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2154184680.htm
Embedded Ethernet Boards http://www.ethernut.de/en/hardware/index.html
Chumby http://www.chumby.com/
Make magazine (lots of fun stuff) http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/11/the_o pen_source_1.html
Transputer
I don't think anyone has to. There are a few specialist applications that are only available for Microsoft Windows, but even then, more and more of these are either being ported or replaced.
The change won't happen overnight, but gradually more and more people are installing alternatives, Mac or Ubuntu on the desktop/laptop and Unix or Linux on servers. When I meet someone who is having problems with the restrictions in Windows or Microsoft Office, I point them to the OpenSource alternatives.
As more and more people start to use the alternative tools, more and more documents will be available in the free (as in speech) formats.
I work on an international project, collaborating with scientists and developers from all over the world. When I write a document and publish it on our project wiki, I no longer bother to supply a Word .doc version.
The document itself is published as an OpenOffice document, and I provide a PDF version for people who don't have OpenOffice.
I have never been asked to supply a Word version.
It won't happen over night, but in a few years time (I hope) it will be the norm to email or publish documents in one of the open formats, and gradually the requirement to use Microsoft Office "because everyone else does" will deminish. At which point, schools, universities, businesses and ordinary users will be free to choose which software they use based on how well it does the job.
Of course, it might not turn out this way, and Microsoft will (understandably) try everything they can to protect their current position. So it is upto us to keep watching for tricks, FUD, underhand lobbying and dodgy patent agreements to make sure things turn out alright in the end.
I don't want to trivialise your recent troubles. You have my sympathy, and I hope that the burglary didn't cause you too much grief.
However, you seem to be suggesting that GoogleMaps StreetView may make us more vulnerable to crime.
This would only really work if GoogleMaps had a search term for find vulnerable houses, or more specifically find vulnerable houses with valuable contents.Without that, the potential burglar would still have to scan through thousands and thousands of (not that detailed) images looking for clues. A very boring and probably fruitless task (after several hours of browsing they may find a house with a vulnerable looking door, but the Google images won't tell them about the dog that barks every time someone approaches)
Daft idea I know, but could the StreetView also be useful for investigating crime too ?
If the StreetView has enough information in it to be useful for criminals to case a street, could it also be useful to the police in looking for clues to investigate a crime ? Say the police took a list of the 100 most recent burglaries and put them into GoogleMaps, could they use the images to try to find for common features of the houses ?
As I said, a daft idea and probably not that useful, but the point I'm trying to make is that GoogleMaps StreeView is yet another useful tool [full stop].
One that can be used for both good and bad things.
Both the criminal and the police would probably get better information by visiting the street in question, but if it makes things easier for criminals to plan a crime, then it could also be equally useful for the police to investigate the crime.
Question is, do we want to restrict something that the rest of us find useful because perhaps some people may also find it useful to plan crimes too ? If so, then you might as well ban the whole internet thing ... and printed street maps, and address books ... because criminals probably find those useful too.
Yes thank you.
Will things change as more people move to using OpenSource software on production systems. If the entire source code for your server, database, webserver and applications are all available, then recompiling for a different platform becomes possible. I know Joe public (or Jane sysadmin) wouldn't want to do this, but the Linux world has lots of keen techies and someone would attempt it.
Yep, that protects your internal systems from attack by nasty things on visitors laptops while still allowing visitors to access their home systems. However, to the outside world, any spam sent from the visitors laptops appers to come from your network.
From the article :
I can understand why you would say that. However, what about external visitors to your site ?
A large part of my job involves visiting other university departments and conferences, email (and Jabber IM) contact with my home department is vital for being able to respond to questions and problems raised by the people that I meet. Which is why I'm there in the first place.
I'm not suggesting that you should allow unrestricted outbound access. Obviously, any spam sent by a visitors laptop would appear to come from your network, which is a bad thing. What I'm looking for is suggestions on how to handle the problem without preventing visitors access to the external tools that they need.
My own solution is to run linux on my laptop (reducing the probability that it would be a spam sender in the first place) and using a ssh tunnel to route any emails that I do send via the mail server at my home institute (so any spam it did send would appear to come from my home institute, not from the site that I'm visiting). If I can't access my department account, then I fall back to using my GMail account.
However, this isn't a generic solution for two reasons.
So, has anyone got any practical suggestions on how to setup a system that allows guest machines to access their (legitimate work related) external email (and IM chat) systems from within a host network without leaving the host network open to being labelled a spam sender ?
It depends on who you are trying to communicate to.
Like the parent post, I find email or text easier to than face to face communication. So, if you want to sell your idea / product to me, then well written technical documentation will get a much better reception than a talkative salesman. In fact, a sales talk from someone in a suit is the best way to put me off.