The 4GB SD card was/is essentially dd-ed mirror of the first three hard disc partitions (/,/usr, + spare) sized to fit 4GB, though now it has drifted away as I have not applied all recent changes to the hard disc copy (manually, by mounting the partitions and hacking files with vi, etc).
The idea is that if/when the SD card dies from too many writes (I have no idea how long this will take even though I have minimised writes) then I can boot off hard disc with minimal work to get right back up to date, and/or stick a new SD card in, dd the partitions onto it (ext3, BTW), do the small fixes, eg in grub and fstab, and reboot off the new SD.
I have kept those changes that would not be trivial to re-apply in SVN on the hard disc.
As to Java: I have just moved a rack of (Solaris) servers @670W on to a single (Linux) laptop @18W (~25W from mains, but sometimes it runs off-grid on solar PV).
I actually now control the CPU-speed control with another small Java app (see update for 2007/08/20 on same page) and in particular watching it with strace() can't see the JVM doing anything that hand-crafted C wouldn't in the main loop.
In fact, the whole machine, including several Java and static Web servers, sendmail, etc, comes in at under 1% utilisation.
So Java and C at least are capable of being reasonably efficient providing the apps are written not to be profligate (I did a set of tweaks to minimise power-hungry CPU use unless there is 'excess'/spare power available from solar).
Just as an alternative ultracapacitor this sounds interesting: I'm going hunting for the efficiency numbers above, though they're going to be hard to gauge at this stage I guess!
I bought a (24-thread) T1 because it was *cheap* for the specs, and because I can use all that parallelism for my Web server ( http://mirror-uk-rb1.gallery.hd.org/ ) and stuff it is doing on the backend, and it is *lovely*.
I also use various flavours of Intel chips including Core Duos in the MacBook that I'm typing on now and in my new low-power Linux laptop that's replaced 5 old Solaris servers ( http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html ), but I have to say again that the T1/Niagara is lovely to write threaded code for (eg in Java).
I'm going through the exercise this month of replacing a whole slew of my always-on Internet servers at home (HTTP, SMTP, DNS, NTP) on machines going back long enough to still be running SunOS 4.1.3_U1 in one case, with a single Linux laptop. Current power consumption is ~700W. Target power consumption for the new system
So, it is doable and worth doing financially, and I don't have to pay the 3x extra cost right now to remove the heat with aircon (if I did, I could pay for the solar panels too power it even in midwinter too).
I would have thought that a nice call from the FBI to the CxOs of the main appropriate ISPs and a selection of those users on the fastest connections (ie with the most capacity to be damaging) would have a salutary effect.
And then a follow up with negligence-related charges for those who refused to give a f**k maybe?
I understand that VCs can be in an awkward position with thousands of headstrong idiots with vast egos and marginal me-too ideas.
But all the VCs that I've has money out of have signed an NDA or equivalent, so some of them clearly are able to get over this problem, which seems to me a very fundamental issue when effectively trading in IP.
Sorry, but it's the VC's problem, not mine, if they won't even make an effort to keep up their side of the due diligence.
A lot of VCs said rude/stupid/wrong/bulling/snide/nasty/thoughtless things during the dot-com boom because they could get away with it, such as one of my all-time-favourite turn-offs as a serial recipient of VC money: "We don't do NDAs", ie "Your ideas are not important so me might be careless with them"...
What was more interesting was that these jerks weren't around during after dot-bomb, but money still was, and I got some of it.
These people might be fine, but anyone whose view of me is based on "He said no to me so he MUST be dumb" is likely to be someone I don't want to work with. I hate conflict and CEO-style sociopathic posturing. So in fact it all works out.
Hi,
An alternative is to forget the all-or-nothing view, and make sure that with some simple round-robin DNS and enough geographically-separated servers for the DNS and HTTP/whatever, then even if one is taken out by a quake or Act of Congress (ewwww, those nature programmes), *most* users will still get through just fine. Any clients/proxies that are smart and that can try out multiple A records for one URL will always get through if even one of your servers is reachable.
Example: my main UK server failed strangely yesterday morning, but only about 30% of my visitors can even have noticed, and the other servers worldwide took up some of the load. Just simple and reliable and cheap round-robin DNS.
Rgds
Damon
I'm not sure about the "increasing evidence", and indeed the repeated WTO gambling ruling against the US is some evidence of the biter bit.
I hope so, because I don't think that I can safely travel to the US until it respects the standard of law and trade that it expects others to uphold. (I know there's a lot of domestic politics/religion/etc involved in this issue in particular, but those driving this should realise that the US has to watch out for the EU and China as serious competition and alternative havens for commerce and even liberty, now or very soon!)
Yes, I thought the two judgements that day dovetailed nicely.
The basic point is (to steal someone else's example): a parent should no more feel it is right to let their child roam unsupervised on the Net then let them roam unsupervised in any major city in the world. It is up to the PARENT and not the INFRASTRUCTURE to ensure their own child's safety, regardless of anyone's view of the morals/ethics/etc of porn and other 'unwanted' content.
The Net was never devised to be an extension of child-safe Disneyland and should not be subverted to be one. Why should I be blocked from reading papers on X-Ray Crystalography because of some hamfisted filtering built deep into a Tier-1's manditory COPA mechanism? Especially if neither I nor the benign site in question are in the US.
Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
The implication that the information is distributed like that in an optical hologram is very interesting, and doubly difficult to get my head around...
But the fact remains that if you damage/disturb a holographic store you lose some information, even if that loss is spread over a large set of information. Maybe the ECC (error-correcting-code) technology being used in new small-geometry silicon CPUs could help if it can be done 'quantum-ly'.
Never mind the developers/contributors, it is severely disconcerting to users of the code (and managers of those users) to feel that an OSS project is staffed by developer-hating truth-dodging self-regarding sociopaths.
Did anyone see the recent(ish) furore about synchronisation on session objects in Tomcat 5? I refuse to use any Tomcat newer than 4 until I think that someone not wedded to the sound of their own voice will take advice and rejoin the real world and make things *safe* without attempting to bend the spec out of whack to suit their own warped view of the world, programming and thread-safety!
I dislike the GNU licences, and won't put my code under them, because of its viral nature which says, in effect, that the FSF's agenda is more important than my work, ***IMHO***.
I like the BSD licence because it allows commercial organisations to use my work if they want to.
There's bits of my code in every recent Linux and Solaris release that I've look at, BTW, which saves me porting the code B^>.
The developer should be free to chose the licence model that they prefer. It's their work.
I've always thought that the Java sandbox is well-enough understood and fast enough to be a natural for this sort of thing, since it's properties are fairly well tested and understood. And 'HotSpot' JVMs can give very good performance too.
For example, I just put up this Java Web Start http://master.gallery.hd.org/_AI/remote.jsp project to enable people to help along my little AI project. It is entirely in the sandbox, and is careful with bandwidth and memory and CPU usage. But you don't have to trust me, you only have to trust Sun.
Note that the Sun Niagara machines responsible for their current black ink are already up to 32 cores and a few GB of memory. Perfect for Web servers, and Java's efficient concurrency-aware memory model lets you write stuff that avoid beating up your interconnect unnecessarily (eg lock-less algorithms). Yes, asymmetric CPUs are very hard to program and/or to apply to even relatively generic workloads...
Slashdot Mirror
There is no live mirroring going on.
/usr, + spare) sized to fit 4GB, though now it has drifted away as I have not applied all recent changes to the hard disc copy (manually, by mounting the partitions and hacking files with vi, etc).
The 4GB SD card was/is essentially dd-ed mirror of the first three hard disc partitions (/,
The idea is that if/when the SD card dies from too many writes (I have no idea how long this will take even though I have minimised writes) then I can boot off hard disc with minimal work to get right back up to date, and/or stick a new SD card in, dd the partitions onto it (ext3, BTW), do the small fixes, eg in grub and fstab, and reboot off the new SD.
I have kept those changes that would not be trivial to re-apply in SVN on the hard disc.
Rgds
Damon
As to Java: I have just moved a rack of (Solaris) servers @670W on to a single (Linux) laptop @18W (~25W from mains, but sometimes it runs off-grid on solar PV).
http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
I actually now control the CPU-speed control with another small Java app (see update for 2007/08/20 on same page) and in particular watching it with strace() can't see the JVM doing anything that hand-crafted C wouldn't in the main loop.
In fact, the whole machine, including several Java and static Web servers, sendmail, etc, comes in at under 1% utilisation.
So Java and C at least are capable of being reasonably efficient providing the apps are written not to be profligate (I did a set of tweaks to minimise power-hungry CPU use unless there is 'excess'/spare power available from solar).
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
Just as an alternative ultracapacitor this sounds interesting: I'm going hunting for the efficiency numbers above, though they're going to be hard to gauge at this stage I guess!
Rgds
Damon
I bought a (24-thread) T1 because it was *cheap* for the specs, and because I can use all that parallelism for my Web server ( http://mirror-uk-rb1.gallery.hd.org/ ) and stuff it is doing on the backend, and it is *lovely*.
I also use various flavours of Intel chips including Core Duos in the MacBook that I'm typing on now and in my new low-power Linux laptop that's replaced 5 old Solaris servers ( http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html ), but I have to say again that the T1/Niagara is lovely to write threaded code for (eg in Java).
Rgds
Damon
There are various 'entropy pool' based servers out there such as mine at http://random.hd.org/ and also see for example http://www.random.org/
The existing public servers gather noise from various sources such as audio or radio or radioactive decay.
Rgds
Damon
I'm going through the exercise this month of replacing a whole slew of my always-on Internet servers at home (HTTP, SMTP, DNS, NTP) on machines going back long enough to still be running SunOS 4.1.3_U1 in one case, with a single Linux laptop. Current power consumption is ~700W. Target power consumption for the new system So, it is doable and worth doing financially, and I don't have to pay the 3x extra cost right now to remove the heat with aircon (if I did, I could pay for the solar panels too power it even in midwinter too).
See http://www.earth.org.uk/low-power-laptop.html
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
I don't for a moment suggest *every*.
Just some of the bigger ISPs and users to maximise benefit and awareness in the meeja...
Rgds
Damon
I would have thought that a nice call from the FBI to the CxOs of the main appropriate ISPs and a selection of those users on the fastest connections (ie with the most capacity to be damaging) would have a salutary effect.
And then a follow up with negligence-related charges for those who refused to give a f**k maybe?
Rgds
Damon
I've just set up a tiny pilot project at home in the UK:
7 .html
http://www.earth.org.uk/solar-PV-pilot-summer-200
The manufacturer's warranty on the solar panel is 25 years IIRC.
(The numbers I have for energy payback for the cell/equipment manufacture is around 6 years, BTW, see: http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/archive/00002642/ )
Rgds
Damon
Which of those two categories is Britney Spears in?
Rgds
Damon
It's called a lever: http://www.exnet.com/
Hi,
I understand that VCs can be in an awkward position with thousands of headstrong idiots with vast egos and marginal me-too ideas.
But all the VCs that I've has money out of have signed an NDA or equivalent, so some of them clearly are able to get over this problem, which seems to me a very fundamental issue when effectively trading in IP.
Sorry, but it's the VC's problem, not mine, if they won't even make an effort to keep up their side of the due diligence.
Rgds
Damon
A lot of VCs said rude/stupid/wrong/bulling/snide/nasty/thoughtless things during the dot-com boom because they could get away with it, such as one of my all-time-favourite turn-offs as a serial recipient of VC money: "We don't do NDAs", ie "Your ideas are not important so me might be careless with them"...
What was more interesting was that these jerks weren't around during after dot-bomb, but money still was, and I got some of it.
These people might be fine, but anyone whose view of me is based on "He said no to me so he MUST be dumb" is likely to be someone I don't want to work with. I hate conflict and CEO-style sociopathic posturing. So in fact it all works out.
Rgds
Damon
Hi, An alternative is to forget the all-or-nothing view, and make sure that with some simple round-robin DNS and enough geographically-separated servers for the DNS and HTTP/whatever, then even if one is taken out by a quake or Act of Congress (ewwww, those nature programmes), *most* users will still get through just fine. Any clients/proxies that are smart and that can try out multiple A records for one URL will always get through if even one of your servers is reachable. Example: my main UK server failed strangely yesterday morning, but only about 30% of my visitors can even have noticed, and the other servers worldwide took up some of the load. Just simple and reliable and cheap round-robin DNS. Rgds Damon
b4 5b 1e 84 f0 1a 49 19 6d 9b ce d2 e2 2a 20 4c
= hex for all my other numbers...
62 5d a4 5d d8 8d 2a 1a cb 65 9d 46 80 cd 4d 69
dc 3a a4 5b 26 86 7d 40 e9 ef 86 d8 0a 81 1c 16
03 a8 a6 0a 18 48 44 22 f3 bd ae b7 61 26 d3 ae
ff 93 ef af 83 f5 1f 91 08 18 3d 09 ad 0a bd 0e
24 80 5d d6 b5 55 b8 83 1f ba 7a 49 d8 39 2f bb
58 23 07 2b b1 4b a9 b1 75 6f dd 9a 13 56 db 14
78 b3 5b 95 1a ce b3 18 5a 75 cc b8 69 30 c8 31
ec 2d 9b c7 89 f9 fe 73 16 17 d4 0d 14 e9 58 fb
4f 43 78 14 4d e5 8d 78 4f 6f 74 8b 08 81 3a ef
b6 10 e4 a9 fb bd 52 c7 be 48 f3 92 df d1 1c 5c
fb 3b b3 0c 5e 07 96 d4 3e 65 b6 4e 5b 79 c6 ff
43 46 32 f3 89 6a f7 52 31 37 7e 3c d0 e6 40 9d
06 aa 4a 62 9f c2 ac 03 6a 10 d3 1e 78 74 76 64
64 7f 72 10 9c ee e2 e1 3d 09 c4 5c 25 e3 62 50
65 92 d5 35 b3 c7 3d db 6b af 70 11 c6 55 f1 3c
See http://random.hd.org/getBits.jsp?numBytes=16&type
Keep your hands OFF *my* numbers!
Rgds
Damon
The Folsom Street Fetish Fair? http://gallery.hd.org/_c/places-and-sights/US-CA-S an-Francisco-Folsom-Street-fetish-fair-dancer-in-s uspended-cage-tweaked-mono-1-DHD.jpg.html
Yes, definitely an eye-opener! But actually I saw nothing 'lewd' on the street at all.
Rgds
Damon
Plenty more of these at http://random.hd.org/getBits.jsp?numBytes=16&type= hex
Hi,
I'm not sure about the "increasing evidence", and indeed the repeated WTO gambling ruling against the US is some evidence of the biter bit.
I hope so, because I don't think that I can safely travel to the US until it respects the standard of law and trade that it expects others to uphold. (I know there's a lot of domestic politics/religion/etc involved in this issue in particular, but those driving this should realise that the US has to watch out for the EU and China as serious competition and alternative havens for commerce and even liberty, now or very soon!)
Rgds
Damon
Yes, I thought the two judgements that day dovetailed nicely.
The basic point is (to steal someone else's example): a parent should no more feel it is right to let their child roam unsupervised on the Net then let them roam unsupervised in any major city in the world. It is up to the PARENT and not the INFRASTRUCTURE to ensure their own child's safety, regardless of anyone's view of the morals/ethics/etc of porn and other 'unwanted' content.
The Net was never devised to be an extension of child-safe Disneyland and should not be subverted to be one. Why should I be blocked from reading papers on X-Ray Crystalography because of some hamfisted filtering built deep into a Tier-1's manditory COPA mechanism? Especially if neither I nor the benign site in question are in the US.
Please note, US lawmakers, that quite a lot of the world and the Net *is* outside the US, BTW.
Rgds
Damon
Hi,
The implication that the information is distributed like that in an optical hologram is very interesting, and doubly difficult to get my head around...
But the fact remains that if you damage/disturb a holographic store you lose some information, even if that loss is spread over a large set of information. Maybe the ECC (error-correcting-code) technology being used in new small-geometry silicon CPUs could help if it can be done 'quantum-ly'.
Rgds
Damon
Did anyone say "Tomcat" or "JBoss"?
Never mind the developers/contributors, it is severely disconcerting to users of the code (and managers of those users) to feel that an OSS project is staffed by developer-hating truth-dodging self-regarding sociopaths.
Did anyone see the recent(ish) furore about synchronisation on session objects in Tomcat 5? I refuse to use any Tomcat newer than 4 until I think that someone not wedded to the sound of their own voice will take advice and rejoin the real world and make things *safe* without attempting to bend the spec out of whack to suit their own warped view of the world, programming and thread-safety!
Goodness.
Rgds
Damon
With stuff like this:
r o+hydro
http://gallery.hd.org/_cat/doHTMLSearch.jsp?q=mic
Rgds
Damon
PS. Also good for welding, cooling beer, and hair tongs...
I dislike the GNU licences, and won't put my code under them, because of its viral nature which says, in effect, that the FSF's agenda is more important than my work, ***IMHO***.
I like the BSD licence because it allows commercial organisations to use my work if they want to.
There's bits of my code in every recent Linux and Solaris release that I've look at, BTW, which saves me porting the code B^>.
The developer should be free to chose the licence model that they prefer. It's their work.
Rgds
Damon
For example, I just put up this Java Web Start http://master.gallery.hd.org/_AI/remote.jsp project to enable people to help along my little AI project. It is entirely in the sandbox, and is careful with bandwidth and memory and CPU usage. But you don't have to trust me, you only have to trust Sun.
Rgds
Damon
Note that the Sun Niagara machines responsible for their current black ink are already up to 32 cores and a few GB of memory. Perfect for Web servers, and Java's efficient concurrency-aware memory model lets you write stuff that avoid beating up your interconnect unnecessarily (eg lock-less algorithms). Yes, asymmetric CPUs are very hard to program and/or to apply to even relatively generic workloads...