/*Likely, as was seen with hurricane Katrina, communication was the biggest obstacle.*/
Regarding Katrina, there was an exercise conducted beforehand called Hurricane "Pam" that forecast many of the problems that were encountered while providing relief to Katrina victims. If the government is unable to integrate the results of disaster management exercises, what guarantee is there that the lessons of *this* drill will be integrated before the nex cyberattack.
In many ways this situation is worse. Hurricanes and other atmospheric phenomena can at least be forecast. Cyberattacks are inherently difficult to forecast, as forewarning would be of no use to any attacker, and therefore the attacker is likely to take active measures (disinformation/denial) to disguise the attack. One also has to take into account that the private companies aren't going to freely disclose vulnerabilities, and that the network can therfore be penetrated by a vulnerability that one did not know existed.
/*Wireless, GPRS, 3G etc are all pushing us back to the centralised model, it's cheaper, simpler and more efficient than fully distributed.*/
First of all, the majority of solutions you've described are nowhere near fully deployed. 802.11b/g is spreading, but you're still tethered to within a 100ft. or so of the nearest access point (discounting the few places that have city-wide wi-fi). 3G/GPRS are being deployed in a select few cities, but, again, is nowhere near providing full coverage. The big cities may get the fancy broadband wireless, but what about the boonies?
Secondly, there's still no guarantee that these technologies will be robust enough to provide guaranteed bandwidth in all areas. I see this everytime my cell phone loses its connection as I step into the basement. Its one thing to boast of providing 100Mbps at 100m across a clear field, but quite another thing to pull it off when there's buildings, cars and other electronics providing interference.
Third, even if you can get to 100% coverage with 100% bandwidth, you're still losing scalability by switching to a centralized system. Cell phones and other mobile devices are becoming more powerful every year. It'd be a huge waste to treat these devices are mere dumb terminals. Ideally, distributed applications would be best for this sort of an environment, as there'd be spare CPU cycles all around for you to use.
/*As we begin to see 4-core and 8-core CPUs, how long will it be until Microsoft begins charging per core?*/
As I recall, earlier there was some confusion about Microsoft's license agreements regarding the core vs. CPU issue in terms of licensing. Microsoft came out and explicitly stated that it was going to charge per CPU.
/*I would assume all of these cores sharing the same memory has to have more of a performance penalty.*/
Depends on your architecture, really. Intel chips might be hurt because of their sharing an external memory controller. AMD chips would experience little or no performance penalty, because they have the memory controller on-die, and the chance of two cores accessing the same memory address is small.
/*Adobe premiere recognizes the dual core during startup but I don't know of many programs that use both cores..i guess it just splits the load between them.*/
As sibling posters have indicated, that is not how it works. Unless an application is specifically written to be multithreaded, it will only use a single core. Multiple cores allow you to have multiple single-threaded applications open without as much of a performance hit, but multi-core will not significantly improve the performance of a given application, unless the app is rewritten/recompiled to take advantage of multiple cores.
While operating systems that scale well certainly are important, I fear that not enough priority is being given to making properly multithreaded applications. Having a multithreaded OS can only take you so far without properly written applications to take advantage of those OS features.
If you don't need a yearly subscription, you probably have the corporate edition, which, for some reason, is far leaner and more polished than the home version.
A fact is any statement that is falsifiable. For example, "The sky is green." is a falsifiable statement, and is therefore a fact, despite the fact that it is not true.
An opinion is any statement of personal belief. For example, "Coffee is bad." Because the criteria for good and bad can vary from person to person, the above statement is not falsifiable, and is an opinion.
Hmm, Myabe it's just me, but that sentence just does not add up. How can you have freedom of commerce in a centralized economy?
The way I've always read it is as such: while communism outlaws private enterprise, fascism seeks to take over the portions of the economy that are considered "vital to the state" while allowing private enterprise to fill in any gaps not covered by state production. In practice this means that the government will take over most of the large industrial producers and convert them to war production, and leave scraps for consumer goods.
No kidding. Where can I get me one of these? I'd happily pay up to $350 or so for something with a guaranteed long battery life and a much more rugged design than a conventional laptop. I mainly program on my laptop anyway, so as long as it runs vim I'm ok.
A well oiled company should only need a minimum of information exchange. So as metrics go, information flow is a pretty poor one.
I respectfully disagree. Information sharing is what allows one part of the company to see what the other part is doing and adjust accordingly, with a minimum of fuss, thus producing your "well-oiled machine" analogy. Without wide data paths between groups, teams don't know what other other teams are doing and either work to cross purposes, or make incorrect assumptions that lead to product failure.
A prime example of this was the failed Mars Climate Orbiter project. The contractor (Lockheed Martin?) assumed that certain data was being received in standard units. NASA, however, assumed that all data would handled in metric units. The result: the probe burned up in the atmosphere, after failing to slow itself properly. If the teams from NASA and the contractor had communicated more often, it would have been easier to weed out these incorrect assumptions.
The whole problem I've seen with this "one laptop per child" initiative is an inadequate focus on infrastructure. Sure, your laptop won't need a power cord due to its crank handle. But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.
Release XBOX360 a year before PS3. By the time PS3 hits 360 will be "cracked" (hoefully) -> Surge in 360 sales -> Death of Sony.
Except for the fact that Microsoft is taking ~$100 loss on every XBox sold. They are relying on games to recoup that loss. Since having a cracked system presumably allows you to play cracked games, I expect Microsoft to be coming down on these hardware mods in order to prevent proliferation of cracked games.
If he wanted to bring attention to this vulnerability, why didn't he post details on a public forum (e.g. bugtraq)? If he'd already notified Microsoft, why the secrecy?
Slashdot's moderation system is as useful as a weapon as it is a tool quality control.
And it is specifically that property that will limit the usefulness of any "global" moderation system. You'd have people running moderation vendettas against each other until the system became useless.
I'm only saying that, if I participate (or am provoked) into a flamewar on one site, I don't want that one event to drag down my reputation at other sites. If we use GPG keys, any moderation of my comments anywhere, even if such moderation is unfair, has the potential to affect my trustworthiness everywhere. I just think that this scheme gives moderators too much power.
I would argue that what is a good idea is reputation. A GPG system creates a reputation system that *persists* across the web. This is the fundamental good idea. If we could rank information *anywhere*, not just on Wikipedia, that would be great.
Yeah, like I really want some of my Slashdot posts to affect my Wikipedia karma...
4. Voters are given completely biased ballots. Proper ballots should force the voter to know who they are voting for and write in the candidate. Offering ballots showing the current office holder or party affiliation provides more power to the two authoritarian parties.
If the ballots forced you to write in the name of the candidate you were voting for, the two main parties would get even more of the vote than the currently do, because of their enormous advantage in advertising. Candidates from the two main parties have a huge advantage in name recognition compared to candidates from lesser parties.
7. Voters are confused by the colluding media that wants them to vote in order to give the authoritarian candidates the mandates needed to expand the power of government. Voters rarely hear that voting is wrong and that the process setting up the vote is a collusion between the authoritarian parties.
And how does not voting reduce the power of the government? You won't remove the two "authoritarian" parties from power by not going to the polling place.
From the article, it seems like the elections commission certified all voting machine manufacturers despite the fact that none of them were in compliance with the law. How was the elections commission allowed to do this? Wouldn't the logical solution have been to certify none of the voting machine manufacturers until they came into compliance with the law?
If no one except Linux enthusiasts care about Linux software, then what's the point of this article? The author is complaining that the Linux software development model is broken because Linux software development model breaks when apps try to appeal to a wider audience than the developer crowd. If that doesn't matter, then why is everyone so defensive when comparing OpenOffice to Microsoft Office?
Why not look at Linux, gnome, kde, or any other massive open source projects which do not receive the majority of their funding/source code from companies?
Perhaps because those projects do receive the majority of their funding from companies. Many distros, such as Red Hat, Mandriva and others use GNOME. Do you think that they don't have developers working to make the GNOME project better? SuSE (now a part of Novell) was a huge user and supporter of KDE. Linux has the backing of IBM, Novell, Sun, and many other figures. IBM and Red Hat have sponosored much Linux kernel development of late, and Novell has brought its Xen virtualization technology as well. I'd argue that the majority of Linux kernel and core library development is paid for by companies who see competitive advantage in improved versions of Linux. Google's "Summer of Code" project paid for lots of (budding) developers to spend time working on Open Source by making it financially viable for them to do so.
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/*Likely, as was seen with hurricane Katrina, communication was the biggest obstacle.*/
Regarding Katrina, there was an exercise conducted beforehand called Hurricane "Pam" that forecast many of the problems that were encountered while providing relief to Katrina victims. If the government is unable to integrate the results of disaster management exercises, what guarantee is there that the lessons of *this* drill will be integrated before the nex cyberattack.
In many ways this situation is worse. Hurricanes and other atmospheric phenomena can at least be forecast. Cyberattacks are inherently difficult to forecast, as forewarning would be of no use to any attacker, and therefore the attacker is likely to take active measures (disinformation/denial) to disguise the attack. One also has to take into account that the private companies aren't going to freely disclose vulnerabilities, and that the network can therfore be penetrated by a vulnerability that one did not know existed.
/*Wireless, GPRS, 3G etc are all pushing us back to the centralised model, it's cheaper, simpler and more efficient than fully distributed.*/
First of all, the majority of solutions you've described are nowhere near fully deployed. 802.11b/g is spreading, but you're still tethered to within a 100ft. or so of the nearest access point (discounting the few places that have city-wide wi-fi). 3G/GPRS are being deployed in a select few cities, but, again, is nowhere near providing full coverage. The big cities may get the fancy broadband wireless, but what about the boonies?
Secondly, there's still no guarantee that these technologies will be robust enough to provide guaranteed bandwidth in all areas. I see this everytime my cell phone loses its connection as I step into the basement. Its one thing to boast of providing 100Mbps at 100m across a clear field, but quite another thing to pull it off when there's buildings, cars and other electronics providing interference.
Third, even if you can get to 100% coverage with 100% bandwidth, you're still losing scalability by switching to a centralized system. Cell phones and other mobile devices are becoming more powerful every year. It'd be a huge waste to treat these devices are mere dumb terminals. Ideally, distributed applications would be best for this sort of an environment, as there'd be spare CPU cycles all around for you to use.
Virtualization isn't going to make the individual application run faster.
/* And seperate address/data busses, then? Sounds like a pretty high pin-count package.*/
AMD pulls it off with their DirectConnect architecture...
/*As we begin to see 4-core and 8-core CPUs, how long will it be until Microsoft begins charging per core?*/
As I recall, earlier there was some confusion about Microsoft's license agreements regarding the core vs. CPU issue in terms of licensing. Microsoft came out and explicitly stated that it was going to charge per CPU.
/*I would assume all of these cores sharing the same memory has to have more of a performance penalty.*/
Depends on your architecture, really. Intel chips might be hurt because of their sharing an external memory controller. AMD chips would experience little or no performance penalty, because they have the memory controller on-die, and the chance of two cores accessing the same memory address is small.
/*Adobe premiere recognizes the dual core during startup but I don't know of many programs that use both cores..i guess it just splits the load between them.*/
As sibling posters have indicated, that is not how it works. Unless an application is specifically written to be multithreaded, it will only use a single core. Multiple cores allow you to have multiple single-threaded applications open without as much of a performance hit, but multi-core will not significantly improve the performance of a given application, unless the app is rewritten/recompiled to take advantage of multiple cores.
While operating systems that scale well certainly are important, I fear that not enough priority is being given to making properly multithreaded applications. Having a multithreaded OS can only take you so far without properly written applications to take advantage of those OS features.
If you don't need a yearly subscription, you probably have the corporate edition, which, for some reason, is far leaner and more polished than the home version.
A fact is any statement that is falsifiable. For example, "The sky is green." is a falsifiable statement, and is therefore a fact, despite the fact that it is not true.
An opinion is any statement of personal belief. For example, "Coffee is bad." Because the criteria for good and bad can vary from person to person, the above statement is not falsifiable, and is an opinion.
Hmm, Myabe it's just me, but that sentence just does not add up. How can you have freedom of commerce in a centralized economy?
The way I've always read it is as such: while communism outlaws private enterprise, fascism seeks to take over the portions of the economy that are considered "vital to the state" while allowing private enterprise to fill in any gaps not covered by state production. In practice this means that the government will take over most of the large industrial producers and convert them to war production, and leave scraps for consumer goods.
No kidding. Where can I get me one of these? I'd happily pay up to $350 or so for something with a guaranteed long battery life and a much more rugged design than a conventional laptop. I mainly program on my laptop anyway, so as long as it runs vim I'm ok.
A well oiled company should only need a minimum of information exchange. So as metrics go, information flow is a pretty poor one.
I respectfully disagree. Information sharing is what allows one part of the company to see what the other part is doing and adjust accordingly, with a minimum of fuss, thus producing your "well-oiled machine" analogy. Without wide data paths between groups, teams don't know what other other teams are doing and either work to cross purposes, or make incorrect assumptions that lead to product failure.
A prime example of this was the failed Mars Climate Orbiter project. The contractor (Lockheed Martin?) assumed that certain data was being received in standard units. NASA, however, assumed that all data would handled in metric units. The result: the probe burned up in the atmosphere, after failing to slow itself properly. If the teams from NASA and the contractor had communicated more often, it would have been easier to weed out these incorrect assumptions.
The whole problem I've seen with this "one laptop per child" initiative is an inadequate focus on infrastructure. Sure, your laptop won't need a power cord due to its crank handle. But how are you going to get on the internet? In my experience, having a computer is increasingly irrelevant if that computer does not enhance your ability to obtain and share information.
Actually, that's the other advantage having a "cracked" XBox is supposed to give you: the ability to play games off the hard drive.
Release XBOX360 a year before PS3. By the time PS3 hits 360 will be "cracked" (hoefully) -> Surge in 360 sales -> Death of Sony.
Except for the fact that Microsoft is taking ~$100 loss on every XBox sold. They are relying on games to recoup that loss. Since having a cracked system presumably allows you to play cracked games, I expect Microsoft to be coming down on these hardware mods in order to prevent proliferation of cracked games.
If he wanted to bring attention to this vulnerability, why didn't he post details on a public forum (e.g. bugtraq)? If he'd already notified Microsoft, why the secrecy?
Slashdot's moderation system is as useful as a weapon as it is a tool quality control.
And it is specifically that property that will limit the usefulness of any "global" moderation system. You'd have people running moderation vendettas against each other until the system became useless.
I'm only saying that, if I participate (or am provoked) into a flamewar on one site, I don't want that one event to drag down my reputation at other sites. If we use GPG keys, any moderation of my comments anywhere, even if such moderation is unfair, has the potential to affect my trustworthiness everywhere. I just think that this scheme gives moderators too much power.
I would argue that what is a good idea is reputation. A GPG system creates a reputation system that *persists* across the web. This is the fundamental good idea. If we could rank information *anywhere*, not just on Wikipedia, that would be great.
Yeah, like I really want some of my Slashdot posts to affect my Wikipedia karma...
Yes, but its not often that a state commission violates its own mandate so brazenly.
4. Voters are given completely biased ballots. Proper ballots should force the voter to know who they are voting for and write in the candidate. Offering ballots showing the current office holder or party affiliation provides more power to the two authoritarian parties.
If the ballots forced you to write in the name of the candidate you were voting for, the two main parties would get even more of the vote than the currently do, because of their enormous advantage in advertising. Candidates from the two main parties have a huge advantage in name recognition compared to candidates from lesser parties.
7. Voters are confused by the colluding media that wants them to vote in order to give the authoritarian candidates the mandates needed to expand the power of government. Voters rarely hear that voting is wrong and that the process setting up the vote is a collusion between the authoritarian parties.
And how does not voting reduce the power of the government? You won't remove the two "authoritarian" parties from power by not going to the polling place.
From the article, it seems like the elections commission certified all voting machine manufacturers despite the fact that none of them were in compliance with the law. How was the elections commission allowed to do this? Wouldn't the logical solution have been to certify none of the voting machine manufacturers until they came into compliance with the law?
Am I missing something here (e.g. time limit)?
If no one except Linux enthusiasts care about Linux software, then what's the point of this article? The author is complaining that the Linux software development model is broken because Linux software development model breaks when apps try to appeal to a wider audience than the developer crowd. If that doesn't matter, then why is everyone so defensive when comparing OpenOffice to Microsoft Office?
Hmmm... I didn't know I could use LaTeX as a spreadsheet.
Does it do presentations as well?
Why not look at Linux, gnome, kde, or any other massive open source projects which do not receive the majority of their funding/source code from companies?
Perhaps because those projects do receive the majority of their funding from companies. Many distros, such as Red Hat, Mandriva and others use GNOME. Do you think that they don't have developers working to make the GNOME project better? SuSE (now a part of Novell) was a huge user and supporter of KDE. Linux has the backing of IBM, Novell, Sun, and many other figures. IBM and Red Hat have sponosored much Linux kernel development of late, and Novell has brought its Xen virtualization technology as well. I'd argue that the majority of Linux kernel and core library development is paid for by companies who see competitive advantage in improved versions of Linux. Google's "Summer of Code" project paid for lots of (budding) developers to spend time working on Open Source by making it financially viable for them to do so.
Are you saying that none of these things count?