Orthogonal persistence is a wonderful concept but if taken to its logical extreme it could have some problems.
"Bit rot" is a fact of life in big systems. Lots of interconnected components sometimes develop internal inconsistencies in their state and fail. Being able to reboot the system is often the only way to recover.
You can't really reboot a persistent system - it just restores the last state and continues from there. Essentially, it lives forever.
It is true that software today wastes a lot of resources in translating back and forth between the tranisent memory image and the persistent filesystem state, but it gives you the ability to reboot if something goes wrong.
I don't know about EROS but in KeyKOS (EROS's predecessor) there was no way to initialize the system - it was shipped as the memory image of a running copy which was somehow created manually by the deveopers and after that it lives forever. If you experience bit rot the only thing you can do is hope you know when it really started and restore a backup made prior to that time, losing all changes done since.
With all due respect, try searching for "to be or not to be" on google. It doesn't allow searching for sentences and it doesn't allow all those +s and -s which are so useful on altavista.
When searching for something which is so common you will find hundreds of results and you want the most relevant one - you can't beat google. But for those hard-to-find tidbits altavista is still the best.
Mutt is my main email client and I am very happy with it. The one thing I don't really like about it is the fact that it won't accept plain in-line PGP-encrypted email, only PGP/Mime and application/x-pgp attachments. The procmail hack suggested in the documentation for solving this issue is not exactly elegant.
This seems to go against Jon Postel's well-known principle: "Be conservative in what you generate, liberal in what you accept" - generate properly formatted PGP/Mime, but accept any kind of PGP encrypted message.
In an attempt to slow down the declassification effort a new provision requires that all documents be reexamined to find whether nuclear weapons data has been inadvertently released into the public domain in the last few years.
A really brilliant move.
If you say anything against it you can be immediately accused of letting terrorists get information which will help them build nuclear weapons.
"Ok, just prove there ISN'T nuclear weapon information in one of these half-billion pages"
Does anyone here have any experience with Sendmail PRO? How good is the user interface at hiding the complexity of sendmail.cf? Does it manage to hide the complexity while still exposing the power of sendmail? Is it a good solution for a 50-100 user network?
At $895 it may sound a little expensive - but have you looked at the pricing for Exchange server lately? A 50 seat license will set you back $4,859.
I am definitely not against paying for software - but is it worth it? (Sendmail PRO, that is... you didn't think I was talking about Exchange, did you?)
In an industry mass producing things by the millions an extra 10 cents on the bill of materials can make a big difference.
The 902-928MHz unlicensed band is covered by cheap silicon because the cellular band is close enough. The silicon RF chips for the 1.8 GHz PCS band cannot be easily stretched to cover the 2.4GHz unlicensed band and it remains a little expensive to implement. Bluetooth will change that soon but 5GHz is still out of the range of cheap silicon.
(and yes, the 9 GHz upper limit was a typo...) ----
The frequency block allocated is 5.850 to 9.925 Gigahertz. That is 75MHz of spectrum. For comparison, the entire FM stereo block is just 20MHz. But at these high frequencies spectrum is cheaper. These frequencies also require more-or-less a clear line-of-sight for communication and the hardware to use it is more expensive. Such frequencies require GaAs RF components and are currently beyond the reach of cheap silicon MMIC (microwave monolithic ICs). But this is going change with the ongoing improvements to silicon processes. Soon this band and the unlicensed NII band (National Information Infrastructure - 5.725-5.825 GHz) will be supported by cheap mass-produced high-integration silicon.
There has been some concern over the use of thw ':' character in the text representation of IPv6 addresses - this could break some programs parsing addresses or especially URLs.
There is an internet draft which proposes the following native format:
instead of "ABCD:EF01::2345:10.9.8.7" use "ABCD-EF01--2345-10.9.8.7.ipv6" which contains only characters valid on a domain name and marks the with a pseudo-TLD of ".ipv6"
I have received reports from different unrelated sources about various people and organizations who approach breaking into systems very seriously and very differently from the regular crackers. Most of the time they don't bother to invent their own expoits. They take the existing ones and convert them from a simple command-like utility to another weapon on a sophisticates automated cracking engine. By automating the process they can gain access to tens of thousands of machines or more. These tools can break in, cover their tracks and install a hidden back door in seconds.
I'll leave the possibilities of having tens of thousands of machines on well-connected high-bandwidth networks as an excercise to the reader.
...which says that in any Slashdot discussion reporting about something there will be at least one post claiming that this isn't really new.
Shall I break such a grand old tradition?
Of course not. There is a computer games called Virus which has a similar concept: you are fighting a virus infecting your computer inside a 3d visualization of your hard disk and you can see the virus destroying your own files and directories. The difference is that unlike this doom version the files aren't really deleted...
I really can't wait for the day when a routine linux kernel release doesn't make a slashdot headline. Will I have to wait until linux is obsoleted by another open source project or will it actually happen before that?
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
----
Re:Move by Intel to try to kill FireWire?
on
USB2 Specs Are In
·
· Score: 2
> "The big drawback is that USB actually uses CPU > horsepower and some people are just not happy > with that. This is why people push IEEE 1394 > (Firewire) so much. It has high bandwidth but > doesn't eat up the processing power that > USB does."
This is absolutely not correct. The USB host controller is using PCI bus-mastering for all transactions based on transaction lists set up by the host. Everything is optimized for minimum CPU impact. Actually, its architecture is very similar to a 1394 host controller. The CPU impact of a USB serial port can be two orders of magnitude lower than an ISA serial port (up to a microsecond per access!)
The source of this error is probably because of USB audio - the audio device is just a fixed rate DAC and all mixing and sample rate conversion for DirectSound, MIDI synthesis, etc is currently done by the host CPU. You will get exactly the same performance with 1394 since it will use the same WDM audio stack and just replace the minidriver at the bottom.
You are correct about Intel always wanting to use more CPU power. A fast bus like USB2 will allow cheap dumb peripherals while doing all the processing on the host. For example, you could have an ADSL modem which is nothing more than a fast A/D and D/A and do all the modulation and error correction coding on the host.
BTW, the USB 2.0 will be on the CPU local bus, not on PCI since PCI isn't fast enough...
I have recently revised by beliefs about cold fusion from the standard explanation: "it's probably somewhere between gross measurement errors and downright hoax" to the milder version of: "there might actually be something there after all, but it's hard to tell with the current atmosphere" Apparently, there are many scientists all over the world and even in U.S. national labs still quietly researching cold fusion, often under less controversial titles such as "New Hydrogen Energy". They hold conferences, show bubbling electrolysis cells and claim the thermal energy output significantly exceeds the electric input for weeks.
Are these people all completely incompetent in operating a calorimeter? Are they all charlatans spiking their samples with helium and other fusion byproducts? I'm finding it harder and harder to believe.
These scientists are attacked by their colleagues, publicly ridiculed and their careers are often in danger. I can easily find parallels to the case of Barbara McClintock who discovered in the 1930s that some genes actually "jump around" and switch places in the chromosomes. The idea was so at odds with the prevailing paradigm that she was ridiculed for decades until she finally received a Nobel prize in 1983.
I'm not claiming that the fact that someone is ridiculed by his peers is proof that he is correct, just that there are certain well-documented cases that the scientific community can be severely biased against theories which contradict common beliefs, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Written by Catherine Faber, performed by filksinger Kathy Mar. You can download it on MP3.com
The Word of God
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design, Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline. . . We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known, And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone. Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks and shells are found; Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground. The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks. Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night, Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light. Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will, Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still. High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars, The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars. We may watch and study or may shudder and deny, Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur, How the living things that are descend from things that were. The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies, These tiny, humble, wordless things---how shall they tell us lies? We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring. The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing. Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife, Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade, Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made, Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand. The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand. Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed, The truth has left its living word for anyone to read. So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled. Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
Huffman coding is optimal only if the probabilities of your alphabet all happen to be (1/2^N) for integer Ns. The problem with Huffman coding is that it can't allocate a fraction of a bit.
Arithmetic coding achieves the equivalent of allocating fractions of bits and truely achieves the optimal compression in cases where the distribution of each symbol is not correlated to previous symbols.
In most cases, though, the difference between Huffman and Arithmetic coding are negligible.
The quote kinda loses it's original meaning when misquoted as "Linux doesn't scale".
The "Linux doesn't scale" argument and many of the other examples he presents about personality problems aren't really problems in the open source model itself- they are inherent problems with people working together. In fact, it is a testimony for the robustness of the model that it works as well as it does IN SPITE of these problems.
When such personality problems hit a closed project you usually don't get to hear about it. You can often tell by the result, though...
The writer spends most of the article debunking claims that ESR never made, and the tone is too personal - It doesn't sound anything like a proper critique.
One of the few valid points he raises, though, is the one about Microsoft's importance to open source culture...
Slashdot Mirror
Orthogonal persistence is a wonderful concept but if taken to its logical extreme it could have some problems.
"Bit rot" is a fact of life in big systems. Lots of interconnected components sometimes develop internal inconsistencies in their state and fail. Being able to reboot the system is often the only way to recover.
You can't really reboot a persistent system - it just restores the last state and continues from there. Essentially, it lives forever.
It is true that software today wastes a lot of resources in translating back and forth between the tranisent memory image and the persistent filesystem state, but it gives you the ability to reboot if something goes wrong.
I don't know about EROS but in KeyKOS (EROS's predecessor) there was no way to initialize the system - it was shipped as the memory image of a running copy which was somehow created manually by the deveopers and after that it lives forever. If you experience bit rot the only thing you can do is hope you know when it really started and restore a backup made prior to that time, losing all changes done since.
----
Although I don't agree with the contents of the above post, I think it would make a good question to Mr. Schneier.
----
Secure distribution of digital media depends, by definition, on tamper-proof hardware/software.
It is therefore not very interesting cryptographically.
----
Altavista detects lynx automatically and switches to text mode. Just "av" will do :-)
----
av.com/?text=y
----
With all due respect, try searching for "to be or not to be" on google. It doesn't allow searching for sentences and it doesn't allow all those +s and -s which are so useful on altavista.
When searching for something which is so common you will find hundreds of results and you want the most relevant one - you can't beat google. But for those hard-to-find tidbits altavista is still the best.
----
Mutt is my main email client and I am very happy with it. The one thing I don't really like about it is the fact that it won't accept plain in-line PGP-encrypted email, only PGP/Mime and application/x-pgp attachments. The procmail hack suggested in the documentation for solving this issue is not exactly elegant.
This seems to go against Jon Postel's well-known principle: "Be conservative in what you generate, liberal in what you accept" - generate properly formatted PGP/Mime, but accept any kind of PGP encrypted message.
----
In an attempt to slow down the declassification effort a new provision requires that all documents be reexamined to find whether nuclear weapons data has been inadvertently released into the public domain in the last few years.
A really brilliant move.
If you say anything against it you can be immediately accused of letting terrorists get information which will help them build nuclear weapons.
"Ok, just prove there ISN'T nuclear weapon information in one of these half-billion pages"
----
Does anyone here have any experience with Sendmail PRO? How good is the user interface at hiding the complexity of sendmail.cf? Does it manage to hide the complexity while still exposing the power of sendmail? Is it a good solution for a 50-100 user network?
At $895 it may sound a little expensive - but have you looked at the pricing for Exchange server lately? A 50 seat license will set you back $4,859.
I am definitely not against paying for software - but is it worth it? (Sendmail PRO, that is... you didn't think I was talking about Exchange, did you?)
----
In an industry mass producing things by the millions an extra 10 cents on the bill of materials can make a big difference.
The 902-928MHz unlicensed band is covered by cheap silicon because the cellular band is close enough. The silicon RF chips for the 1.8 GHz PCS band cannot be easily stretched to cover the 2.4GHz unlicensed band and it remains a little expensive to implement. Bluetooth will change that soon but 5GHz is still out of the range of cheap silicon.
(and yes, the 9 GHz upper limit was a typo...)
----
The frequency block allocated is 5.850 to 9.925 Gigahertz. That is 75MHz of spectrum. For comparison, the entire FM stereo block is just 20MHz. But at these high frequencies spectrum is cheaper. These frequencies also require more-or-less a clear line-of-sight for communication and the hardware to use it is more expensive. Such frequencies require GaAs RF components and are currently beyond the reach of cheap silicon MMIC (microwave monolithic ICs).
But this is going change with the ongoing improvements to silicon processes. Soon this band and the unlicensed NII band (National Information Infrastructure - 5.725-5.825 GHz) will be supported by cheap mass-produced high-integration silicon.
----
There has been some concern over the use of thw ':' character in the text representation of IPv6 addresses - this could break some programs parsing addresses or especially URLs.
There is an internet draft which proposes the following native format:
instead of "ABCD:EF01::2345:10.9.8.7" use "ABCD-EF01--2345-10.9.8.7.ipv6" which contains only characters valid on a domain name and marks the with a pseudo-TLD of ".ipv6"
----
I have received reports from different unrelated sources about various people and organizations who approach breaking into systems very seriously and very differently from the regular crackers. Most of the time they don't bother to invent their own expoits. They take the existing ones and convert them from a simple command-like utility to another weapon on a sophisticates automated cracking engine. By automating the process they can gain access to tens of thousands of machines or more. These tools can break in, cover their tracks and install a hidden back door in seconds.
I'll leave the possibilities of having tens of thousands of machines on well-connected high-bandwidth networks as an excercise to the reader.
----
...which says that in any Slashdot discussion reporting about something there will be at least one post claiming that this isn't really new.
Shall I break such a grand old tradition?
Of course not. There is a computer games called Virus which has a similar concept: you are fighting a virus infecting your computer inside a 3d visualization of your hard disk and you can see the virus destroying your own files and directories. The difference is that unlike this doom version the files aren't really deleted...
----
I really can't wait for the day when a routine linux kernel release doesn't make a slashdot headline. Will I have to wait until linux is obsoleted by another open source project or will it actually happen before that?
----
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
----
Many companies issue patents as a purely defensive move to use in out-of-court settlements when they are sued for infringement. Some companies even make a public statement about the conditions in which the will or will not use the patents. I wonder if the open source community could get IBM to issue such a statement about open source or non-profit software. IBM has one of the world's biggest patent portfolio.
----
> "The big drawback is that USB actually uses CPU
> horsepower and some people are just not happy
> with that. This is why people push IEEE 1394
> (Firewire) so much. It has high bandwidth but
> doesn't eat up the processing power that
> USB does."
This is absolutely not correct. The USB host controller is using PCI bus-mastering for all transactions based on transaction lists set up by the host. Everything is optimized for minimum CPU impact. Actually, its architecture is very similar to a 1394 host controller. The CPU impact of a USB serial port can be two orders of magnitude lower than an ISA serial port (up to a microsecond per access!)
The source of this error is probably because of USB audio - the audio device is just a fixed rate DAC and all mixing and sample rate conversion for DirectSound, MIDI synthesis, etc is currently done by the host CPU. You will get exactly the same performance with 1394 since it will use the same WDM audio stack and just replace the minidriver at the bottom.
You are correct about Intel always wanting to use more CPU power. A fast bus like USB2 will allow cheap dumb peripherals while doing all the processing on the host. For example, you could have an ADSL modem which is nothing more than a fast A/D and D/A and do all the modulation and error correction coding on the host.
BTW, the USB 2.0 will be on the CPU local bus, not on PCI since PCI isn't fast enough...
Belgium is fast becoming the Mecca for speech and language technology with players like Lernout & Hauspie and projects like Flanders Language Valley.
All of europe really needs these kinds of technologies, but Belgium is one of the more multilingual countries within Europe.
I have recently revised by beliefs about cold fusion from the standard explanation:
"it's probably somewhere between gross measurement errors and downright hoax"
to the milder version of:
"there might actually be something there after all, but it's hard to tell with the current atmosphere"
Apparently, there are many scientists all over the world and even in U.S. national labs still quietly researching cold fusion, often under less controversial titles such as "New Hydrogen Energy". They hold conferences, show bubbling electrolysis cells and claim the thermal energy output significantly exceeds the electric input for weeks.
Are these people all completely incompetent in operating a calorimeter? Are they all charlatans spiking their samples with helium and other fusion byproducts? I'm finding it harder and harder to believe.
These scientists are attacked by their colleagues, publicly ridiculed and their careers are often in danger. I can easily find parallels to the case of Barbara McClintock who discovered in the 1930s that some genes actually "jump around" and switch places in the chromosomes. The idea was so at odds with the prevailing paradigm that she was ridiculed for decades until she finally received a Nobel prize in 1983.
I'm not claiming that the fact that someone is ridiculed by his peers is proof that he is correct, just that there are certain well-documented cases that the scientific community can be severely biased against theories which contradict common beliefs, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.
Sir Clarke may have the last laugh after all...
Written by Catherine Faber, performed by filksinger Kathy Mar. You can download it on MP3.com
The Word of God
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline. . .
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks and shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things---how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
Compression using the Huffman algorithm is commonly referred to as huffing. Decompression was naturally dubbed puffing.
Huffman coding is optimal only if the probabilities of your alphabet all happen to be (1/2^N) for integer Ns. The problem with Huffman coding is that it can't allocate a fraction of a bit.
Arithmetic coding achieves the equivalent of allocating fractions of bits and truely achieves the optimal compression in cases where the distribution of each symbol is not correlated to previous symbols.
In most cases, though, the difference between Huffman and Arithmetic coding are negligible.
The quote kinda loses it's original meaning when misquoted as "Linux doesn't scale".
The "Linux doesn't scale" argument and many of the other examples he presents about personality problems aren't really problems in the open source model itself- they are inherent problems with people working together. In fact, it is a testimony for the robustness of the model that it works as well as it does IN SPITE of these problems.
When such personality problems hit a closed project you usually don't get to hear about it. You can often tell by the result, though...
The writer spends most of the article debunking claims that ESR never made, and the tone is too personal - It doesn't sound anything like a proper critique.
One of the few valid points he raises, though, is the one about Microsoft's importance to open source culture...