I know folks into amature radio can get internet connections pretty much anywhere. Connections are 1200 baud, and it is shared, so don't expect much. Web browsing is out, but email can work.
Note that my information is a bit old in this area. I used to know one of the admins for the Minneapolis amature radio IP network, but that was a few years ago and I've since lost touch. Seems like someone in this crowd would have a solution though.
I love underground cabling as it greatly reduces the chances of my gear getting fried.
I have personally had two modems fried from lightning hitting our underground phone cable. In one case I unpluged the computer from the wall before the store (which I knew was coming). Both of the modems didn't work at all, and both computers lost their serial ports (but the computer otherwise worked) FWIW, our electric service is above ground.
I envision desktop (and despit the hype, most people will do most of there work as a desk just because it is so convient) with wired access. anytime you move you get the portable (laptop or palm I don't care) and it will be wireless. wired has no bandwidth limitations, doesn't get over crowded with neighbors... wireless allows you to put the instructions on rebuilding your engine under the shade tree next to the car.
Both are useful, and so long as people use wired where it is possibla and leave wireless to those situations where wired is impractical things will work well.
There were several prizes for solving fremat's last theorom. One of the larger was set up my german mathamatitions before WWI. Unfortunatly inflation in germany in the '20s turned several million into enough for a gumball.
Most likely you have a much better chance at winning the lottery, unless you don't compete in the lottery in which case both chances equal nil:)
Accually your odds of winning the lottery (By which we mean the biggest jackpot in the largest drawing, since smaller lotteries are winnable) is almost exactly the same wither you buy a ticker or not. Remember you can find the winning ticket on the sidewalk. For normal statistics you can ignore those events as insignificant, but winning the lottery is so statisticly unlikely at you have to factor finding the winning ticket it, which is only slightly smaller. (Order of mangnitude yes, but not significant)
The odds that I will come up with any solution in my lifetime are very low as I currently stand - I don't think about math in general much. If I decided to solve one problem my odds of doing so in my lifetime increase dramaticly. Of course deciding that I want to solve one of those problems means that spend all my freetime on it. I'd sell my boat since I wouldn't use it, move into a tiny house (preferabbly near a major university so I can access their library and professors... perhaps even become a professor though as others have said I'd be unlikely to make tenure) I'm smart enough to make reasonable progress in a solution if I dedicated my life to it. I may or may not find a solution, but I have a chance.
Dedicate your life to being the big winnder in the lottery doesn't depend much on your brains. While it is true that I can increase my odds of winning the lottery, to do so significantly would mean leaving cheaply (again, no boat...) and making enough money that in the end I'd have more money saving it all then I'd get when I got the winning ticket.
Re:Been there, wrote it myself
on
Linux Failover?
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· Score: 1
Right, it isn't the best design. However the redundant machines are designed so we can operatue without them for several minutes if need be. The recovery procedure if the Master really does fail involves the backup rebooting. (These machine control other hardware that must work all the time, and that hardware is both more robust and can operate without the controllers for a short time if need be. You just lose access to the disc so you cannot reconfigure them.
I didn't want to get into all the head aches we faced due to the bad design above, it is byond the scope of the orginal question. We are however re-doing things to fix that.
As the other poster said, it depends on the driver. Thats the bad news
The good news is DecNet requires the driver (and hardware) be able to change the MAC address. Thus even for cheap cards most of them can just in case the vender ever has the chance to sell to the last shop out there still running decnet.
I wrote software for Solaris (Which as others have pointed out does not do this without 3rd party software) because we found that no solution would fit our needs well. When looking at the prive tag we concluded that we could do better. (Come to think of it there is High avaiable Solaris, but it isn't cheaper or better then 3rd party stuff)
Basicly we ping something on the other side of the router every 5 seconds, and if the ping doesn't come back we switch to the other port. That is the overview, but you need to do some more isolation before you blindly switch ports.
I strongly recomend you put in some other path between you and the box you are pinging. Several times we have been bitten when the box we weere pinging went down and not the router, or alternaticly the network was so busy the ping didn't get through within our timeout period.
There is no portable way in solaris to tell if one ethernet port has signal. You can find out from some drivers, but when you change to a different ehternet card you have to do something else to find out.
My goal is to write code that doesn't break. I prefer not to do medical or aircraft work where someone dies, focusing instead on systems that would simply cause anouther depression if it breaks. (Which probably kills more people in the long run)
I tried writting user interfaces. I hated that work. I work with folks who love that work. I like flipping bits and watching them cross several busses and appear (inverted) at a different processor. I love yanking out processors that are running my code, and have my code automaticlly move to a different processor. To me that is cool, to others around me it is just a lot of work.
In other words, we are all different. I'm no better or worse then my peers. We work differently, and like different areas. I can do the work that others around me do, but they like it I don't, and vise versa.
You end up having to try things to decide if you like them. Some folks work on KDE, others userland of FreeBSD, others the Linux kernel. Given enough time one person could do all of the above to the same quality, but they would hate some tasks and love others. ANd of course as time goes on your grow, so a task you hated before you might like now, or something you used to love now just bores you to tears.
Don't be inflexable. Someday the inflexable will find that nobody cares about the awesome system he wrote and he no longer can get a job. Because he is unwilling to learn something new the inflexable person is lost. (The mainframe is a classic example, it is slowly dieing. Not because it is bad - though we have learned much about comptuer design since it was made, but because it is out of style. Do you really want to be on a sinking ship, without knowing how to use the life boat? There is a lot of money in mainframes today, but you better know something else)
Don't be too flexable. Sometimes you have to say "I can do this, but it isn't right." Or maybe you are so flexable that you get a new job every few months. You need to see a project through to completion, see what customers really think. (Open source isn't such a problem here, but in buisness you cannot contribute to two different companies at a time.)
I like where I am now, and what I'm doing. I could have - perhaps should have taken an opertunity to transfer to a different department. Only time will tell what would have been best.
The problem is how do you get an unbiased person to review it? Since the dominate religion in our cultur is based on it, it is hard to be unbiased. It was hard enough for me to take greek mythology, and nobody has belived it in a thousand years or so. (With some exception I suppose, but not a significant number)
We are clouded by out culture. When I read a new book by an unknown author I can expect the reviewers are honest. When the culture has knowlege of the book things are different. The Phantom Menance is a perfect example, those I know who have seen it tell me that it was a good movie, but because of our culture people expected too much of it. The orginial Star Wars really wasn't much better (Though they tend to agree it was better), but our perspectives are different, we went into Star Wars not expecting as much as we got, so we set the level higher.
I can give a simple review: a long book, that gets tough going. The book is orginized out of order, and no attempt was made to make it easy to tell which events came first. Mixed in with prophsies of doom against cultures that nobody remembers outside of this book are wonderful short stories.
Everyone should read the bible. As a christian I say that with the hope that you would convert (or grow stronger in faith), but even if you are an athiest. The bible has had a great impact on our culture, and you should know about it. I took Greek mythology in college for the same reason, it has an impact on our culture. Someone once said that 50% of all references in [western] litature comes from the bible, and 30% from greek [and roman] mythology. A significant part came from Shakesphere, but he based off of the eariler works himself. If you don't understand orginal you won't get the reference. Besides, it is fun to laugh at authors who don't understand that which they make reference to.
Now if there was just time to do all the reading I want to do as a geek.
Most likely one nic connects to the internet (through the firewall), and the other to the database backend.
Assuming the above is true, there are several advantages. First, data traffic to the sql server isn't generating colision with data from the internet, this allows both less ethernet collisions for more bandwidth, and more security. The Sql machine can run the every buggy service imanginable. It won't matter because nothing can get to it. The web servers only listen on ssh and httpd ports, and don't forward anytying. The sql network can be a private (192.168.x.x) network which isn't routable. You can still break it I suppose, but much more difficult.
I have a car charger for my phone. I find it highly unlikely that any power outage would affect both my ability to find some car (any car, the neighbor's would do) that works and my local power service.
I can imangine something taking out the tower and all the power lines, but that is a slightly different problems.
I belive it is illegal to make unsolisited calls to a cell phone. (In the Us, I don't know about the rest of the world) That is you cannot call me up trying to sell me something. You can make an unsolisited call for something that I would reasonabbly want to know.
I wish xDSL, or cable modem or similear was avaiable in my area. I'm not far from the central office of either, but they won't do it. Best bet currently seems to be a uncurrent in the city to open up the fiber link they ahve around town for goverment use to everyone. (This is mostly court house to fire department and schools. I don't expect to ever see it though as security must be a concern)
Agreed. Remember too that parts of the country are much lower yet. There are places in the US where if there was a tower, less then 100 people in a day would have the potential to use it!
Add in valleys (Which are hard to cover) and you can expect poor coverage. In any metropolition area or anyplace with big roads (The US has a great road system) the coverage is great.
The person I rent a room from has a land line phone, but I don't use it. I don't know where I'll be living in two months. I see no reason to assume I'll live at the same address for 6 consecutive months again in my life. (Though odds are I will live in one place for a long time) My phone number hasn't changed in years, and I don't expect it to change often.
Land lines are for data. If you want to contact me, I have one phone, and one number - my cell phone.
I've only encountered two areas where I don't have service, and since I was on vacation both times I didn't feel bad. Besides it was just a matter of getting out of the tent and walking up the cliff (a couple hundred feet of steep hillside really) to get service. Not a big deal.
In fact, if anyone can give some examples where the users benefit is greater using an ARM solution than an x86 or even PowerPC based solution, i'd love to know what they are. ARM's are cool CPU's and all, but hardly predominant in the current market place.
Get out of your Everything is a PC or Mac box and you will see why you are wrong.
At work we have make device with (up to) 80 SA110s. It is designed for a job which is easier to do in parrell then serial. We need to do real time tasks, and it is easier to do 64 real time tasks on 64 different processors then to figgure out the timing issues on a single [faster] processor, even if in theory the single processor would have as much power as all combined. With that many processors heat is an issue. Hardware could not have made any other processor work. (Non-arm that is) Also, since our job parrelizes so well it was easier for them to design the hardware with 64 processors then to run all the external ports to one chip.
This is not the only example of where the strongarm is good. I've seen microwaves for campers. They run off batteries. There is nothing that can be done to get 750 watts of microwave with less then 750 watts of power, but the less power you need over that the better. Not to mention power consumed at when not running. Here the asyncronious arm shines. They don't need much of a processor, but it is easier to compare your sensors with tables in software then hardware. (I've seen microsaves that smell when the food is done, it is one sensor, and then 100 different look up tables for each type of food)
I have intintionally covered non-computing devices. However if I could buy a linux laptop with a reasonably fast processor with ultra-low power consumption I would. I currently am not using any significant processing power, and often I offload my hard tasks the the Sparc down the hall. Give me a linux laptop that can supply bursts of power when I need it and I'll be happy. (Granted my boss wouldn't be because he needs windows programs where I compile from source anyway for all my programs)
In the real world we have to deal with thousands of lines of impropperly written code, devices (which may have a different endian), hardware memory locations that have meaning but are different.
Sure, once you have netBSD ported (or linux, for that matter windows if you have the money and time) Then any properly written porgram shoudl port easially.
Still, in the real world not everything is written in C. Sometimes programs are written in self modifing x86 machine language. When fast processors were blazing along at 8Mhz, you needed to wring all the speed you could. today you can sacrifice a little speed for easy to understand portable code, not then.
In answer to the orginial question, BOCHs is probably your best bet. SHould be portable, and emulates x86. Never has been perect, but often good enough.
As a member of a small band, I make CDs for sale at concerts. Since we are not a popular band, we do not have a contract with a major label.
How do I as a legitimate band get a) my money back from the extra I paid for a CD-R (and blank media in the case of cassettes) and b) my share of this money that belongs to me, in payment for those who buy my cd and illegally copy it.
PS, I'm not accually a member of a band, however I do hang around with bands that do exactly the above: record music in their homes, burn CDs on a CD-R and then sell them at concerts. This is common practice. They deserve their share of this money.
I can write you an auction cgi. Not really hard. version 1.0 could (if you paid enough) work in a month. Not a pretty version, but it would work just fine.
I cannot make it secure though. Many people claim to be security experts. Most are lieing. To get all the security right is hard. ssl, and the like are simple technologies in theory, but there are too many subtile ways to screw them up.
The bad news, I don't think most consultants are better then me.
From they way this story is worded, I'm led to belive that you could construct a similear javascript to get the cookies from anywebsite.
Just one more reason that I only use crashscape (Which is what I've been calling that program since 1.1 when I first saw it) with sites I trust. Mostly my bank because they require javascript for some reasons (at least to log in, once I'm logged in I've disabled it with no problems, but that is a pain)
While I work in a closed source shop, we are service based. We may sell our products for millions of dollars, but the real money is in the services.
Our customers have to work 24x7. They are not really satisfied with 99.99% reliability (You can figgure it out for yourself, but that only allows about 2 minutes of downtime in a year - way to much) Management has learned that with these customers you demand 100% relability. We have suits. They only stop harping on relability after several rounds of testing, and then only if all known problems are just minor. That is they know the process of fixing bugs often introduces new ones, which could be worse then the old one.
Suits will have to change as they realise that servies makes the most money when the department is filled with only bill collectors, and the least when the department is flying from customer to customer on technical problems. So by expending more effort upfront they save money in the long run.
FreeBSD: most popular. Wants to be the best for x86. Until reciently didn't care at all about any other platform. Still doesn't care much. Probably the best choice though if your system is x86
NetBSD: try to run on all useful platforms. If it is a comptuer netBSD wants to run on it. An excellent choice if you have many different comptuers with different strenghts. They all look the same from an admin point of view.
OpenBSD: orginally netBSD+, but not different enough. Doesn't care as much about portability (but has more supported platforms then freeBSD and can probably support all of netBSD's platforms with a little work) Wants to be the most secure OS possibal, and in fact it has been years since someone found a remotly exploitable security hole in default install. (You can of course configure it to be insecure.) Best choice if your not sure who will be attacking your system. (The others react quickly to problems, openBSD tends to proactivly avoid them)
However despite the above, the *BSDs are not much different. Pick one. Theo and his openBSD deservies a lot of criticism, but nobody will claim that openBSD is not technically excellent in their area. I should note too that most of openBSD's changes have filtered back into freeBSD and netBSD over time. I'm sure that linux devolpers have looked them over too. And of course it runs in the other way.
The best thing to do is have an infiniate amount of machines and time, so that you can run all 3 *BSDs, every linux distribution, and whatever else you can get your hand on. Then decide for yourself.
At work I'm personally the owner of code that nobody understands. If there is ever a bug in that code, or a feature required I will have to fix it. That code was last touched several years ago, by the person who wrote it that week. He is a better programer then me, I have no hope of writing a couple hundred lines of bug free code as quick as he did.
Point is, if it ain't broke don't break it. The code does it's job. I don't see the point in changing it until I have to port it to a different platform. Even then I wouldn't be surprized if it was a simple re-compile.
I don't need to be targeted everywhere. As anouther poster mentioned, the best ads are not targeted - I'm not a target of a Jaguar based on anything I have (I've driven S10s all my life - which isn't very long), but with some advertising I might look at one for the next car instead of anouther truck. Maybe.
OTOH, if I walk into a music store I want to see music I like. Imangine some face recigniction that sees my face, and adjusts some robotic shelves. Suddenly instead of 10 bluegrass CDs out there are hundreds. Today if a music store has the latest from IIIrd Time Out, it is not on display, but if they could put it on display when I walk in (Taking away Jazz CDs that I's never listen to anyway) I might buy it. But I probably wouldn't ask since I don't expect them to have it. However they do need to account for wanting other things. They won't know that my brother wants some Heavy Metal CD for his birthday next week, even though they have it. SO long as I can find plenty of the type of music that I want and something of other styles I'd like to be targeted. It would make my shopping expirence more useful to be targetted.
the US goverment has a classification level called (I think) sensitive. That is things that are public record, but should not be combined.
An example: It is public record that company a got a contract to build a new top seceret fighter. It is also public record that company a ordered a large amount of Titanium after getting the contract. Take those togather and you can deduct that the new top seceret fighter can break the sound barrior, which is classified knowlege. (titanium is appearently one of the few metals that can stand up to those speeds)
And so we see that information that is public record is not nessicarly something that should be combined.
Slashdot Mirror
I know folks into amature radio can get internet connections pretty much anywhere. Connections are 1200 baud, and it is shared, so don't expect much. Web browsing is out, but email can work.
Note that my information is a bit old in this area. I used to know one of the admins for the Minneapolis amature radio IP network, but that was a few years ago and I've since lost touch. Seems like someone in this crowd would have a solution though.
I have personally had two modems fried from lightning hitting our underground phone cable. In one case I unpluged the computer from the wall before the store (which I knew was coming). Both of the modems didn't work at all, and both computers lost their serial ports (but the computer otherwise worked) FWIW, our electric service is above ground.
No, both in combination is best.
I envision desktop (and despit the hype, most people will do most of there work as a desk just because it is so convient) with wired access. anytime you move you get the portable (laptop or palm I don't care) and it will be wireless. wired has no bandwidth limitations, doesn't get over crowded with neighbors... wireless allows you to put the instructions on rebuilding your engine under the shade tree next to the car.
Both are useful, and so long as people use wired where it is possibla and leave wireless to those situations where wired is impractical things will work well.
There were several prizes for solving fremat's last theorom. One of the larger was set up my german mathamatitions before WWI. Unfortunatly inflation in germany in the '20s turned several million into enough for a gumball.
Accually your odds of winning the lottery (By which we mean the biggest jackpot in the largest drawing, since smaller lotteries are winnable) is almost exactly the same wither you buy a ticker or not. Remember you can find the winning ticket on the sidewalk. For normal statistics you can ignore those events as insignificant, but winning the lottery is so statisticly unlikely at you have to factor finding the winning ticket it, which is only slightly smaller. (Order of mangnitude yes, but not significant)
The odds that I will come up with any solution in my lifetime are very low as I currently stand - I don't think about math in general much. If I decided to solve one problem my odds of doing so in my lifetime increase dramaticly. Of course deciding that I want to solve one of those problems means that spend all my freetime on it. I'd sell my boat since I wouldn't use it, move into a tiny house (preferabbly near a major university so I can access their library and professors... perhaps even become a professor though as others have said I'd be unlikely to make tenure) I'm smart enough to make reasonable progress in a solution if I dedicated my life to it. I may or may not find a solution, but I have a chance.
Dedicate your life to being the big winnder in the lottery doesn't depend much on your brains. While it is true that I can increase my odds of winning the lottery, to do so significantly would mean leaving cheaply (again, no boat...) and making enough money that in the end I'd have more money saving it all then I'd get when I got the winning ticket.
Right, it isn't the best design. However the redundant machines are designed so we can operatue without them for several minutes if need be. The recovery procedure if the Master really does fail involves the backup rebooting. (These machine control other hardware that must work all the time, and that hardware is both more robust and can operate without the controllers for a short time if need be. You just lose access to the disc so you cannot reconfigure them.
I didn't want to get into all the head aches we faced due to the bad design above, it is byond the scope of the orginal question. We are however re-doing things to fix that.
As the other poster said, it depends on the driver. Thats the bad news
The good news is DecNet requires the driver (and hardware) be able to change the MAC address. Thus even for cheap cards most of them can just in case the vender ever has the chance to sell to the last shop out there still running decnet.
I wrote software for Solaris (Which as others have pointed out does not do this without 3rd party software) because we found that no solution would fit our needs well. When looking at the prive tag we concluded that we could do better. (Come to think of it there is High avaiable Solaris, but it isn't cheaper or better then 3rd party stuff)
Basicly we ping something on the other side of the router every 5 seconds, and if the ping doesn't come back we switch to the other port. That is the overview, but you need to do some more isolation before you blindly switch ports.
I strongly recomend you put in some other path between you and the box you are pinging. Several times we have been bitten when the box we weere pinging went down and not the router, or alternaticly the network was so busy the ping didn't get through within our timeout period.
There is no portable way in solaris to tell if one ethernet port has signal. You can find out from some drivers, but when you change to a different ehternet card you have to do something else to find out.
My goal is to write code that doesn't break. I prefer not to do medical or aircraft work where someone dies, focusing instead on systems that would simply cause anouther depression if it breaks. (Which probably kills more people in the long run)
I tried writting user interfaces. I hated that work. I work with folks who love that work. I like flipping bits and watching them cross several busses and appear (inverted) at a different processor. I love yanking out processors that are running my code, and have my code automaticlly move to a different processor. To me that is cool, to others around me it is just a lot of work.
In other words, we are all different. I'm no better or worse then my peers. We work differently, and like different areas. I can do the work that others around me do, but they like it I don't, and vise versa.
You end up having to try things to decide if you like them. Some folks work on KDE, others userland of FreeBSD, others the Linux kernel. Given enough time one person could do all of the above to the same quality, but they would hate some tasks and love others. ANd of course as time goes on your grow, so a task you hated before you might like now, or something you used to love now just bores you to tears.
Don't be inflexable. Someday the inflexable will find that nobody cares about the awesome system he wrote and he no longer can get a job. Because he is unwilling to learn something new the inflexable person is lost. (The mainframe is a classic example, it is slowly dieing. Not because it is bad - though we have learned much about comptuer design since it was made, but because it is out of style. Do you really want to be on a sinking ship, without knowing how to use the life boat? There is a lot of money in mainframes today, but you better know something else)
Don't be too flexable. Sometimes you have to say "I can do this, but it isn't right." Or maybe you are so flexable that you get a new job every few months. You need to see a project through to completion, see what customers really think. (Open source isn't such a problem here, but in buisness you cannot contribute to two different companies at a time.)
I like where I am now, and what I'm doing. I could have - perhaps should have taken an opertunity to transfer to a different department. Only time will tell what would have been best.
The problem is how do you get an unbiased person to review it? Since the dominate religion in our cultur is based on it, it is hard to be unbiased. It was hard enough for me to take greek mythology, and nobody has belived it in a thousand years or so. (With some exception I suppose, but not a significant number)
We are clouded by out culture. When I read a new book by an unknown author I can expect the reviewers are honest. When the culture has knowlege of the book things are different. The Phantom Menance is a perfect example, those I know who have seen it tell me that it was a good movie, but because of our culture people expected too much of it. The orginial Star Wars really wasn't much better (Though they tend to agree it was better), but our perspectives are different, we went into Star Wars not expecting as much as we got, so we set the level higher.
I can give a simple review: a long book, that gets tough going. The book is orginized out of order, and no attempt was made to make it easy to tell which events came first. Mixed in with prophsies of doom against cultures that nobody remembers outside of this book are wonderful short stories.
Everyone should read the bible. As a christian I say that with the hope that you would convert (or grow stronger in faith), but even if you are an athiest. The bible has had a great impact on our culture, and you should know about it. I took Greek mythology in college for the same reason, it has an impact on our culture. Someone once said that 50% of all references in [western] litature comes from the bible, and 30% from greek [and roman] mythology. A significant part came from Shakesphere, but he based off of the eariler works himself. If you don't understand orginal you won't get the reference. Besides, it is fun to laugh at authors who don't understand that which they make reference to.
Now if there was just time to do all the reading I want to do as a geek.
Most likely one nic connects to the internet (through the firewall), and the other to the database backend.
Assuming the above is true, there are several advantages. First, data traffic to the sql server isn't generating colision with data from the internet, this allows both less ethernet collisions for more bandwidth, and more security. The Sql machine can run the every buggy service imanginable. It won't matter because nothing can get to it. The web servers only listen on ssh and httpd ports, and don't forward anytying. The sql network can be a private (192.168.x.x) network which isn't routable. You can still break it I suppose, but much more difficult.
I have a car charger for my phone. I find it highly unlikely that any power outage would affect both my ability to find some car (any car, the neighbor's would do) that works and my local power service.
I can imangine something taking out the tower and all the power lines, but that is a slightly different problems.
I belive it is illegal to make unsolisited calls to a cell phone. (In the Us, I don't know about the rest of the world) That is you cannot call me up trying to sell me something. You can make an unsolisited call for something that I would reasonabbly want to know.
I wish xDSL, or cable modem or similear was avaiable in my area. I'm not far from the central office of either, but they won't do it. Best bet currently seems to be a uncurrent in the city to open up the fiber link they ahve around town for goverment use to everyone. (This is mostly court house to fire department and schools. I don't expect to ever see it though as security must be a concern)
Agreed. Remember too that parts of the country are much lower yet. There are places in the US where if there was a tower, less then 100 people in a day would have the potential to use it!
Add in valleys (Which are hard to cover) and you can expect poor coverage. In any metropolition area or anyplace with big roads (The US has a great road system) the coverage is great.
The person I rent a room from has a land line phone, but I don't use it. I don't know where I'll be living in two months. I see no reason to assume I'll live at the same address for 6 consecutive months again in my life. (Though odds are I will live in one place for a long time) My phone number hasn't changed in years, and I don't expect it to change often.
Land lines are for data. If you want to contact me, I have one phone, and one number - my cell phone.
I've only encountered two areas where I don't have service, and since I was on vacation both times I didn't feel bad. Besides it was just a matter of getting out of the tent and walking up the cliff (a couple hundred feet of steep hillside really) to get service. Not a big deal.
Get out of your Everything is a PC or Mac box and you will see why you are wrong.
At work we have make device with (up to) 80 SA110s. It is designed for a job which is easier to do in parrell then serial. We need to do real time tasks, and it is easier to do 64 real time tasks on 64 different processors then to figgure out the timing issues on a single [faster] processor, even if in theory the single processor would have as much power as all combined. With that many processors heat is an issue. Hardware could not have made any other processor work. (Non-arm that is) Also, since our job parrelizes so well it was easier for them to design the hardware with 64 processors then to run all the external ports to one chip.
This is not the only example of where the strongarm is good. I've seen microwaves for campers. They run off batteries. There is nothing that can be done to get 750 watts of microwave with less then 750 watts of power, but the less power you need over that the better. Not to mention power consumed at when not running. Here the asyncronious arm shines. They don't need much of a processor, but it is easier to compare your sensors with tables in software then hardware. (I've seen microsaves that smell when the food is done, it is one sensor, and then 100 different look up tables for each type of food)
I have intintionally covered non-computing devices. However if I could buy a linux laptop with a reasonably fast processor with ultra-low power consumption I would. I currently am not using any significant processing power, and often I offload my hard tasks the the Sparc down the hall. Give me a linux laptop that can supply bursts of power when I need it and I'll be happy. (Granted my boss wouldn't be because he needs windows programs where I compile from source anyway for all my programs)
In the real world we have to deal with thousands of lines of impropperly written code, devices (which may have a different endian), hardware memory locations that have meaning but are different.
Sure, once you have netBSD ported (or linux, for that matter windows if you have the money and time) Then any properly written porgram shoudl port easially.
Still, in the real world not everything is written in C. Sometimes programs are written in self modifing x86 machine language. When fast processors were blazing along at 8Mhz, you needed to wring all the speed you could. today you can sacrifice a little speed for easy to understand portable code, not then.
In answer to the orginial question, BOCHs is probably your best bet. SHould be portable, and emulates x86. Never has been perect, but often good enough.
As a member of a small band, I make CDs for sale at concerts. Since we are not a popular band, we do not have a contract with a major label.
How do I as a legitimate band get a) my money back from the extra I paid for a CD-R (and blank media in the case of cassettes) and b) my share of this money that belongs to me, in payment for those who buy my cd and illegally copy it.
PS, I'm not accually a member of a band, however I do hang around with bands that do exactly the above: record music in their homes, burn CDs on a CD-R and then sell them at concerts. This is common practice. They deserve their share of this money.
I can write you an auction cgi. Not really hard. version 1.0 could (if you paid enough) work in a month. Not a pretty version, but it would work just fine.
I cannot make it secure though. Many people claim to be security experts. Most are lieing. To get all the security right is hard. ssl, and the like are simple technologies in theory, but there are too many subtile ways to screw them up.
The bad news, I don't think most consultants are better then me.
From they way this story is worded, I'm led to belive that you could construct a similear javascript to get the cookies from anywebsite.
Just one more reason that I only use crashscape (Which is what I've been calling that program since 1.1 when I first saw it) with sites I trust. Mostly my bank because they require javascript for some reasons (at least to log in, once I'm logged in I've disabled it with no problems, but that is a pain)
While I work in a closed source shop, we are service based. We may sell our products for millions of dollars, but the real money is in the services.
Our customers have to work 24x7. They are not really satisfied with 99.99% reliability (You can figgure it out for yourself, but that only allows about 2 minutes of downtime in a year - way to much) Management has learned that with these customers you demand 100% relability. We have suits. They only stop harping on relability after several rounds of testing, and then only if all known problems are just minor. That is they know the process of fixing bugs often introduces new ones, which could be worse then the old one.
Suits will have to change as they realise that servies makes the most money when the department is filled with only bill collectors, and the least when the department is flying from customer to customer on technical problems. So by expending more effort upfront they save money in the long run.
FreeBSD: most popular. Wants to be the best for x86. Until reciently didn't care at all about any other platform. Still doesn't care much. Probably the best choice though if your system is x86
NetBSD: try to run on all useful platforms. If it is a comptuer netBSD wants to run on it. An excellent choice if you have many different comptuers with different strenghts. They all look the same from an admin point of view.
OpenBSD: orginally netBSD+, but not different enough. Doesn't care as much about portability (but has more supported platforms then freeBSD and can probably support all of netBSD's platforms with a little work) Wants to be the most secure OS possibal, and in fact it has been years since someone found a remotly exploitable security hole in default install. (You can of course configure it to be insecure.) Best choice if your not sure who will be attacking your system. (The others react quickly to problems, openBSD tends to proactivly avoid them)
However despite the above, the *BSDs are not much different. Pick one. Theo and his openBSD deservies a lot of criticism, but nobody will claim that openBSD is not technically excellent in their area. I should note too that most of openBSD's changes have filtered back into freeBSD and netBSD over time. I'm sure that linux devolpers have looked them over too. And of course it runs in the other way.
The best thing to do is have an infiniate amount of machines and time, so that you can run all 3 *BSDs, every linux distribution, and whatever else you can get your hand on. Then decide for yourself.
At work I'm personally the owner of code that nobody understands. If there is ever a bug in that code, or a feature required I will have to fix it. That code was last touched several years ago, by the person who wrote it that week. He is a better programer then me, I have no hope of writing a couple hundred lines of bug free code as quick as he did.
Point is, if it ain't broke don't break it. The code does it's job. I don't see the point in changing it until I have to port it to a different platform. Even then I wouldn't be surprized if it was a simple re-compile.
I don't need to be targeted everywhere. As anouther poster mentioned, the best ads are not targeted - I'm not a target of a Jaguar based on anything I have (I've driven S10s all my life - which isn't very long), but with some advertising I might look at one for the next car instead of anouther truck. Maybe.
OTOH, if I walk into a music store I want to see music I like. Imangine some face recigniction that sees my face, and adjusts some robotic shelves. Suddenly instead of 10 bluegrass CDs out there are hundreds. Today if a music store has the latest from IIIrd Time Out, it is not on display, but if they could put it on display when I walk in (Taking away Jazz CDs that I's never listen to anyway) I might buy it. But I probably wouldn't ask since I don't expect them to have it. However they do need to account for wanting other things. They won't know that my brother wants some Heavy Metal CD for his birthday next week, even though they have it. SO long as I can find plenty of the type of music that I want and something of other styles I'd like to be targeted. It would make my shopping expirence more useful to be targetted.
the US goverment has a classification level called (I think) sensitive. That is things that are public record, but should not be combined.
An example: It is public record that company a got a contract to build a new top seceret fighter. It is also public record that company a ordered a large amount of Titanium after getting the contract. Take those togather and you can deduct that the new top seceret fighter can break the sound barrior, which is classified knowlege. (titanium is appearently one of the few metals that can stand up to those speeds)
And so we see that information that is public record is not nessicarly something that should be combined.