While I understand where you are coming from there is another side to this which is that networks that spew crap are bad for both the internet in general and the networks other users in particular.
Bad for the internet in general because that crap gets sent somewhere wasting someone elses bandwidth and possiblly time too depending on the type of crap.
Bad for other users of the same network in particular because 1: some of the crap (particulally worms attempting to spread) is likely to be aimed at hosts close in network space to where it comes from 2: bandwidth used for spewing crap is bandwidth that can't be used for things your users actually want. 3: if too much crap comes from a block of IPs then people may start to firewall off the whole block. Also IPs are often dynamically allocated. It rather sucks to get blocked from a service you use because of bad behaviour of hosts near you.
I don't know about this particular case but I can tell you some general stuff about motors that may help you understand why using an AC induction motor may not be a stupid choice.
A conventional DC motor or "universal motor"* uses brushes. Brushes suck because they wear out relatively quickly, they arc producing a load of electrical noise and as they wear this arcing gets worse.
A brushless DC motor (as seen in your CD drive) puts a permanant magnet on the shaft and the coils outside removing the need for any brushes or slip rings. Some form of sensor (e.g. optical or hall effect) and some control electronics replaces the brushes. Other than the fact it uses feedback rather than a fixed frequency generation this is actually quite similar to a three phase syncronous motor or a stepper motor. This works well for smaller motors but afaict for larger motors a permanent magnet design is cost prohibitive.
The nice thing about induction motors is that the cores magnatism is generated through sitting in a rotating magnetic field. That means you don't need (noise and wear prone) brushes or slip rings and you don't need expensive permanent magnets either. This can make up for the cost of the extra power electronics needed to drive them in a controlled manner.
P.S. rheostats may be simple but they are a very wasteful way to control the speed of a motor. PWM is usually a much better choice.
*A universal motor is essentially a DC motor adapted to run on AC, they are commonly used in electric drills and similar where a high rotation speed is desirable.
It was ActiveX that gave a bad name to COM, but not because it's bad in itself, but rather because it was a poor idea to integrate it to web pages in the way it was done. Poor idea is a huge understatement. It was one of the worst moves ever from a security standpoint and one that MS has been struggling to backtrack from for ages (unfortunately they can't kill activex in browser altogether because too much stuff relies on it).
OLE (in the sense of embedding different types of document within each other in a flexible way) was not such a terrible idea but still it does have the potential to increase the ammount of code exposed to bad data. In this regard installing an application that allows it's documents to be embedded in this way can be considered slightly lower in risk to installing a browser plugin based on the same code.
(I went th That should have said: I went through a long period of purchasing mostly whiteboxes between these machines and the one big brand I did get in that time I don't remember what if anything was in the original software load
Afaict the deals between MS and OEMs are secret so it's difficult to tell exactly what is going on.
If the OEMs are paying a reasonable price for the OEM copies works or office trial (or when it comes out office starter) and the OEMs are including it of thier own free will then I agree it is not an antitrust issue. OTOH if MS is pushing the OEMs into bundling it then IMO it is an antitrust issue
The fact that most big brand machines I see come with either works or an office trial* makes me suspect that the latter is the more likely case.
*List of big brand machines i've ecountered in a state where I could tell and can remember what if any office suite was bundled: AST advantage adventure 4066d: came with works (I went th Apple macbook: no bundled office software ASUS eeepc 900: came with works Dell vostro 420: came with works Dell optiplex 760: came with works HP mini 5101: came with office trial
I've often wondered if MS gives PC manufacturers some kind of kickback for bundling thier sucky office products (works/office trial/this new crippled office product) in the hope that it will net them sales for the full version.
Another reason I can think of is that some manfuacturers (notablly dell) offer office as a build time option. Therefore it is probablly in thier interests not to open peoples eyes to the existance of openoffice.
Half the mass already existed, half of it was created with energy input, all of it is burned, assuming equal mass and ignoring practical inefficiencies E(out) = 2xE(in). This assumes that there is a way to make antimatter without producing a corresponding ammount of matter at the same time. I was under the impression that all known ways of making antimatter produced pairs of corresponding matter and antimatter particles.
Hurd seems to run though last I tried it (in virtualbox) I got some strange errors (tar repeatedly claiming that files changed while it was reading them when trying to do a package build)
sudo apt-get install debhelper Reading Package Lists... Done Building Dependency Tree... Done The following extra packages will be installed:
75 packages upgraded, 80 newly installed, 42 to remove and 858 not upgraded. Need to get 67.1MB of archives. After unpacking 26.9MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
It is quite clear that a careful user is not going to let such an upgade go through unless some hint is given by the system that core functionalities like those suggested by x-window-system and x-window-system-core, which the tool wants to remove, will not disappear, but will be properly replaced by some of the 80 new packages whose installation is suggested.It is quite clear that a careful user is not going to let such an upgade go through unless some hint is given by the system that core functionalities like those suggested by x-window-system and x-window-system-core, which the tool wants to remove, will not disappear, but will be properly replaced by some of the 80 new packages whose installation is suggested.
If that happens it means the user is either running testing/unstable (they are called testing and unstable for a reason! DO NOT USE THEM IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS TO DEAL WITH BREAKAGE), has a sources.list not matched to what they have installed (the debian installer USED to do the stupid thing and putting stable/testing/unstable in sources.list but now it correctly uses the release codename) or is trying to upgrade between releases (in which case they should be reading the release notes, not randomly entering apt commands with no background information).
Can't say i've seen any mobile vendors giving away/subsidising nettops. At least here in the UK they only seem interested in subsidising portable machines (both netbooks and low end regular notebooks) and you have to sign up to pretty long mobile broadband contracts to get them. Did you mean to say netbooks when you said nettops?
IMO even if the desktop dies off in the home I doubt it will die off in the office. Portables are more expensive for a given level of capabilities, less ergonomic, more fragile, harder to service and easier to steal than desktops and I don't see any of those things changing.
We have flying cars already It really depends on your definition of flying car.
If you mean a vehicle that can both fly and drive on the road but still needs a runway/airfield to take off then those certainly exist though none have yet made it to commercial production.
If you mean a VTOL craft that can take you end to end then small helicopters are commercially available albeit at costs that only the very rich can afford. Of course you have to find enough space to land it at both ends which can be a problem.
If you mean a scifi-style craft that can fit into the space of a normal car, can take off and land vertically from a normal parking space and can fly without high noise levels and with affordable fuel consumption then that is much future away.
One thing about so called "rc" bugs in debian is that they divide into a few categories.
* Those that while technically qualifying for severity serious aren't actually bad enough for the release team to take any action. * Those in packages that the release team considers unimportant enough to kick out. * The real rc bugs, those that can't be allowed in the release but aren't in packages that can reasonably be kicked out either. These are a small minority of the so-called "rc" bugs but they are the ones that really hold up releases.
Which is a good reason to either use apt-get which defaults to the sane behaviour of tracking packages it thinks are unused but not removing them until it's explicitly told to or reconfiguring aptitude to do the sane thing.
The users I see are those who want stuff that the freebsd kernel has but don't want to learn a completely new userland and package management system*
Now, what may be interesting that'll come out of this is packages with better FreeBSD compatibility. I doubt there will be much of that. It's only the freebsd kernel that Debian are using. The C library and toolchain are still GNU.
*personally my only experiance with the freebsd "ports tree" has been bad. It seems that once a system had been installed for a while that you couldn't use the ports tree that came with it because you couldn't get the "distfiles" and when I tried to update the ports they borked the system. I then tried to update the core system to match the ports tree but I still ended up stuck with some library issues that I couldn't fix.
Unfortunately not, the people being sued are not the repressive governemnt but a mere download site distributing what they beleived was legit freeware.
If this succeeds it will put running a freeware/shareware/FOSS distribution site into a similar risk category as running a warez site.
Putting home users behind NAT isn't really very functional. The bottom line is most lusers don't know how to set up port forwarding through thier routers anyway so they won't miss much. I'm sure those who do want to accept incoming connections will be given the option for an extra fee.
NAT has serious scaling limitations if you're actually trying to make it work that way. Scaling is not a huge issue, just deal with users in moderate sized blocks.
A lot of corporations use NAT, but they also don't really want the vast majority of their systems to be externally reachable so it isn't that big a deal. Are you really saying that you believe big ISPs wouldn't love to kill off things like bittorrent and make VOIP less reliable.
The IPv6 proponents have been claiming that we're going to run out of addressable space for years and we haven't even come close. The runout was delayed a few years by CIDR and the rise of NAT for corporate internet access but that doesn't mean it's going away.
According to the latest stats i've seen if current trends continue the IANA will run out in 2011 and the RIRs will run out in 2013.
No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes. ISP level nat *IS* the bandaid soloution. By forcing home lusers behind ISP level NAT there will be enough IP addresses left for those who really need them for a while. The cost will be able to be spread out by migrating users to NAT in groups as thier IPs are needed.
IIRC while you can't directly sell them you can transfer them to a parent company or subsidary and you can sell a subsidary complete with it's IP addresses.
So time to set up a shell company, maybe with some token assets.
Oh, and though it may be a matter of debate, some folks swear that it's incorrect to call those NAT. Well the RFCs on the subject clearly use the term "basic NAT" for a device that just changes IPs, "NAPT" for a device that changes both IPs and ports and "NAT" as a catchall term convering both.
"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron, Many big companies have all thier users behind NAT, it's really no stretch that ISPs could do it as well. Yes there is state but it's perfectly managable as long as you do things in reasonable sized blocks (say 256 users behind a nat with 16 extenal IPs).
and one that has already been rejected by the real world. Only an idiot would do it at the moment. It's much better buisness wise for them to grab as many of the (soon to be scarce) IP addresses as they can while allocations are still availible. When the addresses run out they can then gradually recover them from home users to use for more profitable purposes (buisness customers, hosting customers, the internet side of the new NAT boxes etc)
Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements. It's also why if you are single homed and want good reliability you should ideally be buying from a tier 2 provider who in turn buys from multiple tier 1 providers.
Ah, multi-homing. There is an IETF working group busily trying to address that. They have been at work for some time, so I don't hold my breadth. And it seems the RIRs are also giving up on it hence arin and ripe starting to offer provider independent allocations.
The least bad solution with the current standards is to give to each IPv6 multiple addresses, e.g. one with the Verizon prefix, one with the Sprint prefix, one with SAVVIS. Unfortunately that soloution has a couple major problems.
1: it means end hosts have to make routing descisions which is not something they really have enough information to do properly. This means that unless apps get very clever about falling back (coming sometime arround when hell freezes over) you are going to lose the reliability and efficiancy advantages of multihoming. 2: it is a nightmare for network admins who will have to readdress everything whenever an ISP comes or gos (A6 records were supposed to partially fix this but IIRC it was considered too complicated and fragile and deprecated)
If I was a largeish organisation faced with the choice of putting multiple V6 addresses on every machine and dealing with the above problems or simply not adopting IPV6 at all I know what I would be doing. Especially as there isn't exactly much incentive to adopt IPV6 in the first place.
Long term I think the only reasonable soloution is to extend BGP with something lookup based so that routers don't need to carry an effective map of the internet with them all the time.
Failing that, the big organizations will pay their providers large sums and get a short prefix (/32, probably) that will be routed. The small folks will be left hanging. It's not about paying your provider it's about convincing the RIR that you are an ISP and deserve an ISP sized block.
If this continues I expect to see some big organisations setting up some form of ISP/colo/whatever service to try and convince the RIRs that they are an ISP.
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While I understand where you are coming from there is another side to this which is that networks that spew crap are bad for both the internet in general and the networks other users in particular.
Bad for the internet in general because that crap gets sent somewhere wasting someone elses bandwidth and possiblly time too depending on the type of crap.
Bad for other users of the same network in particular because
1: some of the crap (particulally worms attempting to spread) is likely to be aimed at hosts close in network space to where it comes from
2: bandwidth used for spewing crap is bandwidth that can't be used for things your users actually want.
3: if too much crap comes from a block of IPs then people may start to firewall off the whole block. Also IPs are often dynamically allocated. It rather sucks to get blocked from a service you use because of bad behaviour of hosts near you.
I don't know about this particular case but I can tell you some general stuff about motors that may help you understand why using an AC induction motor may not be a stupid choice.
A conventional DC motor or "universal motor"* uses brushes. Brushes suck because they wear out relatively quickly, they arc producing a load of electrical noise and as they wear this arcing gets worse.
A brushless DC motor (as seen in your CD drive) puts a permanant magnet on the shaft and the coils outside removing the need for any brushes or slip rings. Some form of sensor (e.g. optical or hall effect) and some control electronics replaces the brushes. Other than the fact it uses feedback rather than a fixed frequency generation this is actually quite similar to a three phase syncronous motor or a stepper motor. This works well for smaller motors but afaict for larger motors a permanent magnet design is cost prohibitive.
The nice thing about induction motors is that the cores magnatism is generated through sitting in a rotating magnetic field. That means you don't need (noise and wear prone) brushes or slip rings and you don't need expensive permanent magnets either. This can make up for the cost of the extra power electronics needed to drive them in a controlled manner.
P.S. rheostats may be simple but they are a very wasteful way to control the speed of a motor. PWM is usually a much better choice.
*A universal motor is essentially a DC motor adapted to run on AC, they are commonly used in electric drills and similar where a high rotation speed is desirable.
It was ActiveX that gave a bad name to COM, but not because it's bad in itself, but rather because it was a poor idea to integrate it to web pages in the way it was done.
Poor idea is a huge understatement. It was one of the worst moves ever from a security standpoint and one that MS has been struggling to backtrack from for ages (unfortunately they can't kill activex in browser altogether because too much stuff relies on it).
OLE (in the sense of embedding different types of document within each other in a flexible way) was not such a terrible idea but still it does have the potential to increase the ammount of code exposed to bad data. In this regard installing an application that allows it's documents to be embedded in this way can be considered slightly lower in risk to installing a browser plugin based on the same code.
To make it an apples to apples comparison, don't use windows as benchmark and try and add stuff to linux to make it look like windows
Why not?
Though IMO windows+office is quite comparable to a normal desktop install of most linux distros.
(I went th
That should have said: I went through a long period of purchasing mostly whiteboxes between these machines and the one big brand I did get in that time I don't remember what if anything was in the original software load
Afaict the deals between MS and OEMs are secret so it's difficult to tell exactly what is going on.
If the OEMs are paying a reasonable price for the OEM copies works or office trial (or when it comes out office starter) and the OEMs are including it of thier own free will then I agree it is not an antitrust issue. OTOH if MS is pushing the OEMs into bundling it then IMO it is an antitrust issue
The fact that most big brand machines I see come with either works or an office trial* makes me suspect that the latter is the more likely case.
*List of big brand machines i've ecountered in a state where I could tell and can remember what if any office suite was bundled:
AST advantage adventure 4066d: came with works
(I went th
Apple macbook: no bundled office software
ASUS eeepc 900: came with works
Dell vostro 420: came with works
Dell optiplex 760: came with works
HP mini 5101: came with office trial
I've often wondered if MS gives PC manufacturers some kind of kickback for bundling thier sucky office products (works/office trial/this new crippled office product) in the hope that it will net them sales for the full version.
Another reason I can think of is that some manfuacturers (notablly dell) offer office as a build time option. Therefore it is probablly in thier interests not to open peoples eyes to the existance of openoffice.
Half the mass already existed, half of it was created with energy input, all of it is burned, assuming equal mass and ignoring practical inefficiencies E(out) = 2xE(in).
This assumes that there is a way to make antimatter without producing a corresponding ammount of matter at the same time. I was under the impression that all known ways of making antimatter produced pairs of corresponding matter and antimatter particles.
Hurd seems to run though last I tried it (in virtualbox) I got some strange errors (tar repeatedly claiming that files changed while it was reading them when trying to do a package build)
sudo apt-get install debhelper
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
75 packages upgraded, 80 newly installed, 42 to remove and 858 not upgraded.
Need to get 67.1MB of archives. After unpacking 26.9MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] n
It is quite clear that a careful user is not going to let such an upgade go through unless some hint is given by the system that core functionalities like those suggested by x-window-system and x-window-system-core, which the tool wants to remove, will not disappear, but will be properly replaced by some of the 80 new packages whose installation is suggested.It is quite clear that a careful user is not going to let such an upgade go through unless some hint is given by the system that core functionalities like those suggested by x-window-system and x-window-system-core, which the tool wants to remove, will not disappear, but will be properly replaced by some of the 80 new packages whose installation is suggested.
If that happens it means the user is either running testing/unstable (they are called testing and unstable for a reason! DO NOT USE THEM IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THE SKILLS TO DEAL WITH BREAKAGE), has a sources.list not matched to what they have installed (the debian installer USED to do the stupid thing and putting stable/testing/unstable in sources.list but now it correctly uses the release codename) or is trying to upgrade between releases (in which case they should be reading the release notes, not randomly entering apt commands with no background information).
Can't say i've seen any mobile vendors giving away/subsidising nettops. At least here in the UK they only seem interested in subsidising portable machines (both netbooks and low end regular notebooks) and you have to sign up to pretty long mobile broadband contracts to get them. Did you mean to say netbooks when you said nettops?
IMO even if the desktop dies off in the home I doubt it will die off in the office. Portables are more expensive for a given level of capabilities, less ergonomic, more fragile, harder to service and easier to steal than desktops and I don't see any of those things changing.
We have flying cars already
It really depends on your definition of flying car.
If you mean a vehicle that can both fly and drive on the road but still needs a runway/airfield to take off then those certainly exist though none have yet made it to commercial production.
If you mean a VTOL craft that can take you end to end then small helicopters are commercially available albeit at costs that only the very rich can afford. Of course you have to find enough space to land it at both ends which can be a problem.
If you mean a scifi-style craft that can fit into the space of a normal car, can take off and land vertically from a normal parking space and can fly without high noise levels and with affordable fuel consumption then that is much future away.
One thing about so called "rc" bugs in debian is that they divide into a few categories.
* Those that while technically qualifying for severity serious aren't actually bad enough for the release team to take any action.
* Those in packages that the release team considers unimportant enough to kick out.
* The real rc bugs, those that can't be allowed in the release but aren't in packages that can reasonably be kicked out either. These are a small minority of the so-called "rc" bugs but they are the ones that really hold up releases.
Which is a good reason to either use apt-get which defaults to the sane behaviour of tracking packages it thinks are unused but not removing them until it's explicitly told to or reconfiguring aptitude to do the sane thing.
The users I see are those who want stuff that the freebsd kernel has but don't want to learn a completely new userland and package management system*
Now, what may be interesting that'll come out of this is packages with better FreeBSD compatibility.
I doubt there will be much of that. It's only the freebsd kernel that Debian are using. The C library and toolchain are still GNU.
*personally my only experiance with the freebsd "ports tree" has been bad. It seems that once a system had been installed for a while that you couldn't use the ports tree that came with it because you couldn't get the "distfiles" and when I tried to update the ports they borked the system. I then tried to update the core system to match the ports tree but I still ended up stuck with some library issues that I couldn't fix.
Unfortunately not, the people being sued are not the repressive governemnt but a mere download site distributing what they beleived was legit freeware.
If this succeeds it will put running a freeware/shareware/FOSS distribution site into a similar risk category as running a warez site.
AC power conditioning seems a rather ass-backwards way of doing things to me anyway.
IMO if you need AC power conditioning it means your PSU isn't doing it's job properly.
It's just unfortunate that nowhere seems to review PSUs properly :(
Putting home users behind NAT isn't really very functional.
The bottom line is most lusers don't know how to set up port forwarding through thier routers anyway so they won't miss much. I'm sure those who do want to accept incoming connections will be given the option for an extra fee.
NAT has serious scaling limitations if you're actually trying to make it work that way.
Scaling is not a huge issue, just deal with users in moderate sized blocks.
A lot of corporations use NAT, but they also don't really want the vast majority of their systems to be externally reachable so it isn't that big a deal.
Are you really saying that you believe big ISPs wouldn't love to kill off things like bittorrent and make VOIP less reliable.
The IPv6 proponents have been claiming that we're going to run out of addressable space for years and we haven't even come close.
The runout was delayed a few years by CIDR and the rise of NAT for corporate internet access but that doesn't mean it's going away.
According to the latest stats i've seen if current trends continue the IANA will run out in 2011 and the RIRs will run out in 2013.
No it won't. It will be some bandaid solution thought of at the last minute that will patch things together until the current crop of CEOs get their golden parachutes.
ISP level nat *IS* the bandaid soloution. By forcing home lusers behind ISP level NAT there will be enough IP addresses left for those who really need them for a while. The cost will be able to be spread out by migrating users to NAT in groups as thier IPs are needed.
IIRC while you can't directly sell them you can transfer them to a parent company or subsidary and you can sell a subsidary complete with it's IP addresses.
So time to set up a shell company, maybe with some token assets.
Maybe because by the end of 2008 there was finally a ray of hope that Mugabe's power was declining.
Oh, and though it may be a matter of debate, some folks swear that it's incorrect to call those NAT.
Well the RFCs on the subject clearly use the term "basic NAT" for a device that just changes IPs, "NAPT" for a device that changes both IPs and ports and "NAT" as a catchall term convering both.
"PAT" appears to be a ciscoism
"Carrier-grade NAT" is not a solution, it's an oxymoron,
Many big companies have all thier users behind NAT, it's really no stretch that ISPs could do it as well. Yes there is state but it's perfectly managable as long as you do things in reasonable sized blocks (say 256 users behind a nat with 16 extenal IPs).
and one that has already been rejected by the real world.
Only an idiot would do it at the moment. It's much better buisness wise for them to grab as many of the (soon to be scarce) IP addresses as they can while allocations are still availible. When the addresses run out they can then gradually recover them from home users to use for more profitable purposes (buisness customers, hosting customers, the internet side of the new NAT boxes etc)
Simple little things like the owner of the prefix deciding not to advertise it to your network can look like this. This is also why the FCC or other government agencies don't have a hope of regulating peering agreements.
It's also why if you are single homed and want good reliability you should ideally be buying from a tier 2 provider who in turn buys from multiple tier 1 providers.
Ah, multi-homing. There is an IETF working group busily trying to address that. They have been at work for some time, so I don't hold my breadth.
And it seems the RIRs are also giving up on it hence arin and ripe starting to offer provider independent allocations.
The least bad solution with the current standards is to give to each IPv6 multiple addresses, e.g. one with the Verizon prefix, one with the Sprint prefix, one with SAVVIS.
Unfortunately that soloution has a couple major problems.
1: it means end hosts have to make routing descisions which is not something they really have enough information to do properly. This means that unless apps get very clever about falling back (coming sometime arround when hell freezes over) you are going to lose the reliability and efficiancy advantages of multihoming.
2: it is a nightmare for network admins who will have to readdress everything whenever an ISP comes or gos (A6 records were supposed to partially fix this but IIRC it was considered too complicated and fragile and deprecated)
If I was a largeish organisation faced with the choice of putting multiple V6 addresses on every machine and dealing with the above problems or simply not adopting IPV6 at all I know what I would be doing. Especially as there isn't exactly much incentive to adopt IPV6 in the first place.
Long term I think the only reasonable soloution is to extend BGP with something lookup based so that routers don't need to carry an effective map of the internet with them all the time.
Failing that, the big organizations will pay their providers large sums and get a short prefix (/32, probably) that will be routed. The small folks will be left hanging.
It's not about paying your provider it's about convincing the RIR that you are an ISP and deserve an ISP sized block.
If this continues I expect to see some big organisations setting up some form of ISP/colo/whatever service to try and convince the RIRs that they are an ISP.