Agreed... my family had a timex sinclair and then
an Atari 8-bit. We saved sinclair programs on our portable
tape player and used the notorious 32 KB ram pack. We soldered a 256 KB ram upgrade kit
into the Atari. At the time it seemed as though
nobody knew just what could be done with these
new-fangled computer things. Every month there
was some new awe-inspiring piece of software
or hardware coming out, or an interesting project
in a magazine.
Then my dad got a PC-clone Toshiba
laptop (80186 or something) and the fun just
disappeared.
Even after I got into Linux (circa 1992!), it still wasn't quite the same. My first PalmOS handheld
around 2000 seemed to have a similar magic
as those 8-bit computers. Once again nobody
seemed to know just what could be done with
a handheld computer that was always on your person,
and software and hardware addons abounded.
Since many of the people who would use this
technology (business travelers, executives, geeks,
etc.) will have a PDA or even a cell phone with
them anyway, I think a better way to implement this technology is using bluetooth.
Basically they could
save the cost of the extra display in the laptop,
but allow the data and APIs to be exported via
bluetooth. Then I run the client app on my PDA
(or maybe even cell phone), and I don't even
have to lug my laptop out of the bag to see
the latest email or flight times or whatever.
I just use the PDA or cell phone as the user interface.
I hope somebody involved in enforcing
HIPAA can start slapping large punitive
fines on companies that use such
slapdash practices for handling
sensitive medical records.
They need a large tangible downside to realize
that sending hundreds of thousands of
unencrypted medical records to an employee's
home is not a money-saving strategy.
It sounds like the employee likely left
the whole box of tapes and disks in the
cabin of the car in plain view overnight.
For the patients' sake, let's hope their
medical staff is more thoughtful
than their IT staff. I can hear
the surgeon now, "Wash my hands? They
look clean, what could possibly go wrong?"
I agree with this according to the research
I've done. The counterpoint to this is that
having become well-to-do in the publishing
business, he could afford to give
his inventions away for free.
As other replies have stated, the GPS satellites
also broadcast the difference between GPS and UTC time. It even has a flag in there that warns of an impending leap second up to a week in advance. Actually, the
nice thing about running a system from GPS time is
that you don't have to worry about leap seconds.
Absolutely... apparently I've been one the
unknowing beta testers of this feature
for a month or two. I thought it was a clever
tip of the hat to Hormel.
Though I find I rarely notice the webclips,
every once in a while I do, and sometimes
it's something interesting. I took the 5 minutes
to set it up with feeds I normally
don't bother to check regularly, but are still
peripherally interesting to me.
It's unobtrusive enough that I have left it enabled.
I think they're getting at the submarine-like nature of this one.
It's yet another one of the old
"let's wait until this becomes
a widely used standard and then
we'll try to charge them all for
it" schemes. If you read pubpat's
court filing, they recognize
that just because JPEG is so
entrenched is no reason to
invalidate the patent. But pubpat
still mentions how entrenched it is
so the patent office gets the idea
that CSI appears to be doing this
in bad faith. Pubpat lays out the
legal case against the patent
very clearly in the filing, with
a nice table showing the correspondence
between the prior art patent and the
disputed patent, making it very
easy to follow.
The specs don't mention an audio input,
nor support for bluetooth headset profiles. This
could be a great PDA and VoIP experimentation
platform, but without audio input it's a
non-starter.
Johnny: Mommy, when I grow up I want to
be a virtual real estate tycoon and make
lots of money!
Mom: Ok Johnny, but if you want to
be successful you'll
have to spend a lot of time playing
your online games, and you might even
need to skip some classes.
Sheesh... the way people are complaining
about this Lunar Embassy you'd think
they were bilking people out of
thousands of dollars. A "normal"
lunar deed on the site is $20, plus $10
shipping and handling. And the
site is filled with various other
mugs, t-shirts, and other random
silly stuff for lunar owners to collect.
We're talking about $30. Laugh
a little, the site certainly
looks like it's part tongue-in-cheek
to me.
I think the most important part of the article is the economic
forecast of 1.2 cents per KWh to generate electricity with
this method. That's not 1000 times cheaper, but still
significantly cheaper. And it doesn't seem nearly so
quackish as saying "my new technology is 1000 times better
than everything else." So, let's wait and see if anything
becomes of it. I wouldn't mind saving 5 cents per KWh on
my electric bill.
I think they're mainly interested in the
average speed of vehicles in a given section
of roadway. So two phones in the
same car will not
affect the data at all. They may also
be able to get some measure of traffic
volume, such as "there seems to be a lot
more trackable phones on the road
than is typical for this time of day."
Etc...
Regarding Hans's comments about cp,
I've recently been wondering why no filesystems
seem to support copy-on-write semantics.
Instead of physically copying all that data
around, just mark it as copy-on-write with
a new name somewhere else in the filesystem.
Later, if one of the copies is changed, it
then automatically gets copied. This
could be a nice foundation for certain types
of backups and versioning. It's similar
to hard-links, but the link breaks automatically
when one copy is changed.
Add another vote for python.
Python makes the simple things simple,
and the hard things possible.
Here is your hello world program in python:
print 'hello world'
Doesn't get much simpler than that.
But you want to do strings, lists,
arrays, dictionaries, objects, and
whatnot? Python's got 'em, and they're easy.
And since the object model is pretty
similar to C++ and Java it's easy to
pick them up later if needed.
These days I'm writing a lot of my
app code in python, and then optimizing
that if needed, and as a last resort dropping
into C++ for more speed.
I agree with other posters that assembly
and C are great to learn at some point,
but I disagree they should be taught
in a first course. A first course
should be about making some things happen,
getting to see that they can make
computers do their bidding, and learning
some fundamental concepts like preconditions,
postconditions, etc.
Throw some graphics in there (pygame or
one of the turtle graphics libraries maybe)
and you've got some fun stuff.
The satellite antenna pattern can be divided into
a number of "spot beams", similar to cells
in a terrestrial cell phone system. Basically,
it's SDM (space division multiplexing), in addition
to time, frequency, and code multiplexing. So each
spotbeam can have frequency reuse and the
aggregate bandwidth across all spot beams can
be increased.
ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite) has 140 spot beams:
http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
I suspect the term "dish" and any impression
it is parabolic is an artifact of the reporting.
I worked on a satellite system like this...
It is geostationary and it has a
gigantic antenna system composed
of two umbrella-like devices. The "umbrella"
was designed to create 140 "spotbeams"
on the earth, for a total coverage of most
of southeast Asia. Each spotbeam is the
equivalent of a giant (300 Km diameter)
cell in terrestrial networks.
The system is called ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite System)
http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
With x.org running and the savage DRI drivers
from dri.freedesktop.org, I can finally get opengl
acceleration on my laptop (a 3 year-old Toshiba
with Savage 16 MB graphics chip). I'm
not really into games, so that was
never a big deal for me. But it is nice for
messing around with here and there. Also,
I have noticed that firefox scrolling performance
is better with x.org, there is no tearing
when scrolling slashdot. And that's
what it's all about!:)
For those trying to get opengl running, glxinfo
is your friend. If it says "direct rendering: Yes" then you have hardware accelerated opengl.
If it says "no", you don't.
You can also run glxgears and look at the fps
counts. Mine jumped from 100-160 fps to
around 300 fps with hardware acceleration.
-Rob
No, it is fast because it does a full-system
checkpoint every 5 minutes. But because
the checkpoint is implemented with copy-on-write
can take advantage of disk-arm scheduling,
and uses a low-priority migration task,
it is apparently very high performance in
practice.
Also, processes don't need to distinguish between
memory and disk. The entire disk is treated
as virtual memory, and your program
never needs to write any code to save
to a file. Its objects are automatically
persisted by the OS via the checkpointing.
All good points. The ISP or a third party like paypal would be handling the micropayments. The receiver's ISP's mailserver would support the protocol. If the sender's mailserver supports the protocol, that sender can now send me unsolicited email if he is willing to put up the bond.
Anonymous email accounts could be primed with digital cash.
The 13 year old in the third world country may need to rely on some charitable contribution to send the first email to the professor. He may be able to collect a few bonds from some spammers to have enough to email the professor.
The free, popular email list does not need to spend any money. When a user signs up for the emailing list, they must add it to their whitelist, which means emails from that list don't need to post a bond. If the user does not do that, and his inbox requires the bond from the email list, the message will be dropped on the floor. A free, popular email list could possibly even make money on the deal by requiring a bond on unsubscribed posts to the mailing list. The message would go to the moderator, and the moderator could decide to take the bond or forward the message to the list.
A problem I do see is the unscrupulous ISP. They now have some incentive to take the sender's bond for themselves and not deliver the message to me. We also could have spoofing problems, where the spammer pretends to be sending from a widely-known mailing list that many people have on their whitelists. This can be solved by stronger authentication of the whitelisted messages, but is yet more complexity.
While I think it would be very difficult to add this new scheme on top of the existing email infrastructure, it may still be early enough to use it with VoIP. Various people are saying that VoIP spam could become a problem as the technology takes off, and caller pays is already ingrained in telephony culture, so it would have a much better chance of taking hold there. And if it proves useful for VoIP, maybe people would be more accepting for email.
Slashdot Mirror
Then my dad got a PC-clone Toshiba laptop (80186 or something) and the fun just disappeared.
Even after I got into Linux (circa 1992!), it still wasn't quite the same. My first PalmOS handheld around 2000 seemed to have a similar magic as those 8-bit computers. Once again nobody seemed to know just what could be done with a handheld computer that was always on your person, and software and hardware addons abounded.
Basically they could save the cost of the extra display in the laptop, but allow the data and APIs to be exported via bluetooth. Then I run the client app on my PDA (or maybe even cell phone), and I don't even have to lug my laptop out of the bag to see the latest email or flight times or whatever. I just use the PDA or cell phone as the user interface.
I hope somebody involved in enforcing HIPAA can start slapping large punitive fines on companies that use such slapdash practices for handling sensitive medical records. They need a large tangible downside to realize that sending hundreds of thousands of unencrypted medical records to an employee's home is not a money-saving strategy.
It sounds like the employee likely left the whole box of tapes and disks in the cabin of the car in plain view overnight.
For the patients' sake, let's hope their medical staff is more thoughtful than their IT staff. I can hear the surgeon now, "Wash my hands? They look clean, what could possibly go wrong?"
His birthday was January 6 in the Julianl endar.html
calendar. Here's an article about it:
http://livescience.com/history/060104_franklin_ca
A fun unix parlor trick is the following:
cal 9 1752
Unix cal knows where the 11 days were removed.
Franklin would be proud.
I agree with this according to the research I've done. The counterpoint to this is that having become well-to-do in the publishing business, he could afford to give his inventions away for free.
As other replies have stated, the GPS satellites also broadcast the difference between GPS and UTC time. It even has a flag in there that warns of an impending leap second up to a week in advance. Actually, the nice thing about running a system from GPS time is that you don't have to worry about leap seconds.
What you are describing is the Principle Of Least Authority. PLASH (Principle Of Least Authority SHell) is a nifty project to tackle this at the application level for Linux http://plash.beasts.org/. HP Labs has a project called Polaris which does this for windows http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/mmsl/projects/adv/p olaris.html.
Though I find I rarely notice the webclips, every once in a while I do, and sometimes it's something interesting. I took the 5 minutes to set it up with feeds I normally don't bother to check regularly, but are still peripherally interesting to me. It's unobtrusive enough that I have left it enabled.
I think they're getting at the submarine-like nature of this one. It's yet another one of the old "let's wait until this becomes a widely used standard and then we'll try to charge them all for it" schemes. If you read pubpat's court filing, they recognize that just because JPEG is so entrenched is no reason to invalidate the patent. But pubpat still mentions how entrenched it is so the patent office gets the idea that CSI appears to be doing this in bad faith. Pubpat lays out the legal case against the patent very clearly in the filing, with a nice table showing the correspondence between the prior art patent and the disputed patent, making it very easy to follow.
The specs don't mention an audio input, nor support for bluetooth headset profiles. This could be a great PDA and VoIP experimentation platform, but without audio input it's a non-starter.
Johnny: Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a virtual real estate tycoon and make lots of money!
Mom: Ok Johnny, but if you want to be successful you'll have to spend a lot of time playing your online games, and you might even need to skip some classes.
Johnny: I'm willing to make the sacrifices!
only old people buy real property!
Sheesh... the way people are complaining about this Lunar Embassy you'd think they were bilking people out of thousands of dollars. A "normal" lunar deed on the site is $20, plus $10 shipping and handling. And the site is filled with various other mugs, t-shirts, and other random silly stuff for lunar owners to collect. We're talking about $30. Laugh a little, the site certainly looks like it's part tongue-in-cheek to me.
I think the most important part of the article is the economic forecast of 1.2 cents per KWh to generate electricity with this method. That's not 1000 times cheaper, but still significantly cheaper. And it doesn't seem nearly so quackish as saying "my new technology is 1000 times better than everything else." So, let's wait and see if anything becomes of it. I wouldn't mind saving 5 cents per KWh on my electric bill.
I think they're mainly interested in the average speed of vehicles in a given section of roadway. So two phones in the same car will not affect the data at all. They may also be able to get some measure of traffic volume, such as "there seems to be a lot more trackable phones on the road than is typical for this time of day." Etc...
Sounds rockin'. I'll have to look into that. Not that I'll be running Solaris anytime soon, but it's always nice to get some more ideas.
Thanks for mentioning that... actually I do use rsync for backups in the way you mention. :)
Regarding Hans's comments about cp, I've recently been wondering why no filesystems seem to support copy-on-write semantics. Instead of physically copying all that data around, just mark it as copy-on-write with a new name somewhere else in the filesystem. Later, if one of the copies is changed, it then automatically gets copied. This could be a nice foundation for certain types of backups and versioning. It's similar to hard-links, but the link breaks automatically when one copy is changed.
Check out plash, the principle of least authority shell, for a nice version of the chrooting you describe: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~seaborn/plash/plash.html
Add another vote for python. Python makes the simple things simple, and the hard things possible. Here is your hello world program in python: print 'hello world' Doesn't get much simpler than that. But you want to do strings, lists, arrays, dictionaries, objects, and whatnot? Python's got 'em, and they're easy. And since the object model is pretty similar to C++ and Java it's easy to pick them up later if needed. These days I'm writing a lot of my app code in python, and then optimizing that if needed, and as a last resort dropping into C++ for more speed. I agree with other posters that assembly and C are great to learn at some point, but I disagree they should be taught in a first course. A first course should be about making some things happen, getting to see that they can make computers do their bidding, and learning some fundamental concepts like preconditions, postconditions, etc. Throw some graphics in there (pygame or one of the turtle graphics libraries maybe) and you've got some fun stuff.
The satellite antenna pattern can be divided into a number of "spot beams", similar to cells in a terrestrial cell phone system. Basically, it's SDM (space division multiplexing), in addition to time, frequency, and code multiplexing. So each spotbeam can have frequency reuse and the aggregate bandwidth across all spot beams can be increased. ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite) has 140 spot beams: http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
I suspect the term "dish" and any impression it is parabolic is an artifact of the reporting. I worked on a satellite system like this... It is geostationary and it has a gigantic antenna system composed of two umbrella-like devices. The "umbrella" was designed to create 140 "spotbeams" on the earth, for a total coverage of most of southeast Asia. Each spotbeam is the equivalent of a giant (300 Km diameter) cell in terrestrial networks. The system is called ACeS (Asia Cellular Satellite System) http://www.acesinternational.com/corporate/index.p hp?fuseaction=System.satellite
With x.org running and the savage DRI drivers from dri.freedesktop.org, I can finally get opengl acceleration on my laptop (a 3 year-old Toshiba with Savage 16 MB graphics chip). I'm not really into games, so that was never a big deal for me. But it is nice for messing around with here and there. Also, I have noticed that firefox scrolling performance is better with x.org, there is no tearing when scrolling slashdot. And that's what it's all about! :)
For those trying to get opengl running, glxinfo
is your friend. If it says "direct rendering: Yes" then you have hardware accelerated opengl.
If it says "no", you don't.
You can also run glxgears and look at the fps
counts. Mine jumped from 100-160 fps to
around 300 fps with hardware acceleration.
-Rob
No, it is fast because it does a full-system checkpoint every 5 minutes. But because the checkpoint is implemented with copy-on-write can take advantage of disk-arm scheduling, and uses a low-priority migration task, it is apparently very high performance in practice. Also, processes don't need to distinguish between memory and disk. The entire disk is treated as virtual memory, and your program never needs to write any code to save to a file. Its objects are automatically persisted by the OS via the checkpointing.
All good points. The ISP or a third party like
paypal would be handling the micropayments.
The receiver's ISP's mailserver would support
the protocol. If the sender's mailserver supports
the protocol, that sender can now send me unsolicited email if he is willing to put up the
bond.
Anonymous email accounts could be primed with digital cash.
The 13 year old in the third world country may need to rely on some charitable contribution to send the first email to the professor. He may
be able to collect a few bonds from some spammers
to have enough to email the professor.
The free, popular email list does not need to spend any money. When a user signs up for the emailing list, they must add it to their whitelist, which means emails from that list don't need to post a bond. If the user does not do that, and his inbox requires the bond from the email list, the message will be dropped on the floor. A free, popular email list could possibly even make money on the deal by requiring a bond on unsubscribed posts to the mailing list. The message would go to the moderator, and the moderator could decide to take the bond or forward the message to the list.
A problem I do see is the unscrupulous ISP. They now have some incentive to take the sender's bond for themselves and not deliver the message to me.
We also could have spoofing problems, where the spammer pretends to be sending from a widely-known mailing list that many people have on their whitelists. This can be solved by stronger authentication of the whitelisted messages, but is
yet more complexity.
While I think it would be very difficult to add this new scheme on top of the existing email infrastructure, it may still be early enough to use it with VoIP. Various people are saying that VoIP spam could become a problem as the technology takes off, and caller pays is already ingrained in telephony culture, so it would have a much better chance of taking hold there. And if it proves useful for VoIP, maybe people would be more accepting for email.