Let's say a chess game has on average 60 moves by each player, who on average chooses from 10 possibilities. That's 10^120 possible games. Let's say you have a petahertz computer that can evalutate a move per clock. 10^15 moves per second. Let's say every proton in the universe was such a computer and they all worked in parallel. That's 10^80 computers, according to physicist's estimates. Solution time is 10^120 / (10^80 * 10^15) = 10^35 seconds. Since a year only has pi * 10^7 seconds, it would take way over 10^27 years to solve, or about 10^17 times the lifetime of the universe. Chess WILL NEVER be solved by brute force.
The above posting was me, by the way. (Forgot to log in.) By the way, while I think software collections will outpace local storage in the long run (although both are growing like crazy); the real issue is saving effort on software collection distribution and maintenance for a lan.
Debian has an opportunity for major improvement with lan installations. If I could install the Debian application collection (easily) on a distributed filesystem, then the entire LAN could access those applications. The workstations themselves would have a very small core OS with few to no applications locally. Workstations would be easily interchangable, not require huge disks, and keeping the software collection up to date would be even easier (just running apt-get on a single machine.) This type of setup would really blow away NT solutions, whose software collection's flexibility is hamstrung by intellectual property issues. Coda seems to be the best distributed filesystem for this sort of application. This sort of distributed computing environment has worked wonderfully at MIT's project athena and other large computing facilities, but thus far has been out of reach for smaller environments. It's a big project with tangible benefits; and something I'd very much love to work on. (hint hint hint)
As my friend Jean put it, take C++, remove a bunch of complicated crap (multiple inheritance, templates) then add in some goodies (garbage collection, exceptions that work, javadoc) C++--++
Great, I'll forward your reference to the developer, which will hopefully help him fulfill the request. (The request includes a few trimmings like an rpm or debian package, a/etc configuration file, etc.) Slashdot is a pretty good place to share ideas too, and in this case I'm really glad I asked. Thanks!
Anyone that thinks this kind of "contract work" is going to help the community is mistaken.
I don't know about the community in general, but I think I will quite soon be happy with a working phone to email answering machine. Things that are trvial for some people are harder for others. I don't know how to program in perl, for example.
Forget the money; Cosource is a good place to share ideas. I wanted my voice modem to answer my phone, take a voice message, and email it to me at over my DSL line. Cosource gave me a forum to share the idea, and lo and behold, it eventually reached a programmer who both likes it and is willing to do the work. The program is now being written under the GPL for linux. This is great! (Also, I wouldn't have known where to best share such an idea before Cosource. It way beats asking your officemates.)
How can I help the Debian collection of applications work well with distributed filesystems? For example, I'd like an entire LAN to have access to the Debian applications through Coda, saving the need for local appplication installation and maintenance.
If you've ever read Isaac Asimov's foundation, he talks of a society where technology and innovation is stagnating. Specifically, the two fields where humanity regresses are nuclear power and space travel.
Asimov's crumbing "Galactic Empire" was written in the 1950's and set thousands of years in the future. It's pretty easy to see the stagnation in these fields now. Earth's space programs peaked with Apollo, and the nuclear industry has been retreating for decades (and most people are happy about it).
The internet boom started was sparked by a single catalyst - a program written by Marc Andreeson and company that captured our imaginations. Somebody really needs to write the "Mosaic" of spaceflight.
This is a terrible idea! It means that software installation is a very manual and inflexible process. My laptop, running debian, has something like 200 applications running on it. Can you imagine if I had to click through Install Shield to install each one? Can you imagine going through the same nightmare every time a bug fix came out? After just a few applications, the installation and maintenance work become prohibitively expensive.
The good news is, when I want a new application on my machine, it is as simple as typing "apt-get install xbill" and that's it. I'll never go back to the nightmare of proprietary software, which (in theory) requires reading a pages of legal jargon just and clicking ok about five times just to set up a single program. Linux has the rest of the computer universe beat hands down in software distribution and maintenance infrastructure, mainly helped by the fact that we don't have to deal with eight zillion intellectual property barriers before making a system that works well. Let's not throw it our biggest advantage!
By the way, software collections like debian are almost perfect -- if the applications could just be easily run off a distributed file system like Coda for those of us on LAN's, we'd really have it made.
I looked at a lot of distributed filesystems when working on my Master's thesis, and I still have an old page of links around at http://jab.org/thesis/thesis.html. The links page has pointers right up your ally (xFS, WebFS, etc.). Too bad about Coda not meeting your needs -- I, too, can't wait for it to become more popular.
correction -- it doesn't quite work
on
KDE 1.1.2 is out
·
· Score: 1
apt-get update is happy, but apt-get upgrade fails to locate the packages. I'm not apt expert, but reading the Packages.gz file, it looks like there may be an spurious i386 in the pathname. Can anyone confirm (or better yet, fix) this?
The US system is no accident -- it increases the likelihood of representatives from large, centrist parties, and stacks the deck against smaller parties. Bernie Sanders is the only person in the US House of Representatives right now who is not either a Republican or a Democrat as far as I know (he's an independent and claims to follow socialist politics)
A lot of Americans, including myself, think this is a good thing. Proportional representation systems that encourage small parties have caused a lot of trouble in other countries. I'm quite happy to repress our more radical elements (right or left) with election rules. Who wants a system that helped contribute to WWII in Europe? (At least that's what they teach us in history classes, and I buy it.)
Could someone please provide a link to the actual scientific paper(s)?
Re:Kernel Usage will fork unless...
on
Kernels Galore
·
· Score: 1
People who don't want to recompile for themselves can just subscribe to a linux distrubution (debian comes to mind) which will do the dirty work for you.
Usually IP Whois works like a charm. If you enter the IP address of the originating computer (from the earliest Received: header), it will tell you someone just high up on the IP address foodchain that they will care about stopping spammers. In this case, the IP is 210.162.104.178, which gives
See? Write screen savers, get in on IPOs. Who said screen savers were useless.
In a psychology class I took a few years ago, we were told about an experiment on rationalization. Two groups of people spent huge amounts of time picking up paper clips off of the ground, one at a time. One group was paid well for their task, while the other group was paid very poorly. At the end, both groups were interviewed and the poorly paid folks were much happier with their work. According to the Prof, they subconciously figured to themselves, "hey, here I am doing all this work for no reward, so to maintain my mental self respect, I'll imagine it's satisfying."
I distinctly remember trying to decide how to spend a certain block of time last year. It was either enter the RedHat screensaver contest or put together mail-archive.com and help out the communications infrastructure for a whole bunch of software projects. Which I feel pretty good about (how can one feel bad about supporting xmame?) Anyway, I think I've just about convinced myself that I made the right choice by not working on those lucrative screensavers.
I ordered one of those firecracker kits during the last slashdot promotion and got it two days ago. Not being sure what to do with it, I hooked up a small lamp to the web, here.
So now a request to turn on/off the light can pass through the internet, over the firecracker kit's radio link, then through my apartments power grid to the X10 device, which toggles the light. It's kind of a crazy way to activate a light, but it works fine and is kind of amusing.
I have about 1 million files, averaging about 5k apeice, on an IDE drive and being served by a web server. Some directories hold tens of thousands of files. The files are served from a low traffic web server; well under a gig per day. Is reiserfs better than ext2 for me?
They both worked great, and cost the same ($50 per month). I didn't notice much difference in speed in real world use. The biggest difference was in policies - the @home (cable modem service) said I couldn't run servers on my machine. I can do whatever I want with the PacBell DSL line. To @home's credit, they didn't really enforce their policies, but the mere threat was enough to make me wary.
I suspect this has something to do with phone companies enjoying 'common carrier' legal protection. (i.e. phone companies don't get in trouble for content that passes through their line; if criminals talk over the phone, you can't hold the phone company responsible.)
Much of the reading materials for 6.085, a college course taught jointly between MIT and Harvard Law School, are available on line here. This was a great class and the reading materials are quite thorough. Topics included privacy issues, free speech issues, and computer crime.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say a chess game has on average 60 moves by each player, who on average chooses from 10 possibilities. That's 10^120 possible games. Let's say you have a petahertz computer that can evalutate a move per clock. 10^15 moves per second. Let's say every proton in the universe was such a computer and they all worked in parallel. That's 10^80 computers, according to physicist's estimates. Solution time is 10^120 / (10^80 * 10^15) = 10^35 seconds. Since a year only has pi * 10^7 seconds, it would take way over 10^27 years to solve, or about 10^17 times the lifetime of the universe. Chess WILL NEVER be solved by brute force.
The above posting was me, by the way. (Forgot to log in.) By the way, while I think software collections will outpace local storage in the long run (although both are growing like crazy); the real issue is saving effort on software collection distribution and maintenance for a lan.
Debian has an opportunity for major improvement with lan installations. If I could install the Debian application collection (easily) on a distributed filesystem, then the entire LAN could access those applications. The workstations themselves would have a very small core OS with few to no applications locally. Workstations would be easily interchangable, not require huge disks, and keeping the software collection up to date would be even easier (just running apt-get on a single machine.) This type of setup would really blow away NT solutions, whose software collection's flexibility is hamstrung by intellectual property issues. Coda seems to be the best distributed filesystem for this sort of application. This sort of distributed computing environment has worked wonderfully at MIT's project athena and other large computing facilities, but thus far has been out of reach for smaller environments. It's a big project with tangible benefits; and something I'd very much love to work on. (hint hint hint)
As my friend Jean put it, take C++, remove a bunch of complicated crap (multiple inheritance, templates) then add in some goodies (garbage collection, exceptions that work, javadoc) C++--++
Anyone that thinks this kind of "contract work" is going to help the community is mistaken.
I don't know about the community in general, but I think I will quite soon be happy with a working phone to email answering machine. Things that are trvial for some people are harder for others. I don't know how to program in perl, for example.
Forget the money; Cosource is a good place to share ideas. I wanted my voice modem to answer my phone, take a voice message, and email it to me at over my DSL line. Cosource gave me a forum to share the idea, and lo and behold, it eventually reached a programmer who both likes it and is willing to do the work. The program is now being written under the GPL for linux. This is great! (Also, I wouldn't have known where to best share such an idea before Cosource. It way beats asking your officemates.)
How can I help the Debian collection of applications work well with distributed filesystems? For example, I'd like an entire LAN to have access to the Debian applications through Coda, saving the need for local appplication installation and maintenance.
Asimov's crumbing "Galactic Empire" was written in the 1950's and set thousands of years in the future. It's pretty easy to see the stagnation in these fields now. Earth's space programs peaked with Apollo, and the nuclear industry has been retreating for decades (and most people are happy about it).
The internet boom started was sparked by a single catalyst - a program written by Marc Andreeson and company that captured our imaginations. Somebody really needs to write the "Mosaic" of spaceflight.
The good news is, when I want a new application on my machine, it is as simple as typing "apt-get install xbill" and that's it. I'll never go back to the nightmare of proprietary software, which (in theory) requires reading a pages of legal jargon just and clicking ok about five times just to set up a single program. Linux has the rest of the computer universe beat hands down in software distribution and maintenance infrastructure, mainly helped by the fact that we don't have to deal with eight zillion intellectual property barriers before making a system that works well. Let's not throw it our biggest advantage!
By the way, software collections like debian are almost perfect -- if the applications could just be easily run off a distributed file system like Coda for those of us on LAN's, we'd really have it made.
I looked at a lot of distributed filesystems when working on my Master's thesis, and I still have an old page of links around at http://jab.org/thesis/thesis.html. The links page has pointers right up your ally (xFS, WebFS, etc.). Too bad about Coda not meeting your needs -- I, too, can't wait for it to become more popular.
apt-get update is happy, but apt-get upgrade fails to locate the packages. I'm not apt expert, but reading the Packages.gz file, it looks like there may be an spurious i386 in the pathname. Can anyone confirm (or better yet, fix) this?
deb ftp://ftp.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/1.1.2/distribu tion/deb/potato i386/
A lot of Americans, including myself, think this is a good thing. Proportional representation systems that encourage small parties have caused a lot of trouble in other countries. I'm quite happy to repress our more radical elements (right or left) with election rules. Who wants a system that helped contribute to WWII in Europe? (At least that's what they teach us in history classes, and I buy it.)
Could someone please provide a link to the actual scientific paper(s)?
People who don't want to recompile for themselves can just subscribe to a linux distrubution (debian comes to mind) which will do the dirty work for you.
Windows style software administration and maintenance is an expensive headache. Try debian and see what you are missing.
Try the Coda distributed filesystem, and its "hoarding" mechanism. If you are brave.
inetnum: 210.162.104.176 - 210.162.104.191
netname: MOBIC-NET-JP
descr: Mobic Corporation
descr: 22,Obara,Tsuyama-city,
descr: Okayama 708-0001 Japan
country: JP
admin-c: MO821JP
tech-c: ST901JP
changed: apnic-ftp@nic.ad.jp 19990729
source: JPNIC
Hmmm... usually it's a bit more helpful and supplies an admin's name, phone number, and email address.
In a psychology class I took a few years ago, we were told about an experiment on rationalization. Two groups of people spent huge amounts of time picking up paper clips off of the ground, one at a time. One group was paid well for their task, while the other group was paid very poorly. At the end, both groups were interviewed and the poorly paid folks were much happier with their work. According to the Prof, they subconciously figured to themselves, "hey, here I am doing all this work for no reward, so to maintain my mental self respect, I'll imagine it's satisfying."
I distinctly remember trying to decide how to spend a certain block of time last year. It was either enter the RedHat screensaver contest or put together mail-archive.com and help out the communications infrastructure for a whole bunch of software projects. Which I feel pretty good about (how can one feel bad about supporting xmame?) Anyway, I think I've just about convinced myself that I made the right choice by not working on those lucrative screensavers.
Jeff
Jeff
I ordered one of those firecracker kits
during the last slashdot promotion and got
it two days ago. Not being sure what to
do with it, I hooked up a small lamp to the
web, here.
So now a request to turn on/off the
light can pass through the internet, over the
firecracker kit's radio link, then through my
apartments power grid to the X10 device, which
toggles the light. It's kind of a crazy way
to activate a light, but it works fine and
is kind of amusing.
Jeff
Where might I potentially notice an improvement? I'd hate to go through the hassle of switching to a new filesystem just for a faster 'rm -rf'
I have about 1 million files, averaging about 5k apeice, on an IDE drive and being served by a web server. Some directories hold tens of thousands of files. The files are served from a low traffic web server; well under a gig per day. Is reiserfs better than ext2 for me?
I suspect this has something to do with phone companies enjoying 'common carrier' legal protection. (i.e. phone companies don't get in trouble for content that passes through their line; if criminals talk over the phone, you can't hold the phone company responsible.)
Much of the reading materials for 6.085, a college course taught jointly between MIT and Harvard Law School, are available on line here. This was a great class and the reading materials are quite thorough. Topics included privacy issues, free speech issues, and computer crime.