Yup, a truck full of tapes (or disks, it you have *good* packaging) is still the standard way of doing high volume data vaulting. If you need to move multiple TB per day (nothing special for a large datacenter), you don't want to pay for that amount of bandwidth unless you absolutely have to, i.e. you need online access.
That's why tapes keep falling off the back of a truck and get lost every now and then. Bummer if there's credit card records on those tapes. That's why hardware encryption is getting a lot of attention recently.
TFA mentions encryption is passing; are there any standard USB drives with encryption yet? How is the password transmitted to the drive? I sometimes have a bad feeling carrying company data and sources around all the time. I keep the USB stick attached to the company badge so I won't lose is easily, but still...
... and thus provided an evolutionary advantage. And maybe still does (http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/03/polygamist.sent enced/index.html is an extreme example.) That's why it is so widespread. Yes, it's an organized mass delusion, but natural selection doesn't care about that.
Hmm, I'd agree with you on all of the above, though I consider myself *very* liberal. You're a LEFT WING EXTREMIST conservative! Shh, don't tell anybody, especially not any GOP buddies. They'd burn you on the stake.
Obviously, it's a very hard problem, both in the literal layman's sense of the term but also I think in the information-science sense of the term.
Which means that if the bogeymen have some competent cryptographers, the three-letter agencies don't stand a chance. They can only bet on stupidity (like that Mafia guy a couple of weeks ago who used a substitution cipher.)
You may argue about the term "de-evolution" - it's just evolution at work, as always.
But this is really scary stuff. We humans are creating a lot of environmental pressure these days.
Here's the entire LA Times series so you don't have to wade though the Flash crap:
Google is admittedly not an operating system in the classic sense
How about Google sponsoring an ad-supported version of Linux? They have the ad revenue infrastructure and could "sell" Dell or Lenovo an OS for a negative price. Voila, more Linux on the desktop and cheaper hardware, withous MS tax.
I wonder how fast you'd have to spin the Moon and how much you would have to hollow it to get a 1G environment on the inside of it?
a=omega^2 * r.
Moon's diameter=3476.2 km according to Wikipedia.
omega=sqrt(9.81/(3476200/2))=0.002375.
T=1/(omega/(2*pi))=2645 s. One rev per 44 minutes. Assuming there's no mass left inside, i.e. it's completely hollow and all mass is outside of you so its gravity cancels out.
Don't ask me how to keep it from flying apart at the equator and collapsing at the poles.
No, its not that we [...] have special brains that work better when it comes to [...] beer
Huh? Of course we do. The only countries that can keep up in terms of beer are the Irish and the Czech. Maybe the Dutch.
The main point here is that during the first 2 or 3 decades of the last century, when modern physics was developed, Europe (not just Germany) was where the action was, and the US was backwaters. Since then the bias in the US has been towards applied sciences, due to lack of public funding for basic science IMHO (e.g. SSC.) Private investors (or the military) want to see results. Watch: If/when ITER proves that fusion works, the G$ will start to flow.
Nuclear Physics isn't something that seems like a promising career path in Germany today. The first reactors have been switched off already, others will follow.
I don't think building reactors has had anything to do with basic physics for a couple of decades. It's ordinary engineering.
CERN, JET and ITER are another matter though, None of them in Germany, but close enough.
How do these Germans know so much about the atomic nucleus? Did Neils Bohr leave them a working model or something?
Easy: General education level, good science classes in high school, social image/reputation of science and scientists, and an absence of religious bias against science.
Is it that hard to put a thermal printer behind a glass shield
This may sound decidedly un-geeky, but if you want a paper trail, what good is an electronic voting machine at all?
How about a (gasp) paper form with a couple of checkboxes, a pencil, a ballot box, and an optical reader at the central office?
Voila: Permanent record (not one that deteriorates and is susceptible to chemicals like thermal paper), easily verified with the naked eye if you don't trust the machine and need a re-count, and cheaper than electronic voting machines. And no way of forging anything as long as the ballot boxes are locked and supervised at all times.
Only disadvantage: Loss of revenue to Diebold and co. And maybe a couple hours delay until you have results.
Famous quotes: "I don't think the world will need more than a few cores." "There is no reason anyone would want a core in their home." "640 K cores ought to be enough for anyone." "Nobody will need more than one Gigacore."
We've heard it all before. Now that the number-of-cores race is on, better start applying Moore's law.
Given that a core only needs a couple million transistors and the rest is cache, maybe they should revisit turning the memory/CPU relationship around and just put a core into every memory module and hook them up via HyperTransport or whatever. Now *that* would be NUMA.
Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc.
And who is going to predict politics, e.g. the CO2 output of the US over the next 30 years?
I call bullshit. You can't even predict the general climate without taking greenhouse gas emissions into account, let alone specific patterns. So... this is going to depend significantly on e.g. the next elections in the US. Is that outcome included in the simulations? I don't think so.
there would be little evolutionary advantage to developing an inherently less stable "wing" configuration for the low speed flying that this creature would be doing.
Check out the Rogallo glider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogallo_wing). It is simple, lightweight, and suitable for low speeds. The a and d configurations in TFA look similar.
FTFA: The researchers showed how to get round the limited computational abilities of the smart tags to use them as an attack vector and corrupt databases holding information about what a company has in storage.
Whoever wrote the RFID reading code needs to be shot. Or at least fired and sent back to college.
"Oh yeah, we have an externally read binary string here, let's rely on its structure and assume it is always what we expect." Sweet.
Given how some of my UPS packages arrive looking like they were dragged to my house behind the truck, I would say that it is pretty likely that UPS is doing things to the batteries that my computer store doesn't.
Not just UPS. Add Lufthansa, United and American checked luggage - and I'm sure the others aren't any better. I've had clamshell Delseys and Samsonites crushed. Now imagine what could happen to a battery in such a case.
Nope. Lithium is an alkali metal. Alkali metals ignite on contact with water.
If you crush a battery it will short out internally. Since, as another poster mentioned here a few days ago, the energy density of modern batteries is about a quarter that of TNT, a short will yield a very high power release. No, it won't explode since it takes seconds to release the energy, as opposed to microseconds for a detonation, but it's still going to be some nice fireworks, just like that Dell laptop recently.
Maybe it'll help me fix the damaged filesystem on one of my machines. CHKDSK/F doesn't help. There's a directory that contains garbage, among it a file named con:( Gotta try it next week in the office. Otherwise it's "reinstall XP" time.
I read on a theoretical physics blog (yes, there are such things) that there is a fear that this LHC might actually generate black holes.
That would actually be ultra cool. A black hole would evaporate in a minute fraction of a second, giving off a very different signature than the expected quark-gluon plasma. If that were the case, physicists would get insight towards new physics, like string theory - the first experimental data about it. It seems, however, that chances are slim.
Also, a black hole is the most efficient way of converting mass into energy. Think about that.
You know, with some of the recent medical advances I keep idly wondering how long it's going to be before the statement "same-sex couples can't have biological children" is no longer true.
Well our Governor proved that you don't need a woman for a pregnancy - several years ago (http://imdb.com/title/tt0110216/). Now where's the artificial egg? That'll show 'em!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, a truck full of tapes (or disks, it you have *good* packaging) is still the standard way of doing high volume data vaulting. If you need to move multiple TB per day (nothing special for a large datacenter), you don't want to pay for that amount of bandwidth unless you absolutely have to, i.e. you need online access.
That's why tapes keep falling off the back of a truck and get lost every now and then. Bummer if there's credit card records on those tapes. That's why hardware encryption is getting a lot of attention recently.
TFA mentions encryption is passing; are there any standard USB drives with encryption yet? How is the password transmitted to the drive? I sometimes have a bad feeling carrying company data and sources around all the time. I keep the USB stick attached to the company badge so I won't lose is easily, but still...
"If humans evolved from apes...why are there still apes?"
Well, we almost fixed that. Just give us a few more decades.
It's about time we drop religion.
You got it all wrong. Think about what is more advantageous, evolutionarily: Being a mormon, preferably polygamous, or being a geek?
I've been thinking long and hard how to found my own religion. That Hubbard dude sure did get it right.
Ooh, and the tax status...
Religion is a competition of story telling.
... and thus provided an evolutionary advantage. And maybe still does (http://www.cnn.com/2006/LAW/08/03/polygamist.sent enced/index.html is an extreme example.) That's why it is so widespread. Yes, it's an organized mass delusion, but natural selection doesn't care about that.
o lutionary_psychologist) .)
See "The Mating Mind" by Geoffrey Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(ev
Hmm, I'd agree with you on all of the above, though I consider myself *very* liberal. You're a LEFT WING EXTREMIST conservative! Shh, don't tell anybody, especially not any GOP buddies. They'd burn you on the stake.
If you look at that funny square thingy he brings you'll know this is aimed at the over-40 crowd.
Obviously, it's a very hard problem, both in the literal layman's sense of the term but also I think in the information-science sense of the term.
Which means that if the bogeymen have some competent cryptographers, the three-letter agencies don't stand a chance. They can only bet on stupidity (like that Mafia guy a couple of weeks ago who used a substitution cipher.)
You may argue about the term "de-evolution" - it's just evolution at work, as always.
e an30jul30,0,6670018,full.story
e an31jul31,0,7653060,full.story
e an1aug01,0,7088530,full.story
e an2aug02,0,71579,full.story
e an3aug03,1,809748,full.story
But this is really scary stuff. We humans are creating a lot of environmental pressure these days.
Here's the entire LA Times series so you don't have to wade though the Flash crap:
Part 1: A Primeval Tide of Toxins
Runoff from modern life is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms. This 'rise of slime,' as one scientist calls it, is killing larger species and sickening people.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-oc
Part 2: Sentinels Under Attack
Toxic algae that poison the brain have caused strandings and mass die-offs of marine mammals -- barometers of the sea's health.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-oc
Part 3: Dark Tides, Ill Winds
With sickening regularity, toxic algae blooms are invading coastal waters. They kill sea life and send poisons ashore on the breeze, forcing residents to flee.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-oc
Part 4: Plague of Plastic Chokes the Seas
On Midway Atoll, 40% of albatross chicks die, their bellies full of trash. Swirling masses of drifting debris pollute remote beaches and snare wildlife.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-oc
Part 5: A Chemical Imbalance
Growing seawater acidity threatens to wipe out coral, fish and other crucial species worldwide.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/oceans/la-me-oc
Google is admittedly not an operating system in the classic sense
How about Google sponsoring an ad-supported version of Linux? They have the ad revenue infrastructure and could "sell" Dell or Lenovo an OS for a negative price. Voila, more Linux on the desktop and cheaper hardware, withous MS tax.
I wonder how fast you'd have to spin the Moon and how much you would have to hollow it to get a 1G environment on the inside of it?
a=omega^2 * r.
Moon's diameter=3476.2 km according to Wikipedia.
omega=sqrt(9.81/(3476200/2))=0.002375.
T=1/(omega/(2*pi))=2645 s. One rev per 44 minutes. Assuming there's no mass left inside, i.e. it's completely hollow and all mass is outside of you so its gravity cancels out.
Don't ask me how to keep it from flying apart at the equator and collapsing at the poles.
No, its not that we [...] have special brains that work better when it comes to [...] beer
Huh? Of course we do. The only countries that can keep up in terms of beer are the Irish and the Czech. Maybe the Dutch.
The main point here is that during the first 2 or 3 decades of the last century, when modern physics was developed, Europe (not just Germany) was where the action was, and the US was backwaters. Since then the bias in the US has been towards applied sciences, due to lack of public funding for basic science IMHO (e.g. SSC.) Private investors (or the military) want to see results.
Watch: If/when ITER proves that fusion works, the G$ will start to flow.
Nuclear Physics isn't something that seems like a promising career path in Germany today. The first reactors have been switched off already, others will follow.
:)
I don't think building reactors has had anything to do with basic physics for a couple of decades. It's ordinary engineering.
CERN, JET and ITER are another matter though, None of them in Germany, but close enough.
And I agree 100% on Angela Merkel.
How do these Germans know so much about the atomic nucleus? Did Neils Bohr leave them a working model or something?
Easy: General education level, good science classes in high school, social image/reputation of science and scientists, and an absence of religious bias against science.
Niels Bohr was Danish, FWIW.
Is it that hard to put a thermal printer behind a glass shield
This may sound decidedly un-geeky, but if you want a paper trail, what good is an electronic voting machine at all?
How about a (gasp) paper form with a couple of checkboxes, a pencil, a ballot box, and an optical reader at the central office?
Voila: Permanent record (not one that deteriorates and is susceptible to chemicals like thermal paper), easily verified with the naked eye if you don't trust the machine and need a re-count, and cheaper than electronic voting machines. And no way of forging anything as long as the ballot boxes are locked and supervised at all times.
Only disadvantage: Loss of revenue to Diebold and co. And maybe a couple hours delay until you have results.
They're here already...
The filaments were recently seen using the Subaru and Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea.
Don't fear, those are just noodly appendages.
Famous quotes:
"I don't think the world will need more than a few cores."
"There is no reason anyone would want a core in their home."
"640 K cores ought to be enough for anyone."
"Nobody will need more than one Gigacore."
We've heard it all before. Now that the number-of-cores race is on, better start applying Moore's law.
Given that a core only needs a couple million transistors and the rest is cache, maybe they should revisit turning the memory/CPU relationship around and just put a core into every memory module and hook them up via HyperTransport or whatever. Now *that* would be NUMA.
My first thought was "Night of the Living Dead", but no, that was *George* Romero.
D ead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Living_
Add all of these up and you may be able to predict the frequency and severity of storms, the probablility of different weather patterns, etc.
And who is going to predict politics, e.g. the CO2 output of the US over the next 30 years?
I call bullshit. You can't even predict the general climate without taking greenhouse gas emissions into account, let alone specific patterns. So... this is going to depend significantly on e.g. the next elections in the US. Is that outcome included in the simulations? I don't think so.
there would be little evolutionary advantage to developing an inherently less stable "wing" configuration for the low speed flying that this creature would be doing.
Check out the Rogallo glider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogallo_wing). It is simple, lightweight, and suitable for low speeds. The a and d configurations in TFA look similar.
FTFA: The researchers showed how to get round the limited computational abilities of the smart tags to use them as an attack vector and corrupt databases holding information about what a company has in storage.
Whoever wrote the RFID reading code needs to be shot. Or at least fired and sent back to college.
"Oh yeah, we have an externally read binary string here, let's rely on its structure and assume it is always what we expect." Sweet.
Given how some of my UPS packages arrive looking like they were dragged to my house behind the truck, I would say that it is pretty likely that UPS is doing things to the batteries that my computer store doesn't.
Not just UPS. Add Lufthansa, United and American checked luggage - and I'm sure the others aren't any better. I've had clamshell Delseys and Samsonites crushed. Now imagine what could happen to a battery in such a case.
Nope. Lithium is an alkali metal. Alkali metals ignite on contact with water.
If you crush a battery it will short out internally. Since, as another poster mentioned here a few days ago, the energy density of modern batteries is about a quarter that of TNT, a short will yield a very high power release. No, it won't explode since it takes seconds to release the energy, as opposed to microseconds for a detonation, but it's still going to be some nice fireworks, just like that Dell laptop recently.
Maybe it'll help me fix the damaged filesystem on one of my machines. CHKDSK /F doesn't help. There's a directory that contains garbage, among it a file named con :(
Gotta try it next week in the office. Otherwise it's "reinstall XP" time.
I read on a theoretical physics blog (yes, there are such things) that there is a fear that this LHC might actually generate black holes.
That would actually be ultra cool. A black hole would evaporate in a minute fraction of a second, giving off a very different signature than the expected quark-gluon plasma. If that were the case, physicists would get insight towards new physics, like string theory - the first experimental data about it. It seems, however, that chances are slim.
Also, a black hole is the most efficient way of converting mass into energy. Think about that.
You know, with some of the recent medical advances I keep idly wondering how long it's going to be before the statement "same-sex couples can't have biological children" is no longer true.
Well our Governor proved that you don't need a woman for a pregnancy - several years ago (http://imdb.com/title/tt0110216/).
Now where's the artificial egg? That'll show 'em!