that really is a very interesting and comprehensive list butmisses the point that OSes ARE LOW lEVEL SOFTWARE. the purpose of an OS is to arbitrate between software and hardware. everything else is an added application suite. what you say there would be better accomplished by a group of apps which do this transparently for you. if said apps were written in java of.NET/mono, they could even run on multiple platforms but they ARE NOT AN OS. OSes are memory management, process management, hardware device drivers, VFS layers, etc. and those things have no place on a remote server.
I am sorry. my statistics were outdated. here are the new ones:
Total people employed in the public ed. industry (Source: US national census bureau):
National Gov level:10,746
State and Local (ie. counties etc.) level:
Elem & Sec Instructional: 4,544,910
Elem & Secondary - Other: 1,994,693
Higher Ed Instructional: 633,531
Higher Ed - Other: 1,231,616
Other Education: 90,032
Total: 8,505,528
In comparison, total number of teachers: 3,250,600
So, the total percentage of employes in the US ed. system who are not teachers would be (8,505,528 - 3,250,600) / 8,505,528 = 61.78 %.
I apologize for not providing appropriate data with a hard to believe claim but the fact still stands that the US public education system has more administrators than teachers.
The problem with Detroit schools are that they are a bureaucratic mess.
No. that is a problem with the US schooling system in general. in the US schooling system, ~56% of the employes are managers. More managers than teachers in an education system? wtf.
just out of curiosity, has anyone ever published benchmarks for oracle, postgres, db2, mssql, and mysql in different system configurations (i.e. single core vs. 2-way vs. 4 way vs. 16 way) and in different load configurations (mostly serial read vs. parallel reads vs. read and writes with serialization)? I have never seen any benchmarks on this stuff yet and they would be very interesting to see.
"I miss summary management (materialized views, dimensions, query rewrite), various ETL features, streams, data guard, updatable views, multi-table inserts, log miner, flashback, database links, packages, automatic workload repository, OEM, and the several months of my life I spent working around PostgreSQL's lack of anything comparable to these features."
PostgreSQL has query rewrite and updatable view thanks to its rules system. the others are missing (to my knowledge).
First of all, self replication should only be attempted after many years of successful nanotechnology, if at all. It's much safer to have two or more types of nanobots that can produce only the next type in a cycle, but not themselves. This lowers the probability of run away replication, because any point in the chain can be disabled. Having choke-points or environmental controls on reproduction is also a good idea.
Without self-replication, nanobots will get absolutely nowhere. Using current tech, it takes ~ 40 years to build a functional nanobot (it needs to be done atom by atom). The only practical way of changing this is to get some microscopic workers in to help speed the work along in an exponential fashion, thus nanobots making more of themselves.
Probably the single biggest safety measure for individual nanobots is lots of redundancy and cross checking. Every nanobot should be a collection of independant modules, all of which must cooperate in order to complete any task. Additionally, each module should be able to trigger a shutdown of the entire nanobot if inconsistancies arise. Self repair should be avoided at all costs because it is much safer for working nanobots to disassemble the broken ones and build new ones than to allow random changes to evolve within a self repairing and self replicating system. Cryptography will probably also play a large part, because traditional error checking will not be adequate to detect every error in trillions of nanobots, each executing trillions of instructions a second. Additionally, encrypting communication between modules and even instructions and data in memory will serve as protection against intelligent hacking attempts at modifying the internal state of the nanobots.
Are you sure that you are not just being overly paranoid. Nanobots are not some disgruntled slaves just looking for an opportunity to rebel. Also, note that these things do not have much in the way of mass (think just a few million atoms at most), forget processing power. you want these things to run AES on themselves??? So what is one nanite out of a hundred gets a bug, it probably won't last long anyway. also note that nanobots are delicate systems and it takes a lot of effort to get even theoretical ones which work. Having one which could work after getting a mutation would probably the the engineer who designed it the equivalent of a nobel prize.
As part of the redundancy, it makes a lot of sense not to have truly autonomous nanobots, but instead require the environment to supply them with critical components, energy, or control without which they cannot function. It's much harder to make grey goo if every nanobot requires a complex chemical to operate that doesn't occur in nature and cannot be produced by the nanobot, especially if that chemical is what provides its energy to operate.
Evolution should never be allowed in the design of complete nanobots. Components can be evolved to be maximally efficient, but the overall structure and controls must be rigorously verified to ensure safe operation.
First of, removing autonomy defeats their purpose to a large extent. it is not really possible to use these things effectively if you have to keep them in a tank of exotic chemicals just to keep them from falling apart. Evolution probably won't come into the design of these things even if we wanted it to be there. refer to my previous point about mutation in these things.
Repeat after me until it sinks into your head: Nanobots are not out to kill me. Nanobots are not out to kill me. Nanobots are not out to kill me.
I don't have a problem with the nanobots being intelligent and sphisticated (though I think they will get there pretty once quickly once the manufacturing problem is solved) but I have a major problem with the mobile part.
Take a nanotube. then take another smaller nanotube and slide the smaller one inside the larger one. then attach the sensor chemical found in eyes as a hinge between the two. when hit by a photon, the molecule gets a 90 degree bend in femtoseconds. If you just keep hitting it with photons, you can make a sliding device to propel anything on top of the nanotubes across at over 100 m/s. And yes, people have already managed to make working models in labs. movement is not a problem for nanobots.
It makes the perfectly pragmatic assumption that, if the bad hats get physical posession of the passport you're screwed anyway.
Bzzt. WRONG. Without the RFID chip, you would have had to make a physical replica of th passport will all the problems of doing to therein. Compared to this, all you have to do now is to take any passport and insert a cracked chip with cloned data inside. since the passport is "known to be secure," the physical contents would probably not be physically checked again and even if they are checked, the check would still not be as rigorous as it would have normally been. This really is a major security hole and a massive waste of money.
I find it hard to believe that a normal furnace is hot enough to produce carbon nanotubes. Currently CNTs have to be manufactured using plasma torches. in a normal furnace, there will be too many defects in the CNTs for them to be of any use.
still have to power the computers which create the heat in the first place. Also, I wonder how much more expensive power and bandwidth will be when that far away from the major grids but then economies of scale may help.
I am personally curious about how middleman attacks are prevented since that is where the most securty issues are (IMHO). its easy to make sure that only the desired recipient can read the data (encryption does a great job of that). For a passport though, only existance needs to be verified. It doesn't matter if attacker X doesnot find out anything about victim Y as long they can pretend to be that person and for that, it doesn't mater how much encryption is on the data if the attacker can just intercept the message and then relay it to the central reciever. any info on that?
actually... such a force is pretty much the exact definition of a dictator. you are also quite right about the inhuman restraint part. unless a dictator is capable of restraining him/herself efectively, they wil turn the gov. into a tyranny, at which point the they start to drive their country into a hole. Actually, all governments have a problem with trying to do too much when a government should really try to do as little as possible. In a democracy, you have built-in brakes in the form of checks and balances. In a dictatorship, the brakes come from the selection process of the ruler with an above average ability to rule well. just that the democratic system depends on a bunch of possibly unqualified voters to make all the decesions is where democracy fails.
actually there is a simple solution to that. get rid of the democracy. then the only person with a vote is the one in charge. the only problemis picking that one person but revolutions & power struggels usually handle that pretty well.
since when does anybody tell me who I must do buisiness with in a capitalistic society. ADA infringes on freedom of enterprise by forcing me to conduct (possibly unprofitable) buisiness and unwillingly make a trade that I don't want to. not catering to 100% of the population is an inherent right of anybody in a capitalistic society. Extending your argument, since a business must cater to 100% of the population, should they also cater to the ones incapable of paying them? are you sure you aren't confusing socialism with capitalism?
hmm... I have had similar experiences but with lots ofspecial cases. in string processing, python is second to none. the lack of execution speed never shows up and writting string handling code in python is amazingly easy. Ditto in dbs. In numerical calculations though, python is a bad idea for anything except testing out an algorithm. thats because in python, everything even integers, floats, and chars are kept on the heap in pyobjects. so when somebody does x = y + z where y and z are integers, whats really hapening is that python is going to y and z, extracting the values, actually carrying out the operation, and then finally repacking the stuff back together. In defense, this super dynamicness does have some very useful results. namely that everything is dynamic including classes and functions which believe it or not, can actualy be useful sometimes.
P.S. which algorithm competition allows python? really curious since I have always been pissed that these competitions don't accept languages like bash/ruby/python.
I would like to point out that airports in the US do not operate under the same rules as say a street in NY. In an airport, compliance with (airline and security) staff instructions is mandatory under pain of imprisonment (up to 10 years I think but that needs a little checkup). In an airport, you do not under any circumstances mess around with security.
no kidding. MS is now starting to behave as if they own your computer. What I find really interesting is that this helps linux a lot. right now, the biggest problem with Linux adoption (IMHO) is the application barrier to entry, ie. the lack of availability of games and other professional software. Interestingly enough, it is precisely the people who use such software who are also inclined to upgrade their hardware. so, MS is alieanating one of the most locked in segments in the entire market. This could be interesting. Maybe graphics card support for Linux will improve thanks to this (hope so. it is a pain not having DRI right now).
you are right. to make good policies in any field, one needs to have a person trained in that field. thus my lack of support for democracies. in a democracy, we vote based on who can look best on TV and sell themselves the best and make them responsible for all ur national policy. that is a recipy for disaster. The people who should be making the laws for economics should be established buisinessmen or maybe econ professors or maybe somebody else but NOT actors who only know how to act on TV. The ones making laws on medicine should probably be trained in the medical profession. Asking politicians to make decesions on all these subjects is like asking a UNIX admin about policy for how to run a court or policy to run the defense industry. Ofcourse they won't do a good (or perhaps even and acceptable) job. The tech field is just a small example of where this is starting to show up. (for a big example, look at fiscal management or the lack of thereof)
The only solution to get better politicians is a smarter and more informed voter population. Demagogues flourish in countries with low literacy, with few people reading newspapers and more people relying on only a few aligned information sources. So, rather than complaining about politicians, it would be probably more productive to tell the next guy (or better yet write to a newspaper, if there are any chances to be published) about why that politician is a kook. And, in the Grand Scheme of Things, increase education level and independent press.
quite right. a politician is primarily interested in gettin re-elected, not improving any of the economic/social/tech. problems there are. my question is, is it even possible to change that in a democratic system? how about one as large as the US? or maybe even as massive as the one in India? can democracy really work with such a large population?
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that really is a very interesting and comprehensive list butmisses the point that OSes ARE LOW lEVEL SOFTWARE. the purpose of an OS is to arbitrate between software and hardware. everything else is an added application suite. what you say there would be better accomplished by a group of apps which do this transparently for you. if said apps were written in java of .NET/mono, they could even run on multiple platforms but they ARE NOT AN OS. OSes are memory management, process management, hardware device drivers, VFS layers, etc. and those things have no place on a remote server.
Total people employed in the public ed. industry (Source: US national census bureau):
National Gov level:10,746
State and Local (ie. counties etc.) level:
Elem & Sec Instructional: 4,544,910
Elem & Secondary - Other: 1,994,693
Higher Ed Instructional: 633,531
Higher Ed - Other: 1,231,616
Other Education: 90,032
Total: 8,505,528
In comparison, total number of teachers: 3,250,600
So, the total percentage of employes in the US ed. system who are not teachers would be (8,505,528 - 3,250,600) / 8,505,528 = 61.78 %.
I apologize for not providing appropriate data with a hard to believe claim but the fact still stands that the US public education system has more administrators than teachers.
just out of curiosity, has anyone ever published benchmarks for oracle, postgres, db2, mssql, and mysql in different system configurations (i.e. single core vs. 2-way vs. 4 way vs. 16 way) and in different load configurations (mostly serial read vs. parallel reads vs. read and writes with serialization)? I have never seen any benchmarks on this stuff yet and they would be very interesting to see.
PostgreSQL has query rewrite and updatable view thanks to its rules system. the others are missing (to my knowledge).
Repeat after me until it sinks into your head: Nanobots are not out to kill me. Nanobots are not out to kill me. Nanobots are not out to kill me.
Take a nanotube. then take another smaller nanotube and slide the smaller one inside the larger one. then attach the sensor chemical found in eyes as a hinge between the two. when hit by a photon, the molecule gets a 90 degree bend in femtoseconds. If you just keep hitting it with photons, you can make a sliding device to propel anything on top of the nanotubes across at over 100 m/s. And yes, people have already managed to make working models in labs. movement is not a problem for nanobots.
Am I the only one thinking of the posiblity of just making slight alterations to the data when you cloned the passport, say changing the biometrics?
I find it hard to believe that a normal furnace is hot enough to produce carbon nanotubes. Currently CNTs have to be manufactured using plasma torches. in a normal furnace, there will be too many defects in the CNTs for them to be of any use.
still have to power the computers which create the heat in the first place. Also, I wonder how much more expensive power and bandwidth will be when that far away from the major grids but then economies of scale may help.
I am personally curious about how middleman attacks are prevented since that is where the most securty issues are (IMHO). its easy to make sure that only the desired recipient can read the data (encryption does a great job of that). For a passport though, only existance needs to be verified. It doesn't matter if attacker X doesnot find out anything about victim Y as long they can pretend to be that person and for that, it doesn't mater how much encryption is on the data if the attacker can just intercept the message and then relay it to the central reciever. any info on that?
actually... such a force is pretty much the exact definition of a dictator. you are also quite right about the inhuman restraint part. unless a dictator is capable of restraining him/herself efectively, they wil turn the gov. into a tyranny, at which point the they start to drive their country into a hole. Actually, all governments have a problem with trying to do too much when a government should really try to do as little as possible. In a democracy, you have built-in brakes in the form of checks and balances. In a dictatorship, the brakes come from the selection process of the ruler with an above average ability to rule well. just that the democratic system depends on a bunch of possibly unqualified voters to make all the decesions is where democracy fails.
actually there is a simple solution to that. get rid of the democracy. then the only person with a vote is the one in charge. the only problemis picking that one person but revolutions & power struggels usually handle that pretty well.
amen to that.
since when does anybody tell me who I must do buisiness with in a capitalistic society. ADA infringes on freedom of enterprise by forcing me to conduct (possibly unprofitable) buisiness and unwillingly make a trade that I don't want to. not catering to 100% of the population is an inherent right of anybody in a capitalistic society. Extending your argument, since a business must cater to 100% of the population, should they also cater to the ones incapable of paying them? are you sure you aren't confusing socialism with capitalism?
PyGTK. GTK has ben ported native over to windows and PyGTK is much easier (IMHO) to code in than PyQT or especially tk.
P.S. which algorithm competition allows python? really curious since I have always been pissed that these competitions don't accept languages like bash/ruby/python.
I would like to point out that airports in the US do not operate under the same rules as say a street in NY. In an airport, compliance with (airline and security) staff instructions is mandatory under pain of imprisonment (up to 10 years I think but that needs a little checkup). In an airport, you do not under any circumstances mess around with security.
no but it is still a faliure.
no kidding. MS is now starting to behave as if they own your computer. What I find really interesting is that this helps linux a lot. right now, the biggest problem with Linux adoption (IMHO) is the application barrier to entry, ie. the lack of availability of games and other professional software. Interestingly enough, it is precisely the people who use such software who are also inclined to upgrade their hardware. so, MS is alieanating one of the most locked in segments in the entire market. This could be interesting. Maybe graphics card support for Linux will improve thanks to this (hope so. it is a pain not having DRI right now).
see. guns should be in wide circulation in a country. especially the automatic 50 calibre armor piercing kind.
you are right. to make good policies in any field, one needs to have a person trained in that field. thus my lack of support for democracies. in a democracy, we vote based on who can look best on TV and sell themselves the best and make them responsible for all ur national policy. that is a recipy for disaster. The people who should be making the laws for economics should be established buisinessmen or maybe econ professors or maybe somebody else but NOT actors who only know how to act on TV. The ones making laws on medicine should probably be trained in the medical profession. Asking politicians to make decesions on all these subjects is like asking a UNIX admin about policy for how to run a court or policy to run the defense industry. Ofcourse they won't do a good (or perhaps even and acceptable) job. The tech field is just a small example of where this is starting to show up. (for a big example, look at fiscal management or the lack of thereof)
just out of curiosity, what exactly is the difference between emacs and xemacs other than the fact the xemacs is a fork of emacs.