Geek's Blogger

OS and Goverment....

Yes, not quite what I meant but precisely, precisely hehehehehe...It is
all to do with "collaboration" rather than "governing", EVERYTHING
"component based", OS gets created dynamically "on the fly", each
component is fully independent and "stand alone", hardrive, keyboard,
monitor, network cable, the lot, and when those devices start to
interact, they create temporary connections between themselves, and
constantly optimize the whole lot, it is always "commonality" which is
the biggest problem and who/what should be responsible for managing it,
control is power, any OS is like a Goverment: democratically chosen but
by using all political means available, never really giving us what we
really want, controlling, limiting and opressing us, conservative,
beaurocratic machinery with a very slow response to any change, that is
why, one of the whys, Linux is changing fast, it is a young,
revolutionary republic, revolutionary and violitile, can't be bothered
with spelling checker today, big coorporations burnt their fingers by
trying to make a quick buck out of similar scenarios before: investing
in all dodgy revolutionary countries, is it possible for "computers" to
exist without OS? Is it possible for a society to exist without any
Goverment? The Linux question is a hippie question and, in fact, it is
most likely that Linux IS just continuation of "hippism" but in much
more grown up and mature form, so we cannot have software without OS
because we cannot get rid of Goverments, so the next step is to create
a proper simulation of what's "outside", no OS to start with, each
device, each software creates its own virtual file systems and what
have yous, then some applications "collaborate" using some standard,
java, whatever, and create inter-application file systems with "pools",
so from now each application first of all looks for some good file
system it could hook itself up to and creates its own only if it
doesn't find any better ones....and that goes to everything else,
inter-device application level pools, inter-device-inter-application
device pools, "mega" pools, "mega-super" pools, it is a simple matter
of creating an environment which would stimulate the evolution, and
then there will be all this chosing and searching for and bargaining
for the best bit of this and that going on between software, and slowly
all the levels will be engulfed by this and we will have perfect
Goverment Administrative Pyramid, and then people will be able to chose
whatever they like, but not really, because they will be using the
software which is already "tied up" to this or other flavour of things
due to some political or economical reasons... so such software would
act as PM, and in theory we could put pressure and make our choice by
chosing our PMs, but in reality.... and hey presto we would end up
having exactly what we have already hehehehehe....and what I am talking
about is happening already anyway, but from the "other end" lol.... the
OS's are being taken apart and bits and pieces of responsibilities and
duties are being taken away from them by OpenSource and Portability and
all this carry on. So in theory they are getting slimmer and concerned
only with basic minimal life functions - as they should be. But since
anything abstracted tends to be many times over its original size, the
whole installation package is getting larger and larger and that, in
turn, fits yet again into this "pools and pools of pools" reality,
there are so many "services", "server processes", "listeners", "open
pipes", "ports" and other listening, and looking for and searching
happening inside one PC these days, no matter Linux or Windows, more on
Linux me thinks, the difference between "inside" and "outside" is
diminishing, the term "client-server" is gaining purely local context,
of course, the easiest way to adopt to all the unexpected scenarios an
outside world can throw at us is to create an outside world inside us
so we won't be even be able to tell the difference.

--- Paul Hussein wrote:

> You've got to look at this.
>
>
http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html
>
> If you think of it, search google, someone has bloody done it.
>
> What a cool piece of software.
>
>
>

Nigerian Scam - fact or reality?

Pain and emacs

Software Story

You bastards! You started me off again hehehehe... but I had to get
this story off my chest sooner or later, so just as well... :)

At work there are lifts (3 floors) Â– they keep breaking and breaking,
out of order most of the time. Then I see those 2 guys carrying this
card, which looks exactly like a PC card, but 2m x 2m wide. Then I go
to Poland, come back and the lifts have been practically replaced, they
are brand new. They behave erratically, break sometimes, but it isn't
as bad as before. And then, out of the blue, they start to open the
door again after closing it. This is where story begins.

I don't know when this started to happen, but it definitely started to
happen AFTER new lifts were "stabilized" and considered as "fully
working". The door closes, opens again, closes again and off we go.
All 4 lifts (2 on each side of the building) started to demonstrate
this behaviour. This has been going on for months now. Imagine going
from the ground floor to the 3rd, stopping en-route on the 1st floor to
pick up one more passenger. It takes easily 10 minutes to get to the
top hehehehe....there were engineers working furiously and seriously on
all lifts few months after this started to happen. They left and lifts
still behave that way. We, techies, "workaround experts" found a ...
workaround for this! Just after pressing the button you have to wave
your arm in between doors. Then lift takes off after the first door
closing. The only problem with this workaround is usual one: fallible
human factor. I keep forgetting to wave my arm after pressing the
button! And this is where the story begins.

I suspect that this huge archaic PC looking card "lift card" was
replaced by some more modern and more clever combination of less
hardware and more software. One would expect hardware failures to be
to certain extent erratic, accidental and unique. Hard disk failure
can manifest itself in many different nearly unique ways. So this is
my first point: ALL lifts behave in the same way, and their behaviour
is VERY consistent. That's the first hint me thinks. The second clue
is that, despite working hard on it for a week, engineers didn't manage
to fix or even change the behaviour of EVEN ONE of those lifts. And
this is where the story ends.

Punchline: This is what the difference between hardware and software
is.

Geek's World of Hardware Gadgets (colab)

karl:
Over the last few years I use my PC for less of little numerous tasks, like time scheduling, playing music, playing DVDs etc. All the items to perform these tasks are so incredibly cheap now rather than years ago. I have a pocket organiser (cost me about £80). I paid £269 for a DVD player when I decided to dip my toes into the new technology, and I thought it was a bargain compared with others paying £600+). Now I can walk into a store and buy a reasonable DVD player for under £50. I plug it into my television sit down on my sofa, crack open a can of beer and sit in comfort watching my favorite movie or something I recorded from the TV some days before. Why do I want to have a noisy computer and an office chair to watch my film with.

Okay, so now rather than having a £2000 computer and make it do all the clever stuff, playing multiple music from CD tracks, movies etc, I have a piece of dedicated equipment does exactly that task and that one only. I can take comfort that 99% of the time I can put the media (or whatever) into it and it will do what I need in the right amount of time without (Execution of bad instruction or the PC configuration has changed) and get on with using the product not configuring or messing with it just to perform a menial task.

Okay, I have a portable MP3 player with loads of my own CD tracks on. I get home, and plug the output into my mixer and it comes out of my amplifier like a home stereo. The gadget cost me £70 and it will last several years. I use a nimh AA battery (new type of rechargeable batteries - greater charge/discharge and less memory affect) and I get 500+ recharges out of them. I could get a mains powered MP3 player and do it all properly with say a 2gb drive but they're not cheap enough for my budget yet. But when they are I'll be buying one.

So if we extrapolate that over the next few years, we would have an array of pluggable gadgets that we mix together only when we need to have some central processing or doing something that computers do better than us. i.e a PC. Then when the task is finished, separate the gadgets and get them back to doing what they do best on their own. And the PC is left doing anything but each of these individual task performed by the gadgets. My CPU drop to an all time low and I get the best power/£ ratio from my PC.

As an example, I have a usb hard drive with my music on it. I have my portable MP3 player. I have a program I wrote in VB6 which chooses a random selection of music I like, downloads it onto my MP3 player. Once the task is complete I unplug both the gadgets from the PC and they both go their own way. The PC is released from it core central process task to be used for some other task, like fraggin' some other people's butts in Unreal Tournament Deathmatch (internet gameplay) , sending emails of maybe messing about creating the odd cartoon. The days of cellullose and a light box for me are over. A decent graphics tablet and photoshop and you can do some really clever things in a resonable amount of time and hey there's a worldwide audience for your work if you feel brave enough to let them see what you're capable of. I enter my appointments and reminders into my pocket organiser with my touchscreen buttons and plastic stylo. Each night when I get home, I drop my organiser into the cradle attached to the PC and all my important information is automatically backed up to the PC. Each morming I remove it from the cradle and the PC is no longer in the loop.

Okay, occasionally I get caught out because I lose the information and have to wait until the end of the day until I can recover it. But hey, it only happens when I forget to keep the batteries at a reasonable level. So the PC will be less and less of a central processor for all things, maybe more of a connection point, a bit like your idea of a cable less keyboard. =[8-)

jimbo:
My own (not yet implemented) set up would be a 100% quiet Linux box, maybe a laptop, sitting beneath a massive flat panel screen, good for both web/TV/DVD's/games. Then this Linux box connects to my cable TV box and can record shit for me that I'll never watch. This box can also run my music studio, (once Linux works better with sound) feed into an amp/big speakers and everything else. Because I can download all the music I want - btw see http://catalog.allofmp3.com - it is rather excelent - then my laptop is superior to my stereo. No need to copy shit to and from other shit. Mabye I'll have a wireless network anyway, to some linux desktop somewhere upstairs, that acts as my development box. But that's the solution - laptop downstairs for entertainment and desktop upstairs for power user stuff. Oh and I have a CD walkman type thing that I can jog with and it never skips :) And, to finish off the kit bill of materials: a bluetooth-controlled electric "peripherals" for the chicks >grin<
Jim

MadPole:
Well, maybe Paul's discovery is worth investigating then? I am talking about Linux TV box which, in theory, could eradicate the need to have a PC at all - just a quiet laptop to communicate with the box and watch movies in the toilet hehehehehe....

But this is exactly what I was talking about Karl - I entirely agree! The hardware is becoming a "networking journey" when it won't be just a hardware connected via network... it WILL BE NETWORK... bits and pieces of equipment here and there sharing themselves - not just the data. I know, I know, everything is data at the end of the day, but at the moment hardware really is very separate and there is a lot of data which only travels within hardware/computer. Wouldn't it be great to be able to connect (even for money) to some super duper hunderds of thousands pounds worth of 3D graphic card to play some amazing game or watch some amazing 3D movie? At the moment hardware is very teritorial, very enclosed, very black boxy... I guess the main reason for this is a commercial one. But with prices coming down silly this commercial reason becomes irrelevant. Manufactures know they can't get away with selling expensive hardware - so they have to focus on marketing "products".

And this gave me an idea just this very moment: that perhaps one of the reasons why the hardware became cheap is because, maybe, it's manufacturing has been "softened up" and computerised already.
I am not talking about computers running production lines here. I am talking here about the whole process, from the beginning to the final product. Because most of the hardware is very, very tiny and delicate – its production has to be controlled very well by processes and cannot be left to human imperfections. It has to be exact, time after time, it should lack any human individualism or god forbid creativity as much as possible. I am talking about people who put hard drives or video cards together. This kind of environment just begs for computer-program-like, precise "yes" and "no" digital processes. Very few would appreciate the fact that certain video card varies in quality depending which person was on production line at the time. So, in other words, the processes governing hardware manufacturing are most likely very software-like. Just one big system with a lot of different programs. True, some of this software needs to incorporate physical objects as well as human people hehehe. But, overall, the hardware is produced by the software. The main advantage of this is that manufacturing can be "component" based – it might be very easy to produce new hardware by just taking bits and pieces of existing processes and just gluing them together conceptually – as software architect would do. And therefore it doesn't really matter to manufacturers that much if they sell their hardware cheap – because they softened it so such extent that they can produce all kind of varieties of it. In other words, like in software, the quanlity is being replaced by quantity in hardware – rather than having one main and expensive computer, one CPU, one sound card – we end up with all those gadgets which have bits and pieces of hardware duplicated all over the place but it doesn't really matter. Neither to us or to manufacturer.

But maybe, maybe, the main point here is that hardware is already being produced to large extent by the software. The cannibalistic loop has been closed.

And as far as my hardware preferences go: DECENT DESK is my main requirement, and then my own place. Without that I am not even in position to consider what my choices would be. This situation put me in a funny, "vagrant", minimalist position and that is why I go on and on and on about remote computing hehehehe...so all I need is access to Internet. I would also love to have my own dedicated box there, but we need faster Internet speeds for that. The temporary workaround while waiting for that to happen would be for me to burn my own, customised version of Knoppix. I could then work locally on any machine and just download / upload any data I need. And configure Knoppix to do most of those things automatically.

paul:
I agree with some of what you guys have been saying. Its true I have given lots of the traditional jobs that have been my PC reserve to smaller more portable units.

I dont have a PC at home, just my portable. I use my phone for communicating, storing contacts and calendar and sometimes as an actual phone ( and use the PC as just the backup of my contacts and calendar ). My IPOD as portable music player, backup device and contacts backup.

My Laptop PC is just becoming a backup device and web browser. Maybe I experiment with a few things ( which is VOIP at the moment ) and use something else to effect this new change.

I have been toying with buying a Shuttle PC with a TV card and DVB Satellite card and wireless keyb, mouse to act as a linux webserver and media centre.

However, have any of you guys played with

Windows XP Media Centre. Its looking good.

jimbo:
God yeah, I forgot to mention my mobile. In fact, I have two of them, it's actually cheaper, because they both come with 500 "free" minutes, which is cheaper than paying for calls, once the free runs out. Two phones cheaper than one, you have to love it. Anyway I love your diplomacy, paul "I agree with some of what you guys..." Nice way of telling us we are wrong lol.

Few thoughts: Scart leads on tv's are a nightmare, sooner they switch to gigabit ethernet or something the better. Finally, regarding windows media player: first of all, I do not trust MS with anything, so I do not want to invest my time into learning media player. Secondly, I don't run windows :)
Thirdly, now that I'm used to Linux, there is something horrible about windows software. The look and feel of windows is absolutely repugnant to me now. I just do not feel comfortable using it, in the same way I would feel vaguely ill at ease if a leather clad queer was offering me a slice of celery and winking. Or something. Windows makes my skin crawl, windows software is the same. I know I'm preaching to the choir, and it is not my intention to convert. It is more that I'm just self indulgently expressing this sentiment that is surprising to me, as I used to love Windows, back in circa 96-98. The exception is windows games, they are good, but then again, they bypass the OS and go straight to the video card.

paul:
No this time I was being serious, and not being american.

I cant be arsed anymore to spend ages configuring a linux box to do
stuff, when I can buy a box to do it for me.

I was excited about the DreamBox i spoke to Andrew about, but
unfortunately it doesnt have support for cracking NDS, which was the
whole purpose for me.

Thats why I harped on a lil about the shuttle.

Using linux and this box, with a few other bits and bobs ( DVD-RW, DVB,
TV-OUT ) I am sure one could get something miles better than Windows
Media Centre, TiVO, Dreambox, and it can be a web server too, and a
server for my VoIP PBX ( www.asterisk.org ).

Although I really cant get motivated to spend the cash and weeks it
takes to configure.

I want a linux media centre distro that does all this for me. Any
takers on that ?

Soft Ware Story

At work there are lifts (3 floors) – they keep breaking and breaking, out of order most of the time. Then I see those 2 guys carrying this card, which looks exactly like a PC card, but 2m x 2m wide. Then I go to Poland, come back and the lifts have been practically replaced, they are brand new. They behave erratically, break sometimes, but it isn't as bad as before. And then, out of the blue, they start to open the door again after closing it. This is where story begins.

I don't know when this started to happen, but it definitely started to happen AFTER new lifts were "stabilized" and considered as "fully working". The door closes, opens again, closes again and off we go. All 4 lifts (2 on each side of the building) started to demonstrate this behaviour. This has been going on for months now. Imagine going from the ground floor to the 3rd, stopping en-route on the 1st floor to pick up one more passenger. It takes easily 10 minutes to get to the top hehehehe....there were engineers working furiously and seriously on all lifts few months after this started to happen. They left and lifts still behave that way. We, techies, "workaround experts" found a ... workaround for this! Just after pressing the button you have to wave your arm in between doors. Then lift takes off after the first door closing. The only problem with this workaround is usual one: fallible human factor. I keep forgetting to wave my arm after pressing the button! And this is where the story begins.

I suspect that this huge archaic PC looking card "lift card" was replaced by some more modern and more clever combination of less hardware and more software. One would expect hardware failures to be to certain extent erratic, accidental and unique. Hard disk failure can manifest itself in many different nearly unique ways. So this is my first point: ALL lifts behave in the same way, and their behaviour is VERY consistent. That's the first hint me thinks. The second clue is that, despite working hard on it for a week, engineers didn't manage to fix or even change the behaviour of EVEN ONE of those lifts. And this is where the story ends.

Punchline: This is what the difference between hardware and software is.

Novell SLES9 vs Microsoft Win2k3 in a Windows Network

Novell
SLES9 vs Microsoft Win2k3 in a Windows Network

FireFox: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare

Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft (MSFT).

You might think the shy 19-year-old is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla's Firefox...
Read more...

IBM ACS-1 Supercomputer -- Mark Smotherman