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The ABC reports that an oil shortage is predicted soon. The International Energy Agency predicts that oil supply problems will start within the next five years. Oil production has been dropping over the last two years (we have passed the “peak oil” point) and demand is steadily increasing. Regardless of wars oil prices will increase significantly in the near future.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the average age of Australian cars was 10.7 years at the end of 1998. So the vast majority of the current fuel-hungry cars on Australian roads will still be in use in five years time – if the owners can afford them.
The government needs to start providing tax incentives for fuel efficient cars and to end tax incentives for inefficient cars. Currently 4WD vehicles have reduced taxes and the tax deduction for a business car is based on the engine size (get a less efficient car and get a bigger tax deduction).
The government claims to be protecting the economy (at the expense of the environment). But with the way things currently work the economy will be destroyed in less than five years.
Even though the government cares little for the environment (in spite of the effect that climate change is having on farmers) they need to do something if they want to fulfill their claims of protecting the economy!
Thanks to Chris Samuel for informing me of this.
Bruce Schneier writes about Correspondent Inference Theory which deals with situations when the motives of an individual or group are inferred by the results of their actions. Both his article and the MIT article on which it is based only consider the results of terrorist actions against the US and allied countries.
I believe that this is a serious mistake by Bruce, the MIT people, and most people who write about terrorism. The most sensible writing about Terrorism is by Noam Chomsky. Noam considers the definition of Terrorism in both propaganda and literally. By the literal definition of terrorism the US government is responsible for more than it’s fair share of terrorist acts performed around the world.
There is no reason to believe that people in the Middle-East are any less intelligent than people in the US and Europe. It seems obvious that some of the people who’s countries are destroyed by violence sponsored by the US government will believe that the US is entirely inhabited by blood-thirsty monsters. The number of US citizens who realise what their government does and approve is very low as is the number of Muslims who know what Al Quaeda does and approve of it.
The US government claims that it wants democracy in the Middle-East, and Osama bin Laden claims to want the US military out of the Middle-East. If the US forces were withdrawn from Saudi Arabia then it would probably lead to a significant increase in democracy in the region (it couldn’t get any less democratic) – both sides could get what they claim to want.
The discussion of the MIT paper seems to be largely based on the fact that Correspondent Inference causes the US government (and other governments) to decrease the probability of doing anything that might meet the terrorist goals. But no-one has mentioned the possibility that the same may apply to the probability of non-state organisations doing anything that might meet the goals of the US government. The wars in Iraq and Iran have significantly decreased the capabilities of the US military, they can’t recruit enough new soldiers and the current soldiers have reduced effectiveness due to long tours of duty with short breaks. The US economy is stagnating partly due to the direct effects of financing the wars, partly due to the way the airline security theatre has hurt trade and tourism, and partly because everyone has been concentrating on other things instead of fixing the economy.
When two states have a war there is always the possibility of it being ended by a peace treaty or one side surrendering. With modern communications fighting can end in a matter of hours after a cease-fire has been arranged between states. But when non-state forces are involved things become much more difficult to manage. A state can make a deal with one non-state group only to discover that another non-state group (or a dissident faction within the original group) doesn’t like the treaty and continues fighting. With non-state terrorist acts connected to Al Quaeda in the US, the UK, Spain, and Indonesia (and more acts apparently planned in other countries) it’s obvious that we aren’t going to get a clean or quick solution to this problem.
It seems to me that the only way the US and allied countries can escape from Correspondent Inference is to withdraw from the Middle-East entirely. If the people of Iran or Palestine want to elect a government that you don’t like then let it go (that’s what democracy is about anyway). If a dictator seizes control of Iraq then either leave him in control or provide air-support to any province that wants to rebel and establish a democratic government. Either make a stand on the principle of support for freedom and democracy or do nothing on the principle of letting people in other countries sort out their own problems. An invasion for the wrong reasons might fool people on the other side of the world but is unlikely to fool many people who live in the target country.
One problem that I have had in configuring Heartbeat clusters is in performing a STONITH that originates outside the Heartbeat system.
STONITH was designed for the Heartbeat system to know when a node is not operating correctly (this can either be determined by the node itself or by other nodes in the network) and then force a hardware reset so that the non-functional node will not interfere with another node that is designated to take over the service.
However sometimes code that is called by Heartbeat will have more information about the state of the system than Heartbeat can access. For example if I have a service that accesses a filesystem on an external RAID then it’s common for the RAID to track who is accessing it. In some situations the RAID hardware has the ability to “fence” the access (so that when machine B mounts the filesystem machine A can no longer access it). In other situations the RAID may only be capable of informing the system that another machine is registered as the owner of the device. To solve this problem a machine that is to mount such a device must either prohibit the previous owner from accessing the device (which may be impossible or unreasonably difficult) or reset the previous owner.
Until recently I had been doing this by writing some code to extract the STONITH configuration from the CIB and call the stonith utility. The problem with this is that there is no requirement that every node be capable of performing a STONITH on every other node, and that even if every node is are designed to be capable of rebooting every other node a partial failure condition may restrict the set of nodes that are capable of performing a STONITH on the target.
Currently the recommended way of doing this is via the test program. Below is an example of the command used to reset the node node-1 with a timeout of 20000ms and the result of it being successfully completed. I have suggested that the Heartbeat developers make an official interface for doing this (rather than a test of the API) and I believe that this is being considered. In the mean time the following is the only way of doing it:
# /usr/lib/heartbeat/stonithdtest/apitest 1 node-1 20000 0
optype=1, node_name=node-1, result=0, node_list=node-0
Mark Shuttleworth asks if people are interested in a high-end free-software laptop (it seems that Linspire is leading in the low-end free-software laptop stakes).
I am interested in such things. My last couple of laptops have been Thinkpad T series. They are reasonably light (not really heavy), are reasonably fast, have full-size keyboards and reasonable size screens (currently got a 1400×1050 screen on a 3yo laptop). Unfortunately for Mark I’m planning on making my current Thinkpad last for another three years.
The idea makes a lot of sense because laptops are not re-purposed very often. It’s quite common for a desktop machine or a server to be re-installed several times over it’s life – and often having significant hardware changes during the process. Laptops are extremely difficult for hardware upgrades to the degree that by the time people desire an upgrade it often makes sense to buy a new one. So having a BIOS that only supports Linux and prevents the machine from ever being used to run a lesser OS is not likely to reduce the utility of the machine.
The benefit of better Linux integration is that the greater degree of hardware control would decrease the power use and extend battery life.
Maybe in three years time I’ll buy a LinuxBIOS machine second-hand from a Ubuntu user.
The Cyber Law Center has blogged about the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia Limited being permitted to charge night-club owners $1.05 per person per night for playing commercial music up from $0.07. The number of people is calculated on the maximum licensed capacity of the venue – not good if the venue isn’t full. Of course given the huge prices of drinks in clubs this probably makes no difference to the profit margins.
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned in any of the articles I’ve read is whether this applies to clubs that don’t play music from artists represented by the PPCA. If a club can freely play music produced under a Creative Commons license that permits commercial use then the fee increases would be good for the production of music. Also encouraging clubs to pay musicians to perform live is a good thing, most of the best musicians started out with live performances in bars.
The recording industry is the enemy of music. They under-pay artists and lock out competition giving us a succession of talent-less wage-slaves on the radio. It’s difficult to imagine any change other than Digital Restriction Management (DRM) that could make things worse.
On several occasions I have watched part of a TV documentary on gifted children, but I have never been able to watch one completely because every one that I have seen has been offensively wrong.
One thing that they always seem to do is say that gifted children have special needs and often claim that they have problems socialising. This sounds quite reasonable, but if that’s the case then why would you make such children perform tricks on TV? Putting the children on TV is a very poor example of journalism and often of parenting – the parents’ desire to boast about their children’s performance (and implicitly their own parenting skills) is apparently more important than protecting the children. I think that the only situation in which gifted children should have their talents demonstrated on TV is if their skill is related to the performing arts. Not that TV coverage is necessarily good for children who have abilities related to performing (a casual scan of the news regarding adults in Hollywood shows the problems that people have dealing with fame), but it’s something that they will be driven to anyway.
Also if they are going to demonstrate the intelligence of a child on TV then they really should make sure that they don’t demonstrate a lack of intelligence (on the part of the child as well as the producers). Asking a child to provide a definition of a word is often used as an example of intelligence (when it’s really an example of vocabulary). In one documentary a child defined a philanthropist as “someone who has a lot of money” (according to dict on my system it is “Love to mankind; benevolence toward the whole human family; universal good will; desire and readiness to do good to all men“). In another a child defined a genius as “someone who knows a lot“, while the definition of genius is not clear and there is some disagreement about what it is, most people agree that it’s about ability not knowledge. Being able to recognise when you don’t know something and admit would surely be correlated with intelligence…
Telling a child that they are a genius or telling them their IQ seems like a bad idea at the best of times, and doing so in front of a documentary camera crew isn’t the best of times. Children are able to determine how their skills compare to others, there are more than enough attitude problems in schools related to skill comparisons without encouragement from adults. When I was in high school a friend who studied a martial art refused to tell me which belt he wore – he had been taught that such things shouldn’t be discussed outside the dojo to avoid creating a hierarchy based on belt rating in the community. I think that the same thing could be applied to IQ ratings.
The term genius is grossly overused generally, I believe that showing greater than average ability in one area is not enough to qualify. I think that the minimum criteria would be to produce dramatic new developments/inventions in one area of research (EG Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking) or to advance multiple fields of science or art (EG Leonardo da Vinci) would be the minimum criteria. I had people call me a genius when I was young because I won prizes in maths competitions, was good at programming computers, playing chess, etc. The main criteria for achieving such things is to avoid wasting time on sport – in a school run by idiots with a focus on sport this was more a tribute to being stubborn than being smart!
The TV documentaries mention many things that gifted children supposedly require, but strangely I don’t recall any of them mentioning the need to meet adults who are significantly smarter than average! You might think that this is the most obvious thing. The Big Brother and Big Sister programs of mentoring children who are at risk of crime and drugs apparently provide significant benefits, something similar for gifted children might do some good, probably more based on meetings of a few intelligent adults with a small group of intelligent children instead of the BB-BS model of one-on-one meetings. Washingtonienne seems like a good example of the need for this.
There are some useful print articles however, this article in The Age makes some good points, it’s particularly interesting to note that some schools lie about special programs to support gifted children to attract students (someone should name the schools that do this).
But then you get awful ones like this, naming the child in such a situation is irresponsible journalism. The girl in question may be forced to change her name to escape google when she’s older. It’s strange that it’s illegal to name a child who is involved in a court case but it’s not illegal to name them in such an article (let’s hope that the journalist used pseudonyms). Also you might expect an organisation such as Mensa to have someone smart enough to realise that bringing such attention on a 2yo is not in the child’s best interests.
Does anyone know of a good TV documentary about gifted children? I guess that it would be extremely difficult to make one without showing the children on TV so that would restrict the film maker to children who’s abilities are related to the performing arts.
In a comment on my post about memory errors Chris Samuel referred me to an interesting post on the Beowulf mailing list about memory errors. In that list posting Joe Landman says “it is pretty easy to deduce which chip is problematic (assuming it is ram) based upon the address” and then describes how to use Machine Check Exception (MCE) data from an error detected/corrected by the ECC system.
Damn the vendors of motherboards for switching to 8-bit RAM just when it was about to be useful to have 9-bit RAM!
286 class machines had 9 bits of RAM per byte with one bit used for parity. Parity errors were extremely rare, largely due to the fact that memory errors could affect more than one bit at a time and therefore would often give a correct parity – if multiple bit errors were totally random then parity might be expected to pass 50% of the time! The Pentium was the first commonly used CPU to operate with a 64bit memory bus. If it had 9 bits per byte it would have had 72 bit wide memory buses – a Hamming Code could use this to detect and correct single-bit errors, detect all double-bit errors, and detect some errors involving more bits. This would mean that some errors would be recoverable and would display the location of the memory problem instead of being fatal and giving no information.
Now it’s become a standard feature in servers to have ECC memory (at significantly greater cost) and most desktop machines don’t have ECC support – I wonder whether this is aimed at price-gouging people who need reliable servers (they can’t use cheap RAM from desktop machines).
Unfortunately due to issues of electricity use, noise, and price I have to run all the servers that are most important to me on desktop PC hardware. Is anyone selling ECC RAM in desktop systems? I am particularly interested in machines that are a couple of years old so I can get them cheap at auction…
On Thursday I bought a $99 (discounted from $199) MP4 player from Aldi (a German supermarket chain that has recently opened up here). The player is a Tevion model M6.
By a long way it’s the cheapest and nastiest piece of consumer electronics that I have ever owned. It has very flimsy construction (feels like it will crumple in my pocket – not like a solid iRiver) and poor design all around. The viewing angle of the LCD screen is very small, so if I hold it close to my face then the viewing angle will be wrong for at least one eye. There are two power switches, an electronic one on the top (which is also sometimes used as an escape key for menus that don’t recognise the key labelled as ESC) and a slide switch at the side. When I use the electronic switch to turn the power off the back-light will usually flicker – I guess that they wanted to have an electronic switch and then put a mechanical switch in the design when they couldn’t get it working.
The menus are strange, they have a game menu that only has Tetris – why not have a Tetris menu instead?
The FM radio function doesn’t seem to work and the option to select a European frequency range is lost when the power is cut, along with all saved station frequencies.
I never got around to testing the voice-recording function (one of the reasons for purchasing the device) as it failed in too many other ways.
The device has an AVI of Barbie Girl by Aqua and also a MP3 with a text file that has the lyrics for Karaoke, this is probably the only good feature of the device. Unfortunately it appears to have some sort of DRM as it gave a padlock icon and stopped working after I played it a few times (fortunately it’s unable to store settings so a power cycle solved that problem).
When I connected it to my PC via USB it showed two devices, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. /dev/sdb gave an IO error (apparently due to not having an SD memory card installed) and and /dev/sda was not in any format recognised by file -s /dev/sda.
I’m going to have to return this, even $99 is too much for a device of such quality. Maybe I’ll buy an iRiver to do this if they sell one without DRM.
Early this year I deployed a server. As part of my normal procedure I ran the Memtest86+ memory test program (which showed no errors) before deploying it. After some time running the machine started to become unreliable, yesterday it crashed twice and I had to replace it. I ran Memtest86+ before removing it from where it was installed and found several memory errors. When a server crashes I highly recommend running Memtest86+ before removing it so that you at least know the cause of the problems.
As I want to use the machine elsewhere I want to discover the cause of the problem. The machine has two DIMM sockets (I’ll call them A and B) and two DIMM modules (again I’ll call them A and B). After getting the machine home I first tested the machine with DIMM A in socket A (and DIMM B removed) which passed, then I tested it with DIMM A in socket B which also passed. I removed DIMM A and tested DIMM B in each socket and those tests passed. Then I installed both DIMMs and again the test passed!
I now realise that I made a mistake in removing a DIMM when I got the machine home. I should have tested it again with the DIMMs in place. If the problem was due to heat or a poor contact made worse by vibration then the problem might have gone away during the trip home – it would have been handy to know that I would be unable to reproduce the problem! My mistake here was to change multiple factors at the same time. When diagnosing faults you should try to change one thing at a time so that you will know what fixes it!
Now, I am wondering what I should do next? Assume that it was just a bad contact and put the machine back in service? Suggestions appreciated.
An issue that causes some discussion and debate is the number and type of questions that may be asked during a lecture. In a previous post giving advice for speakers I suggested that questions can be used as a mechanism for getting a talk back on track if a nervous speaker starts presenting the material too quickly (a common mistake). This mechanism can be used by the speaker if they realise that things aren’t going to plan or by audience members who are experienced speakers and who recognise a problem. Due to this a blanket ban on questions during a talk will only work with experienced speakers who have planned their talk well.
There are different styles of presentation favoured by different speakers. Some are determined by the nature of the topic (an example that I have seen cited is topics that are very contentious which would lead to a debate if questions were permitted during the talk), but for computer science I think that questions during the talk can always work well. To a certain extent the fact that code either works or doesn’t limits the scope for debate.
Probably the major factor that determines the utility of questions is the size of the audience. If you have an audience of less than 50 people then a conversational approach can work, if you have less than 200 people then a reasonable number of questions can be accepted. But as the audience size increases above 300 the utility of questions approaches zero. If the majority of people who might want to ask questions are unable to do so due to lack of time then the value of allowing any questions diminishes. For the largest audiences there probably isn’t any point in having question time.
Another major factor determining which style works best is where the speaker has had experience speaking. Most of my speaking experience is with less formal meetings (such as local LUGs) and in countries with an informal attitude towards such things (Australia, the US, and The Netherlands). A speaker who has primarily spoken for universities such as Cambridge or Oxford (which seem to have a very formal style and questions strictly reserved for the end) or who has come from a country such as Japan(*) where it’s reported that the audience are obliged to show respect for the speaker by being quiet will probably expect questions only at the end and may flatly reject questions during the talk. A speaker who has a background speaking for less formal audiences will expect a certain number of questions during the course of the talk and may plan the timing of their talk with this in mind. When I plan a talk for a one hour slot I plan at most 30 minutes of scheduled talking (IE covering my notes) expecting that there will be 15 minutes of questions along the way and another 15 minutes of questions at the end. Often with such plans my talks run over-time. Of course this means that people who have mostly had experience speaking to smaller and less formal audiences will find it exceedingly difficult to give talks to larger audiences. This may be an incentive for having more formal arrangements for LUG talks to increase the skills of speakers.
The next issue is what level of contentious questions is acceptable. I believe that if you have a disagreement with points that the speaker is making (and have some experience in the field in question) and the audience is not particularly large then one hostile question is acceptable – as a speaker it’s reasonable to refuse to take any further questions from an audience member who has asked one hostile question. Another category of question is the challenging question (not to be confused with a hostile question), for example describing in one sentence what your business requirements are and asking how the topic being discussed will apply to that business requirement. One of the most useful questions I have been asked during a SE Linux talk was concerning the issue of backups of file security contexts, it was presented in a challenging way and the answer that I gave was not nearly as good as I could give now (the code base has improved over the last few years in this regard) – but I think that everyone learned something so that validated the question.
In smaller groups there may be some heckling when the speaker is a well known member of the group, I don’t think that this is a problem either as long as it only consumes a tiny fraction of the time (maybe 20-30 seconds at the start). For larger audiences or for speakers who don’t know the audience well heckling is generally a bad idea.
(*) When speaking in Japan I had a lot of audience interaction. I’m not sure if this is an indication of the Japanese culture changing in this regard, the fact that translation problems forced some interaction, or the audience was showing respect for the Australian culture by asking questions.
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