Month: December 2002

Here‘s a little something I saw a while back on The Internet Oracle.

My Christmas gift to you all: source code for Obtainium, in php. Enjoy! (What, you were expecting something I wouldn’t just give away anyway?)

Does anyone really understand how much a billion dollars is? My high-school physics professor has a webpage dedicated to this question. But I wanted to rattle on about it here.

From a recent Yahoo article about new “star wars” style defense systems Bush is implementing:

“Erecting such a defense shield is the Pentagon’s single most expensive development program, likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars over coming decades.”

I personally believe that most people can’t conceptualize a million dollars, let alone a billion. (In American and modern British usage, 1 million = 1,000,000; one billion = 1,000,000,000). Supposedly, most people would conceptualize a billion as either two million, or ten million. Most calculators won’t go higher than 99 million (8 digits). Most people who win $1 million or more spend it all and are broke within the first two years (oh, sorry, that’s another rant).

But let’s give it a try. The most expensive things most people will ever purchase are a car and a house.

You can get a fine car these days for around $25,000. For $1m, you could buy nice cars for 40 of your family and closest friends. For $1B, forty thousand. Land Rover (of couse you knew I was going to mention that!) sells around 25 thousand vehicles in the US per year; but they’re a bit more than $25,000 so you could buy about one whole year’s worth of all the Rovers sold in the US (can you save one for me?). Times 100: Missile defense system, or the entire US production of automobiles for a year?

Let’s say a brand-new house costs $250,000 dollars. Four houses cost $1m. Four thousand houses are $1B. For the cost of a $100B defense shield we could build 400,000 houses (or probably more like one or two million, if you count economies of scale) – about enough to hold a million people. In a third-world country, let’s say we could build a comfortable dwelling and provide a lifetime’s worth of food, for $10,000 per person (probably a lot less than that). Missile defense system, or food and housing for ten million people, for life?

Assuming you make around $1000 a week, $50,000 a year – a great salary! In 20 years you’d have made a million dollars – thirty years, after taxes. It would take THIRTY THOUSAND YEARS for you to make a billion dollars. Thirty thousand years ago is roughly when humans began to roam the earth. Missile defense system: three million man-years at $50,000/year (including taxes).

There are some 300 million people in the US. Roughly one in three are paying taxes. The missile defense system will cost each of these taxpayers $1000.

Isn’t there some way we could fight this economically instead of militarily? I know – let’s create some absolute boondoggle mechanical device – something that doesn’t do anything at all (of course I’m not referring to the missile defense system itself!). Budget $100B on it, and then subcontract it out to the axis of evil countries under the condition that they will cease all weapons production and be friendly towards the US. Sure, you can call it a bribe.

If I’ve slipped a digit anywhere in these calculations, don’t bother to tell me, because that’s my point anyway.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Build a multi-billion dollar weapons system and point it at him, and…he’ll probably resent you even more for not just sharing your fish with him in the first place.

Just brainstorming. I know they’re working on this, and different parts of it are available in different forms. See if you can follow me here:

A “cluster” is a networked collection of computers that share processing power to accomplish tasks faster. The best known of these is the Beowulf cluster system (which I would explain more if/when I know more about it). Generally their operating system is a flavor of UNIX, and they tend to be used for math-intensive tasks.

What if there were “Home/business” clustering software such that you install it on all the computers in your home or business, and each computer could then be connected to a cluster just by plugging it in to ethernet. They then would share not only processor power but drive space (as a replicated RAID system). (It wouldn’t need to share memory because that would be inefficient over the network and each machine would need its own local memory anyway). Need more space or more speed, just buy a box and plug it in. Would have to be fault-tolerant (so any machine could be removed without losing data or operations in progress) and preferably serverless (so no one machine would be the “server”).

Each computer could also have (optional) client software, which would allow it to be used as a workstation. Local storage would work, but when connected to the cluster, local should be merged/replicated/synched with cluster storage. The display on the fridge could share its CPU with the cluster when it wasn’t doing anything else (most of the time).

“Weaker” computers such as PDAs might primarily function only as workstations (but would not need to share their own CPU/drive space) – and might have a limited set of replicated items (address book, etc). I suppose when you join a cluster you could choose which of the cluster’s resources you want to participate in. And the system could (automatically) prefer storing locally used data on local or nearby cluster nodes – so for example MP3s would tend to be stored on and/or near my stereo, video files would be on and/or near my TV server; but if I wanted to make a DVD from the computer in my office, it would just get copied over the net automatically.

We need this at work. Our servers are too slow for processing data, and the drives are relatively full, but we’ve got stacks of machines in the closet that aren’t being used, as well as plenty on desktops that are underused.

Haven’t been writing much here since I’ve actually been productively working on stuff.

Pictures, for example, is a photo browser into which I’ve loaded all of my online pictures; I can take notes that go into a database and display with the picture. Still got a bunch of work to do on it.

I also migrated all my websites over to Linux (Red Hat, server) and back to OSX. Notes on the Linux install are here. This was a learning experience. What I discovered is that Linux works nearly identically to OSX for serving web pages, except nothing is configured quite right by default. The mail server, for example, is configured so that when you turn it on it doesn’t accept mail from the outside world. Easy to change this – just edit a text file – but you must first discover what needs to be changed. Plus, every utility has a little bit different way of configuring, when (it seems to me) they could all use the same basic structure, be easy to learn, and still be powerful for experienced users.

OSX on the other hand, comes set up so that when you turn on application, it’s ready to go with the most likely settings already set properly. The default is the obvious. They still have problems with making configuration standard across applications, but it’s getting closer. I’m pleased to discover that Apple has UI people who know what they’re doing both in the OSX user area, and down in the Unix basement.