Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 29 2019, @11:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the chain-things-up dept.

Submitted via IRC for ErnestTBass

When railroad tracks were first laid across the western U.S., there were eight different gauges all competing to dominate the industry – making a nationwide, unified rail system impossible; it took an act of Congress in 1863 to force the adoption of an industry standard gauge of 4-ft., 8-1⁄2 inches.

FedEx CIO Rob Carter believes the same kind of thing needs to happen for blockchain to achieve widespread enterprise adoption.

While the promise of blockchain to create a more efficient, secure and open platform for ecommerce can be realized using a proprietary platform, it won't be a global solution for whole industries now hampered by a myriad of technical and regulatory hurdles. Instead, a platform based on open-source software and industry standards will be needed to ensure process transparency and no one entity profits from the technology over others.

"I think we're in the state where we're duking it out for the dominant design," Carter said during a CIO panel discussion at the Blockchain Global Revolution Conference here. "We're not an organization that pushes for more regulatory control, but there are times regulatory mandates and pushes can be incredibly helpful."

Source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3391070/fedex-cio-its-time-to-mandate-blockchain-for-international-shipping.html


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:49AM (5 children)

    by sshelton76 (7978) on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:49AM (#836628)

    Original AC from the above reply here...

    After writing that rather lengthy post, I was reminded of a time in ancient history where I was still running windows for everything and didn't see a need for, nor really understand linux.
    Then I got swept up in a sea change at work. Microsoft had decided to do an "Enterprise Audit" and was going to fine the company a lot of money for reasons I still don't care about. The CIO came down and said "As of today we're no longer a Windows shop. No new Windows projects are to be started and within a year we will have no more machines running Microsoft products. You have 6 months to either become proficient at Linux or to find a new job."

    I realized I liked working there and therefore I needed to suck it up and learn Linux.
    I tried a bunch of distros including Redhat 9, but never really understood them, until I found a guide called "Linux From Scratch".
    http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ [linuxfromscratch.org]

    After following that, and doing the necessary research, I started to understand what Linux was, why it was and what it's use cases were.

    Eventually the company ended up downsizing me anyways, but the skills I learned from LFS have translated into nearly a decade of 6 figure salaries.

    I wonder if my fellow soylentils would be interested in a "blockchain from scratch", guide.
    The end result being that you have the skills and knowledge to understand at a reasonably deep level what a blockchain is, what the use cases are and of course how to design and implement one, or how to re-use an existing one when you are presented with a problem that is especially suited for a blockchain.

    I think it would be fun to go from a barebones basics discussion, to a fully functional site with all the features of something like slashcode https://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/ [sourceforge.net] , but which has no backend servers to admin and instead exists solely on it's own peer to peer blockchain, and is served up in the browser when you visit the site URL. I could even demonstrate how to implement an AC feature for those times when you need to open your mouth and say something, but don't want to get into trouble at work :)

    Let me know your thoughts!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:12PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:12PM (#836640)

    I'd certainly be interested in it.
    I'm no specialist, but it sounds to me like the HDF5 standard should incorporate something like this to keep track of file changes, if they don't already. In particular I care about HDF5 in the case of massively parallel numerical simulations, where ideally many cores would be writing a lot of data to a single file.

    • (Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:19PM (2 children)

      by sshelton76 (7978) on Tuesday April 30 2019, @12:19PM (#836643)

      I would love to research that and give you some feedback, but there seems to be several things which share that name and could all be candidates for the tech you're talking about. Can you give me a link to the specific item you're talking about?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:15PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:15PM (#836656)

        I'm talking about "hierarchical data format" https://portal.hdfgroup.org/display/HDF5/HDF5 [hdfgroup.org] (this particular website seems to be somewhat broken, so I'm not sure the group is being administered properly at the moment, but the library is nonetheless extensively used in scientific computing).
        And MPI refers to "message passing interface" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_Passing_Interface [wikipedia.org] .

        I've personally encountered situations where a simulation crashed without closing the HDF5 file properly, and a lot of data became unreadable, including parts of the file that were not being written to (individual files are organized more or less like a filesystem themselves, this is why I can clearly identify what was being written to or not).
        I was wondering whether tracking read/write operations properly would help with data recovery.

        • (Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:48PM

          by sshelton76 (7978) on Tuesday April 30 2019, @01:48PM (#836676)

          Ok so for something like this a journal would provide superior results especially if the journal is also storing a hash of the resulting file to ensure integrity.
          The difference here is that yes you're using hashes to ensure integrity, but you don't care so much about the source, no particular node in the system would have any more or less "permission" to make changes to the journal or the filesystem. Thus you don't need to verify the chain of custody on the information, so a blockchain would be overkill.

          A merkle chain vis a vis git would reduce performance, but would solve your integrity issues.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 30 2019, @04:26PM (#836750)

    yes, do it. thanks