Slashdot Mirror

I think the big opportunity is really in rackmounts, not desktops. The electricity cost of a typical desktop is really quite low, as mentioned below, and most consumers just don't care. But HVAC is quickly becoming a limiting factor in big server farms; look at Google's paper on their cluster architecture. Electricity may be cheap, but real estate is not, and anything that lets you pack machines more densely without having your server farm go up in flames is a big win for major web businesses.

Atom is both a syndication format and an API for creation, updating, and deletion of content. It's already in widespread use by Blogger.

What's been (all but) finalized is the syndication format (and rules for extending it). This allows the working group to firm up the details of the publishing API, which, for my money, is the real payoff with Atom.

A pretty good overview of the history of RSS and the motivations behind Atom is here.

> You cannot know the success:failure ratio of closed-source projects.
No. You can estimate it. I've worked in industry in three countries, and after a decade you get a good idea about the success/failure ratio. Also, there is a lot of published work available.

I'd say the success:failure ratio is around 1:1, perhaps better. Of course, it depends on how "successful enough" is defined, but I'm assuming commonly accepted definitions.

I don't have as-firm figures for open source (and yes, they do "fail", by similar commonly accepted definitions) - but I think it's ratio would be worse. But this is _fine_ I say... for one thing, failure is an acceptable result for many more open-source projects than closed source ones.

A couple of interesting URLs I just googled:
IT Failure Rates--70% or 10-15%? (don't have a subscription to view the article, but the title and abstract are interesting... )

Data Mining Project History in Open Source Software Communities where the author states: "But we can also find that this method can predict the 'failed' projects by the project history with good confidence". His paper does not appear to carry the actual data on number of open-source SF projects that he classifies as 'FAIL' - a bit frustrating for our discussion :)

Just because brains aren't binary or synchronously clocked doesn't mean much. One can create analog computers to represent shades of gray or create clockless computers that don't operate in lock-step synchronization. Furthermore, any digital, synchronous computer and simulate both shades of gray (with floating point numbers) and continuous processes (with sufficiently small time slices). Moreover, given the messiness of neuro-electrochemical systems, one can argue that it doesn't take a very precise float or a particularly dense time slicing to simulate neurons.

Some people ascribe the seeming magic of consciousness to some ineffable property of the brain, e.g., quantum mechanical effect. While other insist that its just what happens when you connect enough simple elements in a self-adaptive network.

The question is, are there neural input-output functions that are fundamentally not computable? If not, then a digital computer will, someday, reach human brain power (assuming Moore's law continues).

I'm curious, where have Intel said they're going to push the whole TCP/IP stack onto a dedicated processor ? I've seen a bit of speculation they're going to do it, but not a statement from Intel themselves. Does one exist ?

I don't necessarily think that just because some customers have bought them, means its a good, well thought out and useful idea.

A lot of people buy Britney Spears music, does that make it good or just popular ?

It is in Texas.

http://www.computer.org/software/articles/Speed.ht m

It is impossible to answer your question unless you define "heavy" traffic.

Amen to that.

Step one is to figure out what you mean by heavy traffic. Slashdot is probably at a couple million pageviews per day, and Alexa tells us that there are nearly 1500 sites bigger. A top-10 site will get circa 1000x what Slashdot gets.

In step two, figure out what kind of traffic you're dealing with. Most of Slashdot's page views are probably just hits on the front page or current article by guests, so they can be heavily cached. I'd guess maybe 15% of Slashdot's page views are ones that need to be seriously dynamic. That's a bonus, as even a commodity server these days can give you quite a lot of static traffic. And it's important to think about what kind of static content you're serving. Slashdot's is mostly HTML, and you'll do things very differently for a media-heavy site like Flickr or Atom Films, and very differently again for something like Orbitz or Base Camp.

Step three is to start asking yourself some serious questions about what kind of data you have, where it will live, how much it gets changed, what kind of transactional integrity you need to have, what kind of reliability you're wiling to pay for, and how it will get to the places that need to serve it up.

Step four is to think broadly about the possible architectures. Yes, your average web site is basically an engine for turning HTTP requests into SQL queries, and turning SQL result sets into HTML. But there are many more ways of storing, managing, and rendering your data than that, many of which have radical performance implications. A great example is Google's architecture; if they'd tried to build it with a standard web approach, they'd be six or eight orders of magnitude poorer.

Then in step five, build a cartoon version of your architecture and test it until it bleeds. Even better, build models of your top three architectures and see how they work. The only way you'll know if you can take massive load is to take massive load. Yes, this can be a pain to set up, but it's much, much less pain than you'll feel when a few hundred thousand people watch your site fail.

And then for the last step, build your site incrementally, regularly testing performance as you go. Suppose it takes you six months to build it. If you save all your testing until the end, you've got six months of code to dig through to find the culprits, and six months during which you might have baked in an assumption that leaves you screwed. If you start out small and add to your test suite over time, you're much more likely to find problems when they're small and cheap to fix.

And since this is Slashdot, I'll add step 7: Profit!

Join the IEEE Computer Society instead.

http://www.computer.org/

Brits: The British Computer Society

http://www.bcs.org.uk/

Aussies: The Australian Computer Society

http://www.acs.org.au/

etc etc.

Oh so true. David Parnas was pointing out the fundamental differences between Computer Science and Software Engineering years ago. Sadly, it doesn't seem like anyone has listened to him. Steve McConnell echoed the same sentiments fairly recently. I don't think anyone's listened to him either. Hopefully the tide will turn at some point, but I've seen few signs of it so far.

As the submission noted, this work will be building on what Hawkins wrote about in his recent book, On Intelligence. The companion web site for the book is here:

There are also a some reviews of the book:
http://blogger.iftf.org/Future/000605.html
http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0105/ran dom/index.htm
(By Bob Colwell, who was Intel's chief IA32 architect)
http://www.techcentralstation.com/112204B.html
http://www.corante.com/brainwaves/archives/026649. html

A quote from his book:

The agenda for this book is ambitious. It describes a comprehensive theory of how the brain works. It describes what intelligence is and how your brain creates it. The theory I present is not a completely new one. Many of the individual ideas you are about to read have existed in some form or another before, but not together in a coherent fashion. This should be expected. It is said that "new ideas" are often old ideas repackaged and reinterpreted. That certainly applies to the theory proposed here, but packaging and interpretation can make a world of difference, the difference between a mass of details and a satisfying theory. I hope it strikes you the way it does many people. A typical reaction I hear is, "It makes sense. I wouldn't have thought of intelligence this way, but now that you describe it to me I can see how it all fits together." With this knowledge most people start to see themselves a little differently. You start to observe your own behavior saying, "I understand what just happened in my head." Hopefully when you have finished this book, you will have new insight into why you think what you think and why you behave the way you behave. I also hope that some readers will be inspired to focus their careers on building intelligent machines based on the principles outlined in these pages. ...

Weren't neural networks supposed to lead to intelligent machines?
Of course the brain is made from a network of neurons, but without first understanding what the brain does, simple neural networks will be no more successful at creating intelligent machines than computer programs have been.

Why has it been so hard to figure out how the brain works?
Most scientists say that because the brain is so complicated, it will take a very long time for us to understand it. I disagree. Complexity is a symptom of confusion, not a cause. Instead, I argue we have a few intuitive but incorrect assumptions that mislead us. The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence is defined by intelligent behavior.

What is intelligence if it isn't defined by behavior?
The brain uses vast amounts of memory to create a model of the world. Everything you know and have learned is stored in this model. The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events. It is the ability to make predictions about the future that is the crux of intelligence. I will describe the brain's predictive ability in depth; it is the core idea in the book.

How does the brain work?
The seat of intelligence is the neocortex. Even though it has a great number of abilities and powerful flexibility, the neocortex is surprisingly regular in its structural details. The different parts of the neocortex, whether they are responsible for vision, hearing, touch, or language, all work on the same principles. The key to understanding the neocortex is understanding these common principles and, in particular, its hierarchical structure. We will examine the neocortex in sufficient detail to show how its structure captures the structure of the world. This will b

Akk! I goofed on Spafford, ignore that sentence. The TCPA papers were by Safford [no P], different person. My bad, ignore that part.

But I think that is more than made up for by this item, David Patterson is on Microsoft's Trusted Computing Academic Advisory Board. Chuckle.

They list Carl E. Landwehr (one of their invited experts) as "Program Director" at the National Science Foundation, but more specifically he is the Trusted Computing Program director. Which also happens to be where they say we need $90 million a year in government grants.

And here's a link to the former presidential Cyber Security advisor Richard Clark's Global Tech Summit speech that I mentioned. Quote: "TCPA is not enough. It is a a good beginning, but it is not enough". He goes on to say that we need "a way of forcing down patches" (which can only be enforced through Trusted Computing) and that ISPs and carriers insist that firewalls be installed (again only enforceable through Trusted Computing). To Secure the National Information Infrastructure against bin Laden. Oh, and by the way the Trusted Computing Group has announced they are working on routers that enforce exactly those things, forcing down patches and verifying that firewalls are installed and compliant. If you're not compliant then the router would deny you a net connection except strictly to receive the patches to come into compliance.

Amit Yoran (another invited expert) is the more recent president's Cyber Security Advisor who just resigned becuase he was frustrated that the government wasn't making *mandatory* action for those changes to Secure the National Information Infrastructure. He didn't want to just make recommendations and wait for businesses and the market to change, he wanted the government to regulate and force things along.

I'm too tired to try and research everyone. Neeeeed sleeeeeep. But I'd wager there's more Trusted Computing ties and support among them.

-

Authors of articles published in IEEE Journals and Conferences already pay for the article to be published.

In IEEE Journals this comes as a flat fee per page and an extra fee. "After a manuscript is accepted for publication, the author's company or institution is asked to pay a charge of $110 per printed page to cover part of the cost of the publication." (Some Journals, depending on the Journal; is it IEEE or IEEE Computer Society make this mandatory and some make it obligatory). Reference http://www.computer.org/tc/author_new.htm

There are also extra fees for each page beyond a certain number of pages. For example, for IEEE Transactions on Computers the page limit is 10 pages for $110 per page. Every extra page beyong 10 (up to 16) is charged $200 per page (this is a mandatory fee).

Conferences are similar. When you publish at a conference you must register for the conference and guarantee you will be there to present for it to be published in the proceedings. Typically the conference registration fee helps pay for the publication of the papers. Some of these conferences charge upwards of $400-$450. (I am attending IPDPS next month and I paid $200 for a student registration; my professor is paying $505.)

So authors already pay (or their institution pays) for publication of their articles. If these fees are increased it will be harder for authors to publish. I already paid over $500 to register for and present a paper at FPL'2004 (fpl.org) out of my pocket. I will end up paying $200 for the IPDPS registration and probably another $250 for the hotel. This time my school has already paid for some other expenses.

Agreed; farms/clusters seem to be the thing - I mean, look at what Google are doing - If I was looking at a big installation tomorrow I'd be inclined to take a set of blades or a bunch of generic-internal 1RU units from Dell or someone stacked together on a hefty gigabit network, though I suppose it really depends on what you want from the server at the end of the day.

I haven't kept up with software on render farms since I left my last design agency (now at a large software company which often contains $ in the name), but I would think if the software doesn't scale well right now, it's only a matter of time before the ability is easily within reach for even small studios.

Someone else mentioned the Microsoft patent.

The interesting thing about Microsft's patent is that it includes power, not just data.

Larry

What are your credentials? Must lie in something other than computers and internet, since all of the nerds here can answer questions such as yours by doing a Google search. If you had bothered to so so, you'd have read that Clarke was chairman of Bush's Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Board when he retired in 2003. He was also the first counter-terrorism coordinator. His office also released the US National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, and he seems to be enough of an authority in the field to be interviewed by IEEE Security & Privacy. There is a lot more to his background, if one really cares to investigate.

So, I'd say that he's pretty well credentialed to comment on threats to US cybersecurity. Perhaps not from the perspective as a bits-and-bytes technologist, but certainly as someone who has expertise in assessing systemic strengths/weaknesses from the perspective of counter-terrorism.

Clarke has talked about cyber security before. To the IEEE, in fact. Read it here.

http://www.computer.org/micro/mi2003/m2022.pdf

... the Object Oriented paradigm and the whole Windowing and GUI idea?
Smalltalk may well end up being a mere side-show in the Annals of Time 1972 page 43, but imho Alan Kay at least deserves a mention.

computer.org

Why on earth aren't they on the list?
60% of the others wouldn't be there, if it wasn't for them.

(Yeah, I like to pull statistics out of thin air)

Not really new-I'm sure many Slashdotters who are IEEE members enjoyed the September 2004 issue of IEEE Computer magazine which covered the theme of biologically inspired robotics. There is a paper in that issue by S. Thakoor et al. which uses an optical mouse chip for terrain feature tracking for a flying aerial robot. You can't read the paper if you don't have IEEE digital library access, but here is the link:

http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/co/2004/09/r903 8abs.htm

You seem to be confused about how Fitts' Law is applied. It doesn't have anything to do with keyboard commands versus mouse commands. It's a way of comparing the speed and accuracy of commands issues by a two dimensional input device like the mouse. It doesn't have anything to do with the time required to switch between different types of input devices like the mouse and keyboard, which is a different issue entirely.

Your argument that Fitts' Law has become unreasonably important doesn't make sense. It has nothing to do with whether or not there are visual shortcuts for keyboard accelerators.

You don't say how mouse gestures will "dramatically change the effects of Fitt's (sic) law". You're putting the cart before the donkey. Fitts' law predicts the dramatic and positive effect of speed and reliability of mouse gestures. It sounds like you're trying to say the opposite. What do you mean?

Your statement that "The more you conform to established metaphores, the more easily you can make your product usable." is pure bullshit, but of course it's true that "Creating new metaphores is difficult, and getting them accepted is even more difficult."

The Sims user interface incorporates pie menus (which Fitts' Law correctly predicts are faster and more efficient than linear menus), but it certainly doesn't confirm to established metaphores. Yet it's the top selling game of all time, and the interface has been reviewed by professional designers as "superb". So yes, it's quite possible to successfully apply Fitts' Law to user interface design, to implement an innovative, easily usable product, without confirming to established metaphores.

In the field of user interface design, you should NEVER make a statement like "At no point should a person be presented with more than 9 items in a selection when one has to be chosen." That's "cargo cult design methodology" when you mindlessly repeat rules of thumb without understanting them, trying to imitate the successes of other systems by apeing their surface features, but not understanding their underlying design. User interface design is all about understanding trade-offs and context, not rigidly applying pedantic design rules you read somewhere without understanding them or pausing to consider the actual application.

-Don

Some links to check out on these topics:

Semantic Designs (makers of a very powerful, generic transformational environment) http://semdesigns.com/

Link to Nic Rouquettes slides from a talk on MDA at the UML 2003 conference) http://ase.arc.nasa.gov/uml03/rouquette.pdf

Link to an article from ACM Computer magazine (last january I think) about MDS, and project at JPL which aims to incorporate some of these ideas into the design of a robust, re-usable flight software platform http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0104/Reg an/r1059.pdf

This reminds me of BITNET, an alternate attempt at creating a network. While never using it directly, I remember BITNET protocols being funky, email being handled differently and BITNET mostly just not adapting to new protocols or the internet very well. What started out as an idea to be a new type of network ended up becoming brittle and outdated. Different does not mean better. Good luck, Government, on your defense contractor-driven project where nothing can be changed without a minimum of 18 months of project management and millions of dollars.

Once again, technology is imitating nature with a new class of biologically inspired robots called " Biomimetic Robots ." In this very long article, IEEE Computer Magazine looks at several projects currently underway. All these projects will have practical applications a few years from now. They include robotic lobsters for underwater mine research or flying insect-based robots for future spatial missions. Other projects are about cricket-inspired robots to be used in rescue missions or scorpion-like robots to be deployed in hostile environments for humans. and of course, there are the now famous and robust "sprawling" robots based on cockroaches. For more information, read the whole very well documented article. Or read more for a photo gallery...

The Sprawl family of robots is developed at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University. These six-legged robots "draw their inspiration from the physical construction and mechanical design principles that are responsible for the robustness of the cockroach," according to Mark Cutkosky, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Here are two links to the family of sprawl robots and to the IndependentSprawl one known as iSprawl .

The iSprawl is the first fully autonomous member of the Sprawl family. It is about 11 centimeters in length and can run at 15 body-lengths/second (over 2.3m/s). (Credit: Center for Design Research at Stanford University)

One team investigating about robotic lobsters is working to give to the robots a "nervous system." This project is based on research done "on lobster and crayfish nervous systems conducted in the 1970s by Joseph Ayers, a biology professor at Northeastern University."

The actions of real lobsters have been reverse-engineered and programmed into a library of actions which give the robotic lobster a similar behavior as the real ones. You'll find other details at the Biomimetic Underwater Robot Program at the Ayers Robotics Laboratory at Northeastern University.

This robotic lobster imitates the real lobster behavior. (Credit: Jan Witting, Northeastern University)

The Entomopter family of crawling and flying insect-based robots is designed at Georgia Tech. They can be used as surveillance tools and can fly both indoor and outdoor. There are currently two versions. "This generation of the Entomopter is designed for operation in two atmospheres: a 50-gram terrestrial version and an aerospace version designed for use in different gravitational environments." The Entomopter might even be used on future Mars missions.

You'll find much more details by visiting the Entomopter Project website.

Here is a rendering of the Entomopter-based robot flying over Mars (Credit: Georgia Tech).

And this one shows the Entomopter-based Mars surveyor looking over the cliffs. (Credit: Georgia Tech).

Elsewhere, at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), researchers are building cricket-inspired robots, which can walk and jump. Roger D. Quinn, professor of mechanical engineering at CWRU and director of Biologically Inspired Robotics Lab, is working with his team are not only working on robots inspired by cockroaches and crickets, but also on a hybrid mechanism called Whegs (wheels plus legs).

You'll find more information, including diagrams, pictures and movies at the

Google Info

In the beginning, we had library card catalogs, with their painful attempts to index and cross-reference books. That works well in some areas, typically ones where names of people are significant. Attempts to apply the same approaches to technical papers worked less well.

There's a very elaborate classification system for patents. When you had to look through patents on paper or microfilm, it was essential. Now that we have full text search, it's used less and less.

A modern example of this approach is the ACM Taxonomy, a structure into which all computer science can be fitted. (As an exercise, try to put the current Slashdot stories into that taxonomy.) Nobody actually uses that taxonomy to find anything.

As to data interchangability, that's a separate issue, and more of a standards one. The big problem for publicly available data is that the cost of encoding the data is borne by different people than those who benefit from the encoding. Many companies don't like having all their product and pricing information easily searchable by price. (Froogle may change this, because Google has so much clout.)

I've spent some time dealing with public financial reporting. There's opposition to detailed disclosure in a standardized format. Many companies don't want their detailed information to be too easily analyzed. Embarassing results show up.

The future is better search engines, not user-created indexing data. As we've painfully learned, a search engine must look at the same data a human reader would, or it will be lied to. Lied to to the point of uselessness.

...is right here.

There's an article in last month's Computer, "In Defense of PowerPoint" by Neville Holmes. Basically he rebukes that statement, trying to say that it's just a tool, and that it really can't "make you stupid".

Unless, of course, you ask one of these little script kiddies / perl hackers on slashdot to define computer science. But I digress...

This may seem a bit harsh, but I think that these types of programs are one of the major reasons that the CS profession is advancing so slowly. There's tons of exciting research going on, but what do most people in this field spend their days doing? Sitting in front of a keyboard, typing. It doesn't get any more primitive than that. To top it off, it's not because we don't HAVE the capability to do it any other way - we do - but because people don't know since they think that computer science == programming, end of story.

I think there needs to be a stronger distinction of exactly what defines our field, similar to the distinctions made in some engineering fields (for example, the difference between a degree in EE and a degree in EET).

Finally, as an example of real CS work in action, check out this artical from the January issue of Computer magazine: http://www.computer.org/computer/homepage/0104/Reg an/

Have a look at this. We made an bluetooth connected EEG with a budget of $127. And it worked, too!

• I think its a classic example of building your business around your strength - the searching capability.

Although Linux has yet to achieve wide popularity in the computer game world ("Will Linux Be Computer Games' Dark Horse OS?" Computer, Dec. 2001, pp. 161-162), it is making rapid progress toward becoming the dominant operating system in the other major entertainment arena: motion pictures. Name a motion picture from the past year or two that featured stunning animation or dazzling special effects, and chances are the film's producers used Linux-based computers to splash those graphics on the big screen.

"In short, the big news in Hollywood about Linux is it is no longer big news. Linux has won not only renderfarm servers, but the artist desktops of the top studios. It's hard to find a large studio that does not rely upon Linux as its primary animation and special effects OS, and many smaller film studios have adopted Linux, too...

"You hear a lot about Linux not being ready to work on desktops," said HP's Jeff Wood, director of product marketing for personal workstations. "Well, here we have the perfect example of how Linux is more than ready for the desktop -- hundreds of animators successfully used Linux to create a film right from their desktops."

• Linux in Hollywood: A Star Is Born
• Computer and Graphics World
• Sinbad Hears Linux's Siren Song
• TechNewsWorld: Linux in Hollywood

1. NVidia Gelato (available FIRST for Linux - Windows XP coming soon)
2. Maya
3. Tremor
4. Shake
5. Houdini
6. Renderman
7. Cinepaint

1. Pixar (although Steve Jobs is moving them to Macs)
2. ILM
3. Weta Digital
4. Dreamworks

Linux is the pre-eminent renderfarm for Hollywood and is the dominant workstation for artists. But don't trust me - there are plenty of links out there on the web.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Build yourself a cluster of cheap boxes with cheap IDE disks and replicate your data across them. Because the data is replicated across your cluster, no need for backups or RAID.

• Smithsonian - My favorite. I especially like the history articles they have.
• National Geographic - Great photography of course, but I read the Smithsonian first and don't always get to this one. This was basically free, though (I used expiring frequent flyer miles).
• Dr Dobb's Journal - Read this one religiously
• Linux Journal - Always read this one too.
• IEEE Spectrum - Usually one or two articles of interest.
• Communications of the ACM
• Computer - The magazine for the IEEE Computer Society
• Food and Wine - Don't really like it. I find it pretentious. Another free one.
• Flying - I'm not a pilot, but it is still interesting. Another freebie.
• Conde Naste Travel - Hate it. When I travel, I backpack and stay in cheap places, not 5 star hotels. But it was free.
• IEEE Communications - Not 100% sure on this title. I'm in telecomm, so this is useful when they cover optics stuff.
• Queue - From the ACM. Tries to be more oriented toward practicioners, whereas Communications of the ACM is more academic. Usually pretty good. They have been covering Open Source issues on a reqular basis.
• Maxim - Won't claim to read the articles because they suck. Cute girls, but the internet is a better source for that sort of stuff. This was also free.

Unfortunately, I don't have time to get through them all, but I at least look flip through them and read what really gets my attention

The fight over technology vs. jobs has been playing out for 300+ years, since the invention of the Jacquard loom in the early 1800's.

Joseph Marie Jacquard's invention was fiercely opposed by the silk-weavers, who feared that its introduction, owing to the saving of labor, would deprive them of their livelihood. However, its advantages secured its general adoption, and by 1812 there were 11,000 looms in use in France. The loom was declared public property in 1806, and Jacquard was rewarded with a pension and a royalty on each machine.


Here's another example:

Our city currently has a shortage of 300+ tax drivers particularly during graveyard shifts. The taxi drivers union has proposed that cabs could be fitted with GPS and route-planning software, but the council refuses saying that any potential taxi drivers must pass the official exams (demonstrating their ability to have memorised "The Knowledge").

Introducing technology would create more jobs, and there is no danger of loss of earnings, since the council regulates the fares that taxis can charge.

I think you don't understand what he is saying. He is talking about the elimination of the E.164 standard. There will be directory systems that underly systems like Mobile IP.

I think you fail to understand the kind of shift that will happen when international dialing codes and area codes simply go away. When you can rely on underlying systems like DynDNS married to a directory system that will allow you to plug a SIP phone anywhere, get a DHCP address - register to a directory server - and start taking calls immediately. Or what will happen when cellular providers go IP behind the scenes.

His insight that Domain Naming services tie it all together is quite important. Despite what you think.

Yes - Gateway just released the 610 Media Center box running EFI. Read all about it!

To make it worse you don't get paid to get papers published there. The money goes to the journal not the paper submitters.

Perversely after I've had papers accepted in journals I can't leave the PDFs of the papers on my web site as I don't own them anymore, the journals do.

The IEEE copyright forms explicitly allow the author to retain the right to redistribute. Taken from the link:

Authors/employers may reproduce or authorize others to reproduce the Work, material extracted verbatim from the Work, or derivative works for the author's personal use or for company use, provided that the source and the IEEE copyright notice are indicated, the copies are not used in any way that implies IEEE endorsement of a product or service of any employer, and the copies themselves are not offered for sale.

zoglmannk asked:

What is needed to bring grid computing to the masses? More education, advertisement, prizes, reimbursement?

Grid computing is not aimed at "the masses". Most of the research is concentrating on building systems for solving problems which normal people have no interest in.

That's not to say that we plebs won't benefit from a "cure for X" or "lower oil prices due to better flow models within pipelines" or even "more efficient cars desgined in simulated air tunnels"; we are just very unlikely to be the imediate user of the computing power.

To answer your first question: the grid community exists through several forums and consortiums.

Now, question 2: The machines in today's grid testbeds are typically just cloned machines so if they get compromised they're easy enough to purge.

The risks are many. Should such a powerful system become compromised at a high enough level (through a social or technical attack), then the potential for a brute force attack on other cryptographically secured systems is high.

Also, due to the "webs of trust" that have to exist between machines within these grids, breaking into a grid which exists across multiple organisations may provide strategic attack points from within those organisatiosn firewalls.

Add to this the fact that the early adopters of grid computing are likely to include pharmecutical corporations, oil companies & the defence industry and it may be apparent that the cost of breaking into such a system may be higher than if John Doe's machine gets owned.

In the case of the military, it is possible to enforce security due to the inherent hierarchical nature of the relationships being modeled: witness the structure of X500 and subsequently LDAP based directory services which are derived from X500.

The situation is somewhat more complex with globalized Grid Computing because of the lack of a universally trusted authority. If the ideal of a ubiquitous "on tap" computing resource is to be realised then a model which unifies hierarchical and peer based trust models is needed.

The original post identifies a high level introduction to some of the consortium and forum based research in this area (which everyone is encouraged to contribute to). "It has", as you say, "been some time", however, it's going take significantly more time before the scientists view of grid computing (as opposed to the marketing hype) can be realised.

In the case of the military, it is possible to enforce security due to the inherent hierarchical nature of the relationships being modeled: witness the structure of X500 and subsequently LDAP based directory services which are derived from X500.

The situation is somewhat more complex with globalized Grid Computing because of the lack of a universally trusted authority. If the ideal of a ubiquitous "on tap" computing resource is to be realised then a model which unifies hierarchical and peer based trust models is needed.

The original post identifies a high level introduction to some of the consortium and forum based research in this area (which everyone is encouraged to contribute to). "It has", as you say, "been some time", however, it's going take significantly more time before the scientists view of grid computing (as opposed to the marketing hype) can be realised.

Bingo on the graph theory. My gut feeling (read: logical extrapolation of probabilities) leaves me pretty certain that over the next 20 years it will become a core factor in understanding, designing and perceiving most application programs - driven in equal measure by increased use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) which is core to semantic web markup, increased use of aggregated computer systems based on web services, and the eventual commoditization of Grid services which are still very much at the research stage.

The combination of all of the above will result in the a norm where services can be perceived in the way (code) libraries are today, so designing, building, visualising and proving the completeness of a program becomes "just" an application of graph theory on a very large graph.

The beauty of a graph is that a novice can begin to understand it very quickly, but to know it you need the math. So just as today, people will be able to create simple programs & scripts without requiring too much investment of time, but ultimately, systems architects, designers, programmers and administrators will find their jobs easier if they have the mathematical background to be able to communicate how their systems work.

they're only good for games

Guess again. Medical volume visualization.

Now, if you're point is that for MOST consumers, they're only good for games, you may have a point. But the other way to look at it is that, since consumers have demanded such amazing video technology, the price to deliver advanced medical visualizations to doctors has dropped dramatically.

What you used to need a $40,000 SGI O2 for, now you can do with a $1000 computer from Best Buy. That computer might actually save your life some day. Pretty amazing, if you think about it.

How 'bout RTFM?

"So how much processing power is that? Well, once again, the Google cluster document provides some interesting tidbits. Per the document, the racks that were used were

88 dual-CPU 2Ghz Intel Xeon servers with 2 Gbytes of RAM and an 80-Gbyte hard disk."

SPARC64-I, SPARC64-II, SPARC64-III, and SPARC64-IV were all built by HAL corporation. They all sucked in performance. Horrible designs.

After SPARC64-IV, Fujitsu shutdown HAL. Smart move.

SPARC64-V was entirely designed and built in Japan.

Gosh. Here is the key paper by Fujitsu. It describes the SPARC64-V. The paper indicates that all the architects were Japanese.

Stop YOUR bullshit.

I've been reading several papers on this for a grad class I'm taking. One of the several problems is no government control. If a power outage might be prevented by shedding some load (turning out power to some people), no company wants to step up to the plate and be the one to turn out the power to their customers. So they luck out, or they have a massive power outage.

This paper (click on the PDF link) has a good summary of the problems in keeping power outages from happening again.

"...our analysis finds that the changing rate or the functions modified as a percentage of the total functions is higher in open-source projects than in closed-source projects. This supports the hypothesis that defects may be found and fixed more quickly in open-source projects than in closed-source projects and may be an added benefit for using the open-source development model."

Take that, you Microsoft shills!

"...our analysis finds that the changing rate or the functions modified as a percentage of the total functions is higher in open-source projects than in closed-source projects. This supports the hypothesis that defects may be found and fixed more quickly in open-source projects than in closed-source projects and may be an added benefit for using the open-source development model."

Take that, you Microsoft shills!

The way I see it (although I am not a mathematician), the major hurdle to realizing this is the fact that generating random numbers usually results in patterns.