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• a network of point-to-point "condominium" wavelengths
• condo owners can recursively partition their wavelengths
• wavelength owners determine topology and routing of their light paths
• massive edge peering, "star bursts" vs. "ring of rings"
• not "distributed network objects", but "distributed object networks"

• customer owns infrastructure, carrier provides network management
• asset-based telecom allows customers to fund and control the network
• customer controls the bandwidth

• DoE presentation (2mb pdf)
• 3rd-gen optical network, CANet*3
• Further reading

..if Intel and AMD hadn't got locked into that stupid GHz battle and instead concentrated on optimizing their CPU design (rather than just ramping up the speed silly amounts)

AMD and Intel have gone to great lengths to give their processors deep pipeines. That's a GOOD thing. And they have both gone to great lengths to reduce the penalties associated with deep pipelines (like change-of-flow penalty).

This, in a nutshell, is what computer microarchitecture is. Recent studies have shown that the optimal pipeline depth is very, very long, roughly twice the depth of the P4. So making the pipeline deeper seems to be the right solution.

..if Intel and AMD hadn't got locked into that stupid GHz battle and instead concentrated on optimizing their CPU design (rather than just ramping up the speed silly amounts)

AMD and Intel have gone to great lengths to give their processors deep pipeines. That's a GOOD thing. And they have both gone to great lengths to reduce the penalties associated with deep pipelines (like change-of-flow penalty).

This, in a nutshell, is what computer microarchitecture is. Recent studies have shown that the optimal pipeline depth is very, very long, roughly twice the depth of the P4. So making the pipeline deeper seems to be the right solution.

Look at the recent past.
"A new economical model for software development seems to emerge. The Open Source Software model will certainly not replace the current commercial model but it can challenge it significantly and even prevail in certain areas such as operating systems and programs constituting the "infrastructure" of the Internet."

Look at the standards board .
"we now have a chance to examine these systems in detail, and see if their evolutionary narratives are significantly different from commercially developed systems."

Look outside of 'the monopoly' for future trends.
"The very possibility of competing head-on with Microsoft, critics argue, is enough to discourage competitors from developing rival products, which stifles technological innovation in the entire software industry. Many corporate clients, in the meantime, will accept mediocre software as long as it meets immediate needs and works with existing systems."

And finally, stop screwing around with slashdot and go do the research. Just please, try to stay on topic and don't get lost in rhetoric.

A true professional will tell the truth, no matter how much it hurts the suits to hear it. Read your Software Engineering Code of Ethics sec. 5 to see what I mean.

Actually, check out this paper for an experimental that shows that the extra time you spend in pairing will increase the quality of the resulting code. So you have a choice: program alone and get buggier code faster, or pair and get less buggy code a bit more slowly (but the quality gains are larger than the speed loss).

It is the perSUasive not "pervasive" computing lab.

Persuasive tech is about "psychosocially active" computing (and other) technologies, ie. that affect motivation, persuasion etc. The paradigmatic example is "Baby think it over", the doll given to teens to make them think twice about getting pregnant. (There's even a special "crack baby" model I think.)

But in the last couple of years BJ Fogg (the guy behind persuasive tech) has completely focused on web trust, which is a lot less interesting than the original program IMHO.

Pervasive computing, in contrast, is another term (originally IBM:s I think) for Ubiquitous Computing. Something quite different in fact.

www.research.ibm.com/thinkresearch/pervasive.shtml
www.computer.org/pervasive/

In some organizations and especially in Canadian Universities where the funding simply isn't there to establish a supercomputing infrastructure (an article last week referred to a University in the Southern USA that had greater supercomputing capacity than all of Canada) the ability to purchase computing power on demand will probably be of great interest to Academics and medium to small sized businesses.

But the money for IBM wouldn't just be in the sharing of the computing power.

Say that Company A lacks the programming staff to develop a program for assessing the success of their Oil drilling or other geological analysis they need to do. What if IBM developed the custom program on behalf of the company and as well sell them the CPU time to run it. Would be a great way to increase their Consulting business and this one simultaneously.

I think it will be a very successful business model.

I'm also curious if it might on the whole reduce the power consumption of Server-Farms as fewer would be needed if IBM had a number of them prebuilt and ready to serve up power. I would imagine that a number of Hollywood studios might prefer this model to constantly upgrading their own server farms.

As for implementation of the communication end of things something like CANET:

CANET3 would probably fit the bill.

Lines of code has a little bit to do with reliability. It's a well-known fact that the more lines of code you write (called SLOCs), the more bugs you will have (notes on this here). Although more SLOCs means more bugs, density of bugs does not increase with code length (IEEE report here).

Better reparse what he said. it uses the same design philosophy, not the same architecture. The X1 and Red Storm are distinctly different machines.

More of what you are worried about is this. That might be both scary and fun to code for.

However, it looks like vector processing is on the upswing, not down. It hit rock bottom during the 90s...

> In 50 years time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another

Think so? The Univac was state of the art in 1952. Considering that the progress of technology is accelerating over time (check out The History of Computing Timeline), do you really think that the ideas behind rsync are going to be relevant? Network throughput is already getting massive. If we could fast-forward to 2052, I imagine we would barely recognize the technologies in use.

Do you think that Turing could have even fathomed performing a billion operations a second and having a almost a terrabyte of storage available and (almost) accessible anywhere on the planet at megabit data transfer rates? In our homes? For an inflation adjusted price of under $100? You have to be kidding me -- it would have blown his mind.

In 2052 CPU power will be effectively unlimited (imagine doing a billion billion operations per second), storage constraints meaningless, and, if networking trends continue and/or quantum plays out (as it may), effectively instantaneous access to that data.

Think we'll still be diff-ing data to squeeze the most out of the net? In 2052 that is the last thing we'll be bothering with.

All this only hold true of course if we assume that technology will improve as fast as it historically has and that we don't hit a cataclysmic end to human progress in general (plague, nuclear armageddon, etc). But if the last 50 years have been any indication, what we will see in 2052 will bare little resemblance to what we have in 2002.

The IEEE Computer Society Magazine published in August an article on this topic. There are a lot of alternatives to UPnP: Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine here, so I cannot say much. Here is the index of the magazine, here abstract of the article, and here is the article in PDF (but you must pay 19$ US for it).

If you are actually interested, e-mail me (pgq AT poboxes DOT com) and I'll send you a summary.

The IEEE Computer Society Magazine published in August an article on this topic. There are a lot of alternatives to UPnP: Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine here, so I cannot say much. Here is the index of the magazine, here abstract of the article, and here is the article in PDF (but you must pay 19$ US for it).

If you are actually interested, e-mail me (pgq AT poboxes DOT com) and I'll send you a summary.

The IEEE Computer Society Magazine published in August an article on this topic. There are a lot of alternatives to UPnP: Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine here, so I cannot say much. Here is the index of the magazine, here abstract of the article, and here is the article in PDF (but you must pay 19$ US for it).

If you are actually interested, e-mail me (pgq AT poboxes DOT com) and I'll send you a summary.

The IEEE Computer Society Magazine published in August an article on this topic. There are a lot of alternatives to UPnP: Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, etc.

Unfortunately, I don't have the magazine here, so I cannot say much. Here is the index of the magazine, here abstract of the article, and here is the article in PDF (but you must pay 19$ US for it).

If you are actually interested, e-mail me (pgq AT poboxes DOT com) and I'll send you a summary.

First, we have to get a few assumptions out of the way. Let's assume that we're dealing with IBM/Hollerith punch cards, so we can standardize. Now, let's pretend that these cards hold 80 bytes. The card's design predated ASCII, so while there were 12 punches per character, they didn't even represent as much data as a byte. (Follow the link for more.) So, rather than pretend they're 12 bits * 80, let's assume they were used for more or less today's equivalent of 80 bytes. And, in keeping with the hard drive manufacturers' "truth" in advertising, I'm going to assume that 1TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.

Whew, now that we established those assumptions, 1TB of punch cards would be 12,500,000,000 cards.

Assuming the strict standard dimensions under which these cards were produced, we can say that this stack of cards would be ~1,322 miles high +/- ~99 miles. In terms of volume, these cards would take up ~43,025 cubic yards (+/- ~3,211 cu yds). Assuming roughly 100,000 cu yds of concrete for a major-league baseball stadium (seems to vary a fair amount by stadium design), it would take roughly 2.3 TB of punchcards to equal the volume of concrete in a stadium.

Aww, man, I realized I didn't subtract the volume loss for the diagonal-cut top left corner. Someone else can take that.

( As always, props to Google for my research. :-)

1) Hmm...I wasn't completely clear. I meant that TCPA can be disabled. This effectively does the same thing to Palladium.

This mentions it.

2) Linux folks haven't been able to control Microsoft in the least before -- just work around them, and provide an attractive alternative. What's new about not being able to tell Microsoft what to do?

Ken Thompson stole some cool ideas from Multics, like for example command-line plumbing and a hierarchical filesystem.

Nevertheless, Unix was an entirely new and much less ambitious system. See Thompson's thoughts on the subject here.

Deep(er) Blue's custom ASICs were basically there to make the brute-force approach go faster. They [...] had little to do with sophisticated position evaluation

An article about the methods IBM used to cluster eight dual processor Linux workstations to provide the necessary graphics power.

Movies of Deep View in action.

In spite of the trolling title, nothing in the article even implies that the USPS even considered "owning" or controlling the email delivery infrastructure. It says that there was a point where it could have bought much of the telegraph infrastructure (but it didn't), and there was a point where it could have offered email services, but decided it was out of their mandate.

If, in 1982 they decieded to offer electronic mail services, they would have found UUCP
and BITNet already there, connecting colleges, government agencies, and some companies with electronic mail and other services. Businessmen and power users with money were already sending electronic mail through services like Compuserve and The Source.

I don't see anything the USPS could have done to stop the rise of FidoNet in 1984. FidoNet allowed anybody to call up a local BBS system (which was often free), and send an email that could get routed internationally, or to any of the other email networks.

The bottom line is, there is no way short of draconian legislation that would have allowed the USPS to "own" email. The most that could have happened is for them to offer email to customers; customers who have other options that the post office must compete with. Kind of like package delivery: the USPS offers package delivery service, but as any employee of FedEx, UPS or DHL will tell you, they by no means own the service.

I had a picture of myself at 5 years old gazing in amazement at what at the time was a fairly new GE 625 When i was a little older, i got to play "Nim" via toggle switches and status lights and help run batch jobs. When the company decomissioned the machines in the late 70's i was invited to take whatever parts of them i wanted. Damn i wish i had grabbed the front panel of the cpu!

I remember that one of the systems had this message on it:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten.

Also, it's MORONIC that NOT A SOUL is recommending a book that'll teach you even ONE of the Top Ten most important algorithms of the 20th century.

You're getting outraged over nothing. This page you link to gives the top ten most influential algorithms for computing in science and engineering, not the overall most influential algorithms of programming in general. Reading through them, I didn't see more than a couple that would be useful for general application. They're mostly just for the researchers in these different fields. Besides, everyone knows the most important and influential algorithm of all time is Hello World.

For my money, I really like the O'Reilly books. They're detailed and informative without feeling overwhelming or distant. I would recommend most of those to a beginner in whatever subject it may be.

I find it amazing that almost all the recommendations are for yet another book that teaches frickin for loops in yet another frickin dialect. "Using the STL" YEAH, iterators man, THEY RO0L0RZ, TOTALLY different from for loops. "Design Patterns" ADAPTER: reformats the parameters between two functionally compatible but syntactically different pieces of code. YEAH! ROCKET SCIENCE D00D.

Also, it's MORONIC that NOT A SOUL is recommending a book that'll teach you even ONE of the Top Ten most important algorithms of the 20th century. They are REALLY IMPORTANT. The Fast Fourier transform made possible: sound compression, image compression, electrical engineering in general, efficient numerical PDE's, fast integer multiplication, fast polynomial multiplication and many more. Metropolis integration made possible: nuclear bomb simulation, and the best (so far) algorithms for rendering 3d images. QR decomposition is REALLY IMPORTANT to finding eigenvalues, which is often useful when solving any kind of PDE. The simplex method can be used to solve a very wide variety of real-world optimization problems efficiently.

The other ones are really important as well.

So I'll make a suggestion to at least fix the problem for Fourier Series and elementary integration method by suggesting An Introduction to Numerical Analysis [amazon.com] by Kendall Atkinson. This is an excellent introductory book. If you "smart" people want to learn something other than "look at me mom! for loops in Python instead of Perl!" then you'll find this a REAL BREEZE to read (smart person that you are.)

</outrage>

I also like Purely Functional Data Structures [amazon.com] by Chris Okasaki.

I find it amazing that almost all the recommendations are for yet another book that teaches frickin for loops in yet another frickin dialect. "Using the STL" YEAH, iterators man, THEY RO0L0RZ, TOTALLY different from for loops. "Design Patterns" ADAPTER: reformats the parameters between two functionally compatible but syntactically different pieces of code. YEAH! ROCKET SCIENCE D00D.

Also, it's MORONIC that NOT A SOUL is recommending a book that'll teach you even ONE of the Top Ten most important algorithms of the 20th century. They are REALLY IMPORTANT. The Fast Fourier transform made possible: sound compression, image compression, electrical engineering in general, efficient numerical PDE's, fast integer multiplication, fast polynomial multiplication and many more. Metropolis integration made possible: nuclear bomb simulation, and the best (so far) algorithms for rendering 3d images. QR decomposition is REALLY IMPORTANT to finding eigenvalues, which is often useful when solving any kind of PDE. The simplex method can be used to solve a very wide variety of real-world optimization problems efficiently.

The other ones are really important as well.

So I'll make a suggestion to at least fix the problem for Fourier Series and elementary integration method by suggesting An Introduction to Numerical Analysis by Kendall Atkinson. This is an excellent introductory book. If you "smart" people want to learn something other than "look at me mom! for loops in Python instead of Perl!" then you'll find this a REAL BREEZE to read (smart person that you are.)

</outrage>

I also like Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki.

try this paper. there are others, of course, this is only part of the architecture.

> can we say OpenFirmware?

On slashdot, no. No you can't. You'll only frighten half the PC junkies, and the other half will think you're making it up. It's not like the IEEE know anything about systems design or, heaven forbid, firmware.

- RustyTaco

Maybe it is about time Microsoft engineers read the Software Engineering Code of Ethics. Specifically, their duty to the public at large.

There are already codes of ethics for software engineers. Sure, they aren't mandatory, but I subscribe to them, and I'm sure that many (if not most or all) open source developers do as well (even if unconciously).

The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy is one of the longest-running forums on this topic and is well worth being aware of. The papers for the 2002 session are on CD-ROM; so is a compilation of those from 1980-1999...

The IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy is one of the longest-running forums on this topic and is well worth being aware of. The papers for the 2002 session are on CD-ROM; so is a compilation of those from 1980-1999...

Have you relized that Steve C McConnell is not emplyee of M$.
He is CEO and chief software engineer at Construx Software.
He is also Editor in Chief of
IEEE Software magazine

Why can we have a moduler windows of sort, you plug in a device, those device drivers that are stored within the device automatically get loaded into the system (okay that could push the price of devices up abit). and similairly, when the device is removed or unpluged, said drivers are removed from the system.

The IEEE just released a new publication called "IEEE Pervasive Computing; Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems". You can track down a dead-tree edition (got mine in the mail a couple of days ago) or read it online if you have a digital subscription.

The first (paper) issue even includes a reprint of Mark Weiser's "The Computer for the 21st Century", Scientific American, 1991 article. A very interesting read, seeing how far things have and have not gone in ten years.

I thought they already did? Some Linux Journal article about Broadcast 2000 and aA list of supported video capture cards for Linux

Sure the hardware isn't quite Linux supported yet, but at least there are some lower-end cards out there that are supported. So it looks like for the home user the hardware and software is somewhat there. And what about for high-end? Well supposedly Linux is already being used for editing movies (including LOTR). I'm not sure how they get their video onto the computers though, but there must be some way to do it I guess.

So I guess this hardware is special because it is specifically targetted at Linux, but as far as breaking Linux into the video editing market...I think that already happened a little bit so far. And it's not going to get any better with a $3000 USD card.

Metropolis algorithm for Monte Carlo

Simplex Method for Linear Programming

Krylov Subspace Iteration Methods

The Decompositionnal Approach to Matrix Computations

The Fortran Optimizing Compiler

QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues

Quicksort Algorithm

Fast Fourier Transform

Integer Relation Detection

Fast Multipole Method

A quick trip to the IEEE's online store, and about $300 bucks will give you all the gory details you need to measure software quality ... provided you consider that software quality synonyous with programmer productivity.

For example. In grad school, we took the 1992, IEEE Standard for a Software Quality Metrics Methodology, along with GNU Flex, and wrote a program that would slice-n-dice C & C++ programs against a table of measureable metrics for code readability and reusability.

Of course, we had a blast testing it against winning entries from the 9th International Obfuscated C Code Contest. But we also noticed that there were just some things that it would never be able to test. For exmaple, while our little app spotted code that was uncommented, it could not tell us whether or not the comments were useful or relevant.

Point is, judging code and productivity is always (or at least until HR offices are equipped with Beowulf's) going to have a subjective element. Because lets' face it, when it comes down to it, many bosses really only care that the job gets done on-time and under-budget.

Or what's that great line from the movie "War Games" ... Hell, I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought it'd help.

The article forgot an important new certification now being offered by the IEEE Computer Society. You can now become a Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP). This is a certification from a professional society, not a company trying to sell (hard|soft)ware and it has serious, vendor-neutral requirements. You have to account for 9000 hours of software development experience (close to 5 years!) and you have to agree to a code of ethics. This is the kind of certification that will make people take the software development industry seriously. Check it out. I'm working on mine now.

Found this on Plastic
tags

Right, in 1801. From the link: "In France, Joseph-Marie Jacquard invented an automatic loom using punched cards for the control of the patterns in the fabrics."

You may want to check check out marsupial robotics.

...battery power will likely continue to be an issue...

They didn't produce the compiler - Kuck and Associates did. Intel bought them out. The guy who invented it has been around for a while - here is a short bio on him.

See the page on 1945, where it says:

"Grace Murray Hopper, working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark II computer, found the first computer bug beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they tell Howard Aiken that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers."

Something I forgot to mention in my other post:

The October 2001 issue of IEEE Computer has some articles on security, and the first article in the issue is titled "Search Engines as Security Threat" by Hernandez, Sierra, Ribagorda, Ramos.

Here's a link to it.

Remember these days in your waning time left at a university. They will probably be some of the best times in your life. I hate to give you the news, but a B.S.C.S doesn't qualify you to do squat. Not only will everything you think you know as valuable information be obsolete in 4 years, you will face an even more competitive GLOBAL market of millions of sellers of the same skills.

Within 5 years, all software engineers will be required to become a LOT better at their craft. You will not be able to get a hack job without IEEE software engineer certification

As large organizations invest 25% to 50% of gross revenue in very large IT integration projects, much of what passes as CS research is simply not going to get funded. The consolidation of IT vendors (Compaq-HP for example), will mean fewer opportunities and those that are available will require higher, and more specialized skills.

As that famous philospher, Axel Rose of Guns & Roses once said "Welcome to the Jungle".
Prepare to be re-educated by the "School of Hard Knocks".

A good general resource for this kind of advanced computer architecture is the book Computer Architecture by David Patterson and John Hennessy. It's quite dense. For the latest in processor architecture, the IEEE Micro magazine is useful.

IEEE Software magazine has had a decent coverage on the broad subject of "open source" software development in recent years. Open source was the main topic of the January/February 1999 (Vol. 16, No. 1) edition. Unfortunately IEEE Software is not available on-line (I can't remember any peer- reviewed software-related magazines that are), so you'd just have go to your department's library and copy the relevant articles.

IEEE Software magazine has had a decent coverage on the broad subject of "open source" software development in recent years. Open source was the main topic of the January/February 1999 (Vol. 16, No. 1) edition. Unfortunately IEEE Software is not available on-line (I can't remember any peer- reviewed software-related magazines that are), so you'd just have go to your department's library and copy the relevant articles.

The good folks at the MIT Media Lab (especially under the Things That Think research program) have been researching such things for years.
The July/August issue of IEEE Micro contains several articles on their work, including one on parasitic power.