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The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Maybe the site is so "in", you have to wake up next to Cox to appreciate little gems like "Temperature control using Beard(tm) technology"?

Maybe Cox himself came up with a new take on the Resume format - "capable of handling practically infinite tasks at a time while churning them all out without a hitch"? What a guy!

Seriously, I haven't seen such an overtly fawning fansite since Ready,steadman,go.

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• Quite frankly, I don't blame them, either. I wouldn't want to spend thousands of dollars on a TV show just to have some punk kid record it and 'share' it with a few thousand of his closest friends. The copies that are now in peoples possession are lost income for the industry- they could have been sold to people for profit.

You're probably conflating the socialists and greens based on the Green Party USA platform, which is different from Nader's much saner Association of State Green Parties platform. You can compare the two on the GPUSA website

btw I know the subject line has messed up precedence.

Chilli

So powerful and rich corporations are gonna take care of the handicapped and homeless?

Yes, in a sense. Since the government isn't taking any money from you, there's no excuse "Well, I pay for charity through taxes!", so the average decent man will feel compelled to give to charity. Perhaps big, powerful charities. Or just to the homeless guy on the street corner.

They are going to school the population, and invest in sustainable and non-profit ventures?

This too. Parents will pay the money they save in taxes to private schools. Perhaps big, powerful schools. Or maybe little schools. Other decent people will also donate money. It's a good cause.

People will be free to invest their money in whatever ventures they like, not the ventures government likes. And government likes some evil ventures -- seen the Drug War lately? Would you pay for the Drug War? The Libertarians won't make you. Can you say that about Nader?

22. We oppose the illicit activities of the international drug trade and the illicit money laundering that often accompanies the drug cartels. We call for a revised view of the "drug problem" and an end to the "war on drugs," recognizing that after over a decade of strident law-and-order posturing, the problems with hard drugs have only worsened.

8. At the same time, we must develop law enforcement approaches that are firm and directly address VIOLENT CRIME, street crime, and trafficking in hard drugs. Violence that creates a climate of further violence must be stopped.

These contradictory statements are typical of Nader's platform. Number 8 equates "hard" drugs with violent crime, and mandates firm law enforcement against them. Number 22 calls for an end to the War on Drugs! To me, and end to the War on Drugs means legalizing all chemical substances. Not just the ones Nader likes.

Nader whines a lot about all sorts of rights -- "workers' rights", "citizen rights", "privacy rights", and countless more uses of the word. I don't care. I want the right to life, liberty, and property. Absolutely. Without any restrictions.

Does that make me a right wing capitalist? Or does the fact that I laugh at silly "if I were king" statements like

Greens support a major redesign of commerce. We endorse "true-cost pricing." We support production that eliminates waste. In natural systems, everything is a meal for something else. Everything recycles, there is no "waste." We need to mimic natural systems in the way we manufacture and produce things. "Consumables" need to be designed to be thrown into a compost heap and/or eaten, for example. "Durable goods" would be designed in closed-loop systems, ultimately to be disassembled and reassembled. "Toxics" would be safeguarded and could have "markers" identifying them as belonging, in perpetuity, to their makers.

You're voting for that?

This platform is not binding for candidates on any level.
Here is a link to the Platform endorsed by the Nader/LaDuke campaign.

I'm terribly enthusiastic about OpenSource Educational Material.

Open Publications can provide us with much more than merely free and improved literature. We can apply groupware concepts to online education and build a very modular and exacting approach to education. Knowledge requirements for particular subjects can be made explicit and linked to. Community systems (such as ArsDigita's) can be applied in order to permit annotation, both textual and graphical, chat rooms (the largest study group in history), and other assistants to understanding material. Multiple explanations of the same subject can be given side-by-side. Methods of explaining can be analyzed and optimized.

OpenContent books such as Havoc's book Gnome/GTK+ Application Developmentappear to be doing well on the shelves. I haven't witnessed price wars yet; most Open Publication books are only being published by one publisher, even though there is nothing to preventing republishing. Indeed, it makes me wonder why more books are not published under free licenses.

Publishers' roles (and living) will not disappear until book compilers are commonplace, even though content may be liberated; I, and several others, severally annotate our books. (My copy of House Of Leaves has a lot more in blue than just the word "House".)

Virtual hosting isn't just about HTTP. It's also about FTP, POP3, IMAP, SSL, and whatever other protocols a host chooses to support. Some hosts even virtualize Telnet, SMTP relay, or finger. There are problems with bandwidth shapers, traffic analysis, partitioned "virtual servers" or other unique technologies, etc.

I don't think anyone has mentioned the impact of filtering systems or Spam filters such as ORBS. If you have three hundred customers on one IP, and that address gets filtered by such a service because of one rogue customer, you're screwed.

We're not talking about giving IP addresses to toasters. We're not talking about giving Class C's to T-1 customers. We're talking about using IP addresses for hosting customers who need and pay for a package of virtualized services. Services which hosts have provided for years, and will need to continue to provide in order to remain competitive. Services provisioned in a fashion which ARIN has supported.

Lastly, what about enforcement, reclamation, and competitive advantages? Will Host A run out of allocated space before Host B? Will Host C decide to circumvent the policy through any of a dozen methods that come to mind? Will ARIN go to Host A and say "give us back that /18 you've been using for three years"? Will they do the same to Host B? Will the big hosts end up in court?

I'm running for one of the seats on the Advisory Council, myself. It seems that the policy was created without input from those actually using the technology. Again, it's not just about HTTP.

Kevin Martin
sigma@pair.com
www.pair.com

So called zero emissions vehicles simply shift the pollution source from the tailpipe to the power plants.

If you do the numbers, you will find that the power plant emissions attributable to each mile of EV driving are about 3% of those of conventional internal combustion engine cars. The actual percentages depend on the pollutant in question. See the detailed analysis of this exact issue on my website.

"But power plants make power more efficiently!" Ever study thermodynamics? Energy is always always always lost when it's converted from one form to another.

You then proceed to list all the conversion steps in the electric vehicle fuel cycle, claiming that because there are more steps, EVs are necessarily less efficient. You should know that it's not the number of steps, but the product of the efficiencies at each step.

If you do the numbers, you'll find that current production EVs are typically at least twice as efficient, in primary energy consumed per mile, as conventional ICE cars. Modern combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants can exceed 50% efficiency, vs perhaps 20% peak for an ICE. The power grid is typically 95% efficient (that's the figure for SDG&E). The charger & battery are typically 70-80% efficient, though this depends on the technology. The inverter and motor are usually well over 90% efficient.

To be more specific, the measured AC consumption for the PbA version of the 1997 EV1 is 248 Wh/mile. It's 373 Wh/mile for the 1999 NiMH version, mainly because of the battery pack cooling required in warm weather. There is definite room for improvement here, btw.

Then there's the fact that EVs are the only practical way to use certain primary energy sources, such as hydro, solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear -- all sources that pollute far less than fossil fuels.

And the current power grid could not handle the increased load should the public switch to electric vehicles.

Southern California Edison has calculated that California could easily support several million EVs with existing plants and transmission lines -- despite our well-publicized shortages -- as long as they're charged at night. Right now, as my EV1 is charging in my garage shortly past midnight PDT, the load on the California ISO-controlled grid is 23067 MW. The load at which they start to have trouble is around 40000MW. That's a lot of slack for nighttime EV charging.

Electric vehicles also shift pollution to the landfills. Depending on the type of battery, they are made up of lead, sulphuric acid, mercury, lithium, cadmium, and other nasty chemicals. We ignore this problem. NiCd batteries say "dispose of properly at an approved facility". Ever actually tried this? Trashing them is illegal, yet no recycling facility in the Los Angeles phone book officially accepts cadmium!

No production EV I know of uses NiCd batteries. They all use lead-acid, nickel metal-hydride or lithium ion. There's a well-established recycling infrastructure for lead-acid batteries, and nickel is also far too valuable to just throw away.

Vehicle range. What fool even thinks of vacationing in an EV? It can't be done. Insufficient range before batteries run dry. 100+ miles with no gas stations and no civilization at all *and* over hilly terrain? It's like this all over the western US.

Several people I know regularly drive their EV1s on cross-country trips. The first went from LA to Troy, Michigan. Another went from LA to Florida. Yes, it takes them a lot longer than in an ordinary car. They do it for fun. They spent some time arranging for 240V outlets to be available, but it was possible.

That said, no one really argues that EVs can now replace every ICE vehicle application. But they don't have to! The vast majority of daily commuting is well within the range capability of existing EVs, so if we reserved ICE vehicles for when they were really needed we could cut total vehicle emissions enormously.

My EV1 is my only car. Most of my trips out of town are by air, and my EV1 gets me to the airport quite easily. On the very rare occasion I/we need to take a road trip that exceeds its capabilities, I either take my fiancee's car, or we rent an ICE. This happens very, very rarely. Maybe once or twice a year.

Power? EVs can barely move themselves and some passengers about. A camper? A trailer? Cargo? Forget it.

My EV1 does 0 to 60 in less than 8 seconds. Does that count as "barely move themselves"? That said, see the previous paragraph about it not being necessary to replace every ICE, only most of them. If I ever need to tow a boat, I'll rent a SUV with a big engine -- something I hardly need to commute to work every day.

And stupid lazy drivers who don't recharge.

I recharge every night in my garage. Takes me 10 seconds to plug in the paddle, and it's full by morning. Second nature, I have yet to forget.

What about in winter when it's cold outside? Electric heating? There goes your battery. And of course, bateries tend to get weak and have problems when it's cold anyway. Double handicap.

My EV1 actually has a pretty good heat pump, augmented with an electric heating element. Works great in both heating and cooling modes, but then again I do live in San Diego.

NiMH batteries actually work pretty well in cold weather.

Charge time sucks too. I can refuel a gas/diesel engine in a few minutes and be good for another 500 miles. With electric? How many hours to recharge?

This is, in my opinion, the one valid concern about the present generation of EVs. The standard 6kW charger for the EV1 gives you about 25-30 miles of range for every hour of charge. On days when my total driving is less than a full charge (which is almost always true), charging occurs at night when I sleep, so as long as it's done by morning it doesn't matter how long it takes.

That said, I do believe we need high power public charging stations for those occasions when you need to drive more than a single charge will take you in a single day, and you don't have the time to spend at one of the public 6kW charging stations. GM is supposedly testing a 50kW charger now on a fleet of electric S-10 pickups. I'd very much like to see it publicly available.

And yes... the costs. EVs are currently sold at a loss

Any car made by hand in batches of 500 (like the EV1) is bound to be expensive. They'd get much cheaper in volume production, but even if they remain more expensive than comparable ICE cars you have to trade that off against significantly lower operating and energy costs.

What more needs to be said? The EV is nothing less than snake oil.

See my EV web page for another side to the story.

There's no question that we'll all be driving EVs some day. The only question is when -- before or after the oil runs dry, or before people are born and live their whole lives in LA without ever having seen the mountains.

Phil Karn

Seriously, the claims are going to be very similar from co-lo companies. Previous posts really covered the technical things you want to look for. But I think the real value is in first hand experience. For my $.02 I have always liked Pair Networks, but I don't know if they offer co-location with your own servers any more.

Ultimately, I think it would come down to:

1. Support. This includes the overall competence of the company.
2. Location, so you can physically administer your servers when needed.
3. Good routing and bandwidth capabilities.

Or maybe reverse the order of these. Like I said I have always gotten a good feeling from Pair.

The potatoes sound like a much better bet.

My web provider, pair networks used to use standard PCs on shelves. They have a bunch of pics taken during their latest office move. There's a couple of the shelves they used in the old datacenter that might be useful. Note how messy everything is! They are using exclusively rack mount cases for future installations.

My web provider, pair networks used to use standard PCs on shelves. They have a bunch of pics taken during their latest office move. There's a couple of the shelves they used in the old datacenter that might be useful. Note how messy everything is! They are using exclusively rack mount cases for future installations.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

It's quite possible to write a primitive TCP-IP stack on TI-85 and serve web pages from it. It has 32kB RAM (minus the screen area 128x64, 1kB) + 128kB ROM (hmm... maybe it would be possible to replace this with EPROM?). Lower 32kB is mapped for ROM with bank switching and upper 32kB for RAM. It's running ~6MHz Z-80. You can pretty easily turbocharge it by just modifying one capacitor on the circuit board, but of course it eats a lot more batteries up then. Z80 is able to execute about one instruction every 4-8 cycles, so it's not that fast, but some guys programmed a Wolfenstein clone, Daedalus framerates being like 5 frames per second on so on unmodified TI-85! Ricochet + Daedalus + some extra programming = deathmatch on TI-85? :)

There's also a 512kB memory expansion for it, although it's more like a RAM-disk.

TI-85 a neat system if you're such person who wants to play with gadgetry (and modify it too). And it's pretty cheap too.

no doubt, go with pair.com (and good luck with your love).

kind regards philippe, A-Z-Internet.com

Read and understand this before talking about user interfaces.

To answer the original poster's question:

The reason people care about fps is that when playing a fast-action game, you want as clear a view of the motion as possible. If you turn around really fast and there is another player standing there getting ready to kill you, it's much easier to notice him if there are 7 or 8 intervening frames instead of just 1 or 2. Having lots of frames can give a player an advantage in fast action games. I seem to recall a discussion about this on Tom's Hardware Guide a few months back, but I can't find it. Anybody remember the article I am talking about?

• Hummingbird flying platform
  
• The Moller
  
• Hiller Flying platform
  
• SkyRider
  

I heard on good authority that a certain manager at Redhat Advanced Development Labs thinks that Microsoft is the best thing ever, their interface is wonderful and GNOME (and hence the Redhat default interface) should look and behave exactly like it.

This is probably why Redhat ship with modified kernel sources - so the OS can crash like Microsoft OS's too ;-)

Seriously though, this person may like to read Thomas McCarthy's intro to NeXTStep which has some very good information on interface design.

For example, you do not put three tiny weenie buttons on a titlebar, each performing a different operation, such that a 1-2 pixel mis-click is all the difference between maximising the application, and losing the past hours work by closing it.

Popular conspiracy nut William Cooper talks about Project Jason in his book "Behold a Pale Horse" and how they planned this from the very beginning of the Galileo project. The probe will be crashed into Jupiter creating a new star. Look for the book at Amazon. Here's a cached version of an article - search the page for plutonium. Another link. Information all the way at the bottom

For more on this subject, see:
http://geolib.pair.com/welcome.html

I think the Open Content License has been shown to work quite well. Take, for example, Havoc Pennington's GTK+/Gnome Application Development, released from New Riders earlier this year.

Havoc has a page online with errata for the book, an online version is available, and there's even a CVS version available. That's the power of an open publication license - I think it's great.
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I've had lots of luck with Pair networks. They seem to have a good pricing structure (only pay for features you need) and have been very reliable - in 2 1/2 years of service the biggest outage was a planned one when they moved their data center a couple of miles :-)

• Sensei - Started LinuxNewbie.org
  
• Matt Welsh - Wrote a couple of books. his homepage is here
  
• Havoc Pennington - Works on GNOME for Red Hat. His page is here
  
• Tom Christiansen - Did a lot of Perl documentation. More info here
  

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But the servers and network are smokin, and the guys really know what they're doing. There are none of the shortcomings I've found at other providers, their new facility looks fantastic, and they have a huge project underway to make everything run more smoothly and reliably for customers - pair2000.

They also have a special for anyone who's transferring a site from another provider - free setup. This is handy to say the least :)

Just another satisfied customer! www.pair.com

It's amazing what you get with a webmaster account for only $29/month -- 120M disk (and extra is cheap), 400M/day bandwidth, virtual FTP server, modern Apache http service, CGI scripts anywhere, shell access, unlimited email aliases, etc.

And they're extremely well-connected (redundant DS3s); cumulative downtime over the last few years has been maybe a few hours.

I don't get anything for plugging them, I'm just a happy customer. Oh, and unlike most sites, their own web site doesn't suck.

Pair recently moved their headquarters, and the amount of information that they provided during their (as brief as I could ever imagine) outage was stunning. (It was obviously hosted on another site during the move).

Pair's pricing doesn't seem as cheap as some places, but there will come a day when you need you host to come through for you. When that happens, Pair will be there for you. The cheaper host's staff (oh, yeah, it's a one man/woman operation) will be unavailable.

I don't work for pair, but happily host a site there.

They are not clueless - shut up my account quickly when I tried to run some daemon. I had to remove it :-( the dedicated server is yet too expensive for me

I run Pref News there - a russian-speaking e-zine devoted to Perl, Python, Java and PHP-programming. 8 people post interesting links and code snippets almost daily. We are looking for more enthusiasts.

/Alex

The second problem, maybe we can work on - compiling a list of decent web hosts, and keeping track of problems and sucesses. Any thoughts?

I definitely agree with you. It's really tough to pick a provider for web hosting.

I'm currently using pair, and I've been pretty happy with them. That said, they're not perfect, though they seem to be honest. They recently moved into a new facility, which involved some downtime for their entire network. While I would have liked to have seen the move made at an off-peak time (they started it early on a business morning), they did a very good job of keeping information about the status of their network available. They set up and externally hosted site specifically for this purpose and they posted to it regularly until they were back online. While the move didn't go as smoothly as they had hoped, they didn't try to keep their customers in the dark.

Back to your point, a completely unbiased site that rated service providers would be a great resource.

joe

Check out pair Networks. http://www.pair.com/

I have to chime in as well.
pairNetworks ROCKS.
Hosting providers should look at their migration updates page as a model for how to do it right the FIRST time and keep CUSTOMERS informed.
http://www.mp3.com/fudge/

I've tried at least two dozen hosts for my 60 odd sites. Now I've got all of them with just two hosts. Both do an excellent job.

They are:
1. Voxel.net:10/10, but a *little bit* pricey
2. Pair:9.5/10, and very reasonable.

It's a real tossup between the two. But this is a good place to start.

On the positive side for Silicon Valley. It does have a lot of young professional people in my age group (25+), there are a lot of stores (Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted) geared towards my interests, and I'm constantly surrounded by the Industry and learning a lot for it. It is exciting to walk down the street and run into Trimble technologies while seeing the military planes flying into Moffett airfield next to Lockheed, or get lost and find myself in Netscape's compound. Or just play the driving game of how many times you see Sun/HP/Cisco buildings in your 10 mile commute home. The place is also very dynamic and powerful when reading the San Jose Mercury News and seeing familiar companies that either you've worked for or know friends who are listed among the technologically elite. But most of all, it's great to sit around with a bunch of friends discussing the latest finds in computing over a glass of wine. I love it!

However, on my return home, I have noticed a few things I do miss. For one, last night I had a bunch of my old friends over -- non-geeks in a large part so far less homogenous than those I am hanging out with in the Valley. The topics never touched computers or money, but strayed from politics to philosophy and morality and back touching a number of issues current and historical. The variety of opinions on the subject were from people with vastly different personal experiences and I realized just how homogenous the Valley can be and where this is, at times, a disadvantage.

Also, I miss working at pair Networks. It is not a company looking for IPOs and Get Rich Quick, so they are all earnest in keeping the company together and the people on board. It makes for a more bonded *team* of employees, and less sense of temporary company holdings. (Not to mention that pair is doing very well, it often makes me reflect if I did make the right decision in leaving). The problem is that so many of the companies out in the Valley are oriented towards selling out and making money that many of them have lost the sense of personal touch. Even the employee resources step into offices with the attitude of temporary staying power. That makes for a lot more sense of transience and less settled.

I could mention the issue of cost-of-living, but that's been discussed to death here and elsewhere. Though, I will note that I drove down a street yesterday looking at brick 3-story 1890 homes that sell for 1/5 the cost of a 1950's post-WWII tract house with maybe 2 bedrooms in Sunnyvale.

Lastly, everyone is a workaholic in Silicon Valley. To the point where one of the first articles I read in the San Jose Mercury News was a headline Sunday Paper about "How to Know You're a Workaholic" pointing to a big branch of Workaholic's Anonymous. The culture there reflects this greatly in that the valley shuts down after 9pm, and going to the movies is the biggest thing to do (and not much else). Or hosting a LAN party. :)

Summing up: I do miss a lot about Pittsburgh -- for personal reasons not applicable to this discussion, I am not moving back, however I will encourage those who remain to recognize the advantages they do have. Silicon Valley is not for everyone, but neither are Pittsburgh-like places. Seriously consider the options, and reflect on the advantages you do have where you are at. I am glad that I moved 5 months ago, but I do sorely miss a lot of the things I left behind.

(btw, on a less serious note, one word: snow)

"Focus! ..."

It would be smarter for the company to sit down first and discuss possibilities. Market research is very useful. Your problem doesn't lie in the fact that "engineers" supposedly know all and marketing doesn't know the web from their ass -- it's that politics and lack of trust are getting in the way of useful group input. A lot of expert opinion definitely lies outside the domain of the programmer/sysadmin/html design artist (have no idea why you claim these people are engineers).

"RAIL ..."

I don't see your point. Any respectable web provider will have a number of redundant links. Providers such as exodus have the ability to re-route traffic within minutes (even seconds) of reported problems. They are much better equipped to deal with such things than you. Note that most DSL providers won't let you have AS authority over a group of ip addresses, so redundant connections are completely worthless because you can't re-route traffic when one link goes down. If the company absolutely needs their bandwidth in house at inception, then they should get a t1 with a shadow t1 connection from another provider for redundancy.

"Hacking um, you WILL be 'hacked'."

Oh give me a break. Just delete all default cgi and test scripts and make sure you're programming securely. When and if you get hacked, just restore from backup.

384 sdsl line is NOT capable of handling this many hits. Traffic spikes will come, especially if you are linked or were recently visited by a search engine spider (and have certain popular key words on your page).

As for simplicity, I completely agree.

Content on the other hand. Yes, content is central to a sites success. Bad site design will prevent that content from being seen or turn users away. It is a very important element to take into consideration. While I agree that resources and time are limited, there are many established sites that you can use to get inspired.

to the person who 'asked slashdot':

A much cheaper solution is to start your site out on any number of shared hosting providers such as pair networks who are very cheap and support mysql, php, cgi etc. There you can get 12gb transfer a month for only 27 bucks (or 6 gb transfer for 15) with php, mysql, cgi and a telnet login to one of their hundreds of freebsd boxes. I went from 12 to 50 to 100 gb a month. I'm sure there are hundreds of other similar providers. It's smarter to do this first than to make a very big investment and get a dedicated connection and whatever servers. Let others provide these services for you while you build a customer/client base and eventually you will outgrow the price curves of companies such as these. Remember, if your site has any downloads, you'll definitely need available burst speeds that these providers have. Slower static links just won't cut it (well unless you can compromise and put every large file on medium quality xoom.com or whatever links).

If your idea is really that good, then I suggest you scout out possible competitors and siphon whatever useful data you can. First identify your target market and the viability of your business model. Are you going to try and sell something online or rely on advertisements? Is this market already clogged with other hopefuls and/or will they soon join in on your good idea? How will you differentiate? If your site will be complex, are you standardizing the design and implementation to prevent many wasted hours? Are you establishing relationships with people in that particular industry? How will you promote the site during and soon after your go live date?

For one, it's very important to standardize your design and try to modularize your code. You don't want to know how many companies I've consulted for and who decide to change their entire flawed backend model after building months of content. It's not fun.

Remember, competition will come if your idea is potentially profitable. You want to build up a good repeat client base before others do.
----------

Pair was a useful and pretty inexpensive service before I was committed, and it was great to have access to SSL and MySQL without having to sweat the details, but my next setup looks to be a ppc-linux system at above.net.

bumppo

I'm a part-time webmaster, so I use virtual hosting with several different ISPs. My favorite is Pair (www.pair.com). They don't do any dial-up services (read: bandwidth hole), run BSD servers (which I prefer to Linux for web hosting), and I get to let them take care of the details. That way I can take off for the weekend and not worry about my server going down while I'm gone. Yes, I sacrifice some flexibility and power, but my time is valuable. Matt

See what Pair Networks names their servers.

(see the bottom of the page for a note on naming)

Even the simplest tracking strategy, raw bandwidth use, is problemmatic. A large percentage of net traffic never goes through any of the concentrated access points, and as more private companies expand their networks, this will increase. If they cannot even track bandwidth, they certainly cannot monitor the content of that traffic to a sufficient extent to determine what is commercial and what is not.

To some extent, they could assess incorporated businesses which ship products ordered over the Internet, but this is just an extension of mail order. And much Internet commerce involves services which are not shipped at all.

At the moment, only a small percentage of commerce happens on the Internet, as compared with traditional stores, mail and telephone order. But over time, this will certainly increase to a point where a considerable portion is online. And if governments seek to shift the tax burden to non-connected businesses, it will only accelerate this trend.

Ultimately, taxes on commerce will become impractical altogether. At this point, a return to land assessment will become a very necessary alternative.

For some economic & political implications of this, you may find some of the following links interesting:

EarthSharing Homepage

Dan Sullivan's essays:
Real Libertarians and Royal Libertarians
Greens and Libertarians

Even the simplest tracking strategy, raw bandwidth use, is problemmatic. A large percentage of net traffic never goes through any of the concentrated access points, and as more private companies expand their networks, this will increase. If they cannot even track bandwidth, they certainly cannot monitor the content of that traffic to a sufficient extent to determine what is commercial and what is not.

To some extent, they could assess incorporated businesses which ship products ordered over the Internet, but this is just an extension of mail order. And much Internet commerce involves services which are not shipped at all.

At the moment, only a small percentage of commerce happens on the Internet, as compared with traditional stores, mail and telephone order. But over time, this will certainly increase to a point where a considerable portion is online. And if governments seek to shift the tax burden to non-connected businesses, it will only accelerate this trend.

Ultimately, taxes on commerce will become impractical altogether. At this point, a return to land assessment will become a very necessary alternative.

For some economic & political implications of this, you may find some of the following links interesting:

EarthSharing Homepage

Dan Sullivan's essays:
Real Libertarians and Royal Libertarians
Greens and Libertarians

I use pair.com for my hosting. Basic service starts at US$5/mo. Hosting your own domain with telnet is US$10/mo. Not too bad. Their price list is here.

And the mouse sensitivity under NextStep really sucks.

Okay, enough of my opinions, let me offer some real info. "I would love to have a NeXT machine but they are rather hard to come by these days...." Actually, that's wrong. NeXT machines are easy to get these days, because nobody wants them. Check out these sites:
Spherical Solutions (www.orb.com)
Black Hole Inc. (www.blackholeinc.com)
Deep Space Tech (www.deepspacetech.com)

Any of them would be happy to sell you a NeXT box for a few hundred bucks. Also, look at the software at Black Hole, Inc. If you're a student, you can get NextStep for under a hundred bucks, if I remember right.

Here are a couple more links that you might find useful:
http://www3.pair.com/mccarthy/nextstep/
http://people.ne.mediaone.net/jkheit

I hope something in here was helpful
ccg

chad at glendenin dot org

"Linux" is just a kernel to an OS. Most (all?) distributions using the Linux kernel also use utilities from the GNU project. If you ever download the source code to FreeBSD, you will notice along with the kernel source is the source to everything else on the system.

As far as Linux security, take a look at rootshell.com. Most of those are for Linux based systems. Needless to say, one stupid CGI script can defeat the security on any system.

I can't really speak about the stability of the systems... Just that FreeBSD developers tend to make this work first then mark it as stable. Linux kernels seem to add things all the time to stable versions without testing. On one system I administer which needs to be up 100%, I have stuck with 2.0.37 because of the problems still with the "stable" 2.2.x line. I'm not trying to bait people but Slashdot is the perfect example with kernel problems. I'm not saying this wouldn't happen with FreeBSD but most of the servers for pair.com have been up for more than a month. They claim 51,000,000 hits/day accross 125 servers which works out to Slashdot's .5mil/day rate.

PicoBSD is a version of FreeBSD which runs on low-end hardware. Something like the LRP.

And no, Slackware isn't BSD based. It is just like Redhat, Debian, and SuSE but with different init scripts and package management.

It's not the whole book, but take a look at this.

These days I get most of my web reading from links on weblogs of one kind or another - I'd personally count Slashdot as a weblog. I read Ars Technica, Scripting News, Robot Wisdom and Tomalak's Realm, and I'm on Haddock which has several great links every day.

NTK is often listed as a weblog, innaccurately - it's a weekly mag. But it's completely brilliant. Subscribe.

Also, h2g2.com (The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, online) has, amongst its many fab features, the ability for users to create their own weblogs on their homepages, with forums hanging off each entry. Worth a look, and I'm not just saying that 'cos I work there.

I've found a handy link with some helpful hints for maintaining order on slashdot. Remember: You're not really dead if you're killed with a rubber bullet.

Hope this helps.