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Ooh. It frosts my shorts to see how someone can use "Ecosystem" as a metaphor for a One Microsoft Way. Ecosystems require diversity to be self-regulating. Ecosystems survive ecological crises by having lots of different species, all evolving separately in their niche. When conditions change, some species suffer, while others thrive. That's a diversified ecosystem.

The open source community exhibits that kind of behavior. Some people ask "Why are there so many different Jabber clients? Shouldn't we all get together and concentrate on one good client for each OS? Not if you want a healthy 'ecosystem'... Let a thousand projects bloom... 10 might become great products. 'Natural selection' will cause a lot of them to fail, but the rest will succeed in their niche.

Opensource software development even allows for transgenic mutation, if the code is copyleft. The 'DNA' (our code), can move around, joining other projects, making robust solutions for each niche. If conditions change, some projects will suffer, but others will rise.

Bill Gates thinks that Capitalism and Innovation work, because it's worked for him. Meanwhile, $209 for Visio? What's up with THAT? It's MacDraw for Org Charts... Lemme out of "that" ecosystem pronto!
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Meanwhile, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is giving extraordinary sums of money to real nuts and bolts making the world a better place kinds of causes. Gates could literally turn out to be the most significant philanthropist in the history of the world. They're giving so much money that you can almost see a chunk of what you spend on MS going to a good cause.

Assuming (which may be wrong,) that Gates put up all that money himself, that still leaves him with 43.5 billion dollars. You'd have to work for almost half a million years to earn that much (probably a million years after taxes.)

In other words, he's not going to miss that money. It's not going to require any change to his lifestyle such like any of us "normal" people would have to face to donate 35% of our money to charity.

that's only $11.20 USD per man, woman, and child

Which is less than the global average of $12.923 (according to the international version of the previously mentioned Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock).

according to the Bill Gates Personal Clock the average US cizan's personal contribution to bill gate's forune is about $280.

> And say what you will about Bill Gates, but at least he isn't hoarding all his wealth.

Hmmm. He's worth $72,273,900,000 right now, and his $100,000,000 is spread out over the next five years, so his yearly donation of $20,000,000 is worth a whopping 0.02767% of his net worth.

An ordinary millionaire would have to give a budget-busting $276.73 per year to keep pace. Someone worth $100,000 would have to hurt themselves to the tune of $27.67 per year -- that's a decent steak dinner, I'm telling you. A working highschooler could keep up by throwing a quarter in the hat once a year.

"Capitalism overcoming the shortcomings of capitalism", indeed!

All hail to Saint Bill of Borg! He steals from the rich -- or at least limits himself to the working class and above -- and throws pocket change to the poor -- at least when the media are watching.

Sorry, Bill, but this is only going to buy the love of people without a pocket calculator.

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Actually, you only measure from the official final announced price, which was 21, so it doubled. (Actually more than doubled according to Yahoo'sRTQ service, its at 45 3/8 now).

While we're on the topic, anyone know how many shares Linus is getting, and is anyone running a Linus wealth clock ala the Bill Gates Wealth Clock?

From what i know about ServerBench it uses a threaded IO model on NT, but a fork/process model on Linux.

Instead of getting all wrapped around benchmarks (let alone closed-source benchmarks!) we would be better off paying attention to the efficiency of the server program:

Speed

It is so easy now to get a high-efficiency server program that speed is no longer a significant discriminant. In ancient times, the Web server forked a new process every time a user requested a page, graphic, or other file. The second generation of Web servers pre-forked a big pool of processes, e.g., 64 of them, and let each one handle a user. The server computer's operating system ensured that each process got a fair share of the computer's resources. A computer running a pre-forking server could handle at least three times the load. The latest generation of Web server programs uses a single process with internal threads. This has resulted in another tripling of performance.

It is possible to throw away 90 percent of your computer's resources by choosing the wrong Web server program. Traffic is so low at most sites and computer hardware so cheap that this doesn't become a problem until the big day when the site gets listed on the Netscape site's What's New page. In the summer of 1996, that link delivered several extra users every second at the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock ( http://www.webho.com/WealthClock). Every other site on Netscape's list was unreachable. The Wealth Clock was working perfectly from a slice of a 70 Mhz pizza-box computer...

I see you have created the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock. Since Microsoft stock has been dropping lately, Larry Ellison is ready to pass him (if he hasn't by the time you read this). If so, will it be time for the Larry Ellison Personal Wealth Clock?

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.

Does anyone know how much of Billy Boy's net worth is still tied up in MS stock?

Regardless, he's still turned a pretty profit on the million dollar trust fund he started with.

meanwhile, check out the Bill Gates Personal Weath Clock


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Imagine 1 trillion Bill Gateses standing in a circle (not a pretty picture, but play along for a moment). Now ask each one to convert his fortune into pennies and toss them in a collective pile.

OK, so I'm a math weirdo, but play along for a moment. If one trillion Bill Gateses were standing in a circle and threw all their pennies in, how tall would the pile of pennies be?

Actually, there wouldn't be a pile at all: the density would only be one penny per 2.5 square cm. Assuming three Gateses per linear meter. Evenly spread out, there's plenty of room to spare. 1*10^12 people -> (1/3)*10^12 m circumference -> 1.06*10^11 m diameter -> 2.5*10^21 m^2 area -> 2.5*10^13 cm^2 per Gates. Each Gates gets to throw his wealth of 1.06*10^13 pennies into a square 50 km on a side.

If all those Gateses were standing in a circle, light would take over five minutes to cross its diameter. The circle would be not quite the size of Mercury's orbit around the sun.

If each penny contained 1 trillion tiny computers and each computer had its own IP address, you'd still have used only a fraction of IPv6's potential space.

To be precise, about 2.9%.

But good luck rewriting the TCP protocol for your penny network -- its end-to-end space-time delay is ten minutes!

Jamie McCarthy

I think your dislike for Katz has clouded your thinking. I sympathize.

I don't actually dislike Katz; I simply disagree intensely with a number of his viewpoints. For all I know, if we had a chance to sit down, crack a few beers together, and argue philosophy into the wee hours, I'd end up with a genuine affection for the man. But I'd still disagree vehemently with what he is writing here.

Of course pain is not irrelevant. When you say that pain is irrelevent but personhood is relevant, you fail to see that pain includes personhood.

You're right, I don't see that at all.

While persons experience pain, pain is not an intrinsic part of personality. Before the Fall (I write as a Christian, of course) humanity was human, and had the gift of personality, before there was pain in the world. And, we look forward to a day when this will be true again. So, while it may appear that pain and personality are linked, this is simply an accident of our local conditions in time and space.

Now, I'm not trying to promote some angists philosophy, or, for that matter, arguing that ability to sense equals personhood. What I am saying is that when Katz says "Can Androids Feel Pain" he really means "Are Androids Going To Be Persons Just Like Me And You Really Soon Now." (Note the difference of sense and feel.)

Yes, that is exactly what I understood Katz to mean. And my point is, to ask the question of pain when one really means to ask the question of personality is to misunderstand personality. The question itself is bogus -- it's simply a bad question, a philosphical equivalent of "have you stopped beating your wife?" One can't simply answer the question without dealing with the assumption behind the question first.

Person isn't very good word for the use you are putting it into. Person is rather synonymous with human and that may well lead to assumptions that aren't correct.

No, I'm not using "person" as synonymous with "human," but to mean "a being with the quality of personality." Christians understand that there are non-human persons. God is three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit (the mystery of the Trinity), only one of whom is also human (the mystery of the Incarnation). Angels are persons too, although they are not human, but of different races from us.

In Star Trek, for example, Humans, Klingons, Vulcans, Romulans, Ferrengi, etc. are all clearly persons. Commander Data is clearly portrayed as a person as well. I don't know what word is used in Trek to distinguish between Klingons and cats ("sentient"?), but whatever that word is, is what I am talking about.

As to choice and meaning provived by modern technology. Clarke speaks about future not today.

In the past and present, we have heard these promises before. Nuclear power would soon become "too cheap to meter", the Industrial Revolution, the Nuclear Revolution, the Green Revolution, all promised and failed to deliver humanity from need and want. All have failed on that promise, and have instead helped make certain men rich beyond the dreams of Midas while "saving" so much labor that we now have an unemployment problem. Most folks who haven't hit the jackpot on these various "revolutions" have been transformed into oppressed Morlocks or effete Eloi. Meanwhile, the promised "freedom from necessity" is further away than ever. This is not a technological problem -- we could implement a society with no poverty today if we had the will and the virtue to do so. We have not done so, we are not going to do so, because greed ("Greed is good! It fuels The Economy!") is the rule.

And now, we have the hype of the Computer Revolution (under way already), the AI Revolution, and the Nanotech Revolution, bearing the same promises. I shall remain skeptical. So far, I see that we have some new robber-barons who have become richer than the old robber-barons, through control of the new resources. I don't see that I or my neighbors who require the necessity of a steady paycheck to put food on the table are closer to this mythical state of "freedom" than our ancestors 150 years ago, who could at least plant a garden and spin wool, and worried about the weather rather than the stock market.

Sure numerous men and women have contemplated the meaning before but they have more or less been part of that other 1% and have chosen to think about meaning.

I disagree. There are a lot of philosophers on the farm and the factory floor today. Certainly at least as many as among the cubicle-dwelling Eloi. I don't know what Clarke thinks we're going to be "freed" from, because history and observation show us that a life of work is not incompatible with the highest contemplation, and in fact may be a benefit to it.

Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.
-- G. K. Chesterton

This isn't an 'all of it' solution, but examine what Philip Greenspun has done with photo.net. Especially look at the Images chapter of his guide to web publishing and the source code.

Basically he's written a bunch tcl scripts to do his indexing/searching for him. The results are impressive and clean, dunno about the implementation.

-matt

I still think it's rather important. I mean really do you want this to be a common occurence?

Posted by The ULTIMATE Crippler:

This one is a little closer to reality.

Even better would be to put up a big Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock in the cafeteria...