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Towards an Internet-Scale Operating System
gschoder writes: "Two Berkeley computer scientists (including David P. Anderson of SETI@home) envision an Internet-scale operating system to harness the processing power, networking efficiency, and storage capacity of everyone's computers. Scientific American has their proposal."
hell yeah!
"Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be selective on who it makes friendship with"
....FP!!!!
looser.
Someone had to say it. ;)
Now go ahead and waste your points modding me down you humorless moron!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
only that your silly beowulf cluster is most likely going to pale in comparison.
fuck you.
1) Why hasn't this post been modded down as offtopic?
2) You forgot to hit Ctrl-D to quit writing to cat.
of course the key word here is envsion....
mojo nation? tell me about it please.
I am always suspicious of formal mathematics applied to software. I agree
with Richard Feynman: "Computer Science" is a misnomer. Our field isn't
about science; it's about engineering. A better term for the entire field is
"Software Engineering".
Electrical engineering is a field with much more excuse for heavy
mathematics (I would know--my masters is in EE), and they don't call the
branches that use it "Electrical Science".
As far as I can tell, ALL of the formalistic areas of computer "science" are
bogus. I would like to see just one example where these ideas pay off,
starting with the theory of computation. Just why do we care about the
halting problem? And precisely why is the heavy formalism necessary to build
simple pattern matching tools? (I would know about this one: I've
designed/implemented my own matcher/parser from the ground up--and I didn't
need any fancy formalisms to do it).
Yes, my training is in EE, not CS, so maybe I just don't "get it". But I
think it's more likely that poor CS students are going to absorb whatever
their professor tells them, and not be able to tell that it's junk. After
years of solving homework problems that depend on these formalisms, they
take it for granted that they're useful (after all, they ARE useful--for
solving homework problems).
I have an opinion as to why these formalistic approaches are in CS. The
field was founded by a bunch of mathematicians. They were the type who
worshiped the form and not the purpose of mathematics--to them mathematics
was an end in itself. They regarded the computer not as a device whose
construction is guided by the purpose of filling engineering needs, but as a
brute fact of nature, to be mathematically analyzed for what it is, with the
only end being a mathematical "understanding" (which to them means only: a
mathematical catalog and description).
The form worshippers are in essence no different than any of a number of
people who attempt to combine mysticism with science. E.g., we have
"Scientology", and the various Christian groups who put the word "Science"
in their titles. Why do they do this? To ride on the coattails of science's
reputation for objectivity and truth. These groups are for people who are
honest enough to recognize that science does discover the truth, that
science's methods of reason are superior to mysticism's methods of faith,
but who are not honest enough to reject the ritualistic, faith-based
approaches they had previously accepted.
I.e., they want to have their cake and eat it too.
Why are the form worshippers like mystics? They think of mathematics as some
kind of magical system, where you manipulate symbols from another dimension
and then, magically, you get answers that work in this world. They don't
understand the reason why mathematics works, or that the symbols are merely
symbols, so they're in an awed stupor, just as a witch doctor would be in
awe over airplanes (see Richard Feynman on this--I'm borrowing his line of
thinking here). So they get their PhD's in mathematics to become witch
doctors of mathematics--experts at symbology, but nothing else.
Since mathematics is their God, they see him as Universal. EVERYTHING is
mathematical. And so is CS.
Shayne Wissler
Really? You didn't learn about George Washington Carver? MLK jr.? Jesse Jackson? Colon Powell? Weird. I did. How about a WHITE college fund? Oh wait THAT would be racist wouldn't it? ermm.. right.. let's just keep breaking every thing down to the group identity of black and white and male and female.. and let's just ignore the individual.
The Borg