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Bob Metcalfe on Open Source, IPv6, IETF
prostoalex writes "The inventor of Ethernet Bob Metcalfe is interviewed by AlwaysOn on current issues. Metcalfe is known for challenging commonly accepted wisdom and this time he's quite confrontational. On open source and operating systems: "If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?" On IPv6 adoption and IETF: "Back when you attended the IETF, you all looked down your noses at the ITU (or I guess it was called CCITT at the time)--the entrenched, corporately manipulated, corrupt, competent standards being embodied in IT. We were the IETF--the swashbuckling, institution-oriented, open people, the rebels. That's changed now. The Internet has arrived, and all of those people are now just like ITU: IETF has become the ITU.""
There's no doubt that Mr. Metcalfe is quite bright and has contibuted greatly to the IT world, but I don't understand this rant. If he doesn't see the innovation, I guess he's never compared Slackware '96 to today's distros, or Windows 3.1 to WinXP. Apple certainly can't be ignored here either. Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? I'm going to take a wild guess, and say "probably from the OS's of today." They don't need to be completely rewritten every few years to count as progress. Even the emergence of UNIX itself was evolutionary, not revolutionary.
It's also interesting that he clearly shows a lack of faith in the OSS community, but then digs at the IETF for evolving into elitist and monolithic organization.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
.NET, and Mono are examples of the market attempting to find a way to combine modern technology with the tech of yesterday. Unfortunately, the results are less than stellar. For example, instead of aligning Virtual Memory along object bounds (a natural fit that could be done without hardware support), these systems must contend with the existing 4K VM implementations. Instead of running the protected code in a flat heap (which CAN'T break the memory model!) these systems must contend with the memory indirection that operating systems throw their way. The results of this poor matchup between machine and software is a performance penalty, both real and perceived.
I hate to break it to Mr. Metcalfe, but most entities lack the resources to do a ground up rewrite of a fully featured Operating System. Simply writing a functional OS isn't the hard part. It's just a platform upon which software will be built. There were hundreds of OSes written between 1960 and 1990. During the '90s, however, computing platforms began to stabalize. Software was written that had a greater than 5 year life span, Operating System began to stabalize on a few "standards" (namely Unix/Vax/CPM derivitives), and massive amounts of time and money were invested into developing these platforms. Now we're standing on the 10,000 ft high towers we call Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X(NextSTEP) and we're looking at how difficult it is to replicate the decades of work that has gone into these systems.
Building a more powerful and "correct" system would mean throwing away software such as OpenOffice, Mozilla, Quickbooks, Photoshop, Acrobat, etc. Software that took decades to build! Thus any future solution based on cutting edge CompSci Technology must either bite the bullet and rewrite these complex apps (good luck) or build in a translation layer that allows them to continue working. Neither choice is very appealing.
The "third road" that is currently being explored is the road of running Virtual Machines on top of today's existing infrastructure. Java,
The Virtual Memory swaps more than it should. Object files are not shared. Memory usage is 20% greater than a native program. So on and so forth.
A lot of research has gone into mitigating these issues (with Sun producing some very impressive results!), but it doesn't change the fact that the machine and software are mismatched. That mismatch discourages companies from writing new applications in these managed environments, where they would be free from the bonds of traditional OS designs.
My gut says that a rather major shift in how we use our computer will have to happen before we can truely replace the systems we have today.
I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
In all honesty, the Internet never would have been as successful as it was if it wasn't for the freedom it provided. Many other networks offered these features, but they were eventually usurped by the Internet.
Hindsight is 20/20. Had the BSD/ARPANET folks attempted to address these issues back when it was created (which would have been ludicrous given its Military intent), their solutions would have likely been wrong. Keep It Simple Stupid. It may not be the best solution, but it's the most effective solution.
P.S. In case of Slashdotting, break glass
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
They aren't going to come until we get past "old" technology like monitors, keyboards, and mice.
Okay, while I'll agree that the technology and underlying philosophies of design are "old" in technology years, but for something to be an "old clunker" there should be a basis for comparison -- something that is NOT an old clunker. What is that something? Anyone have any examples?
Everybody complains about Linux and Window and all the other operaitng systems about being old an obsolete but I see only a few putting effort in building new operating systems like what Slate can become (in the long term) or what Movitz is aiming.
Pupeno
Best ever OS I've seen, from a purely technical standpoint, is Tao Group's Intent, that started life as TAOS. Truely a beautiful piece of software engineering. This is a fairly old story that gives some background: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=157 This is the modern website: http://tao-group.com/
Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system
yeah wait what
The problem with a new OS other than Windows or Linux is that most of the Open Source community is against Windows, and put all their effor into Linux in an attempt to take down MS market share. It would be nice to see a bunch of OSS developers get together and create a new exciting OS.
Voice your opinion!
That a site called Always On has been slashdotted.
Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968.
Huh?
Since when has the Mac operating system not have a GUI or since when has Windows been more GUI like then the Mac OS.
Also the Mac operating system has a heck of a lot more in common with both Linux and Unix than is does with Windows. In fact if you want to say anything about comparing GUIs, it would be far more accurate to say that the Mac operating system is a GUI version of unix and Windows is a GUI version of DOS.
Anybody has a mirror?
The Army reading list
always on look off right now. /.'ed
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
This whole "Operating Systems are based on too old technology" argument is just bullshit.
Cars are based on technology that is over a hundred years old (they still have four wheels, a motor etc.), but they serve us well and even if the key principles don't change they are enhanced all the time.
This is just the old "rewrite from scratch"-mentality coming through...
Everyone so far is focusing on the Wondows/Linux/MAC comment, which is somewhat interesting, but not really his area of expertise.
What is much more interesting is the comments about the IETF, which I agree, has been/is being turned into a facilitator for corporate agendas.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
Before we can ever hope to innovate the OS, we must first innovate software development, i.e. languages.
All the language techniques that we use are rooted in old technologies. Its still just as hard to code today as ever, if not harder.
I've been programming since 1980 and back then you wrote everything yourself. It was a lot of work but at least you controlled the quality of the system because you wrote it all.
Today, systems are so complex (unnecessarily so), and the technology hasn't changed enough to keep up with the demand. We still write for loops like we always have.
The spoon is a fine tool when all you dig are holes in ice cream but when you have to dig a trench in the ground, forget it.
I think what he is hinting at is computers need to be based on the wonderful new technology known as leet speak. It would make them so much more efficient.
Until then, I'm just going to go pwn sum nubs.
That's what happens with installed base, Bob.
Ironically, the alwayson-network.com has been /.ed.
One ring to bind them - should probably have more fiber and less rings in their diet.
So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?"
Unfortunately, it will probably be Windows 2007, Windows 2010, etc. I have see a ton of awesome and inspriring OSes over the number of years and it always comes down to compatibility.
Quoting Bob Metcalfe: [...] Private property is a great technology [...] This is backwards thinking, sloppy thinking, boring thinking. The big problem with the "private property" myth is that over time property accumulates in the control of few. This is a huge problem in the face of the goal of economic justice. What is Bob Metcalfe's answer to that?? His remarks about big corporations knowing "motivation of customers" and "motivation of employees" are completely misguided. On the side of the customers, we're looking at mega-advertising campaigns. On the side of employees we're looking at union-busting and the like. This is not brilliant, this is crude stuff. Stuff that we can do without. The rest of the interview is just boring.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
While today's software is good I think some 'old' things from the past should be revived. We just don't make software like we used to. Large amounts of memory and CPU cycles have made us sloppy. Those people that designed software for a few kilobytes of RAM we smart.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
He's just trolling. He has a pathological need to pop up every once in a while and say "You know I invented Ethernet, don't you?"
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Sorry, Bob. That one sentence blew away any seriousness and credibility your argument had.
It's a very dark ride.
"Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system"
As opposed to the non-gui version of Mac's operating system....
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Just because linux is based on older technology does not mean that it should be thrown out as old technology.
Is there somebody out there doing some research to replace the wheel? It is about time someone did!
He did not invent the internet...Al Gore did!
How do you propose we right a loop. A good programming langage allows you to clearly express a logical process. The only other way to program if through a WYSIWYG type of interface that has wizards to handle complex things. These do exist, but only as upper layers to more fundamental programming languages.
Metcalfe - modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
Linux: 1991. Slack, April 1993. Debian, August 1993. How long until he would agree that it is sustainable? Is this the same Polaris Ventures? It's a high tech VC. That explains his suspicion of the motivational structure of people who are not concerned solely with the ROI to stockholders.
And, I am quite capable of aligning my own interests, thank you.
Not a big shock... about 15 years ago, the two power centers in BC Politics were the NDP and the Social Credit Party.. The left wing was in the NDP who had power at the time, and the Socreds had pretty much lost favour as the reigning right-wing party (( yeah that belies their name, but having been decades in power, the right wing had taken them over )). Then an upstart Liberal party maaged to worm their way into the leaders debate and caught fire, becomming the official opposition.
By the next election, the formeer Socred political machine had taken over the Liberal Party and kicked out it's leader. These are the people who now run the province.
The problem with our political/media system is that the only people who tend to end up in positions of power are those who really want it (and are willing to do whatever it takes to get that power). Unfortunately, these are precisely the people you don't want in power.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
AMEN!
As someone who has recent scars (SPF, MARID) from dealing with the IETF, it is clear to me that they are no longer an engineering organization, but rather a highly political one. No longer is there much concern about adopting patent encumbered technology into key Internet protocols (MS SenderID) like they used to object to things like the RSA patents.
Instead, the IESG is actively working to push through this patented technology by shutting down the MARID WG so that they can advance the SenderID proposal without any public review. More over, the IESG has declared that it is ok for the SenderID spec to re-use SPF records in incompatible ways, that the SPF RFC must be held back until MS is ready ("to be fair to MS"), and the IESG is going to ignore the last 1.5 years of SPF deployment experience and start fresh with collecting data since MS has only recently started doing SenderID checking (again "to be fair to MS").
The IETF needs to take the "E" out of their name and become the Internet Political Task Force.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
You invented ethernet. Even before that, you were THERE, and helped operate, the first big ARPANet demo for Congress. You founded 3Com. You wrote more Inforworld columns than a mere human like me could read. You are the Old Master, Yoda in the swamp.
Don't spoil it now by being Dvorak. Please.
Linux is only Unix on the outside. There's scarcely little code on the inside from 1992. And I believe there is none (zero, nada) from before 1975. I know this because I've looked at the early UNIX code at http://tuhs.org/ and what little survives is not found in Linux.
Windows a copy of the Mac? In the sense that English is a copy of French, maybe [flames >/dev/null]. Some elements are the same, but how you do things with them is quite different.
Asking what the new OS will be is asking the wrong question. Ask instead what new class of devices will need an OS, and the answer would follow from that. I say "would" because I'm not sure even that question is relevant.
sigs, as if you care.
If networks were configured so that the "general rule" is NOT to be anonymous, then there is no way you can guarantee true anonymity. The reason being that if someone wantred to be "anonymous", they would have to request that privlege from some kind of "anonymity broker" or... own their own network. And even then, with the ability to track the packets, the only guarantee of anonymity is not technical, but social. The owner of the network that the message originated from would have to be the barrier. And as we all know, the current political climates around the world will be unlikely to respect that anonymity if they decide that your activities are "illegal". If someone wants to send e-mail saying they hope that a certain politician gets assainated, in some locations, that would be "illegal". Even though it's really freedom of speech. So, I don't think his suggestion works because it's not true anonymity unless you are in a very powerful position. Every citizen (from beggar to king) should have access to anonymity.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"I guess someone should tell automakers that they should reinvent a mode of transportation from scratch."
Perhaps transport engineers rather than automakers. The automakers have a huge investment in the status quo. You don't need 4 wheels an engine, brakes, throttle or even a driver.
Transport engineers have already designed and built transport systems which don't have any of the above. Starting from scratch in the 1950s they devised a transport system which optimises the mathematics of getting from A -> B. Yes there is mathematics which describe the performance of transport.
It turns out that this is about as close to optimal as you're going to get with current technologies. Computer controlled, linear induction motors, a few rollers rather than wheels and only 16 moving parts. Non stop from A->B, no congestion, no traffic lights, no changing routes, no waiting on schedules.
It's been independantly re-invented a few times over the last few decades but we've now got the computer technology to actually do it.
Deleted
How is the red swingline a symbol for IT? Cubicle farms, office bs in general i see, but how IT?
Milton was entirely ineffectual. Do IT workers sympathize with him for being victimized or is the red swingline a passive finger to the man?
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. -- Carl Sagan
Look where that got it. Until the apps demand innovation for what they want to do, we won't see innovation in the OS sphere. Dos programs were making GUIs and using the mouse before GUI operating systems became popular.
I am trolling
I'll agree that the FOR loop example was a flippant one. My point is that we code the same way we always have, one nasty for loop after another.
One thing that OO programming did was allow us to reduce the number of IF THEN ELSE structures that we needed by putting the complexity into the structure of the design.
I think that I'd like to see a reduction in the need for FOR loops and the IF THEN ELSE structure by developing language constructs that intrinsically were those things but at a higher level. Iterators are an example of that, albeit a poor one.
If you think about it, FOR loops are used to iterate over collections. Even a FOR loop from 1 to 10 is an iteration of a collection of: {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10}.
I think we need to think about programming differently now that we've been doing it for 40 to 50 years. When I say differently, I don't mean graphically. Graphical programming is like reading a newspaper through a pinhole.
That said it all ;-)
On the SPF issue, one can't help but wonder if "they" would advocate "us" checking PRA records against MFROM?
I'm still waiting for transporters to come out.
Perhaps the answer to this question is the combination of communication and operating system technologies. Certainly operating systems are necessary, but if I'm looking for a file, I'm as likely to use Google as a local search function. If I'm writing a letter, very often it's an email rather than a document. Isn't the protocol now more necessary than the tool which accesses it. I could be using a tack hammer or a sledge hammer, but what is most important is whether I'm hanging a picture or smashing a Windows machine to rid it of spyware.
You do realize that Mach is 1980s technology, correct? Even stuff like today's Cocoa was mostly developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Mac OS X is a fantastic system, it is hardly "futuristic", as you incorrectly claim.
The thing with Mac OS X is that it does not have the cruft of other systems. Hardware wise, Apple is willing to force their consumers to eliminate the old (ie. floppy drives) and to proceed with the more modern (ie. FireWire). But the more modern technology is hardly futuristic. Mac OS X is still solidly based on software technology that is at least 15 to 20 years old, it not more.
Don't confuse "modern" with "futuristic". You'll never find "futuristic" items available for sale today.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
*nix is a kernel in which different underlieing designs and applications can be easily added. That is why *nix survives.
MVS, which was the original stable OS (not huge changes since the 60s) made it difficult to change out things (and very expensive).
As to the VM world, yeah, that should introduce us to a load of new changes.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can't even get drivers for my 64-bit Clunker. Do you think manufacturers would want to start supporting a raft of other OSes?
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Didn't we just hear about OS/2's final death?
Didn't we just hear about NetWare's final death and the migration to Linux?
Does the name "Stac" ring a bell?
I have a whole cabinet at work filled with software that died or from companies that don't exist any more.
He's looking at the few companies that have survived throughout the years and ignoring the 1000x other companies that have died and left their customers stranded.
With Open Source, at the very worst, you'll still have the code and the right to hire somebody to fix the bugs and add the enhancements.
Bob is 100% wrong on this.
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
From your ass, dude. Like everything you spread.
This is the second part of a four-part conversation between AlwaysOn editor-in-chief Tony Perkins, managing editor Rich Seidner, and Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet and former CEO of 3Com who's now a general partner at Polaris Ventures. In Part 1, Mr. Metcalfe talks about the next big thing for the Internet (video); in Part 3, he tells the story behind Metcalfe's Law; and in Part 4 he tackles the blogosphere.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.18.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees:
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
One thing that makes his case a little stronger:
Windows was also greatly influenced under the skin by Dec VMS-the OS that was previously created by Cutler-the guy that later went to MS.
That said:
I agree with a previous poster that the emergence of good VM's is what really promises to break open OS development again. We already have decent commercial VM's(VMware) and Xen. When Xen supports Windows, there will be a VERY compelling case for larger installations to use it.
Perhaps you find it harder to code today because you are forced to program at a higher level. Sure, in the 1980s implementing a hash table yourself was part of programming. And you'd get paid for reimplementing a very well-known and well-understood idea.
But things have changed. Now the hash table is already implemented for you. As a programmer, you must devise systems that aren't so well known. You must now implement the unknown. That is called innovation. You find it "harder" to code today because we're actually having to think now. We have to innovate in order to create the systems we need.
If everyone keeps implementing rudimentary stuff like hash tables over and over, then our systems will never evolve beyond what was implemented in the 1980s.
Languages like Java, which offer many of the common data structures as part of their libraries, or languages like Lisp, Scheme, O'Caml, Python and Ruby, which offer them instrinsically, are what are needed. They are what will lead us into the future. They let us build on what we mastered in the 1970s and 1980s. Today calls for very complex systems. They allow us to develop such systems. Things are "harder" today because they are far more complex.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Functional languages such as LISP are certainly a thing I miss from my college years. Most developers have had imperative languages imposed on us by sheer day to day usage. But when you program under SCHEME, you sense deep underneath a powerful different way to tackle problems.
One of the most beautiful things from this kind of languages is the ability to dynamically construct its own code. For instance, Postscript (yes, the thing printers use), which is also a funciontional language, does not have a switch-case statement. This was a requirement in one final project. Rather than forcing a switch-case upon the language, I wrote a function which would return a function mimicking the actual switch-case funciton, once evaled.
The grading teacher just checkmarked the requirement, no comments no nothing. *sigh*
My other OS is the MCP!
Bob is talking about packets using faked source addresses.
/dev/null his logs on a continuing basis and both sides using encryption. As you said, this is not technical, but social.
These are useless for anything other than a (D)DoS attack. They are useless because a connection cannot be established and no data can travel.
It is easy to have personal anonymity, but still have the first upstream router check the source addresses to make sure they are legit. But it depends upon someone, somewhere being willing to
There is NO reason for the source address to not be confirmed by the upstream router.
There are LOTS of reasons for personal anonymity to be maintained. And we can have personal anonymity even if we confirm the source addresses of packets.
Internet Security and the Threshold of Pain
How bad do things need to get for organizations to be willing to switch to IPv6? Very, says Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, who nonetheless believes that the time has come.
Bob Metcalfe [Polaris Ventures] | POSTED: 07.17.05 @08:20
AlwaysOn: I want to talk about open source. Our view is that open source is a metaphor for a lot of things. And it's all because Metcalfe's Law is finally coming into full bloom--because everything's on the network. Community is becoming really important, and people are sharing and uploading everything from photographs to blog posts. What are your thoughts in this area?
Bob Metcalfe: I'd like to point out that two major pieces of infrastructure were left out of the Internet when it was being built--largely because it was built by graduate students (and people like graduate students). They left out security and economics. So we have the spam problem (which can be traced directly to the lack of concern for security), and we have IP rules that are in flux because the Internet doesn't have the right tools for monetizing various activities. So we're busily trying to put security and economics into the Internet.
This is a little bit counter to the open-source mentality. You have to be careful, however, because open source isn't one group. There are a bunch of different, contending open-source groups. For example, the free-software people shouldn't be confused with everybody else in open source.
I think the problem with open source is that it doesn't quite have its economics worked out. There need to be ways to own things. Private property is a great technology; it's probably one of the major tools the West has. By granting private property to people, you stimulate economic growth. And I think the same thing applies to software. So open source will have to figure out how to get monetized to protect property over time.
If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from? And will that OS come from the modern software corporation (of which Microsoft is the epitome), or will it spring out of some open-source initiative at some university somewhere? My bet is that the modern U.S. corporation--like Microsoft but not Microsoft in particular--is much more likely to come out with this new OS than a loosely coordinated band of volunteers in the open-source community.
AlwaysOn: Because?
Metcalfe: Because modern software corporations know how to align the interests of the people. They know how to motivate people. They know how to sustain themselves over a long period of time, whereas I'm suspicious about the motivational structure of an open-source community and wonder whether it's sustainable.
I'm thinking of investing in a company that sells software, and its competitors are open source. I've been speaking to the company's customers and asking them why they'd buy this software instead of just taking the open source. Their answer: 'We don't want to learn about the software, and we need it serviced and supported, so we're going to buy it from this company instead of taking it free from the open-source community.'
In that case, it's the motivation of customers. A little earlier I was talking about the motivation of employees: How companies pay people and what they offer in terms of stock options, management structures, performance reviews, and all of that people technology we associate with modern corporations.
AlwaysOn: You're the perfect person to ask a question I've been wondering about for a decade--and which goes back to your point about security and why IPv6 hasn't been adopted. It seems to me that protocol-level changes, IETF changes could actually resolve some of this question--something like a nonspoofable header origination packet, so
Support the FairTax
Here's a 1990 paper on Tandem system uptime. Unix/Linux data center users, read it and weep. They have systems with MTBFs in measured in years. Sometimes decades.
Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
Where are the new wheels likely to come from? I mean the wheel was invented by the cave man and tires have been around since the 19th century. So who will make a better wheel?
Maybe Unix is still around because back in 1968 those engineers got it right. Maybe there aren't any revolutionary OSes around the corner -- just evolutionary changes to the ones we have.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Are you suggesting something along the lines of a foreach loop in C#? You can iterate over an entire collection by going:
foreach(ObjectType ot in ObjectCollection)
I think that we've been getting more powerful tools slowly but surely. Like many things in computing, its an incremental improvement rather than a huge change. Its much easier to build a large program in C# or Java then it is in C or C++.
Metcalfe predicted in 1999 that Linux would disappear when Windows 2000 came out and referred to open source as "open sores". I see no more reason to take anything he says seriously now than I did back then.
STFU about slashdot bias.
I guess someone should tell automakers that they should reinvent a mode of transportation from scratch.
If you could invent a vehicle that floated above the ground, used water as fuel, drove itself, and had a forcefield to prevent crashes and could make it under $1,000 then perhaps they should.
Not that any of is possible in the 21st century, but I feel a problem of many engineers, coders, and thinkers get tunnel vision and think things have to be done just like they have been done before.
I mean maybe should we create computers that use trinary instead of binary? Should we advance beyond the x86 architecture? Should we find another language besides C++ to do programming in? I'm not saying we should throw away everything that we created so far, but on occasion we should look outside and see if things could be done better. I'm sure if the originators of Unix, the x86, and OSS had the same technlogy and resources then as we do now, they may have done things very well different.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
use http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys if you want a working solution which doesn't break forwarding.
Now that you've solved the technological problems, let us know when you find the political will to fund it and build it.
I'm sure I'll still be driving a car then.
You'll get new operating systems when the underlying hardware changes OR when the "old" hardware becomes powerful enough to emulate "something else"
The automobile metaphore was insightful. The basic auto design has not changed since the 40's (back any further and you throw out your electric starter). What came next? The airplane.
The computer's basic purpose is to keep track of "stuff", a checkbook, a payroll, TCP/IP protocal session. The next "os" will not be recognizable as an "os" at all. It will feel more like the Arabian Nights Djinn (or Genie with the Light Brown Hair, if you will) than Windows XP, OSX, or GNOME/KDE.
It's not "where do you want to go today". It's "What is thy bidding, my Master?" Strap yourselves in, it's gonna be a bumpy flight.
--
Sometimes, being Right Does Not Matter.
Generated by SlashdotRndSig via GreaseMonkey
"If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him" --Voltaire
That's first one is a horribly designed website. But it's a pretty interesting idea; it'd certainly be a good idea for cities. Perhaps it could be run like the subway or other public transit systems currently are. I'd certainly like to see how a real public trial would work out.
And hey, there's an article.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
How about AROS?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
And how will these wonderful trolley cars get me around to these various destinations with my cargo.
s sion+loc:+Apex,+NC&num=10&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://www.google.com/maps?li=lmr&hl=en&q=transmi
You and Metcalf both need to be beat with a cluestick. Some things just aren't useful. Revolutions usually don't happen because fore the most part the architects/designers try to get the right solution the first time, and the things they did wrong get weeded out if possible. If after a few decades, you still the the answer is wrong, it is generally because you're asking a different question.
Metcalf is a washed up hasbeen that had one brilliant instant of insight and has been riding it ever since.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I'd hate to get into one of those cars after some bozo has barfed up his curry along with 6 pints of Scruttock's Old Dirigible. Let's face it, half the human race are slobs, and the other half don't want to get near them.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
First NeXT is not dead. It morged with the MacOS when Apple acquired NeXt (or the other way around).
NeXT orignated from a fourth strand of UNIX (not ATT, not BSD, not Linux). Carnegie Mellon wrote a highly layered version of UNIX called the Mach microkernel. Conventional UNIX was sinking under weight of trying to do to much in the kernel.
Indeed, I have developed on an LMI-LAMBDA machine quite a bit. And yourself?
Of course there is the "cultural" aspect. Like I mentioned, many programmers today struggle with functional programming. Most programmers these days are brought up using imperative/imperative-derived languages like C or BASIC. Functional programming is part of the academic culture, not part of the corporate culture. And in order for technology to spread these days, it must often be part of the corporate culture (see Java, C#).
The general unfamiliarity of most programmers with a language such as Lisp makes those who are competent with it worth a great deal. The cost of one talented Lisp programmer could exceed that of numerous (especially offshored) VB programmers. That leads to numerous economic issues.
Sure, you could "toss together something nice in basically no time at all". But it was expensive. That's the economics at play. It was expensive in the late 1970s and 1980s. Today the costs would be astronomical, especially to get the system to where current systems are.
For many tasks these days it is often cheaper to throw together a Perl or Visual Basic implementation on a commodity PC. While a re-emergence of Lisp machines may be beneficial in some niches, such a machine will never play a prominent role in today's (or tomorrow's) computing environment. Like we both agree, the economics just don't work for such a machine.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
" I'd hate to get into one of those cars after some bozo has barfed"
You don't need to. The Taxi2000 system has a reject button. Reject the car and a replacement arrives a few seconds later, the soiled one heads off to the depot for cleaning.
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I've seen *nix everywhere darned near everywhere there are computers: running appliances, super computers, robots, desktops, servers, routers, hospitals, restaurants, homes, utilities, etc. etc. etc.
... well ... the open source *nixes let me integrate it without reinventing the wheel.
Perhaps what makes the *nix way so flexible is that it leaves the user interface up to the user -- it provides a user agnostic interface to diverse hardware platforms, that's about it. While *nix is more or less defined by various standards like POSIX, I don't think any of the standards are exclusive. If I want to write any sort of UI system from scratch, *nix doesn't get in the way. If I want to build a magnificent hardware widget
So, it seems his critique should really be directed at user interfaces and hardware platforms, not the operating system in between.
Then again, there is something to be said for the revolutionary culture found in some "from scratch" projects, even if they're simply replicating the functionality of existing systems. It's a lot easier to challenge fundamental assumptions when you don't a lot of baggage.
Yes, Linux is 25 year old technology and yes, the IETF has lost its engineering drive. Those two statements are so true and obvious that the almost don't warrant discussion.
/.ers debating those basic truths.
They are on par with "Microsoft is a monopoly".
The only distinction among them is that the latter is an accepted truth while the former two go against the grain of what people would like to think. Hence we'll see a large number of really upset
Once automobiles figured out good user interfaces like starters, steering wheels, gas pedals and speedometers, they changed little in 75 years. Though the ICE may be replaced by fuel cells in a decade or two, much of the older user interface will be recycled. And it will cost a good fraction of tera-buck to put in the distribution and manufacturing infrastructure.
"let us know when you find the political will to fund it and build it"
There's a US system, software and hardware built and looking for a test track. There's an independant UK system with hardware and software built and tested looking for a pilot.
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
"I'm sure I'll still be driving a car then."
Statistically, you're far more likely to be sitting stationary in traffic when it happens.
Deleted
It's "Always On," not "Instant Response."
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
"These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?"
So, the other question is, where are the new hammers likely to come from? Because, you know, I've used the same 16 oz. straight clawed Estwing since 1975. It's old; it mustn't work anymore. Right?
Get your hits and go away Mr. Metcalf. You're capable of better than this.
Metcalfe is being interviewed because he invented Ethernet 35 years ago. I don't hear him demanding a successor to whom to hand his crown, creating a new network technology. I don't hear him demanding we discard quantum physics because it's "a century old". ICs are 45 years old, but we're still very excited about the life left in them.
Of course, some old horses should go out to pasture. We don't use a VAX anymore for most business infosystems. But we're not riding "Old Paint" to the office: we're riding "Paint IX", the descendent of OP which survived as "best of breed" through several generations. And which has the latest trainers and jockeys racing the track. Maybe Windows is saddled with too much backwards-compatible baggage - certainly XP is not installed on anyone's "phone". Maybe Linux also has a few "old school" bottlenecks, though its spread throughout the varieties of new devices and environments indicates that its breeding includes proven solutions to the same problems in any context.
The only sawback in this entire menagerie is Metcalfe - he hasn't even contributed to Ethernet for generations. That stud might still have some kick, but there's no point hitching your wagon to him.
--
make install -not war
The problem with this idea is that the complexity of an operating system cannot be removed; there are a number of things an operating system must be able to do, and the only way to do that is by complex methods.
That being said, using a higher level language only moves the complexity from the language, and adds it to the compiler, ups the memory requirements, et cetera.
Changing the toolset doesn't change what you are building. The goal is the same no matter what the tool you use, and it just so happens that assembly and C are very good tools for operating system construction.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It turns out that this is about as close to optimal as you're going to get with current technologies. Computer controlled, linear induction motors, a few rollers rather than wheels and only 16 moving parts. Non stop from A->B, no congestion, no traffic lights, no changing routes, no waiting on schedules.
Ever tried a bicycle? It's pretty cheap and the only infrastructure required is a semi flat strip of dirt from point A to B. No need for an engine, gasoline, roads, taxes for highway subsidies, expensive oil wars, or covert ops to replace democratic governments with puppets.
Anyone can cause a taxi to go the cleaners with a push of a button? Have you ever gotten into an elevator after some asshat has pushed the button for every floor before he got out?
"And how will these wonderful trolley cars get me around to these various destinations with my cargo."
It is a network transit system, the track is laid out more like a grid than a corridor. It'd get you directly to your destinations because there would be stations nearby.
e.g.
http://www.swedetrack.com/city7.gif
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Considering suppliers to the automotive industry, the jobs they provide, the petroleum products required to make them run, and that much freight moves by trucks, the investment by society as a whole is huge.
Which is why it's going to be increasingly traumatic as the oil faucet slowly begins to close. Geopolitics surrounding petroleum is already traumatic enough now, thank you.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
... not quite.
If an operating system was more like a car then each person could carry the keys with them and be able to drive on any highway, free road or toll.
with that analogy converted to something more descriptive of computer technology, including OS's.
Yeah sure, we should be able to take our prefered setup/os with us like car keys (usb drives or similiar) and this would be the all the security needed of the OS, no multiuser security overhead needed as you would be the only driver of it.
roads: shared resources, applications, etc that live on perhaps a company network of which you access with your USB based OS via plugging it into a company terminal. Administrator/traffic cop, street signs, lights, etc.. are set to either allow you to do given things on the network of not, perhaps with a toll to pay (yuck).
Some have commented on the short comming of Development. Yeah, its true that development in software has been badly detoured by the carrot of money. I'm sure that's also what is biasing him.
We should have had even ten years ago a much higher level of user accessible development automation and clearer and simpler control of port access to one own computer.
What we should have today is very small and efficient OS's that don't need the multiuser security over head and a way to translate a program on the fly to work on various OS's and user ease in autiomation at all levels.
Why don't we have it, cause of the carrot of money.
To understand this you too will know how much of a contridiction he himself is babeling.
He simply cannot have his cake and eat it too.
Indeed, Lisp does not suffer from the problems that cause the lion's share of security breaches today. At the same time, Lisp pioneered many concepts of modern programming languages (even if they weren't all invented on Lisp), and then some. Garbage collection, Lisp macros (which allow you to extend the syntax of the language), functional programming, and object-oriented programming are all common practice in Lisp, just to name a few. All of this (maybe not OO - I'm not sure if it had been invented yet) worked very nicely on Lisp machines, and I think they even had some sort of GUI, although it wasn't like the GUIs of today.
Lisp machines failed mostly because Symbolics tried too hard to make money off them. They made them very expensive, so people bought cheaper hardware and lived without Lisp. In the meantime, they protected everything with patents and copyrights, and since Symbolics folded, nobody seems to have been able to re-create the technology.
It is worth knowing that the GNU project was started pretty much as a direct reaction against the Symbolics affair. A certain hacker called Richard Stallman worked at Lisp Machines Inc., the other company that made Lisp machines, and was so upset about the abuse and destruction of this good system for the sake of commercial interests that he decided to build a system that would be Free and remain Free. Indeed, Lisp was mentioned as an official language for the GNU system (the other one being C), although few programs are written in it (Emacs and Sawfish come to mind).
Lisp still survives as a language (I think it's the second oldest programming language), and the community seems to be reviving a bit, although many lispers seem to "make do" with languages like Ruby and Python, that have a somewhat lispy feel to them. And with projects like Movitz, maybe we will have lisp machines again someday.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Um. You're aware that you will have to pay for the use of the system?
Taxi's that go to the depot for cleaning would only be unavailable until the service personnel at the depot had checked it. In the meantime there would be hundreds or thousands of other vehicles available to everyone else on the rest of the network. The only person who'd be inconvenienced is the guy who'd paid to stand and press the reject buttons on the taxis as they arrive.
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"Ever tried a bicycle?"
15 miles/day, 5 days/week. But it's really too slow for most people, the practical limit is about 10 miles. Then there's weather, traffic, sweat, clothing etc. Not exactly non stop either, certainly in UK you are expected to obey road traffic laws, that means traffic lights.
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A computer, hw, OS, and apps and all, is a tool to get some job or set of jobs done.
HW, OS, and "support programs" like network-stacks are, together are a tool to let your apps run.
HW and the OS are a tool to let everything else above it run.
It doesn't matter if it's using 1960s technology or tech built this morning. If it works, and works well, then it's A Good Thing.
For most tasks, the best word processor is made of wood and has an eraser on the end. It's design hasn't changed in over a century.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My point was that the will to build a system that satisfies the criteria of improving on mass transit to the point of being a compelling alternative to cars is likely to be at least as big as the system itself.
It took Minnesota 10 years of wrangling and $800M to build a single leg (~10 miles) of a light transit system -- and they had 90% of the right of way already. Presumably PRT will be no cheaper.
Thus the political will to build and fund a $XX billion dollar PRT system isn't likely to exist. Perhaps a smaller system that services some high density area like SF, NY or Boston, but nothing substantial will likely ever be built.
So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?
Plan 9, MacOS, z/OS, AmigaOS, MorphOS, QNX, or other embedded OS.
neat idea... terrible website.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
We're still using keyboards limited by the design of 5-bit BAUDOT teleltypewriters-- despite the fact that the keyboards are commonly used to enter basic calculations, we still don't have a real multiply or divide symbol, and are using asterisk and slash as substitutes. Some would probably like to do away with keyboards altogether, but that's not gonna happen. The mouse was a step backwards (I've got 10 fingers, not just 1 or two, BTW).
As far as a new OS, the ones that are sure to have a very limited lifespan will be monolithic utopian attempts to encapsulate everything you'll ever want to do in an OS. Unix has had the long life it has, simply because it was extensible-- you didn't have to use the drivers or interfaces it provided, and could reconfigure individual components and their interconnections so whe you wanted to rework something you didn't have to write it ALL from scratch, just the parts that needed to be different. A successful OS will have to be very component oriented and extensible.
is better how? ;-)
Oh well, what the hell...
I think that systems are complex because of bad design first and bad implementation second. If you have a bad design, no amount of good implementation is going to save you. If you have a good design that's poorly implemented, then there was no point of having a good design.
As far as languages are concerned, you could implement an object oriented approach to a C program (good design, bad implementation), but it is much easier to design a language that embodies that approach, i.e. C++.
I've spent most of my 23 years programming, designing systems. Every time that I go the extra mile to do the best design that I can with the time allotted, the programming is simplified and complexity is reduced.
Good designers see everything the same, good programmers see everything different. The best designs have their complexity in the structure not the code. Most systems have their complexity in the code.
What are the problems today in languages that cause complexity in coding? Inheritance, garbage collection, OO languages that break encapsulation (.NET, Java, any programming language that uses GC), multiple objects being "owned" by more than one other object, multi-threading locks that are defined at programming level instead of structural level, etc.
What I'm tired of seeing in "new" languages is the same old same old. Sure the syntax is different or some esoteric problem that the language designer had implementing a particular system in an existing language has been solved by their "new" language. But the basic concepts are identical to most existing languages.
The only real innovation, (if you can call it that), that's been made in a recent (10 year old language) mainstream language, viz. Java, is by making INTERFACE a language element. Granted, interfaces have been around forever, but Java is the first mainstream language to implement it at the language level.
What is needed is someone to completely throw out everything they thought they knew about languages and start from scratch using everything they know about complex system development.
You may ask yourself, "Why don't I do this?" Because there's no money in it and once I did, I'd have to convince the religious to convert. Not worth it.
Don't know about you but on windows the higher level RAD languages like delphi, C#, etc remove much of the tedium your talking about. Sure some of it is still there but it doesn't take hours to create basic applications. Hell a heavily GUI program is mostly drawn, with a few lines of code to instruct it what to do on events like menu selections, Ok opens, etc.. Tree component expansion, and the like are handled transparntly in the component. Data manipulation is often just writing SQL statments which are themselves sometimes generated with SQL generators. Most basic algorithms you learned in school exist in the standard libraries as generics. Programming is far less tedious now than it was 10 years ago if you choose the right tools. Otherwise you spend all day screwing around with command line utilities you are gluing together by rewritting the same code to redirect stdin/stdout that people were writting 15 years ago. Then once you have the data you spend all day walking it in for loops to set some state on the data elements.
Mass transit is no replacement for cars in the US
I take the subway to work all the time in DC. But the other 3 places I've lived didn't have anything like the population density to support it. Seems like this thing could replace subways, but is it more efficient? I can't tell, 'cause the site requires forbidden Flash technology....
rage, rage against the dying of the light
You basically have to subsidise it to around about 50% in order to persuade people to use it. The UK subsidises the rail system to the tune of around £4 billion a year (approx $7 billion). This is largely because all current public transit systems are designed to carry groups of people from A->B.
All of the above mean that current public transport is a dreadfully slow and expensive method of travel. Is it any wonder at all that people don't like current public transport and would rather sit in a congested traffic jam?
Personal Rapid Transit should manage to be cheap enough to run at a profit and still attract passengers because it's way faster than the rest, including cars, there's no drivers to pay, the infrastructure is cheaper to build than a road.
Deleted
I'm picturing a taxi stand with a row of taxis. One malicious guy rejects every taxi then takes the last one. I suppose if they don't queue up like regular taxis that wouldn't be a problem.
After reading the web site you sent out about the PRT I realized the prototype is in the back of parking lot 3 at raytheon's site in marlboro MA (where I worked for 3+ years) and I can tell you point blank the project died years ago.
:)
They can't even fire it up because the mice have chewed through most of the wiring. Rumor has it the last time they fired it up (5+ years ago) the PRT actually got stuck on the track and the people where left there for 2 hours while they tried to fix it.
On a side note I actually used to park my car under it
SPF doesn't break forwarding, if I'm publishing -all SPF records and the reciever is checking them, forwarders better be sure they are complying with our wishes regarding domain spoofing.
"If you look at Windows and Linux, both are based on 25-year-old technology. Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system, and Linux is of course Unix, which stems from 1968. These are both old clunkers. So the question is, Where are the new operating systems likely to come from?"
Absolutely! And furthermore, what's with our antiquated notion of the automobile? The motor is nothing but a knockoff of a late 1800's Daimler Benz model and the tires are from the same era by Michelin. About the most modern major part is the assembly process, and that comes from Henry Ford in the early 1900's. Where are the new automobiles going to come from?
Sometimes building on existing success is the right answer.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
While I like it, it does not solve the crucial issue about cars that also hampered other alternative attempts like car sharing: /part of home/. Look at how people decorate cars. Look at what they carry with them: CDs, books, pillows, woollen blankets, drinks, etc.
/is/ cool to have, I just fail. After 3 years it still is empty as new except for the 2 CDs I currently listen to and a pen and such.
in car culture, the car is not just a vehicle for transport. It is
Many people have everything they need for say, a trip to the beach, in the car at all times (at least during summer).
Not to speak of baby gear.
I didn't realize that for a long time because I didn't grow up in a car culture home, Austria in the 70ies just wasn't, and while my family always had one, it wasn't important. Most of my adult life I lived in Vienna, where you simply are better off without one if you aren't into trips to the countryside every weekend or have a baby, so I didn't have one until I moved to a bigger place at age 35.
And so I also only had looked at the transportation side of things and just couldn't understand why the alternatives didn't catch on when it was, to me, so obvious that they were better.
And now living in a mode and a place where a car is actually needed, I do try to carry stuff with me, because it
All this to illustrate that old habits are hard to kill. I can imagine well that if one lives in his car, as so many people from car cultures do, that this would be the thing that PRT just doesn't do for you.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Well, go ahead and compare the work that went into cygwin against the work that would be needed to port a bare-minimum win32 system to run on top of Linux. I suppose the comparison can't be very precise, since cygwin can run in an entirely command-line fashion, but there are plenty of well-designed applications like Audacity that are built in a cross-platform fashion. (I'd like to include Hugin in that list, but it's way too crashy right now.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Exactly---the more functionality you have to build into the compiler, the more difficult it is to build systems that revolve around the language (think Multics taking so long to get off the ground because of PL/I!)
Exactly what is wrong with the X Window System that can't be fixed and is worth starting with ZERO debugged drivers for video cards and no working applications? Meanwhile Keith Packard and friends are quietly reworking the guts of the xorg server to use native OpenGL. They report impressive peformance and eye candy possibilities without breaking the interface. The same sound argument you just made against scrapping Linux in favor of some hypothetical successor applies to X.
Not all those who wander are lost.
...after all they both have four wheels.
Fool.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Modern functional languages typically come with fold, which is (if memory serves) a generalization of everything you can do with iteration:And then there's logic languages, which, in the purest sense, do away with any sort of sequential operation whatsoever, and allow you to construct your programs in terms of what is true and false about various things, rather than listing a process.
People have been experimenting with ways of programming other than the traditional imperative model for a while now, but you won't hear about it much from the average software development crowd, because almost everyone's been trained on C and its children, and they're not interested in learning something wildly different.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Since the whole system is computer controlled, I would expect that the computer would probably notoce that someone is rejecting car after car from the same location, and would trigger some action.
:)
I would be more affraid that someone breaks into the central computer and start re-routing people all over the place...
AccountKiller
Perl 5 (I don't know if the foreach construct was in Perl 4 or earlier) has been around since 1993. Where have you been?
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Geee, I'm really glad that Microsoft made a GUI version of the Mac operating system, because it got so frustrating using those command-line only Macs.
... and then they built the supercollider.
I'm not sure you answered the GP's question. This was the first thing that occured to me. I buy groceries once a week...I fill up the front seat and floorboard of my car easily...and if I buy charcoal, and a couple of other things (not counting if I'm having a party)...well, It takes me 5-6 trips to the car to the house to unload it all. I don't see how this would be practical for living if you had to haul all this stuff back and forth between the grocery store, and the station, and from the station to the house. Hell, how would most people get their Xmas tree home from the tree lots to the house? It just doesn't seem practical for everyday life. If it was in addition to cars...well, sure that would work, but, if everyone could still have a car, and the independence it gives...well, that kills the personal transport thing too.
Also, the thing that bothered me...CCTV's in every station/car? Just want we would need...another infringment on privacy, being filmed all the time...tracking your movements? Not for me thanks.
And with weather....I see the examples of how a cold snowy climate like MN would have problems with a system like this...but, was thinking about New Orleans. Would be VERY difficult to evacuate with this system in such small cars. Even if it were nationwide and would get everyone out of the city..again, the smallness and lack of storage for traveling with personal property is an issue? How would you evacuate the city, and bring your pets?All your records you need...family pictures..etc. When you leave NOLA in fear of a hurricane...you bring all you can, 'cause there is that chance the city itself will be wiped off the face of the earth.Elderly people and their walker/wheelchairs...
This also doesn't look practical for normal city emergencies. How would one of these function as an ambulance with all the equipment they need? Firetrucks? Police?
It IS a neat idea..and possibly one that needs to be kept in the working on stage, but, it just does not seem at ALL practical for daily life as we know it. And these are just issues we have for more urban areas. A great deal of the US is not in the category...you'd still need roads out there to transport things....and if you have all these roads and vehicles still...what do you need the new 'transit' system for?
Just some thoughts...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I think it's both. Bob Metcalfe invented the Ethernet network protocol, which has evolved to into the standard that most network run on. It got that way because he gave it the headroom for it to evolve. He also can see the limitations that today's OSes bring to the table. Bob also accurately forecasted the collapse of the Internet stock bubble before anyone else that I knew of. I took his advice and got out ahead of the collapse. I think I would cut Bob some slack and agree with him that a new look at hardware and OSes may be the best way to fuel a new wave of true innovations. Change is hard when you spent years learning Cobol then suddenly everyone jumps onto the C++ bus. People will gravitate to the best party. It's only the hosts that need to decide on closing down theirs to join the other celebration. And perceptions can only go so far, that's why Microsoft is fighting furiously to stave off the Linux onslaught. The inevitable will come, it's just a matter of who brings it.
Metcalfe's a bit confused about why OSS exists. The goal of OSS is not to elminate all proprietary software, but to provide infrastructure. For instance AutoCAD will always exist, but the engineering firm that uses AutoCAD needs an office suite as much as the people that develop AutoCAD do. Thus they can use the same office suite and that's why OpenOffice, Gnome Office, and KOffice exist. They can all use commodity browsers, email clients, ftp clients, document viewers, etc ad infinitum.
Isn't this the same Bob Metcalfe who said the Internet would be dead by 1996 or something like that? I think I have a NANOG tee-shirt that shows him eating his words.
Mass transit only happens when population centers have enough people to generate gridlock. Then, people figure out a solution and implement it. Hopefully, over time new solutions will be more efficient.
Public infrastructure is much like the software that supports various internet infrastructures...it evolves.
"Hey, there aren't that many computers on the net, I'll just wing packets onto the net and in the slim chance there's a collision I'll try again!" (Aloha protocol). You can see network protocols evolving during the 60's-90's.
Of course, at some point the cost of changing the existing infrastructure negates any positive gains (see Windows backward compatibility issues). I don't see the Sky Web Express coming to Boston any time soon, but there are a lot of people who use the current system, and a lot of people working on that system to make sure it's at least usable.
The flaws of that idea are to numerous to count. But here are some:
* They had nothing indicating how the urine that the bum who is living in it is going to be cleaned. Don't say that it will get sent back to a cleaning crew. Just look at the vast majority of public restrooms (since that is what these would quickly become). Even with staff on site, they are generally not kept clean.
* Population control. Unless you plan to inact Chinese style population control, a three person shuttle is simply not going to cut it.
* Rats in a cage. This designer has fallen prey to one of the most common problems that total mass transit advocates fall prey to. It requires everyone to live in tiny high rise condos. People don't want that. They want a house that you don't have to listen to your neighbors arguing next door, and a yard for their kids to play in. This would also require huge numbers of people to give up an use of their land.
* Cannot move. If you somehow get a bed into your new rat cage condo, how do you move. I don't think that king size bed, or your dresser for that matter, are going to fit inside one of those little pods. Or, does the desinger suggest that we all start sleeping on roll up mats, and keep our clothes in easily collapsible boxes?
* Roads will still be needed for delivery. The claim that this would make roads unnecessary is childish at best. Even if we do start sleeping on roll up mats, there are huge numbers of products that simply are not feasible to shrink to human size. For example: Sheetrock, couches, large TVs, bunny hutches, carpet, the kinds of air conditioners required for cooling these rat cage condos to safe levels, furnices large enough to heat these same buildings to safe levels. I'm sure others could add thousands of items to this list.
The list goes on....
The guy has some serious issues with open source. He even goes thru the "free software = communism" fallacy:
The Open Source Movement reminds me of communism. Richard Stallman's Marx rants about the evils of the profit motive and multinational corporations. Linus Torvalds' Lenin laughs about world domination.
Disagreeing even on how to pronounce Linux -- "leenucks," says Torvalds -- they flip the collective finger at Bill Gates, the software Romanoff whom they'd like to trap in a basement somewhere. Eric Raymond breaks with Stallman, like Trotsky waiting for The People's ice pick. A Soviet Linux lies ahead, with successive five-year plans every three.
Eric Raymond as Trotsky? Jesus! The guy knows how NOT to make an analogy.
Likewise, there was BeOS and Next
While these were good, they hardly did anything in a new way. If you want an OS that tried doing novel things look at Plan 9. There's also EROS (which was a research project).
Though even Plan 9 still uses the same GUI (first demonstrated in 1968, and fully developed by Xerox PARC) as most other system, using a different protocol of course.
PDAs are (IMHO) a fairly novel UI, especisally from Palm: they were simply and fairly intuitive--allowing what needed to be done, and generally getting out of the way. The main issue was that the human user had to learn a new writing system.
It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
i t
Most of the time cars are just standing around without being used, taking up valueable space and resources. With PRT you could reduce the number of vehicles to much smaller number because their utilization is much better.
You also don't need as much space for parking and the tracks would take up a lot less space because the computer controlled routing is way more efficient than human drivers.
Wikipedia got a lot of info without flash:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Rapid_Trans
Imho it is a great idea, but it is completely unlikely to get implemented in a democracy. If people would get rid of their cars and all switch to PRT we would get a transportation system that would be cheaper, faster, easier to use, safer and wouldn't depend on oil. But people like having their own cars and it would initially be a huge investment.
I can only see someone like China trying it on a large scale, because they can just ban cars at will.
Jan
Stand it on end, of course.
That said, I'm rather intrigued by the notion of XRC, especially since it's cross-platform.
There was something about replacing boring, repetitive and brittle code generation with data wherever possible; it seems silly that the wx folks were the first to do this. It expresses constructed GUIs in data form, then lets the program put in hooks and callbacks. I'm told that newer versions of Glade can do the same.
To me, that's one of the most impressive, obvious-in-hindsight-only advances in programming I've seen in the last couple of years.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That first web site is a really cool concept so long as you live in a city and only want to ever visit other cities without seeing anything of the area between them. For anyone in an non-urban setting, though, it is basically useless. And on the page where it describes how NOT to do PRT, it advises not to have vehicles with capacities above 3 passengers. That's just stupid. Did the designer of this concept not know any family with more than one child? I have a wife and 3 young children. I have one friend who has 6 children and I know another family who has 8. I cannot imagine a family routinely separating into multiple 3-person squads to travel around town, especially if the children are young. It ain't gonna happen. A reasonable lower limit on the individual vehicle passenger capacity would have to account for the size of families traveling together. But then you get into a larger vehicle size that this concept so desperately tries to avoid. Hmmm... I think this needs a little more thought.
I think it is cool, though. I would use it, presuming these concerns were addressed.
"Windows is sort of a GUI version of the Mac's operating system"
What is Mac OS again?
You don't. These things are for dense cities, like London or New York or Paris.
You and Metcalf both need to be beat with a cluestick. Some things just aren't useful.
This is not useful in any way? Are you insane? It is extremely useful. Most communters in the city do exactly that - they travel to the same locations every day. The exact same routes. They either do this on a subway, or in a car or a taxi. Now, the car and the taxi are especially inefficient. Why do you need slow, dangerous and error-prone humans controlling an untethered, gasoline-powered car in the predetermined grid of city streets. In New York, why do you need your car to be able to go off-road?
Of course, the answer is that you don't. Computer control is a much better idea for city commuting. It can a;lleviate congestion and accidents. Additionally, the user doesn't have to focus on driving, and can do work while they commute. All with more privacy and comfort than a subway, and without having a predetermined travel schedule.
It's cars that don't make sense in cities, not Personal Rapid Transport, which is ideal for the application. The cities would be far more pleasant, efficient, and clean with these than cars. The economies of places which implemented such solutions would probably skyrocket from the increased productivity and lack of stress/raised standard of living.
It's not like office workers in NYC are carrying around lumber or other "cargo" besides a briefcase or package.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Then that malicious guy gets banned from the network, just like you would with a malicious user on your computer network. I just don't understand why people have to constantly think of any possible reason (no matter how trivial or stupid) to reject new technologies that might actually be more sustainable and efficient.
I mean, big fucking deal. How does this inconvenience of "malicious users" in any way compare in scale or intensity to the problems of drunk drivers killing kids, air pollution giving us cancers and breathing problems, massive amounts of mining needed to produce the metal and oil to make enough private cars, traffic congestion, road rage, etc?
It's not as if cars and subways don't both have massive problems. But no, let's not think of how to improve things. Lets just bitch about some new idea that might have some small potential problem.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Metcalfes been on this rant for five years. I continue to find it an odd statement from the inventor of a 30 year old technology called Ethernet.
Depends on the particular implementation that's a possible scenario, they would be queued up.
i zer/mait/projects/
One thing thing to mention is that the systems are generally designed to constantly try to fill any empty bays in the stand. As each car is rejected or used a new one is ordered from the next nearest upstream station.
According to the simulations the average wait for a vehicle would be around 120 seconds during rush hour if there wasn't already a taxi waiting. The stations are designed to be small and cheap, more like bus stops a few hundred metres apart and holding a few vehicles than train stations which are miles apart and holding tens of vehicles.
BTW, you can design a network and run simulations on your PC. Requires Python.
http://www.trasporti.ing.unibo.it/personale/schwe
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I agree whole-heartedly with cayenne8's comments concerning cargo space (or complete lack thereof), but even worse is the three person limit.
Imagine, one parent, three children. Whoops sorry junior, you'll have to ride in a car all by yourself. I hope you don't get lost. Trust the computer. The computer is your friend.
What about families with small children, do these guys have any idea how much room it takes to move a small child around? The stroller and the diaper bag alone would fill one of those things and that's before you've brought any groceries home!
So, I see you've played knifie-spoonie before.
... and then they built the supercollider.
That Personal Rapid Transit system looks fantastic, but it's going to be a long long time before it reaches the point where it can thoroughly replace the automobile. A person won't be able to get in a PRT pod on my block in New Jersey and take it all the way to my grandpa's farmland in rural Illinois anytime in my grandchildren's lifetimes, much less mine or Grandpa's.
Which is not to say that adoption couldn't take place in small steps, over time. Within 100 years, for example, I could see the NYC subway system retrofitted to make use of PRT vehicles -- at first only along the same service lines that selected trains currently run on, and then eventually expanded to include seamless automated transfer points between lines, reconstruction of long-abandoned elevated tracks, expansion into outlying neighborhoods, and so on.
The same kind of slow evolution applies to computing technology. Yes, new improved ideas in operating systems, programming languages, whatever will appear in the future, but the world won't be migrating to them overnight -- there are going to be long, slow, transitory periods, and in retrospect nothing will look revolutionary, only continuous evolution.
See, that was kind of the point of Tandem systems. They had redundant CPUs, and the OS kept them in sync. So if you lose one CPU to some psychopath with a bucket of water, the other one keeps runnning, and your system stays intact.
lick my ass you dirty bastards!!!!! all of you!!!
And when the routing goes wrong enough that the TTL expires: Yikes!
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
Mr. Metcalfe's observations about private property seem to be oversimplified and unneccessarily negatively critical of open source. Its not about private property or ownership. Its about real opportunities for large numbers professional software engineers and programmers to earn a decent living by developing and supporting open source. I believe that the open source platform can only advance at a rate consistent with the size of the programmer base that can make a decent living contributing to it. It might be just a matter of misunderstanding on the part of professional programmers. Maybe a lot of them believe that they can't make a good enough living developing open source software. If that's the problem then the open source community needs to recruit software developers by doing a better job explaining how there are tons of real concrete opportunities to make a decent living developing and supporting open source software. They need to be shown that the customer base is real. Ideological arguments about how you should be able to make money developing and supporting open source software are a dime a dozen. The hard nuts case descriptions are not getting enough air time. The open source community needs to broadcast real examples that are common enough to represent tens of thousands of real opportunities. With tens of thousands of real software engineers supporting open source today the future would be here tomorrow afternoon.
"Presumably PRT will be no cheaper."
o n.doc
It should be, it doesn't require the large amount of land use traditional corridor systems do. Largely because the vehicles weigh 400kg rather than 40,000kg. The infrastructure can be correspondingly small and light.
The UK Ultra system has built and costed actual test infrastructure at around $5 million/km ($8million/mile), which means you can cover 10 times as much area with 10 times as many potential passengers or just do an equivalent system for a fraction of the cost.
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/ultra_pdfs/sae_paper_lows
The US Taxi2000 people reckon they can improve further on the costs with their system.
"Thus the political will to build and fund a $XX billion dollar PRT system isn't likely to exist."
You're mostly right. There isn't a lot of political will around. However, rail (heavy and light), buses and all other conventional forms of group based public transit have demonstrated that they can't have a significant effect on road use and generally require huge subsidies to operate at all.
People are starting to look around for something that could take significant amounts of ridership. PRT can potentially turn a profit where group transit systems can't. It could therefore be run privately and profit is a great alternative to political will.
Deleted
Which 'sky' is falling today, Bob? I can't keep up with how many times you've almost incoherently railed about pending doom. I remember several rants just about the internet being about to implode.
It should work in lower density living areas, the infrastructure costs (around $8million/mile) are similar to suburban road costs (about $5million/mile).
Light rail can cost $50million/mile. Heavy rail, $120million/mile and underground systems hundreds of millions per mile. With those costs they need high density population.
The cost per mile means much larger areas can be covered, far more passengers, lower density areas are viable.
Deleted
Looks great until you realize that bums will pee in all the cars.
It isn't a mass transit replacement. It is more like a solution to replace both mass transit and cars. You go to the next station and request transportation from A->B and the computer controlled routing takes care of everything else. Getting a free vehicles to you and finding a fast way to B. It also knows about all of the other vehicles, so it can prevent traffic jams.
That sounds like a mass transit replacement to me. By "mass transit", I mean a system that's only useful in dense areas that can afford high infrastructure costs.
I mean, that wikipedia says things like "Passengers get rides at discrete locations similar to bus stops or taxi stands. Most systems locate these about 400 metres (1/4 mi) apart".
That's just laughable for a huge portion of the population, and for the areas where it is feasible there's already functional mass transit--as I said, I take mass transit to work every day.
The reason I had a car growing up in Maine was that there were no bus stops in my town, there was one cab company with maybe 6 cabs, and there were maybe 10 other families living in a half mile of me. And I'm not talking about some tiny town, it was a respectable college town with 30,000 people--it's just they don't all pack in to a tiny area. I couldn't stand in sight of my house and see another house, but I could drive to the usual destinations (schools, groceries, mall, movie theater, etc) in under 15 minutes or to downtown Portland in under 30.
That's hardly unusual, and this kind of system isn't going to replace cars.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Bob Metcalfe invented the Ethernet network protocol, which has evolved to into the standard that most network run on. It got that way because he gave it the headroom for it to evolve. He also can see the limitations that today's OSes bring to the table. Bob also accurately forecasted the collapse of the Internet stock bubble before anyone else that I knew of. I took his advice and got out ahead of the collapse. I think I would cut Bob some slack and agree with him that a new look at hardware and OSes may be the best way to fuel a new wave of true innovations.
....
Interesting, informative, insightful. Wish I had mod points
-kgj
-kgj
Branch prediction? On function pointers?
You can't know at compile time where the branch will go, since that depends on run-time values for the pointers. So you're talking about hardware branch prediction, which is independent of language.
Or what am I missing? Do you just mean that the C++ compiler always spits out more optimizable (branch predictable) pointer code?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Living in Australia, we wouldn't have that problem. You see someone doing that, you walk up and whack 'em a good one on the ear hole. Problem solved.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The logic is simply that a vast majority of trips that folks take simply don't need that kind of capacity. Are there execeptions that do? Of course. But most don't.
If you happened to live in a city that had nothing but this style of transport, then odds are pretty high that you'd go to the store, load up your cart, and then have the store deliver the goods to your house. Or, you'd incorporate the grocery store into a daily routine where you'd not need to bring home vast amounts all at once.
If the transport system can eliminate some large percentage of the amount of car trips, then the benefits are that you have more efficient transport (energy and transport) more of the time.
The other advantage of this system is that it can be put in place on top of current roads (so it seems) without replacing them and without having to require new Right of Way (or at least very little in comparison to a new road or light rail).
"I buy groceries once a week...I fill up the front seat and floorboard of my car easily..."
t em=6783518401 S earch?storeId=10001&referredURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.a rgos.co.uk%2Fwebapp%2Fwcs%2Fstores%2Fservlet%2FSea rch%3FstoreId%3D10001&referrer=FG13P&searchTerms=2 852706¶ms=P6813 p x?sid=FMNJA95VFXLQBRN080FB0RF3561EW9J8&brand=KaysL S&prod_id=211251
m ages/congestion.jpg w ay2large.jpg 9 3002corridor.jpg
Groceries:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&i
http://www.argos.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/
http://www.kayslifestyle.co.uk/psnlnet/product.as
You'll notice these are all UK sites, we already have an extensive rail network. It's common for people to shop with these.
"cold snowy climate like MN would have problems with a system like this..."
The Taxi2000 system shouldn't be affected much, the running surfaces are enclosed in the track. The UK ATS Ultra system would be affected by heavy snow. Depends on the implementation.
"Would be VERY difficult to evacuate with this system in such small cars."
You say that, but people use automobiles which aren't much bigger. A single Taxi2000 track is designed to take 7,200 vehicles per hour, 21,000 people/hour. It's the equivalent of a 3 lane highway. The performance limiting step with PRT systems is actually the stations, it takes 20-30 seconds to chose a destination and get into the vehicle (180 vehicles/hour/bay).
"All your records you need...family pictures."
You're kidding right. You're the one holding up traffic on the highway with the sofa strapped to the roof of your car?
"Elderly people and their walker/wheelchairs..."
The taxi2000 system is designed to accomodate wheelchairs.
"How would one of these function as an ambulance with all the equipment they need? Firetrucks? Police?"
It wouldn't but I'd expect police stations and hospitals to have stations built in.
"and if you have all these roads and vehicles still...what do you need the new 'transit' system for"
http://www.dot.wisconsin.gov/projects/d1/verona/i
http://www.portcult.com/DRIVING-emfhell26.jpg
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/whoweare/img/traffic.jpg
http://www.dorsetcc.gov.uk/media/images/8/j/Ridge
http://www.metrokc.gov/kcdot/news/photos/2002-2/0
Google has lots more.
Deleted
Aye. Rolling shelter. Which explains why people like me (please note all flames will be shunted to ground) like large 4WD's with leather seats and premium sound systems. Forget the actual road utility or huge operating costs - It's like owning a two-story house with wheels. Tangible asset.
Oh occiasionally I pull a trailer with a few pavilions and a set of armour or three off to Rowany Festival, but I could hire something for that. The real reason I put up with the parking strife is that I can spend the hour each way to work in a comfortable personal space that I'm used to.
...and the "Pop" you hear is the implosion of what's left of my Slashdot karma...
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
They'll have to pay to do it. How many bums do you know who are willing to do that?
Deleted
If Mr. Metcalfe wants to come up with something better, he's welcome to do so and propose it.
This sig no verb.
That hasn't stopped them from peeing in DC's Metro trains. Or maybe it's drunken fratboys. Either way, it only has to happen once. The car will stink forever.
"the urine that the bum who is living in it is going to be cleaned."
How did he get the money to get into the vehicle and live there? What did he do when one of the users pressed the reject button and sent him and the vehicle to the depot for servicing?
"a three person shuttle is simply not going to cut it"
Really? You haven't done the maths have you? Average ridership for cars in the US is 1.2 people per vehicle. The Taxi2000 has space for 3. The vehicles run with a 0.5second headway, 7,200 vehicles per hour (a highway lane is about 2000 vehicle per hour).
Taking car ridership that three person shuttle is going to be able to transport 8,500 people/hour. More people per hour than a three lane highway at rush hour.
"It requires everyone to live in tiny high rise condos."
No, it doesn't. It has a similar infrastructure cost to suburban roadways, about 8million dollars per mile. No drivers to be paid, stations every 800metres or so. With those levels of cost and coverage it can support urban and suburban populace.
"Cannot move."
WTF? Hire a van.
"Roads will still be needed for delivery. The claim that this would make roads unnecessary"
Again, WTF? Who said roads would be unnecessary? I said cars would be obsolete, and so they would be.
Deleted
There are lisp-like languages, where there is, as mentioned by another poster, fold, and its many cousins, such as map (happily, other languages, such as python, even have some such constructs, although their future in python is questionable).
In python, you can do "for x in whatever:", where whatever may be a list, a dictionary, etc, and iterate through every element.
In smalltalk, there are messages such as do:, accept:, and reject:... so, given some kind of arbitrary collection, you could say "myStuff do: [:anElement | some magical processing]" - this is equivalent to "for(i = 0; i < number-of-elements-to-process; i++) {some magical processing on mydata[i]};", and much less tedious to write... it makes off by one errors a lot harder as well.
At this point, writing C-style for-loops annoys me, especially in Java, where a change in datastructure can mean switching between them and iterators in very arbitrary ways.
If all else fails, I suppose we could abandon for for your choice of jmp, while, and goto ;)
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
The PRT advocates would have you spayed or neutered after that first child.
Nah, it's simpler. It's performance. All of the alternatives (including car sharing) are poorer performance than the car. Slower A->B, more expensive, less convenient.
PRT if implemented as envisioned by the system designers would be higher performance than the car. By that I mean that journeys would be far quicker A->B, lower cost and more convenient day to day.
Deleted
Then that malicious guy gets banned from the network,
.
Oh, I see. So you're saying that there's no anonymnity on the 'network.' If somebody 'acts up' or is 'unsuitable' to be a passenger, they are refused service.
And everybody else is consistently and rigorously tracked and cleared for each use of the system, in case they become 'unsuitable' or 'act up.'
I see where you're taking this. .
What's the difference between an infrastructure application and something lik AutoCAD ? Why will AutoCAD always exist ?
"I can spend the hour each way"
And if it only took 15mins each way, giving you back an hour and a half each day? PRT systems average speed is 95% of peak speed, they don't stop or even slow down till they reach their destination. And you don't have to spend the time on the vehicle reading the bumper sticker of the car in front.
Deleted
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I first heard about IPv6 about 6 years ago - is this pretty much vapourware, along with water powered cars, 3D bio memory, electronic paper, etc. When is this stuff ever going to make it to the end user. Is there a list of all of this stuff somewhere, and where its at in making it to the realn world??
It's called Archy, a humane computing environment. It's just in Alpha now, but eventually the Raskin Center will have the basics in, and if it gains momentum, it will become the next kind of OS. As it is, it's the best development platform to work on, ever, and it's being built from scratch. Thing is, it's small (can run on very old hardware) and infinitely expandable. It ditches the shitty mazes (menus) and the windows that love hiding information from you... Archy shows the user's content all at once on an infinite plane. The ZUI provides navigation. Check out their site for more info, and read this crash-course post I wrote to get a better idea of what it is and will be (answer FAQs as well).
Each one of you keep suggesting that the roads are still going to be there...The designer was clear that this was a REPLACEMENT for roads. Also, how is that guy making minimum wage going to afford a moving company. Since he doesn't drive. Why would he? He always public transportation right?
"How did he get the money to get into the vehicle and live there?"
He got it from the asshole that doesn't mind making beggin a profitable business just so he can feel good by giving money to a bum.
" What did he do when one of the users pressed the reject button and sent him and the vehicle to the depot for servicing?"
He waits their every day until the same user tries to use that station again, and stabs or rapes them.
"Really? You haven't done the maths have you? Average ridership for cars in the US is 1.2 people per vehicle. The Taxi2000 has space for 3. The vehicles run with a 0.5second headway, 7,200 vehicles per hour (a highway lane is about 2000 vehicle per hour)."
This doesn't fail because of the 90% of the cars that have one driver. It fails because of the 10% with 4. Disenfrachising people just because you don't fall into their group is just not ok.
"7,200 vehicles per hour (a highway lane is about 2000 vehicle per hour)"
So, a 4 lane highway can handle more traffic. Ok. And at what speed do these vehicles in one lane need to travel to handle that traffic? Are those numbers calculated at one person per vehicle? Because people are certainly not going to start carpooling MORE because of a system like this.
"No, it doesn't. It has a similar infrastructure cost to suburban roadways, about 8million dollars per mile. No drivers to be paid, stations every 800metres or so. With those levels of cost and coverage it can support urban and suburban populace."
I'm not buying the numbers. You are going to need security at each of those stations to stop the rapings and muggings. You are going to need huge numbers of people to clean the urine from the cars and stations. The numbers your stating sound like best case for pods, and worst for cars.
You also have to remember that huge parts of our country are rural. Basically these kinds of schemes would require an entire rework of our entire culture from the top down. They are not answers to OUR transportation problems. There are answers, but this isn't even close.
This is the same sensationalist troll who coined "Open Sores" back in June 1999 to mock FLOSS, and called Stallman a communist, and Torvalds Lenin.
Mr. Metcalfe, if we wanted to read intelligent rants on how Everything is Wrong, I think we can pick from several better sources than you, and might learn something from it instead of suffering through your screeds...
I would like to contribute this link to your history, that one day search engines might pick it up: Pompous Windbag
o/~ Join us now and share the software
I honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or being truthful, and since both Multics and PL/I predate me (but I do know that Multics became UNIX), I can't really render an opinion. I do know that UNIX's success came from being built on a toolchain that was easily portable, which came from the not-so-feature-rich language C.
From the looks of the PL/I language, it seems like it must have taken decades to compile on the hardware of the time; unlike Java, it had to compile to machine code on every machine it ran on.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
It's also the Data Link. After that it's network and transport, which have nothing to do with Ethernet.
Cool links... so when will we see the first non-trivial use of PRTs? I think they will become much more popular if/when everybody can see at least one operating success story...
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
If you have too many people for one car, take multiple cars. If you have more than four children, then maybe PRV is not for you -- you would probably be better off on the bus, or in a large automobile of some sort. However, that is a rare case, and nobody is forcing anyone to use the PRV system. You would still benefit, because traffic would be lighter with so many people using PRV and keeping their cars off the road.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
No worse than any other form of public transportion... thank Bin Laden for that.
This also doesn't look practical for normal city emergencies. How would one of these function as an ambulance with all the equipment they need? Firetrucks? Police?
Correct... PRVs aren't a replacement for the automobile, they are a replacement for the subway. Think of them as automated taxis.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Or are you spouting baseless FUD? Anonymous use of public transport systems is not your right, and never has been.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I don't mean to take away from your rant, but I did NOT say the whole idea was worthless. I simply pointed out that the "go to the cleaner" button could be abused. I'd also like to point out that you aren't going to convince a lot of people that its a good idea by flying off the handle whenever someone questions any aspect of it.
Do you show ID every time you use Mass Transit?
I often read his columns in computer industry tabloids years ago and was struck by his loud, opinionated, shallow, and often way off the mark columns. He doesn't understand the computer industry especially well, and these riduculous remarks bear that out quite eloquently.
I don't think that the alternatives are slower or more expensive today in most cases.
Slow: Depends on how you measure your time. While train etc may be slower from A to B, you can actually do something during that time, while when driving a car you are reduced to cell phone, CD, or radio.
And cost: depends on how much you use it. Many people in European cities own a car, but don't use it regularly, but instead use public transport for commute. In such a case you have huge upfront cost that just rots on the street.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Interesting...and the links to the carts and such are too. I'm assuming you live in the UK. From the tv shows I watch and all...the kitchens and such are pretty small...tiny refrigerators, etc.
I don't have what I consider a large kitchen, but, is much larger than what I presume to be the norm in Europe. One of these carts would not carry what I even normally buy each week at the store. I don't have time to run to the store each day...I shop on either Sat or Sun..and cook most all day Sun...to prep meals for the week's lunches and dinners. I work out after work..so, don't have time to cook in the evenings.
I look in the paper each week to see what's on sale...on a trip I easily can buy, 4-5 2L things of cola...2-3 bottles of wine and or 12paks of beer (gotta have a bit to lubricate the cooking day away...hehehe)...if I'm smoking, I may pick up at 12-14lb brisket, or a 20 lb fresh ham for BBQ...or whatever is on sale meat wise...I buy in bulk and buy for on sale...I have a large chest deep freezer..so, I stock up when I can. I buy lots of fruits and veggies...etc. If I have to pick up charcoal or wood logs for the smoker or grill...those are 10-40 lbs each. This, I promise you, is NOT an extreme for me...and I'm single, but, I do like to entertain too. This is a lot to haul on a hot humid day (90+F, and 90%+ humidity) just from store to car, and from car to door. And I'm actually lucky, my grocery stores are only about 5-10 min. away...many others don't have them that close...
I like the idea of a system like what is proposed...would make a 'pub crawl' much more fun...not having to drive...but, in the US..I don't think it is too practical. We're much too spread out, and the lifestyle is so different.
Oh, and no...I don't strap on a couch, but, I do try to get my guitars, as many of my computers, my dog, important papers and irreplacible pictures and mementos out when I evacuate for a hurricane. In NOLA...if a Cat 3 storm or stronger comes up the mouth of the Mississippi river...this city wil be under 20+ft of water entirely...for a long time till they can figure how to pump out the city..it will basically be gone, along with everything in it. Yup...I leave and take what I can't replace...you have to.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
the infrastructure costs (around $8million/mile) are similar to suburban road costs (about $5million/mile).
You're talking about increasing the single largest expense for most towns by 60%. How is that similar? What kind of town do you live in that can just throw away $3 million for every mile of road in the town?
And that's ignoring the fact that the roads are already built and you'd be building the new infrastructure from scratch. In the town I grew up in, assuming that you could sustainably increase the roads budget by an order of magnitude it'd by 30+ years before you finished the project--and that's assuming no ongoing maintenance/operational costs, and that you stop maintaining the existing roads entirely.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Well, if you're creating an anti-spam solution and all the e-mail gurus of the world including Eric Allman, Wietse Venema and D J Bernstein says you are wrong ... chances are they've got some point there and you should not blame the IETF for not accepting your standard.
Was it really necessary to take three paragraphs to say that Americans are fat?
Anyway, this really is proposed for big cities with big traffic problems. Think about London, New York, Paris - you have to be insane to drive centrally anyway.
It is not going to work out in the sticks, and will be uneconomic for a long time for even mid sized or sprawling (low density) cities like Auckland.