I'm surprised I didn't see this at the top of the responses. These guys have, if their claims are accurrate (they are shipping hardware, supposedly to the likes of Nasa, so...), revolutionized both the FPGA development process and computer hardware architecture.
Their ideas seem to be based on the idea that a big array of FPGAs, which are reconfigured on the fly to suit a specific application at the gate level, is significantly (they claim orders of magnitude) faster than a conventional general purpose Von Neuman CPU or CPUs (even modern Athlons, etc). The frightening thing is that intuitively it makes sense to me, and if it really does work, it could change everything.
Obviously to make this work, they've developed a high-level language which compiles down to the FPGA level... They call it IIADL and/or Viva...
Whether we generally acknowledge it or not, we have an excellent system of government here in America. Some of this is based on the forethought and intention of the various people who helped found our country, and some of it is based on chance, or, if you prefer, luck. Things happened in many cases because of compromise, accident, and caprice.
One of the most important unintended features of our government is the amount of play between law and enforcement. It is widely understood (among law and philosophy students, anyway) that no society enforces its laws perfectly. Laws are usually written with the inherent limitations of the state in mind.
In many cases, a poorly or selectively enforced law is good for society - and I will take copyright as an example (albeit a hot button one). We currently have an impossibly strict and protectionist set of laws protecting authors (of books, software, etc). Yet these laws are rarely enforced at all, and when they are, typically against companies or large organizations doing what we would call "bootlegging" or "piracy" and hardly ever against "informal" violations. Person to person breaches of copyright happen with astounding frequency and, looked at objectively, constitute a massive act of civil disobedience, with just those acts we know about totaling millions per minute (napster, etc). This state of affairs, where enforcement lags behind the law, has two important effects it would have been difficult to achieve "head on:"
1) Artists do get paid, and they get paid quite well. Copyrightable media is a worldwide business estimable in the trillions of dollars. Most people who can pay the author, do.
2) Conversely, lower-income and disadvantaged users gain access to books, software, and other media for free (by violating the law without consequences).
Should this be stopped via systematic enforcement, a massive chilling effect would occur across all aspects of our society, as children, students, and low-income users could no longer learn on stolen $1,000 compilers, or depend on hundreds of "stolen" texts. Programmers lose their (illegal) access to the latest tools and work of the industry, slowing feedback and development overall. As copyrighted material represents our intellectual heritage, properly enforcing the tollbooth in front of it stymies our intellectual development.
Surveillance technology such as a national ID is dangerous because, aside from the obvious potential for abuse, it allows for enforcement which is too effective. Many of the laws in our country were written as copyright law is - to be enforced using traditional, 20th century law-enforcement techniques. In some cases these laws (copyright, taxes) have extravagant penalties by way of "intimidation" - since enforcement is expected to be difficult or impossible. While new technology may be effective in improving enforcement against violent criminals and other laudable activities (for which improved enforcement actually is better), it will have numerous negative effects as it surpasses legislative intent on good laws and reduces the "containment" of bad laws.
Of course, no discussion of federal or quasi-federal surveillance or information-gathering technology should pass without further acknowledgement of the general "chilling effect" on free speech and free expression these technologies create.
When people are aware that they are being observed (even in abstract, highly specific, or systematized ways), their behavior is altered - whether it is no longer stealing a kiss on a dark street corner for fear of the mute eyes of the surveillance camera on the traffic light, or altering the way they write their correspondence, choosing not to share an opinion in a debate, or choosing not to travel. This is an implicit and often unconscious reaction to authority, and it represents, collectively, the psychological weight of being observed. U.S. Courts have acknowledged that this kind of tacit "intimidation" sometimes constitutes a breach of our first amendment rights, as it makes us self-conscious and we work to avoid an implicit judgment. It is political dialogue on a primitive level - and where those in power are actively observing, "dissent" is stifled.
Common sense can tell you that to live in a state of "freedom" we must be free of the specter of observation.
The story of government is the story of uneasy compromise between freedom and conformity necessary for a healthy society. America has had its success on the foundation of personal freedom's default supremacy; here, our homes, our persons, and our daily business are meant to be sacrosanct and immune from invasion by both each other and the state, as evinced by many of our strongest legal edicts (the Bill of Rights is preoccupied extensively with personal sovereignty, and it is - theoretically - the highest legal doctrine in our country). Our lives were meant to be lived outside the view of the government, which must be absent unless it has "probable cause" - and by and large, this is true... at least for the moment.
This is not an accident, but by design. Our government's success is based on its distrust of itself. We could still have a monarchy if we believed people in power always know what's best, or do the right thing. Instead, we have a complicated, subdivided, cynical democracy; one which, even now, functions in spite of itself, its wheels greased with millions of illegal yet necessary actions every moment. In all of human history, Government has never, ever walked it's talk, but with new technology, it might soon be ready to try.
I'd not be surprised at all to see a decision like this coming out of congress or the White House - things there are, for all intents and purposes, up for sale, and there are mountains of interests falling all overthemselves to bury CTS and other RSIs... Bringing a little bit more of the 3rd world home every day, I like to say.
It's not just white collar employers like Microsoft who want to see CTS swept under the rug. It's _everybody_. The garment industry. Manufacturing consortia. Even agricultural concerns have RSI risk factors on the job. And it's just (gushing) _so_ much cheaper (gasping) if the problem doesn't exist.
Thus, there's virutally endless money for brave politicians to step up and try to protect industry (and government) from responsibility for RSI injuries. The surprising thing about this is that it's _not_ congress or the White House. It's the Supremes.
The judiciary is, for all its flaws, relatively free of the kind of quid pro quo corruption you see in elected officials... at least in it's higher echelons, and certainly the supremes. Or at least it has been.
This year may spell the beginning of the end of that, with GWBush's rather blatant repayment for Scalia's 11th hour election decision, and, I suppose, with this decision. I hope there is adequate scrutiny of these justices; I had assumed there was, but now I am starting to wonder.
I'm just thinking big-picture here. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but what flashed into my head as I read the precis for this story was worrisome scenario:
A student learns a technique from a professor. He goes out into the world, uses it for his employer, and then... a year or two on... the employer gets a letter with the two ugliest words in the business ("patent infringement")...
Isn't it a kind of conflict of interest for university professors to be patenting IP that may overlap with their course material? Isn't it an exceptionally likely trap to fall into? We generally assume that what we learn in class is "paid for" by our tuition, but that might not be the case...
So the talk tonight is about your phone call history being for sale. Perhaps it's already happening, or perhaps the water is merely being tested... the groundwork laid. But let's speak generally, and think about the future. If privacy is outlawed, look at the bright side. There should be a lot of interesting things for sale!
If the telephone company will sell the dirt on who calls who and when, then they should sell it to anyone... even you, right?
Of course, they may refuse to sell YOU such information (for whatever reason). Then you have an interesting double-standard to explore... Why do they deal with Mr. Make Money Fast and not with you? It might be a question for the courts. And you can probably fool them into dealing with you anyway - start a "fake" shell company, pretend to be someone they will deal with, etc...
I would be surprised if it's so hard, though. If they've really gone to the trouble of gearing up to sell this data, shouldn't they be selling it to every customer they can find? No, the worst possibility is likely that they will make it a little bit expensive. But this won't be a bother to a public interest group which can pool resources.
Now picture yourself holding the binder of DVDs (or the u/p to the database) - phone records for whole regions for whole years. You now have access to all kinds of nifty information about all kinds of interesting people. Celebrities, government bureaucrats, policemen, your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend, your boss, your employees... The more detailed and revealing the data, the better!
An apocryphal mountain of dirt will be at your fingertips. Start mining it, and start abusing it! Anyone you embarass or blackmail is an instant convert to the cause! The more marks you horrify, and the more wealthy and powerful they are, the better. Get creative! Take out a full page in a local paper and fill it with names of everyone in the neighborhood who calls 900 numbers for pr0n. "Stalk" your mayor/congressman/sherrif/principal. Try to catch people cheating on their spouses. Try to catch businessmen calling politicians - and vice versa! Have fun watching how much police talk to organized criminals - and when!
Of course, the really interesting targets (members of congress, secret service, military, movie stars) might somehow manage to get themselves hidden - although many won't, since the opt-out trap works on powerful and meek alike. Regardless, you either get everyone, or you get another exploitable double-standard, from which comes either the ability to make trouble for the marketers, or the ability to get yourself off the lists too.
Hey, that's one of my favorites - the myth that you can "opt-out" at all - meanwhile, everyone who's already bought your data has resold it to 100 people, and each of those resold it to another 100... You could print a regular column of detailed information on those people who have "opted out" by buying the data regularly and comparing versions. I just kill myself sometimes.
The worse damage they do, the more egregious the privacy violations become, the better the opportunities for successful protest. If some people (dare we say, even the majority of people) lack the imagination to understand what the erosion of privacy rights is doing to them, then they need some preventative medicine, and (according to the gov't!) you have every right to give it to them. It will be your social duty, not to mention smashingly funny, to unleash some tough marketing love, if you will, on the unenlightened. You know what they say: we only realize what we love by how much it hurts when it's lost.
Of course, if your point is that they could go after the _server_ market, which _does_ benefit from parallelism quite a bit, then hey, I agree in principle - but then we still have the problems of other CPUs on that market being faster/cheaper/practically lower power... and all of the established players... &c &c;>
I wonder about this. Especially because someone raised intriguing speculation of adapting TM's code morphing technology to parallel processing in some kind of "original" way. AFAIK the problem with this is always bandwidth. When you start stacking up CPUs returns diminish pretty fast. Some problems adapt quite well to being broken apart into little pieces than can be executed simultaneously. Others are utterly resistant to it. For general purpose computing (i.e. desktop), I expect to continue to see very little parallelism barring a fundamental advance either in architecture or software design, so... for the next 5-10 years at least, I doubt it.
I'm hoping the more clever watchers of the semiconductor industry can enlighten me on this. As far as I can tell, Transmeta has been an expensive and overhyped flop.
They came out with low power consumption CPUs that, while cool, aren't THAT cool, really (to the point where Intel and AMD immediately responded with conventional laptop CPUs that were in the same spec ballpark), and weren't that fast, either. In fact, when you sit down with them, they're quite slow for the $$$. And that was they debuted - let alone now, in Q1 2002. Their design involved doing IA emulation right above the silicon, which sounds wacky to me; fine, advances in runtime optimization lately are quite interesting (hotspot) but it doesn't sprout wings and fly, and I can't see how we could ever expect it to.
Then we have the fact that virtually no one sells transmeta-based products, and some significant percentage of the few companies that said they would, have since backed out of the deal (which screams trouble with the product).
Maybe I'm just too cynical. Yes, everybody loves them because they're competing with Intel and they're a patron of Linux. Please, tell me why I'm wrong about this. I'd love to be convinced their killer app is right around the corner.
If I'm right, though, they should call it a day, shut down now and return whatever money they have left to their investors...
It's amazing how many people fail to understand how simple this is. HINT: Unsolicited faxes are already illegal. This is the only reason anyone has any fax paper left in the tray.
Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
Your response is well considered and a pleasure to read, but I must disagree with you that it is a complicated issue for anyone. Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities. It is utterly simple.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
The Lack of an Anti-Spam Lobby
on
Crazy Stats on Spam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam? All of the ingredients are there:
1) Issue affects better educated citizens who are more likely to vote
2) No one likes spam. No one at all. Except for the spammers, that is
3) It's a magnet for all kinds of illegal activity
4) Unsolicited faxes are already prohibited - the technical and legal parallels are clear as day
And yet every time spam bills appear, they disappear, or are neutered, with lightning speed. Then I remember. This is America.
With the exception of what I have heard politicians refer to as "hot button" issues (abortion, gun control, school prayer), the sad reality is that almost nothing gets through congress unless someone is paying for it.
Congressionals and members of the executive are so deluged with paying customers that they seldom have time to worry about the real world. The rest of the time, rivals routinely block each others' attempts to pass any legislation as a matter of principle or habit or a continuous cycle of revenge, usually across party lines.
"A better solution would be to profile applications, feed the profile info into the linker, have it put the most-used stuff first, and put a hint in the executable that indicates how much needs to be preloaded to get through the first few seconds of running without a page fault..."
I was just thinking the same thing. This is an interesting idea. I wonder how difficult a patch would be...
It seems, still, though, to come down to better tuning the system we have (and helping it tune itself!)... if you are proposing a fundamentally different alternative I still do not understand it.
Alright, I'll bite. What you say is interesting, and I believe your comments regarding the changing relative costs of traditional VM paging algorithms make sense. The problem is that I suppose I don't understand the alternative you are proposing. I am certain this is due to my own ignorance; please give tolerance to my questions, and don't let my inquisitiveness be mistaken for criticism.
You say, "The price of having virtual memory is terrible performance once paging between active processes starts." Assuming the VM algorithm is working correctly (big assumption lately), this means basically that you are trying to run more than your memory can handle, and have reached a load-shearing point with respect to RAM. From this I surmise that we might be talking about a "smarter" VM system that would shear better, perhaps by identifying the condition, and perhaps by better communication with higher levels - in other words, a different/better application-level interface to the VM system.
And, indeed you say, "On a server which is processing short transactions, you're much better off throttling at the transaction launch point [than thrashing]... This requires some coordination between applications and memory allocation." So I think I understand so far.
Then you say: "A basic problem with shared libraries is that you load in the whole library, needed or not, when you need any function from it." This is where I perhaps display my ignorance of the kernel, but that's not what I have understood was going on. My impression of things was that an application was loaded into memory by mapping its data on the disk into "virtual" memory, and that the VM subsystem arbitrated between real and virtual memory by retrieving from the disk only what blocks were "necessary" (i.e. being referenced by the executing code), and that this process naturally extended to libraries, and especially shared libraries (which need only exist in "real" memory in one location, despite being mapped into multiple "virtual" memory environments). Then again, perhaps it is a minor point - if the whole SO image is loaded and then unused pieces are unloaded or vice versa, it seems less important than the contention problem already on my mind...
You say "VM ejects [unused bits of libraries and applications] from memory. That's what VM is really used for today." Absolutely! But regardless of the relative differences, isn't this process of migrating data between different "tiers" of data storage in the computer (each with a different latency, throughput, and cost/availability) always going to be necessary? While I can certainly see a major advantage in creating/improving ways for the application to communicate with the memory management system, is there really some fundamental alternative to the block-based VM "guesswork" that takes place in absence of directives set at compile time?
You say: "So if you're actually page-faulting, VM is hurting, not helping." I am wondering if the VM is either hurting or helping per se, since the real problem is that you don't have enough RAM even for the "active" blocks you want to run. Of course, the quality of your VM will determine how close you can get to "perfect" utilization of your RAM.
Then you say, "I'd argue that it's time to go back to a swapping model - all of an app has to be in before it runs." This is where you lose me, I suspect because I do not understand what you are really proposing. You go on to say "in support of this, apps need more information about the current memory situation. And they should be able to designate parts of their space as pageable, at least at the shared object/DLL level. Only a few apps (web servers, window managers) need much memory awareness, so that's feasible.Throttling needs to occur at a smart place, just before allocating substantial resources, such as CGI process launch or connection opening. By the time the VM system becomes involved, it's too late; resources are already overcommitted."
At first it sounds as though you are saying that you want to eliminate swap altogether. I do not doubt that for some situations this is preferable - you want to have consistent performance and a sharp failure rather than the long thrash in the case where you use up your resources (and you mention QNX). However for general-purpose computing, I'm not so sure this is a good idea, even with RAM as cheap as it is. Depending on what you're trying to do, the slight loss in predictability and overall performance is vastly preferable to sharp failures for many, I would even say, "most" applications, even on the server.
But moving on, it seems you are saying that what you dislike about the VM is that data is broken into arbitrary blocks - and so we should rely on application programmers to designate what it would be a good idea to swap out in case of memory contention ("designat[ing] parts of their space as pageable"). The problem I see with this is that you are relying on the programmer to do something that, if they do not do it, their program will appear to run anyway.
This is therefore automatically classified a frivolous expense by commercial software developers, and even OS people working for the love of the game may be tempted into the same pitfall. This is superficially similar to the argument between malloc/free proponents and garbage collector advocates. Giving the programmer another "lower-level" thing to worry about gives them an opportunity to optimize it, but in practice we often find that on the balance we get more mistakes and the quality of the user experience suffers.
The compiler probably could be coaxed to do it for you. But the various tradeoffs between compile time "pre-blocking" and runtime blocking might leave compile-time computations, whether in the compiler or even in the developer's head, looking inferior to what a good VM system can do while observing actual behavior in real-time.
Your point about throttling occuring "at a smart place" is not lost - obviously many applications could benefit from more transparency by the memory management system in managing their affairs - apache users really don't want to have to guess how many processes/concurrent users should be allowed, they want apache to determine it for them based on what the system can handle. But most application programmers are not going to do this extra work or do it right, and a VM seems like what you need as a "default behavior," even if its benefits (and its audience - those who have enough RAM that they never need fear swap) are lessening over time.
This is an interesting problem I think because of the data longevity requirements.
It will be extraordinary and expensive, but you can certainly get 100+ terrabyte solutions that are fully automated, both disk and tape. There is a small (almost entirely North American-based) industry and these things are used by a variety of people for a variety of uses - commercial, scientific, defense...
You can certainly drop cash over a fairly large range and to play with various speed/reliability/support tradeoffs; your budget will dictate how quickly you can get data back at a given age. One thing is certain: you're going to end up with some large, impressive looking pieces of equipment suitable for display in a harshly lit, well air conditioned space.
People have discussed brands and preferences - there is some competition in the marketplace. You will want to make a big project of shopping around. Have a good read...
(http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Hardw ar e/Storage/)
Call people up. They will certainly lavish attention on you if you give them the same spiel you gave us. Ask vendors who their competitors are - it's not taboo, and they will tell you, if they're confident their own solutions are better.
Moving right along. Depending on how important retrieval speed is at various ages of the data, you may opt for a very, very big hard drive array (think EMC). Regardless, I expect you'll ultimately be thinking tape output, and a very, very big tape library (or three, depending your data's popularity in relation to its age) (think StorageTek), and develop a regimen for emptying it and storing the tapes - probably in a very expensive safe place.
All this you can do. The relative price/performance to existing analog systems and "package deals" by existing security vendors (there's a google category for them, too; exercise for the reader) is up in the air, but you're not landing on the moon, and my guess is there are already some (<50?) systems like yours running as we speak.
BUT... and now it gets interesting: your system has one very unusual requirement. "Indefinitely" is a long time. And the system you chose to archive your data with has been designed for redundancy, not archival storage. Tapes tend to have a high rate of failure, and their rated lifetimes tend to be _short_ (generally 3-5 years, as it is, for instance, with DAT or AIT or DLT). If indefinitely is really "3-5 years" then fine, all good. However, if it's not...
Interestingly, tape capactities are losing the race against hard drive capacities quite spectacularly, so, if you just want to buy yourself a "little" more time (maybe 5-10 years instead of 3-5) you can (arguably) consider archiving the hard drives directly. This will cost more, of course, both in drives (my intuition says it will about double your ongoing media costs vs tape, unless you can find a way to use EIDE drives, in which case it might even be cheaper than tape - !) and in making sure your storage facility has a well-conditioned environment. But the fact remains, select your drive vendor well (and you will be able to develop an excellent relationship with a manufacturer, I'm sure), drives will last longer than tapes under the right conditions. Maybe twice as long. Maybe longer.
Of course, you will get HD failures too. And this is ultimately a troubling regimen because drives are complicated and have many moving parts - stiction, fragility, etc... Because of vagaries of the manufacturing process, some drives will last 50 years, and others 50 days. And anyway, maybe for you, indefinite is like unto the next generation...
In which case, you pretty much have to go optical. DVDs might prove very attractive. Given factors of size/weight/storage capacity even the commercial stuff available now doesn't look _so_ bad, and I would personally think about calling Sony (for instance) and chatting with them about it. There might be higher capacity formats you can look into (trading off vs. price). I expect you can find someone who makes a DVD-R robot that would fit the bill.
Your DVD-like media has exceptional durability and will last... well, a long time. I say this because I spent some time a while ago attempting to find a longevity rating for DVD/DVD-R/DVD-RAM media (when we were considering an archival project), calling all over hill and dale, and I finally got the answer that there really isn't a rating, because really nothing has failed yet due to "age," and based on the materials they don't have an "expectation of failre." Take that with a grain of salt - it's the manufacturer talking - but still... plastic lasting forever has some kind of upside at least.
Ideally in such a situation you want to be able to skip the tape step and go right from hard drives to optical. Your application's needs will dictate whether or not you can get away with that. Still, interesting to think about it. The time capsule people in Denmark were talking about using specially treated plastic paper to hit a 1,000 year lifetime, so it all comes full circle eventually...
Well, I'm going to disagree with you. It does seem as though most of your points are matters where reasonable people can disagree, so I have to say at the outset your argument is respectable. Nonetheless,
They paid for the right to take a look at what Parc was doing and to hire the people who did it.
Fine. I've heard different things about their dealings with Xerox, but whether you're right or not, it's not an important point. The point is that they didn't invent their much vaunted UI technology. They appropriated it.
Neither is it relevant that Xerox will go down in history as having been the most profligate and stupid company in history (so far) in the handling of their corporate R&D. There have been books written about it. Whatever.
Jobs was out of Apple in 1985
In September, yes I know.
outside licensing would probably have slowed down technological development
It would also have contributed towards sanitizing the "market" for Macintosh products, pushing the prices down, eliminating the the frequent supply and sales channel problems Apple faced, legitimizing the platform in the eyes of institutional buyers, insuring its longevity, etc.
Is it impossible to have an open standard and drive a market without compromising your engineering standards? Is that really your argument?
And please don't argue that "Apple's has plenty of longevity by itself" - we're not talking about hindsight, we're talking about the hundreds of proprietary platforms that bite the dust along with the company that owns them over the last 30 years. Many buyers of computer equipment had already learned that painful lesson by the time Macintosh hit the stores, and were not eager for remedial classes.
it was their big joint (cross-licensing) venture to develop "Pink" with IBM that really screwed them
I could run out of fingers counting their technical debacles. Pink was one of many failed initiatives, and there was an underlying factor behind all of those (continuous) fiascos. Bad management.
Apple had also become notorious for completely mispredicting demand for their products.
I'm glad you noticed. But, that is what happens in a market with one supplier...
The chasing big business question is an interesting one, since the history of the Mac is trying to get into that market... You could blame Apple, or you could just realize that being #2 to start was a nearly insurmountable barrier in the business world, especially when #1 is MS itself.
You could say the game was rigged and Apple never had a chance, but that would be ignoring Apple's many notorious mistakes...
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985. It may have sucked, but it looked more like a Mac, and that was enough to guarantee the Mac permanent minority status.
I don't want to seem unkind, but I think that statement is ridiculous. I'm going to guess that you've never actually tried to use Microsoft Windows 1.0.
Suffice it to say, nothing Microsoft did in a technical capacity posed any significant threat to Apple until the advent of Windows 95... though some more charitable people might claim Windows 3.1/WfWG was a legitimate entry...
Wintel succeeded by aggressive engagement of the sales channel, forging important alliances, marketing well, and exploiting IBM's connections and reputation with many large business concentrations. They fought very smart and very dirty, and they had some advantages that Apple didn't and could never have. But all of the people I talked to in the IS sales and services sector at that time say the same thing. "Apple just wasn't there." "They didn't engage." "They didn't come to the show floor." "Only showpiece advertising, no real marketing." "The pricing was way out of line." "I couldn't get my calls returned." And I could go on. A lot of frustrated people who feel like they wasted their time because Apple made as if to move into the market, and then disappeared. If Apple had created a platform and invited licensees, it might not have mattered. But it looked to me as if they had voluntarily surrendered the market.
Woz is out of Apple by 1985, and it was *since* then that the adoption of really good outside ideas like SCSI, PostScript, built-in networking, etc. happened.
Did I say Wozniak invented Postscript?
Quickdraw, TrueType, Firewire, ADB (followed up by USB), the continuous reinvention of the notebook...
As I say, maintenance, incremental improvements, and hardware and functionality kluges. Yes, they had to rev their disk interface, and yes, they had to get rid of bitmapped fonts, and yes, they had to move their proprietary desktop peripheral connectivity along, and yes... they developed their multimedia API a bit... Postscript is great and all, but Suitcase/ATM is still crashing machines daily to this day. Ah yes, built in networking. I always did have a soft spot for localtalk, even though that serial hardware's interrupt kept smashing through the OS with 750ms pauses every 2 seconds when data was transferring...
Still, it was cheap, and it worked. I give them a lot of credit for that. Many of the developments in those days (like AppleTalk, and some of their earlier filesystem work) had a real panache about them.
But let's not forget that they made it to 2001 without real memory protection, or process encapsulation, or a comprehensive approach to multitasking, with "Preferred" and "Minimum" memory allocation boxes in Application info dialogs, with little bits of 680x0 code still hanging from the System, which, while it was one of the best things going for over a decade after it was created, hasn't changed fundamentally since the Pascal days, except now even MacOS ships with 50 extensions, and it takes 4 minutes to boot, just like everything else.
Let's not talk about Quickdraw GX. Or OpenDoc. Or eWorld. Or CyberDog? CHRP? PREP? PPCP? Kaleida? Dylan? Taligent? A/UX servers? the "Apple Video Conferencing Solution"? Can I still buy a Perfoma 6917.5? Hey, at least I can still send an iCard.
Notice I don't mention the Newton. I liked the Newton. Apple's two cardinal mistakes with the Newton were: not admitting to themselves that handwriting recognition was a loss and just licensing Graffitti, and canning the division, ceding the market to 3com etc.
Intel closed the UI gap??
No, Wintel did.
Apple and IBM deserve some blame, to be sure. But I don't see how this would have allowed them to seize the majority market share away from Wintel.
I can do nothing other than disagree. If they had matched a unix-stable, well-engineered core to the Apple GUI any time before 1996 (you could argue as late as 1998 or even as late as the relase of Win2k, I suppose), they could have ruled the world.
As for "deep in the five figures", you're full of it. The Cube cost $10,000 for non-educational markets in 1989, and went way down from there
The color cube was "down from there" at $17,615 without options. You're right, though, and I aplogoize. Reading it again, "deep" sounds like >$50k, which it wasn't.
Moreover, it isn't surprising that NeXT never hit the mass market because...it wasn't aimed at the mass market AT ALL. Now, I think you're right that Jobs grossly overestimated the market he did aim at, but that sure wasn't the same market as the Mac.
My point is that he had no market, and he had no clue. My point is, frankly, that Steve was clearly smoking the crack rock.
Speaking of which, about his comment that he "didn't need" 3rd party applications ported to his platform, you said:
That was arrogant as hell, to be sure, but you don't actually argue with the fact that it could have been...true.
Yes, I do argue with it. Because it is fucking insane. And so is Steve.
in vertical financial markets... (rapid application development with a pretty face)... I have never heard that it didn't completely rule
I did, actually. I heard nobody bought it and they went out of business. Schools (universities, really) were the biggest NeXT customers if I am informed correctly.
Yes, and we all know how horribly Apple has been doing since they brought Jobs back.
Jobs getting credit for Amelio's reforms was one of the big themes of my post. I'm surprised you missed that.
You say of OS X:
*the sucker works*
I say, it's an unmitigated disaster. That comes from having used it, having been through its APIs and documentation, and having talked to a number of people who have tried to develop against it.
They kluged up its APIs for Adobe, to make porting to the native layer easier. Just awful, but I can understand it. Apple is Adobe's bitch, after all.
The funny part is that Adobe took one look at it and said, "call us back in a year or two, when you finish it." Hence, there is no scheduled OS X native port of Photoshop, etc. that I am aware of.
Saying anything spells Apple's doom will get you flamed back and forth across the screen around here, not to mention it makes few people sadder than me, so I won't say it. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
First of all, Amelio was from National Semiconductor
Ah yes. Got me there, you clever devil.
that's an outfit that has just whipped Intel, right?
Huh?
some of the more painful things actually happened under Jobs, including the MS investment, the canning of the Newton...
Yep, I know.
Pixar
Fine, you liked the Toy Story movies.
For starters, I believe they sold more Macs last year than they sold during the entire Reagan administration.
With MacOS 9 installed. And what was that percentage of sales relative to all PC sales, by the way?
But to argue that they can't do anything right...is just silly.
Who'se arguing that? I'm just saying they're the last people on earth to deserve a cult following.
Apple stole Xerox's OS interface metaphor and released the Lisa/Macintosh.
It was unquestionably a wonderful product. However, Jobs et al managed to squander a 10 year technology lead by failing to develop a good licensing strategy, pricing badly, marketing terribly, and failing to go after big business customers until it was too late. Despite an overwhelming technical superiority and an early window in which it might have successfully competed against wintel, Macintosh stagnated, and became an expensive 5%-of-the-market niche machine, a status which it retains to this day.
Apple has always been at war with its engineering talent. Its R&D and development elan has gradually eroded ever since its storied beginnings (Woz etc) on the basis of Apple's (and many say Jobs') keystone cops management style - especially on the software end. For over a decade, stewardship of the OS and platform came down to maintenance, incremental improvements, and hardware and functionality kluges. Microsoft, IBM and Intel, meanwhile, slowly but steadily closed the UI gap.
Meanwhile Jobs, who is by all accounts an arrogant, fairly ignorant and antagonistic manager, took off/was booted out and started NeXT, another company with a variety of similar problems. NeXT was to sell a new kind of computer. It had some interesting hardware/software ideas and a completely stupid/unrealistic idea about how to package/sell/market them. NeXT packages cost deep in the 5 figures, eliminating any chance at a mass market. Jobs actually _discouraged_ porting of 3rd party applications to his system, saying "the NeXT developer community will do things its own way, and it will be better than anything else out there." If you can believe that.
Unfortunately, there never was a NeXT developer community. NeXT lost money prodigiously, canned its hardware platform, tried selling an x86 port of its operating system (competing with Windows... real bright), and then was weeks away from receivership when Jobs magically conned Apple into buying it from him (for a ridiculously inflated price) on the theory that NeXTStep would magically morph into Mac OS X. Unfortunately, it has.
The ex-NCR exec who had (fairly successfully) cleaned house at Apple after its disastrous slide in the early nineties (during which it had been so close to bankruptcy it had to take investment from Microsoft!) saw Jobs coming, was unable to prevent his return, and split.
My understanding is that Jobs inherited the iMac/G3 from Amelio - he did not create them. But he was happy to take credit for them anyway. Depending on how you interpret Pixar, Jobs has a consistent track record for failure. Regardless of what you think of Jobs, Apple's glory days were over before Regan left office.
Apple reminds me more of Commodore every day
on
Apple releases iPod
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Goofy internal projects, expensive gaffes trying to "diversify" into areas it has only a tenuous relationship to, a complete inability to understand markets, and a constitutional immunity against learning from their mistakes.
There is no future in a $400 (about $250 too expensive) firewire-only (5% of computer users) hardrive-based (read: fragile) mp3 player. Any one of these critical flaws might doom the product - take them all together and you have another classic corporate farce.
When you see silliness on this level, though, normally you expect to see a raging egotist who is immune to common sense and criticism in some position of power in the company... oh wait, Steve Jobs. Never mind.
This just reinforces my steadily growing sense of foreboding about Apple. Yes, I've said this before and been wrong, but I'll say it again anyway. They're living on borrowed time.
I recently price hunted quite a while for a friend who wanted a good workstation for doing 3D modeling. Dell was my first stop too. At the time I looked (several months ago) they did sell Athlons, and while their prices were at the reasonable end of the big 1st tier builders, I found it was possible to beat them by at least $400 with the 2nd tier vendors.
We built what, at the time, was the fastest uniprocessor x86 computer available (1.4Ghz Athlon, DDR) for ~$850 (not including monitor). The URL is:
http://www.epcworld.com/
I see that today, the same system (which has - barely and arguably - been edged out of the "fastest possible" title by the ludicrously priced 2Ghz P4) is now selling for $783.
We found them to be acceptable, though not thrilling to deal with, and the hardware was of good quality.
PERL is not a good language, and probably an especially bad choice for a stored procedure langauge.
The syntax is a mess, and like many basic-esque languages it's very easy to get into namespace trouble. There are gotchas with strings and escape sequences. Memory is managed with a reference counting garbage collector, which means circular dependencies will create memory leaks; this isn't as serious with kludge maintenance and CGI scripts, but on a database it will be of signal concern. What passes for a language API is what I would call deliberately obscure (lots of one and two letter functions, a million operators, &c &c). On the whole, it's a complete horror show, and just as with Win32, I'm continually amazed at how many things get written against it.
I say stop the cycle of abuse. There are over a dozen free languages that would have been a 100% better choice.
As our partition continued to grow, from 13GB to 37GB to 50GB and now 100 and soon to grow again (and there are hundreds of thousands of files), somewhere around the 50GB mark ext2 started to get a little overburdened.
Linux has never crashed on me without a hardware problem causing it (not an exaggeration), but that doesn't mean we haven't had plenty of hardware problems, and each time there was a failure, the fsck would take 30-45 minutes. My first thought was ext3, but... heh. It was always grayed out in the kernel config menus. Not a good sign. ReiserFS on the other hand was immediately available.
Of course, you don't trust your data to something without being damn thorough about it, so I did a bunch of tests on staging servers (which went great) and I spent a lot of time reading Hans Reiser, who impressed me considerably as a smart person with a lot of good ideas. We made the move this spring and have had zero problems with the filesystem during normal operations. Zero. It's blazing fast on our tests, it appears to scale beautifully, and if I go down, I have no wait time anymore coming back up.
Of course, I keep up with the kernel changes and upgrade when I see updates relevant to the filesystem.
It's not a perfect package, but nearly. Its consistency checker/repair tool (reiserfsck) is not finished (as its messages vigorously warn). Now, remember, this is not the same thing as e2fsck. You are not using it in the same role, its purpose is much more specialized (disaster recovery), so the significance is different. Still; we came to use it during several of the many times high-speed SCSI chomped on our asses and corrupted data. We have backups, of course, but I wanted to see what the tool was capable of. In several cases it was able to successfully rebuild the filesystem, very slowly, with --rebuilddb, but in several other cases, the tool would dump core, which, if you were one of those fools without a backup, would leave you stranded.
Even in this, however, I was reassured; the maintainer of the tool answers emails quickly and was eager to try to troubleshoot the problem. I thus have no doubt that it will quickly mature into something quite good. It's just not there at this moment.
On the whole I would say I'm extremely happy with ReiserFS; we've punished it here pretty brutally and it's passed every test. I don't have any experience with ext3, but anecdotally I'm told it's less mature. Still, I have nothing against it. I can only comment that I hope Redhat's upgrade process from 7.1 to 7.2 will at least take reiserfs into account, instead of breaking the way it did from 7.0 to 7.1.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/cont-tech.html
I'm surprised I didn't see this at the top of the responses. These guys have, if their claims are accurrate (they are shipping hardware, supposedly to the likes of Nasa, so...), revolutionized both the FPGA development process and computer hardware architecture.
Their ideas seem to be based on the idea that a big array of FPGAs, which are reconfigured on the fly to suit a specific application at the gate level, is significantly (they claim orders of magnitude) faster than a conventional general purpose Von Neuman CPU or CPUs (even modern Athlons, etc). The frightening thing is that intuitively it makes sense to me, and if it really does work, it could change everything.
Obviously to make this work, they've developed a high-level language which compiles down to the FPGA level... They call it IIADL and/or Viva...
Looks fascinating.
-David
Any lawyers want to comment on the impact of UCITA in legitimizing such a license - actually making it enforcable?
Whether we generally acknowledge it or not, we have an excellent system of government here in America. Some of this is based on the forethought and intention of the various people who helped found our country, and some of it is based on chance, or, if you prefer, luck. Things happened in many cases because of compromise, accident, and caprice.
One of the most important unintended features of our government is the amount of play between law and enforcement. It is widely understood (among law and philosophy students, anyway) that no society enforces its laws perfectly. Laws are usually written with the inherent limitations of the state in mind.
In many cases, a poorly or selectively enforced law is good for society - and I will take copyright as an example (albeit a hot button one). We currently have an impossibly strict and protectionist set of laws protecting authors (of books, software, etc). Yet these laws are rarely enforced at all, and when they are, typically against companies or large organizations doing what we would call "bootlegging" or "piracy" and hardly ever against "informal" violations. Person to person breaches of copyright happen with astounding frequency and, looked at objectively, constitute a massive act of civil disobedience, with just those acts we know about totaling millions per minute (napster, etc). This state of affairs, where enforcement lags behind the law, has two important effects it would have been difficult to achieve "head on:"
1) Artists do get paid, and they get paid quite well. Copyrightable media is a worldwide business estimable in the trillions of dollars. Most people who can pay the author, do.
2) Conversely, lower-income and disadvantaged users gain access to books, software, and other media for free (by violating the law without consequences).
Should this be stopped via systematic enforcement, a massive chilling effect would occur across all aspects of our society, as children, students, and low-income users could no longer learn on stolen $1,000 compilers, or depend on hundreds of "stolen" texts. Programmers lose their (illegal) access to the latest tools and work of the industry, slowing feedback and development overall. As copyrighted material represents our intellectual heritage, properly enforcing the tollbooth in front of it stymies our intellectual development.
Surveillance technology such as a national ID is dangerous because, aside from the obvious potential for abuse, it allows for enforcement which is too effective. Many of the laws in our country were written as copyright law is - to be enforced using traditional, 20th century law-enforcement techniques. In some cases these laws (copyright, taxes) have extravagant penalties by way of "intimidation" - since enforcement is expected to be difficult or impossible. While new technology may be effective in improving enforcement against violent criminals and other laudable activities (for which improved enforcement actually is better), it will have numerous negative effects as it surpasses legislative intent on good laws and reduces the "containment" of bad laws.
Of course, no discussion of federal or quasi-federal surveillance or information-gathering technology should pass without further acknowledgement of the general "chilling effect" on free speech and free expression these technologies create.
When people are aware that they are being observed (even in abstract, highly specific, or systematized ways), their behavior is altered - whether it is no longer stealing a kiss on a dark street corner for fear of the mute eyes of the surveillance camera on the traffic light, or altering the way they write their correspondence, choosing not to share an opinion in a debate, or choosing not to travel. This is an implicit and often unconscious reaction to authority, and it represents, collectively, the psychological weight of being observed. U.S. Courts have acknowledged that this kind of tacit "intimidation" sometimes constitutes a breach of our first amendment rights, as it makes us self-conscious and we work to avoid an implicit judgment. It is political dialogue on a primitive level - and where those in power are actively observing, "dissent" is stifled.
Common sense can tell you that to live in a state of "freedom" we must be free of the specter of observation.
The story of government is the story of uneasy compromise between freedom and conformity necessary for a healthy society. America has had its success on the foundation of personal freedom's default supremacy; here, our homes, our persons, and our daily business are meant to be sacrosanct and immune from invasion by both each other and the state, as evinced by many of our strongest legal edicts (the Bill of Rights is preoccupied extensively with personal sovereignty, and it is - theoretically - the highest legal doctrine in our country). Our lives were meant to be lived outside the view of the government, which must be absent unless it has "probable cause" - and by and large, this is true... at least for the moment.
This is not an accident, but by design. Our government's success is based on its distrust of itself. We could still have a monarchy if we believed people in power always know what's best, or do the right thing. Instead, we have a complicated, subdivided, cynical democracy; one which, even now, functions in spite of itself, its wheels greased with millions of illegal yet necessary actions every moment. In all of human history, Government has never, ever walked it's talk, but with new technology, it might soon be ready to try.
I'd not be surprised at all to see a decision like this coming out of congress or the White House - things there are, for all intents and purposes, up for sale, and there are mountains of interests falling all overthemselves to bury CTS and other RSIs... Bringing a little bit more of the 3rd world home every day, I like to say.
It's not just white collar employers like Microsoft who want to see CTS swept under the rug. It's _everybody_. The garment industry. Manufacturing consortia. Even agricultural concerns have RSI risk factors on the job. And it's just (gushing) _so_ much cheaper (gasping) if the problem doesn't exist.
Thus, there's virutally endless money for brave politicians to step up and try to protect industry (and government) from responsibility for RSI injuries. The surprising thing about this is that it's _not_ congress or the White House. It's the Supremes.
The judiciary is, for all its flaws, relatively free of the kind of quid pro quo corruption you see in elected officials... at least in it's higher echelons, and certainly the supremes. Or at least it has been.
This year may spell the beginning of the end of that, with GWBush's rather blatant repayment for Scalia's 11th hour election decision, and, I suppose, with this decision. I hope there is adequate scrutiny of these justices; I had assumed there was, but now I am starting to wonder.
I'm just thinking big-picture here. I don't know what happened in this particular case, but what flashed into my head as I read the precis for this story was worrisome scenario:
A student learns a technique from a professor. He goes out into the world, uses it for his employer, and then... a year or two on... the employer gets a letter with the two ugliest words in the business ("patent infringement")...
Isn't it a kind of conflict of interest for university professors to be patenting IP that may overlap with their course material? Isn't it an exceptionally likely trap to fall into? We generally assume that what we learn in class is "paid for" by our tuition, but that might not be the case...
So the talk tonight is about your phone call history being for sale. Perhaps it's already happening, or perhaps the water is merely being tested... the groundwork laid. But let's speak generally, and think about the future. If privacy is outlawed, look at the bright side. There should be a lot of interesting things for sale!
If the telephone company will sell the dirt on who calls who and when, then they should sell it to anyone... even you, right?
Of course, they may refuse to sell YOU such information (for whatever reason). Then you have an interesting double-standard to explore... Why do they deal with Mr. Make Money Fast and not with you? It might be a question for the courts. And you can probably fool them into dealing with you anyway - start a "fake" shell company, pretend to be someone they will deal with, etc...
I would be surprised if it's so hard, though. If they've really gone to the trouble of gearing up to sell this data, shouldn't they be selling it to every customer they can find? No, the worst possibility is likely that they will make it a little bit expensive. But this won't be a bother to a public interest group which can pool resources.
Now picture yourself holding the binder of DVDs (or the u/p to the database) - phone records for whole regions for whole years. You now have access to all kinds of nifty information about all kinds of interesting people. Celebrities, government bureaucrats, policemen, your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend, your boss, your employees... The more detailed and revealing the data, the better!
An apocryphal mountain of dirt will be at your fingertips. Start mining it, and start abusing it! Anyone you embarass or blackmail is an instant convert to the cause! The more marks you horrify, and the more wealthy and powerful they are, the better. Get creative! Take out a full page in a local paper and fill it with names of everyone in the neighborhood who calls 900 numbers for pr0n. "Stalk" your mayor/congressman/sherrif/principal. Try to catch people cheating on their spouses. Try to catch businessmen calling politicians - and vice versa! Have fun watching how much police talk to organized criminals - and when!
Of course, the really interesting targets (members of congress, secret service, military, movie stars) might somehow manage to get themselves hidden - although many won't, since the opt-out trap works on powerful and meek alike. Regardless, you either get everyone, or you get another exploitable double-standard, from which comes either the ability to make trouble for the marketers, or the ability to get yourself off the lists too.
Hey, that's one of my favorites - the myth that you can "opt-out" at all - meanwhile, everyone who's already bought your data has resold it to 100 people, and each of those resold it to another 100... You could print a regular column of detailed information on those people who have "opted out" by buying the data regularly and comparing versions. I just kill myself sometimes.
The worse damage they do, the more egregious the privacy violations become, the better the opportunities for successful protest. If some people (dare we say, even the majority of people) lack the imagination to understand what the erosion of privacy rights is doing to them, then they need some preventative medicine, and (according to the gov't!) you have every right to give it to them. It will be your social duty, not to mention smashingly funny, to unleash some tough marketing love, if you will, on the unenlightened. You know what they say: we only realize what we love by how much it hurts when it's lost.
Of course, if your point is that they could go after the _server_ market, which _does_ benefit from parallelism quite a bit, then hey, I agree in principle - but then we still have the problems of other CPUs on that market being faster/cheaper/practically lower power... and all of the established players... &c &c ;>
I wonder about this. Especially because someone raised intriguing speculation of adapting TM's code morphing technology to parallel processing in some kind of "original" way. AFAIK the problem with this is always bandwidth. When you start stacking up CPUs returns diminish pretty fast. Some problems adapt quite well to being broken apart into little pieces than can be executed simultaneously. Others are utterly resistant to it. For general purpose computing (i.e. desktop), I expect to continue to see very little parallelism barring a fundamental advance either in architecture or software design, so... for the next 5-10 years at least, I doubt it.
Actually, it is completely over. Ford lost. Read the update on 2600.com...
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=915
I'm hoping the more clever watchers of the semiconductor industry can enlighten me on this. As far as I can tell, Transmeta has been an expensive and overhyped flop.
They came out with low power consumption CPUs that, while cool, aren't THAT cool, really (to the point where Intel and AMD immediately responded with conventional laptop CPUs that were in the same spec ballpark), and weren't that fast, either. In fact, when you sit down with them, they're quite slow for the $$$. And that was they debuted - let alone now, in Q1 2002. Their design involved doing IA emulation right above the silicon, which sounds wacky to me; fine, advances in runtime optimization lately are quite interesting (hotspot) but it doesn't sprout wings and fly, and I can't see how we could ever expect it to.
Then we have the fact that virtually no one sells transmeta-based products, and some significant percentage of the few companies that said they would, have since backed out of the deal (which screams trouble with the product).
Maybe I'm just too cynical. Yes, everybody loves them because they're competing with Intel and they're a patron of Linux. Please, tell me why I'm wrong about this. I'd love to be convinced their killer app is right around the corner.
If I'm right, though, they should call it a day, shut down now and return whatever money they have left to their investors...
It's amazing how many people fail to understand how simple this is. HINT: Unsolicited faxes are already illegal. This is the only reason anyone has any fax paper left in the tray.
Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
Your response is well considered and a pleasure to read, but I must disagree with you that it is a complicated issue for anyone. Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities. It is utterly simple.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam? All of the ingredients are there:
1) Issue affects better educated citizens who are more likely to vote
2) No one likes spam. No one at all. Except for the spammers, that is
3) It's a magnet for all kinds of illegal activity
4) Unsolicited faxes are already prohibited - the technical and legal parallels are clear as day
And yet every time spam bills appear, they disappear, or are neutered, with lightning speed. Then I remember. This is America.
With the exception of what I have heard politicians refer to as "hot button" issues (abortion, gun control, school prayer), the sad reality is that almost nothing gets through congress unless someone is paying for it.
Congressionals and members of the executive are so deluged with paying customers that they seldom have time to worry about the real world. The rest of the time, rivals routinely block each others' attempts to pass any legislation as a matter of principle or habit or a continuous cycle of revenge, usually across party lines.
"A better solution would be to profile applications, feed the profile info into the linker, have it put the most-used stuff first, and put a hint in the executable that indicates how much needs to be preloaded to get through the first few seconds of running without a page fault..."
I was just thinking the same thing. This is an interesting idea. I wonder how difficult a patch would be...
It seems, still, though, to come down to better tuning the system we have (and helping it tune itself!)... if you are proposing a fundamentally different alternative I still do not understand it.
Alright, I'll bite. What you say is interesting, and I believe your comments regarding the changing relative costs of traditional VM paging algorithms make sense. The problem is that I suppose I don't understand the alternative you are proposing. I am certain this is due to my own ignorance; please give tolerance to my questions, and don't let my inquisitiveness be mistaken for criticism.
You say, "The price of having virtual memory is terrible performance once paging between active processes starts." Assuming the VM algorithm is working correctly (big assumption lately), this means basically that you are trying to run more than your memory can handle, and have reached a load-shearing point with respect to RAM. From this I surmise that we might be talking about a "smarter" VM system that would shear better, perhaps by identifying the condition, and perhaps by better communication with higher levels - in other words, a different/better application-level interface to the VM system.
And, indeed you say, "On a server which is processing short transactions, you're much better off throttling at the transaction launch point [than thrashing]... This requires some coordination between applications and memory allocation." So I think I understand so far.
Then you say: "A basic problem with shared libraries is that you load in the whole library, needed or not, when you need any function from it." This is where I perhaps display my ignorance of the kernel, but that's not what I have understood was going on. My impression of things was that an application was loaded into memory by mapping its data on the disk into "virtual" memory, and that the VM subsystem arbitrated between real and virtual memory by retrieving from the disk only what blocks were "necessary" (i.e. being referenced by the executing code), and that this process naturally extended to libraries, and especially shared libraries (which need only exist in "real" memory in one location, despite being mapped into multiple "virtual" memory environments). Then again, perhaps it is a minor point - if the whole SO image is loaded and then unused pieces are unloaded or vice versa, it seems less important than the contention problem already on my mind...
You say "VM ejects [unused bits of libraries and applications] from memory. That's what VM is really used for today." Absolutely! But regardless of the relative differences, isn't this process of migrating data between different "tiers" of data storage in the computer (each with a different latency, throughput, and cost/availability) always going to be necessary? While I can certainly see a major advantage in creating/improving ways for the application to communicate with the memory management system, is there really some fundamental alternative to the block-based VM "guesswork" that takes place in absence of directives set at compile time?
You say: "So if you're actually page-faulting, VM is hurting, not helping." I am wondering if the VM is either hurting or helping per se, since the real problem is that you don't have enough RAM even for the "active" blocks you want to run. Of course, the quality of your VM will determine how close you can get to "perfect" utilization of your RAM.
Then you say, "I'd argue that it's time to go back to a swapping model - all of an app has to be in before it runs." This is where you lose me, I suspect because I do not understand what you are really proposing. You go on to say "in support of this, apps need more information about the current memory situation. And they should be able to designate parts of their space as pageable, at least at the shared object/DLL level. Only a few apps (web servers, window managers) need much memory awareness, so that's feasible.Throttling needs to occur at a smart place, just before allocating substantial resources, such as CGI process launch or connection opening. By the time the VM system becomes involved, it's too late; resources are already overcommitted."
At first it sounds as though you are saying that you want to eliminate swap altogether. I do not doubt that for some situations this is preferable - you want to have consistent performance and a sharp failure rather than the long thrash in the case where you use up your resources (and you mention QNX). However for general-purpose computing, I'm not so sure this is a good idea, even with RAM as cheap as it is. Depending on what you're trying to do, the slight loss in predictability and overall performance is vastly preferable to sharp failures for many, I would even say, "most" applications, even on the server.
But moving on, it seems you are saying that what you dislike about the VM is that data is broken into arbitrary blocks - and so we should rely on application programmers to designate what it would be a good idea to swap out in case of memory contention ("designat[ing] parts of their space as pageable"). The problem I see with this is that you are relying on the programmer to do something that, if they do not do it, their program will appear to run anyway.
This is therefore automatically classified a frivolous expense by commercial software developers, and even OS people working for the love of the game may be tempted into the same pitfall. This is superficially similar to the argument between malloc/free proponents and garbage collector advocates. Giving the programmer another "lower-level" thing to worry about gives them an opportunity to optimize it, but in practice we often find that on the balance we get more mistakes and the quality of the user experience suffers.
The compiler probably could be coaxed to do it for you. But the various tradeoffs between compile time "pre-blocking" and runtime blocking might leave compile-time computations, whether in the compiler or even in the developer's head, looking inferior to what a good VM system can do while observing actual behavior in real-time.
Your point about throttling occuring "at a smart place" is not lost - obviously many applications could benefit from more transparency by the memory management system in managing their affairs - apache users really don't want to have to guess how many processes/concurrent users should be allowed, they want apache to determine it for them based on what the system can handle. But most application programmers are not going to do this extra work or do it right, and a VM seems like what you need as a "default behavior," even if its benefits (and its audience - those who have enough RAM that they never need fear swap) are lessening over time.
Even Slant-Six has acknowledged it. Check their front page.
http://www.slant-six.org/default.asp
This is an interesting problem I think because of the data longevity requirements.
w ar e/Storage/)
It will be extraordinary and expensive, but you can certainly get 100+ terrabyte solutions that are fully automated, both disk and tape. There is a small (almost entirely North American-based) industry and these things are used by a variety of people for a variety of uses - commercial, scientific, defense...
You can certainly drop cash over a fairly large range and to play with various speed/reliability/support tradeoffs; your budget will dictate how quickly you can get data back at a given age. One thing is certain: you're going to end up with some large, impressive looking pieces of equipment suitable for display in a harshly lit, well air conditioned space.
People have discussed brands and preferences - there is some competition in the marketplace. You will want to make a big project of shopping around. Have a good read...
(http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Hard
Call people up. They will certainly lavish attention on you if you give them the same spiel you gave us. Ask vendors who their competitors are - it's not taboo, and they will tell you, if they're confident their own solutions are better.
Moving right along. Depending on how important retrieval speed is at various ages of the data, you may opt for a very, very big hard drive array (think EMC). Regardless, I expect you'll ultimately be thinking tape output, and a very, very big tape library (or three, depending your data's popularity in relation to its age) (think StorageTek), and develop a regimen for emptying it and storing the tapes - probably in a very expensive safe place.
All this you can do. The relative price/performance to existing analog systems and "package deals" by existing security vendors (there's a google category for them, too; exercise for the reader) is up in the air, but you're not landing on the moon, and my guess is there are already some (<50?) systems like yours running as we speak.
BUT... and now it gets interesting: your system has one very unusual requirement. "Indefinitely" is a long time. And the system you chose to archive your data with has been designed for redundancy, not archival storage. Tapes tend to have a high rate of failure, and their rated lifetimes tend to be _short_ (generally 3-5 years, as it is, for instance, with DAT or AIT or DLT). If indefinitely is really "3-5 years" then fine, all good. However, if it's not...
Interestingly, tape capactities are losing the race against hard drive capacities quite spectacularly, so, if you just want to buy yourself a "little" more time (maybe 5-10 years instead of 3-5) you can (arguably) consider archiving the hard drives directly. This will cost more, of course, both in drives (my intuition says it will about double your ongoing media costs vs tape, unless you can find a way to use EIDE drives, in which case it might even be cheaper than tape - !) and in making sure your storage facility has a well-conditioned environment. But the fact remains, select your drive vendor well (and you will be able to develop an excellent relationship with a manufacturer, I'm sure), drives will last longer than tapes under the right conditions. Maybe twice as long. Maybe longer.
Of course, you will get HD failures too. And this is ultimately a troubling regimen because drives are complicated and have many moving parts - stiction, fragility, etc... Because of vagaries of the manufacturing process, some drives will last 50 years, and others 50 days. And anyway, maybe for you, indefinite is like unto the next generation...
In which case, you pretty much have to go optical. DVDs might prove very attractive. Given factors of size/weight/storage capacity even the commercial stuff available now doesn't look _so_ bad, and I would personally think about calling Sony (for instance) and chatting with them about it. There might be higher capacity formats you can look into (trading off vs. price). I expect you can find someone who makes a DVD-R robot that would fit the bill.
Your DVD-like media has exceptional durability and will last... well, a long time. I say this because I spent some time a while ago attempting to find a longevity rating for DVD/DVD-R/DVD-RAM media (when we were considering an archival project), calling all over hill and dale, and I finally got the answer that there really isn't a rating, because really nothing has failed yet due to "age," and based on the materials they don't have an "expectation of failre." Take that with a grain of salt - it's the manufacturer talking - but still... plastic lasting forever has some kind of upside at least.
Ideally in such a situation you want to be able to skip the tape step and go right from hard drives to optical. Your application's needs will dictate whether or not you can get away with that. Still, interesting to think about it. The time capsule people in Denmark were talking about using specially treated plastic paper to hit a 1,000 year lifetime, so it all comes full circle eventually...
Well, I'm going to disagree with you. It does seem as though most of your points are matters where reasonable people can disagree, so I have to say at the outset your argument is respectable. Nonetheless,
... You could blame Apple, or you could just realize that being #2 to start was a nearly insurmountable barrier in the business world, especially when #1 is MS itself.
... (rapid application development with a pretty face) ... I have never heard that it didn't completely rule
They paid for the right to take a look at what Parc was doing and to hire the people who did it.
Fine. I've heard different things about their dealings with Xerox, but whether you're right or not, it's not an important point. The point is that they didn't invent their much vaunted UI technology. They appropriated it.
Neither is it relevant that Xerox will go down in history as having been the most profligate and stupid company in history (so far) in the handling of their corporate R&D. There have been books written about it. Whatever.
Jobs was out of Apple in 1985
In September, yes I know.
outside licensing would probably have slowed down technological development
It would also have contributed towards sanitizing the "market" for Macintosh products, pushing the prices down, eliminating the the frequent supply and sales channel problems Apple faced, legitimizing the platform in the eyes of institutional buyers, insuring its longevity, etc.
Is it impossible to have an open standard and drive a market without compromising your engineering standards? Is that really your argument?
And please don't argue that "Apple's has plenty of longevity by itself" - we're not talking about hindsight, we're talking about the hundreds of proprietary platforms that bite the dust along with the company that owns them over the last 30 years. Many buyers of computer equipment had already learned that painful lesson by the time Macintosh hit the stores, and were not eager for remedial classes.
it was their big joint (cross-licensing) venture to develop "Pink" with IBM that really screwed them
I could run out of fingers counting their technical debacles. Pink was one of many failed initiatives, and there was an underlying factor behind all of those (continuous) fiascos. Bad management.
Apple had also become notorious for completely mispredicting demand for their products.
I'm glad you noticed. But, that is what happens in a market with one supplier...
The chasing big business question is an interesting one, since the history of the Mac is trying to get into that market
You could say the game was rigged and Apple never had a chance, but that would be ignoring Apple's many notorious mistakes...
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985. It may have sucked, but it looked more like a Mac, and that was enough to guarantee the Mac permanent minority status.
I don't want to seem unkind, but I think that statement is ridiculous. I'm going to guess that you've never actually tried to use Microsoft Windows 1.0.
Suffice it to say, nothing Microsoft did in a technical capacity posed any significant threat to Apple until the advent of Windows 95... though some more charitable people might claim Windows 3.1/WfWG was a legitimate entry...
Wintel succeeded by aggressive engagement of the sales channel, forging important alliances, marketing well, and exploiting IBM's connections and reputation with many large business concentrations. They fought very smart and very dirty, and they had some advantages that Apple didn't and could never have. But all of the people I talked to in the IS sales and services sector at that time say the same thing. "Apple just wasn't there." "They didn't engage." "They didn't come to the show floor." "Only showpiece advertising, no real marketing." "The pricing was way out of line." "I couldn't get my calls returned." And I could go on. A lot of frustrated people who feel like they wasted their time because Apple made as if to move into the market, and then disappeared. If Apple had created a platform and invited licensees, it might not have mattered. But it looked to me as if they had voluntarily surrendered the market.
Woz is out of Apple by 1985, and it was *since* then that the adoption of really good outside ideas like SCSI, PostScript, built-in networking, etc. happened.
Did I say Wozniak invented Postscript?
Quickdraw, TrueType, Firewire, ADB (followed up by USB), the continuous reinvention of the notebook...
As I say, maintenance, incremental improvements, and hardware and functionality kluges. Yes, they had to rev their disk interface, and yes, they had to get rid of bitmapped fonts, and yes, they had to move their proprietary desktop peripheral connectivity along, and yes... they developed their multimedia API a bit... Postscript is great and all, but Suitcase/ATM is still crashing machines daily to this day. Ah yes, built in networking. I always did have a soft spot for localtalk, even though that serial hardware's interrupt kept smashing through the OS with 750ms pauses every 2 seconds when data was transferring...
Still, it was cheap, and it worked. I give them a lot of credit for that. Many of the developments in those days (like AppleTalk, and some of their earlier filesystem work) had a real panache about them.
But let's not forget that they made it to 2001 without real memory protection, or process encapsulation, or a comprehensive approach to multitasking, with "Preferred" and "Minimum" memory allocation boxes in Application info dialogs, with little bits of 680x0 code still hanging from the System, which, while it was one of the best things going for over a decade after it was created, hasn't changed fundamentally since the Pascal days, except now even MacOS ships with 50 extensions, and it takes 4 minutes to boot, just like everything else.
Let's not talk about Quickdraw GX. Or OpenDoc. Or eWorld. Or CyberDog? CHRP? PREP? PPCP? Kaleida? Dylan? Taligent? A/UX servers? the "Apple Video Conferencing Solution"? Can I still buy a Perfoma 6917.5? Hey, at least I can still send an iCard.
Notice I don't mention the Newton. I liked the Newton. Apple's two cardinal mistakes with the Newton were: not admitting to themselves that handwriting recognition was a loss and just licensing Graffitti, and canning the division, ceding the market to 3com etc.
Intel closed the UI gap??
No, Wintel did.
Apple and IBM deserve some blame, to be sure. But I don't see how this would have allowed them to seize the majority market share away from Wintel.
I can do nothing other than disagree. If they had matched a unix-stable, well-engineered core to the Apple GUI any time before 1996 (you could argue as late as 1998 or even as late as the relase of Win2k, I suppose), they could have ruled the world.
As for "deep in the five figures", you're full of it. The Cube cost $10,000 for non-educational markets in 1989, and went way down from there
The color cube was "down from there" at $17,615 without options. You're right, though, and I aplogoize. Reading it again, "deep" sounds like >$50k, which it wasn't.
Moreover, it isn't surprising that NeXT never hit the mass market because...it wasn't aimed at the mass market AT ALL. Now, I think you're right that Jobs grossly overestimated the market he did aim at, but that sure wasn't the same market as the Mac.
My point is that he had no market, and he had no clue. My point is, frankly, that Steve was clearly smoking the crack rock.
Speaking of which, about his comment that he "didn't need" 3rd party applications ported to his platform, you said:
That was arrogant as hell, to be sure, but you don't actually argue with the fact that it could have been...true.
Yes, I do argue with it. Because it is fucking insane. And so is Steve.
in vertical financial markets
I did, actually. I heard nobody bought it and they went out of business. Schools (universities, really) were the biggest NeXT customers if I am informed correctly.
Yes, and we all know how horribly Apple has been doing since they brought Jobs back.
Jobs getting credit for Amelio's reforms was one of the big themes of my post. I'm surprised you missed that.
You say of OS X:
*the sucker works*
I say, it's an unmitigated disaster. That comes from having used it, having been through its APIs and documentation, and having talked to a number of people who have tried to develop against it.
They kluged up its APIs for Adobe, to make porting to the native layer easier. Just awful, but I can understand it. Apple is Adobe's bitch, after all.
The funny part is that Adobe took one look at it and said, "call us back in a year or two, when you finish it." Hence, there is no scheduled OS X native port of Photoshop, etc. that I am aware of.
Saying anything spells Apple's doom will get you flamed back and forth across the screen around here, not to mention it makes few people sadder than me, so I won't say it. I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
First of all, Amelio was from National Semiconductor
Ah yes. Got me there, you clever devil.
that's an outfit that has just whipped Intel, right?
Huh?
some of the more painful things actually happened under Jobs, including the MS investment, the canning of the Newton...
Yep, I know.
Pixar
Fine, you liked the Toy Story movies.
For starters, I believe they sold more Macs last year than they sold during the entire Reagan administration.
With MacOS 9 installed. And what was that percentage of sales relative to all PC sales, by the way?
But to argue that they can't do anything right...is just silly.
Who'se arguing that? I'm just saying they're the last people on earth to deserve a cult following.
-Dave
Hmm. Let's recap.
/ 19 97/q4/970709.pr.rel.amelio.html
Apple stole Xerox's OS interface metaphor and released the Lisa/Macintosh.
It was unquestionably a wonderful product. However, Jobs et al managed to squander a 10 year technology lead by failing to develop a good licensing strategy, pricing badly, marketing terribly, and failing to go after big business customers until it was too late. Despite an overwhelming technical superiority and an early window in which it might have successfully competed against wintel, Macintosh stagnated, and became an expensive 5%-of-the-market niche machine, a status which it retains to this day.
Apple has always been at war with its engineering talent. Its R&D and development elan has gradually eroded ever since its storied beginnings (Woz etc) on the basis of Apple's (and many say Jobs') keystone cops management style - especially on the software end. For over a decade, stewardship of the OS and platform came down to maintenance, incremental improvements, and hardware and functionality kluges. Microsoft, IBM and Intel, meanwhile, slowly but steadily closed the UI gap.
Meanwhile Jobs, who is by all accounts an arrogant, fairly ignorant and antagonistic manager, took off/was booted out and started NeXT, another company with a variety of similar problems. NeXT was to sell a new kind of computer. It had some interesting hardware/software ideas and a completely stupid/unrealistic idea about how to package/sell/market them. NeXT packages cost deep in the 5 figures, eliminating any chance at a mass market. Jobs actually _discouraged_ porting of 3rd party applications to his system, saying "the NeXT developer community will do things its own way, and it will be better than anything else out there." If you can believe that.
Unfortunately, there never was a NeXT developer community. NeXT lost money prodigiously, canned its hardware platform, tried selling an x86 port of its operating system (competing with Windows... real bright), and then was weeks away from receivership when Jobs magically conned Apple into buying it from him (for a ridiculously inflated price) on the theory that NeXTStep would magically morph into Mac OS X. Unfortunately, it has.
The ex-NCR exec who had (fairly successfully) cleaned house at Apple after its disastrous slide in the early nineties (during which it had been so close to bankruptcy it had to take investment from Microsoft!) saw Jobs coming, was unable to prevent his return, and split.
http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases
My understanding is that Jobs inherited the iMac/G3 from Amelio - he did not create them. But he was happy to take credit for them anyway. Depending on how you interpret Pixar, Jobs has a consistent track record for failure. Regardless of what you think of Jobs, Apple's glory days were over before Regan left office.
Goofy internal projects, expensive gaffes trying to "diversify" into areas it has only a tenuous relationship to, a complete inability to understand markets, and a constitutional immunity against learning from their mistakes.
There is no future in a $400 (about $250 too expensive) firewire-only (5% of computer users) hardrive-based (read: fragile) mp3 player. Any one of these critical flaws might doom the product - take them all together and you have another classic corporate farce.
When you see silliness on this level, though, normally you expect to see a raging egotist who is immune to common sense and criticism in some position of power in the company... oh wait, Steve Jobs. Never mind.
This just reinforces my steadily growing sense of foreboding about Apple. Yes, I've said this before and been wrong, but I'll say it again anyway. They're living on borrowed time.
I recently price hunted quite a while for a friend who wanted a good workstation for doing 3D modeling. Dell was my first stop too. At the time I looked (several months ago) they did sell Athlons, and while their prices were at the reasonable end of the big 1st tier builders, I found it was possible to beat them by at least $400 with the 2nd tier vendors.
We built what, at the time, was the fastest uniprocessor x86 computer available (1.4Ghz Athlon, DDR) for ~$850 (not including monitor). The URL is:
http://www.epcworld.com/
I see that today, the same system (which has - barely and arguably - been edged out of the "fastest possible" title by the ludicrously priced 2Ghz P4) is now selling for $783.
We found them to be acceptable, though not thrilling to deal with, and the hardware was of good quality.
I have. I am.
PERL is not a good language, and probably an especially bad choice for a stored procedure langauge.
The syntax is a mess, and like many basic-esque languages it's very easy to get into namespace trouble. There are gotchas with strings and escape sequences. Memory is managed with a reference counting garbage collector, which means circular dependencies will create memory leaks; this isn't as serious with kludge maintenance and CGI scripts, but on a database it will be of signal concern. What passes for a language API is what I would call deliberately obscure (lots of one and two letter functions, a million operators, &c &c). On the whole, it's a complete horror show, and just as with Win32, I'm continually amazed at how many things get written against it.
I say stop the cycle of abuse. There are over a dozen free languages that would have been a 100% better choice.
Linux has never crashed on me without a hardware problem causing it (not an exaggeration), but that doesn't mean we haven't had plenty of hardware problems, and each time there was a failure, the fsck would take 30-45 minutes. My first thought was ext3, but... heh. It was always grayed out in the kernel config menus. Not a good sign. ReiserFS on the other hand was immediately available.
Of course, you don't trust your data to something without being damn thorough about it, so I did a bunch of tests on staging servers (which went great) and I spent a lot of time reading Hans Reiser, who impressed me considerably as a smart person with a lot of good ideas. We made the move this spring and have had zero problems with the filesystem during normal operations. Zero. It's blazing fast on our tests, it appears to scale beautifully, and if I go down, I have no wait time anymore coming back up.
Of course, I keep up with the kernel changes and upgrade when I see updates relevant to the filesystem.
It's not a perfect package, but nearly. Its consistency checker/repair tool (reiserfsck) is not finished (as its messages vigorously warn). Now, remember, this is not the same thing as e2fsck. You are not using it in the same role, its purpose is much more specialized (disaster recovery), so the significance is different. Still; we came to use it during several of the many times high-speed SCSI chomped on our asses and corrupted data. We have backups, of course, but I wanted to see what the tool was capable of. In several cases it was able to successfully rebuild the filesystem, very slowly, with --rebuilddb, but in several other cases, the tool would dump core, which, if you were one of those fools without a backup, would leave you stranded.
Even in this, however, I was reassured; the maintainer of the tool answers emails quickly and was eager to try to troubleshoot the problem. I thus have no doubt that it will quickly mature into something quite good. It's just not there at this moment.
On the whole I would say I'm extremely happy with ReiserFS; we've punished it here pretty brutally and it's passed every test. I don't have any experience with ext3, but anecdotally I'm told it's less mature. Still, I have nothing against it. I can only comment that I hope Redhat's upgrade process from 7.1 to 7.2 will at least take reiserfs into account, instead of breaking the way it did from 7.0 to 7.1.
I can't believe they're gone.