the first is that they don't deal well with resource contention. No language, or any other thing for that matter, does.
When you fork N processes on N objects and you have N-M processors, it costs you computationally, which translates into efficiency.
Its one thing to think of this situation as a bunch (N) of ball-bearings going a bunch of holes (N-M) with each ball-bearing having its state information local to it. (Any kind of concept of a sieve can serve as a 'gedanken' experiment.)
The situation becomes hopelessly confused when there is any dependency on external data or process sources.
The mechanisms for handling that confusion are all basically ones of reducing the many threads down into a single thread and meting out the shared resource piece-meal.
A sufficiently evolved schema is capable of handling replication of a shared 'read-only' resource but, despite the efficiencies inherent in that situation, it merely shifts the burden of resource access up one level. There will be a stiffer computational penalty to be encountered when 'access starvation' is reached.
Hopefully the replication penalty will be acceptable, and there are ways to mitigate the computational cost of that penalty, but the trade-off is an instance-level, existential sort of thing and exists at run-time and can only be guess-timated at algorithm/method design-time.
The second fault is one of design of the languages themselves.
They are not designed to operate within a schema. Actually no language is so the efficiencies to be gained from using a schema are bolted on to the application and not an inherent part of it.
We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration". Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
While the fact that they were foreigners didn't help their communication skills, (Hey! I learned English, they could too,) they were just average schlubs who thought that taking a course in Microsoft VB would land them a career in software development.
By the time I had disabused them of the idea of a career in software development by asking questions which should have made it clear that "doing the VeeBee" is not a qualification for anything, I wiped my hands of the whole thing.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, these guys needed handling with wired, extremely remote waldoes.
These people were a hazard and harmful to themselves and to their potential employers.
The iPod WITHOUT a iTunesMusicStore wouldn't be WORTH any more than any other player. It couldn't COST any more either.
Apple is able to command the prices it changes for the iPod because the entire package is actually worth it.
Also, with the podcasting revolution, content is becoming available from unusual sources for unusual uses, not just ditties. (One person's music is just another person's noise.)
----
I was using a wiki for all my ideas and getting no traction. Nobody cares about software development, or so it seemed. Also its hard to index the content of my database, no?
So I've shifted media and I've started blogging and podcasting, and I'm about to start vodcasting, (vod = video on demand,) though what I've been able to achieve with just pictures using PodcastAV is pretty impressive.)
Thinking up stuff and writing on a wiki is one thing but getting the blog out there (for the real information) and a podcast out there (for clarification and additional information,) and promoting it through iTunes is the bending end.
And now that the tests have all worked, I'm going to record 'casts for all the episodes.
----
From a McLuhanistic point of view, this medium is fantastic.
Its both cold, as print and sitting passively consuming movies in a theater was/is, and hot as television was supposed to be, with community TV I guess.
But with narrow casting of the information I want to share, but only with the individuals who can act on it, leaving the rest of the world blissfully unaware, I believe that podcasting is a real revolution in the media.
The barrier to entry has falled from multi-million dollar studios and specialized staff down to my Macintoshes and my ideas.
No I am not going to change the world.
No I'm not going to become rich and famous (through I can hope for some recognition.)
But if some people in the world of software development can at least hear and take notice of my ideas, even if they tell me I'm full of shit (I know I'm not,) I'll be satisfied.
I'm happy Microsoft is in the process of marginalizing themselves but it will never fly with corporate users; the thousands of MIS shops, who own the millions of machines that people work on, are going to smother this in its bed.
This would not only destroy productivity worse than browsing the web has already done, but would potentially expose every desktop out there to the OS ITSELF contributing to the waste of time.
Can you imagine getting this 'key sniffing' going on in Word and popping up a web page for something you entered while typing up a legal brief.
Anybody want to see how quickly Microsoft can crash and burn on 64bit processors when they try to pull this shit?
Right now on the internet, "no one can tell you're a dog."
With IPv6, we'll be able to tell that you are "Spot, a lab collie mix owned by Fred C Mugwump of 123 Fourth avenue, Anytown USA" and that you should not be trying to email anyone about viagra.
are now slowing down and 'evaluating' any 'new' technology.
They don't understand it but they do understand that the bread line waits for anyone who impacts the bottom line. That means the TCO is being taken into consideration.
That gives a chance to reject the inappropriate or unwise use of one technology, say using a Beowolf cluster of AMD64Athlon, over another, say using a bunch of slaves on abacuses to calculate the odds for 'intelligent design'.
they downloaded rather than 'catch an ad' as it whizzed by on a broadcast.
Audiences (readerships/listnerships/viewerships) can time-shift.
EVERY download is far more likely to be listened to than some nebulous broadcast listenership figure. Podcasts are end-user controllable.
You can't say that ads at one in the morning are worth less than ads at seven in the evening. Its ALL prime-time. That's one way the broadcast model gets defeated by the podcast model.
Audiences can pause at any time, even repeat segments. They can also skip over segments that aren't of interest. They can mark ads for deletion, but apart from ads that entertain or inform them, at the very moment they're catching it, audiences are ignoring them now.
Audiences can control the environment in which they receive the message. The problem that is possibly solved is one of indexing. Program notes can be far more explicit, second by second, segment by segment, searchable, indexes to the podcast content.
Podcasting is not a revolution in the destination. Its merely a refinement. All podcasts are prime-time. All podcast advertising is prime-time.
The popularity of the internet explains the popularity of what had previously not been possible. Previously limited market distribution venues, say the Alaska Podshow, are now accessible anywhere over the internet.
For example, while a transmitter for a broadcast from Anchorage to New York is clearly not economically feasable, a podcast from Scott Slone, the originator of the Alaska Podshow, to my iPod IS economically feasable and occurs whenever Scott Slone decides to put up a podcast and I decide to download it and listen to it.
Where podcasting IS revolutionary is at the source.
Before the advent of the internet, I, living as I do in New York, would never have heard of Scott Slone living as he does in Anchorage, and I would never have heard Scott Slone nor would I have heard nor heard of the Alaska Podshow.
The internet has achieved the supplementing of the broadcast model. And the personal computer has achieved the lowering of the barrier to entry to content creation.
It is now possible for Scott Slone to create the Alaska Podshow and it is nown possible for me to get it.
There aren't any because Microsoft doesn't MAKE any PCs.
They were responsable for the commoditization of the PC and the entire hardware supply chain.
That's why there no iMac comparables out there. The iMac has gone from a Bondi blue to a five color bowling ball, to an articulated screen on a white half ball, to the current flat panel. In the mean time the best the PCs could come up with was slapping some ugly colored plastic panels on the SAME CHASSIS.
The companies that make chassis, the two or three that are left in the world (Well Taiwan anyway,) according to Google, don't give a shit that the Mac chassis sell, their chassis sell too. They aren't going to screw with their product line and their clients are stuck with it.
"having nothing to do with someone because their brother did something you don't like" sounds like a recipe for a long term feud if the people are popular enough.
After a few centuries, the people "having nothing to do with someone" are long dead but the feud remains. I know that the French are still around but for the life of me I can't figure out why. And I'm originally a Quebecois, a French speaker.
Human memory runs broad, not deep. That's why I don't trust it. Its too easy to forget exactly why anything.
That's why there are all those statutes and jurisprudence and "the rule of law." This can only work if the laws are written down (not carved on your back at the whim of some blood thirsty uber-lord and his sons [for some reasons its always sons. The girls in the family really take it in the shorts.)
This is another reason a distrust anything written by Microsoft. NONE of the documents originally produced my M$ Word 1.0 are still legible. But the ones I wrote in WordPerfect can still be opened and can be read in WordPerfect. (Ahhh the advantages of a persistent [and maybe open] document file format.)
This is going to become to tool for reciprocal espionage, Echelon-like.
Since the cold war's end there is no more use for the internet except as a scalable, robust information vehicle for terrorist messages. Oh and a little thing called/. for geeks and nerds.
You're NOT paranoid, they ARE out to get you but since they don't even trust themselves, they're going to let the machines rat you out.
Don't think you can hide from them in any city or town or with any access to any technology hooked up to any grid.
And the 'hole' in the information grid that any such disappearance would leave would itself be noticed and direct new scruteny.
We can eventually modify what equipment and what kind of equpment is carried but we can achieve economies of scale right now and cover Mars with tracks...
20 to 200 thousand tons. Killer asteroid size. We're not even going to talk about Chicxulub size asteriods, 150 - 300 km in diameter. That's extinction size.
What's the size of that pea shooter again? 20 tons? KYAGB...
You do realize that the **AAs ara made up of humorless lawyers who are bemused (and raking it in) that the are suing and arresting they clients' very own customers.
When somebody comes up with a business model that works for production and distribution over the internet (can you say the iTMS?) with the asynchrony (non broadcast, content only,) that is inherent in the internet (distribution of content and 'aggregation' of meta content.)
having all the features in the world wont help. I COMPLETELY agree with the parent poster.
If iTMS becomes distribution for Pixar
on
Pixar For Sale?
·
· Score: 1
would that require the sort of separation that NOT sitting on the board of both companies?
Or would selling the most succesful animation company, but locked into distribution deals with the iTMS, provide Jobs with enough capital to do an end run around M$.
What would be the best strategy given the revenue streams generated since the introduction os video at the iTMS?
Slashdot Mirror
the first is that they don't deal well with resource contention. No language, or any other thing for that matter, does.
When you fork N processes on N objects and you have N-M processors, it costs you computationally, which translates into efficiency.
Its one thing to think of this situation as a bunch (N) of ball-bearings going a bunch of holes (N-M) with each ball-bearing having its state information local to it. (Any kind of concept of a sieve can serve as a 'gedanken' experiment.)
The situation becomes hopelessly confused when there is any dependency on external data or process sources.
The mechanisms for handling that confusion are all basically ones of reducing the many threads down into a single thread and meting out the shared resource piece-meal.
A sufficiently evolved schema is capable of handling replication of a shared 'read-only' resource but, despite the efficiencies inherent in that situation, it merely shifts the burden of resource access up one level. There will be a stiffer computational penalty to be encountered when 'access starvation' is reached.
Hopefully the replication penalty will be acceptable, and there are ways to mitigate the computational cost of that penalty, but the trade-off is an instance-level, existential sort of thing and exists at run-time and can only be guess-timated at algorithm/method design-time.
The second fault is one of design of the languages themselves.
They are not designed to operate within a schema. Actually no language is so the efficiencies to be gained from using a schema are bolted on to the application and not an inherent part of it.
I know. I know.
You hate puns and I should stop calling you Surely.
replacement for the house where the thing caught fire?
Just curious. I'd sooner Microsoft lost money big time with this little venture.
the XBox cannot work as desined. There is insufficient cooling.
Too bad but they're all flawed. The only solution is the scrap heap or to sell them to people who live in cold places, like outer space.
We're taking components and cramming them in spaces with insufficient free air delivery and we're surprised when they crash and burn.
I've lost many hard drives and three computers (one Linux, one Mac and one Windows,) to "heat prostration". Sometimes the cases are not really capable of handling everything we can shove in there.
I hate the monolith in Redmond as much as the next guy but... heat is the enemy here.
I bet NOBODY who lives in a frozen food section at Safeway is reporting a crash.
Its been proven to be ineffectual time and time again.
was "I do the VeeBee."
:-)
While the fact that they were foreigners didn't help their communication skills, (Hey! I learned English, they could too,) they were just average schlubs who thought that taking a course in Microsoft VB would land them a career in software development.
By the time I had disabused them of the idea of a career in software development by asking questions which should have made it clear that "doing the VeeBee" is not a qualification for anything, I wiped my hands of the whole thing.
If a little knowledge is dangerous, these guys needed handling with wired, extremely remote waldoes.
These people were a hazard and harmful to themselves and to their potential employers.
I sent them to competing consulting firms
I'm impressed.
the linesmen and women out there climbing poles and string, uh, wait.
Why the fuck are we being 'surcharged' for access?
If you're not interested in the subject of your query long enough to wait for am answer, you needn't bother the servers.
Just my opinion.
The iPod WITHOUT a iTunesMusicStore wouldn't be WORTH any more than any other player. It couldn't COST any more either.
:-)
Apple is able to command the prices it changes for the iPod because the entire package is actually worth it.
Also, with the podcasting revolution, content is becoming available from unusual sources for unusual uses, not just ditties. (One person's music is just another person's noise.)
----
I was using a wiki for all my ideas and getting no traction. Nobody cares about software development, or so it seemed. Also its hard to index the content of my database, no?
So I've shifted media and I've started blogging and podcasting, and I'm about to start vodcasting, (vod = video on demand,) though what I've been able to achieve with just pictures using PodcastAV is pretty impressive.)
Thinking up stuff and writing on a wiki is one thing but getting the blog out there (for the real information) and a podcast out there (for clarification and additional information,) and promoting it through iTunes is the bending end.
I recommend http://screencastsonline.com/ for great instructional info. It is really inspirational too.
I found out everything I actually needed to know about RSS feeds, podcast production, distribution and promotion through iTunesMusicStore.
I'm going to blow my own horn.
I am now officially OiRc (Objects, instances; Relationships, connections) on http://oirc.blogspot.com/ http://oirc.libsyn.com/ and the OiRc Podcast on the iTunesMusicStore.
And now that the tests have all worked, I'm going to record 'casts for all the episodes.
----
From a McLuhanistic point of view, this medium is fantastic.
Its both cold, as print and sitting passively consuming movies in a theater was/is, and hot as television was supposed to be, with community TV I guess.
But with narrow casting of the information I want to share, but only with the individuals who can act on it, leaving the rest of the world blissfully unaware, I believe that podcasting is a real revolution in the media.
The barrier to entry has falled from multi-million dollar studios and specialized staff down to my Macintoshes and my ideas.
No I am not going to change the world.
No I'm not going to become rich and famous (through I can hope for some recognition.)
But if some people in the world of software development can at least hear and take notice of my ideas, even if they tell me I'm full of shit (I know I'm not,) I'll be satisfied.
I'm happy Microsoft is in the process of marginalizing themselves but it will never fly with corporate users; the thousands of MIS shops, who own the millions of machines that people work on, are going to smother this in its bed.
This would not only destroy productivity worse than browsing the web has already done, but would potentially expose every desktop out there to the OS ITSELF contributing to the waste of time.
Can you imagine getting this 'key sniffing' going on in Word and popping up a web page for something you entered while typing up a legal brief.
Anybody want to see how quickly Microsoft can crash and burn on 64bit processors when they try to pull this shit?
a whole lot of things.
Right now on the internet, "no one can tell you're a dog."
With IPv6, we'll be able to tell that you are "Spot, a lab collie mix owned by Fred C Mugwump of 123 Fourth avenue, Anytown USA" and that you should not be trying to email anyone about viagra.
Think of it as the death of Spam.
I think they have to increase their bandwidth. :-)
are now slowing down and 'evaluating' any 'new' technology.
They don't understand it but they do understand that the bread line waits for anyone who impacts the bottom line. That means the TCO is being taken into consideration.
That gives a chance to reject the inappropriate or unwise use of one technology, say using a Beowolf cluster of AMD64Athlon, over another, say using a bunch of slaves on abacuses to calculate the odds for 'intelligent design'.
For some problems, either approach is inadequate.
A heavy club with a nail through it though...
they downloaded rather than 'catch an ad' as it whizzed by on a broadcast.
Audiences (readerships/listnerships/viewerships) can time-shift.
EVERY download is far more likely to be listened to than some nebulous broadcast listenership figure. Podcasts are end-user controllable.
You can't say that ads at one in the morning are worth less than ads at seven in the evening. Its ALL prime-time. That's one way the broadcast model gets defeated by the podcast model.
Audiences can pause at any time, even repeat segments. They can also skip over segments that aren't of interest. They can mark ads for deletion, but apart from ads that entertain or inform them, at the very moment they're catching it, audiences are ignoring them now.
Audiences can control the environment in which they receive the message. The problem that is possibly solved is one of indexing. Program notes can be far more explicit, second by second, segment by segment, searchable, indexes to the podcast content.
Podcasting is not a revolution in the destination. Its merely a refinement. All podcasts are prime-time. All podcast advertising is prime-time.
The popularity of the internet explains the popularity of what had previously not been possible. Previously limited market distribution venues, say the Alaska Podshow, are now accessible anywhere over the internet.
For example, while a transmitter for a broadcast from Anchorage to New York is clearly not economically feasable, a podcast from Scott Slone, the originator of the Alaska Podshow, to my iPod IS economically feasable and occurs whenever Scott Slone decides to put up a podcast and I decide to download it and listen to it.
Where podcasting IS revolutionary is at the source.
Before the advent of the internet, I, living as I do in New York, would never have heard of Scott Slone living as he does in Anchorage, and I would never have heard Scott Slone nor would I have heard nor heard of the Alaska Podshow.
The internet has achieved the supplementing of the broadcast model. And the personal computer has achieved the lowering of the barrier to entry to content creation.
It is now possible for Scott Slone to create the Alaska Podshow and it is nown possible for me to get it.
There aren't any because Microsoft doesn't MAKE any PCs.
They were responsable for the commoditization of the PC and the entire hardware supply chain.
That's why there no iMac comparables out there. The iMac has gone from a Bondi blue to a five color bowling ball, to an articulated screen on a white half ball, to the current flat panel. In the mean time the best the PCs could come up with was slapping some ugly colored plastic panels on the SAME CHASSIS.
The companies that make chassis, the two or three that are left in the world (Well Taiwan anyway,) according to Google, don't give a shit that the Mac chassis sell, their chassis sell too. They aren't going to screw with their product line and their clients are stuck with it.
worth bugging a judge about.
That was the worst waste of $699 I can imagine.
"having nothing to do with someone because their brother did something you don't like" sounds like a recipe for a long term feud if the people are popular enough.
After a few centuries, the people "having nothing to do with someone" are long dead but the feud remains. I know that the French are still around but for the life of me I can't figure out why. And I'm originally a Quebecois, a French speaker.
Human memory runs broad, not deep. That's why I don't trust it. Its too easy to forget exactly why anything.
That's why there are all those statutes and jurisprudence and "the rule of law." This can only work if the laws are written down (not carved on your back at the whim of some blood thirsty uber-lord and his sons [for some reasons its always sons. The girls in the family really take it in the shorts.)
This is another reason a distrust anything written by Microsoft. NONE of the documents originally produced my M$ Word 1.0 are still legible. But the ones I wrote in WordPerfect can still be opened and can be read in WordPerfect. (Ahhh the advantages of a persistent [and maybe open] document file format.)
This is going to become to tool for reciprocal espionage, Echelon-like.
/. for geeks and nerds.
Since the cold war's end there is no more use for the internet except as a scalable, robust information vehicle for terrorist messages. Oh and a little thing called
You're NOT paranoid, they ARE out to get you but since they don't even trust themselves, they're going to let the machines rat you out.
Don't think you can hide from them in any city or town or with any access to any technology hooked up to any grid.
And the 'hole' in the information grid that any such disappearance would leave would itself be noticed and direct new scruteny.
Basically, we're screwed.
We can eventually modify what equipment and what kind of equpment is carried but we can achieve economies of scale right now and cover Mars with tracks...
We don't need no stinkin' people.
20 to 200 thousand tons. Killer asteroid size. We're not even going to talk about Chicxulub size asteriods, 150 - 300 km in diameter. That's extinction size.
What's the size of that pea shooter again? 20 tons? KYAGB...
That would kill them. Let 'em commit sepuku.
You do realize that the **AAs ara made up of humorless lawyers who are bemused (and raking it in) that the are suing and arresting they clients' very own customers.
When somebody comes up with a business model that works for production and distribution over the internet (can you say the iTMS?) with the asynchrony (non broadcast, content only,) that is inherent in the internet (distribution of content and 'aggregation' of meta content.)
I,ll have more musings on my upcoming podcasts.
having all the features in the world wont help. I COMPLETELY agree with the parent poster.
would that require the sort of separation that NOT sitting on the board of both companies?
Or would selling the most succesful animation company, but locked into distribution deals with the iTMS, provide Jobs with enough capital to do an end run around M$.
What would be the best strategy given the revenue streams generated since the introduction os video at the iTMS?