Increasingly greedy and possesive corporatism or thorough and pervasive communications infrastructure that will make it impossible for the corporate entities and their political cronies to threaten individuals and control information distribution?
The article is great. I love the little blurb about Microsoft ramen noodles - you could just imagine -
The ramen noodles would not cook very evenly, it wouldn't taste that great, and would take much longer to cook than other ramen noodles.
They would be uniquely shaped and could be cooked mostly only in Intel brand pots.
To get people to buy more of it, they don't improve the ramen noodle, they just put in more noodles, more flavor packets, adding some with ingredients that no one would ever know about, and make the packaging prettier. Oh, you have to get bigger Intel Ramen Noodle Pots.
They would have launched their Microsoft Ramen Noodle 95, and claim they invented Ramen Noodles. Their marketing machine sets the machinery in action, selling millions of packages.
Eventually, to be more competitive, they sell just the noodles, and give away the seasoning packets, or better yet, pre-seasoning the noodles so that it can say the seasoning is part of the noodle, and cannot be separated from the noodle, because it will make the noodle inedible.
okay, so that was a bit of a stretch, I couldn't do justice to it, but I'm sure someone else could...
Well, non-volatile no-moving parts persistent data storage devices will get smaller and less power consuming as we move ahead, of course. But I think that if you absolutely want to have something like a book, and don't mind not having physical pages to flip through, then not having a reliable wireless connection, regardless of bandwidth size, would require some kind of memory. Entire books can be stored a couple of megs.
So, I thought that well, the hi-res LCD should be out soon. The memory's already there. Then there's Crusoe. So I think what I am asking for should be out by the end of this year, beginning of next. But then, the LCD's probably going to be expensive at that kind of resolution.
I think before that happens, we would develop nanomites that can selectively target the enemy, burrow into their body, and paralyze them or self-destruct. But the public outcry would probably be very loud, and there would probably be international treaties against it, but it will be developed.
Right, I understand that, now, because the overhead for interprocessor communication would defeat the purpose. But still, if you want to use beowulf, doesn't the application need to optimized for the cluster? Would distributed.net client take advantage of the beowulf cluster without modification, just by setting the threads?
So...can we say that they are the same, except parallel computing is used generally to categorize a system where the processors are connected with high-speed in real-time, and consequently, the processors are more homogeneous and the environment more controlled, where as distributed computing can be more lax on all of these requirements?
Well, can you actually tell me the difference between parallel and distributed computing? I mean, there IS a difference, right?
I think, the way I see it, distributed computing (in the sense of distributed.net and seti@home) is that the problem is easily broken up into repeating but unique parts. The kind of problems being solved using this architecture is not serial (wait, then it's parallel...isn't it?)
so what IS the difference? I'm pleading ignorance.
how come they don't make parallel computer versions of the distributed computing programs? Or do they? You know, like if they created a version of say, seti@home or distributed.net to run on a Beowulf cluster?
Come to think of it, if they can keep the data transmission routines close-sourced, with some validation routine to make sure that the results being generated from the portion of the program that does the calculation, then they could open-source the calculation part to be ported to parallel or clustered systems. I personally think it's better than running some fractal demo program...
Still, isn't a G3 or G4 Macintosh Beowulf cluster somewhat more expensive than an equivalently powered Intel-based Beowulf cluster?
This is one of the best uses. It's the first thing that came in my mind. Since most of the machinery is so cumbersome (hydraulic pumps, motors and belts and gears, etc.) the best thing would be to use some kind of material that would contract or push when applied with electricity.
Granted, artificial limbs would be a great application for this, but even better would be to enhance our own abilities, like the japanese mechs. We can either be encased within a sheath of the stuff, complete with high strength artificial exoskeleton, actuating the robot with our own movements, or we could (gasp!) actuate remotely.
We would create strands of this stuff, bundle them together into an artifical muscle which can then be wrapped with a material live Kevlar, which will protect it, and has some flexibility. We could then add tough armor outside of it to protect it from direct damage.
if we were not the peace-loving people that we are, we could create an army of these, send them over to any hostile area, and destroy the crap out of people, and never risk the life of a single American soldier (which the American public always gets all worked about).
Or, we could use it to build prostheses for veterans who may have lost their limbs in battles because they had to be there in person.
Someone use the Crusoe chip and the up and coming IBM hi-res 200dpi LCD technology (or any other hi-res portable display technology) to create truly readable portable and long lasting electronic books. The Slashdot group, more than any other, should have no problem reading electronic text over traditional ink-and-paper medium text.
Think about it, we are not even talking about multimedia stuff, which transmeta touted as a great application for teh crusoe chip. We are talking about only text, or maybe some sprinkling of pictures. The amount of memory consumed is very low if it's all just text. You can store dozens of books in flash memory if it's just text. You are talking no moving parts, even lower power consumption, etc.
As an added feature, you'd want to allow a pen to create annotations with. then you'd want to be able to synchronize with a desktop, I suppose.
Everything that led up to the situation between Taiwan and China is you described, more or less. But making decisions today based on how Taiwan was formed decades ago and ignoring what it is today is foolish. Granted, China is much more powerful today and is a force to be reckoned with. But just as the US had indirectly skirmished with the Soviet Union during the cold war era with countries like Afghanistan and the sort, the US will do the same with China vis-a-vis Taiwan. More importantly, Taiwan is an economic asset to the US and the world. China owes its current economic growth to Taiwan and Hong Kong. If we keep thinking of the country today in terms of the way it was formed, we would not be dealing with Germany, Italy, Japan or many of the other countries that we deal with today.
Slashdot Mirror
The article is great. I love the little blurb about Microsoft ramen noodles - you could just imagine -
okay, so that was a bit of a stretch, I couldn't do justice to it, but I'm sure someone else could...
Of course, they should probably investigate using Crusoe for one of these things.
So, I thought that well, the hi-res LCD should be out soon. The memory's already there. Then there's Crusoe. So I think what I am asking for should be out by the end of this year, beginning of next. But then, the LCD's probably going to be expensive at that kind of resolution.
I think before that happens, we would develop nanomites that can selectively target the enemy, burrow into their body, and paralyze them or self-destruct. But the public outcry would probably be very loud, and there would probably be international treaties against it, but it will be developed.
Right, I understand that, now, because the overhead for interprocessor communication would defeat the purpose. But still, if you want to use beowulf, doesn't the application need to optimized for the cluster? Would distributed.net client take advantage of the beowulf cluster without modification, just by setting the threads?
So...can we say that they are the same, except parallel computing is used generally to categorize a system where the processors are connected with high-speed in real-time, and consequently, the processors are more homogeneous and the environment more controlled, where as distributed computing can be more lax on all of these requirements?
I think, the way I see it, distributed computing (in the sense of distributed.net and seti@home) is that the problem is easily broken up into repeating but unique parts. The kind of problems being solved using this architecture is not serial (wait, then it's parallel...isn't it?)
so what IS the difference? I'm pleading ignorance.
Come to think of it, if they can keep the data transmission routines close-sourced, with some validation routine to make sure that the results being generated from the portion of the program that does the calculation, then they could open-source the calculation part to be ported to parallel or clustered systems. I personally think it's better than running some fractal demo program...
Still, isn't a G3 or G4 Macintosh Beowulf cluster somewhat more expensive than an equivalently powered Intel-based Beowulf cluster?
Granted, artificial limbs would be a great application for this, but even better would be to enhance our own abilities, like the japanese mechs. We can either be encased within a sheath of the stuff, complete with high strength artificial exoskeleton, actuating the robot with our own movements, or we could (gasp!) actuate remotely.
We would create strands of this stuff, bundle them together into an artifical muscle which can then be wrapped with a material live Kevlar, which will protect it, and has some flexibility. We could then add tough armor outside of it to protect it from direct damage.
if we were not the peace-loving people that we are, we could create an army of these, send them over to any hostile area, and destroy the crap out of people, and never risk the life of a single American soldier (which the American public always gets all worked about).
Or, we could use it to build prostheses for veterans who may have lost their limbs in battles because they had to be there in person.
Think about it, we are not even talking about multimedia stuff, which transmeta touted as a great application for teh crusoe chip. We are talking about only text, or maybe some sprinkling of pictures. The amount of memory consumed is very low if it's all just text. You can store dozens of books in flash memory if it's just text. You are talking no moving parts, even lower power consumption, etc.
As an added feature, you'd want to allow a pen to create annotations with. then you'd want to be able to synchronize with a desktop, I suppose.
Everything that led up to the situation between Taiwan and China is you described, more or less. But making decisions today based on how Taiwan was formed decades ago and ignoring what it is today is foolish. Granted, China is much more powerful today and is a force to be reckoned with. But just as the US had indirectly skirmished with the Soviet Union during the cold war era with countries like Afghanistan and the sort, the US will do the same with China vis-a-vis Taiwan. More importantly, Taiwan is an economic asset to the US and the world. China owes its current economic growth to Taiwan and Hong Kong. If we keep thinking of the country today in terms of the way it was formed, we would not be dealing with Germany, Italy, Japan or many of the other countries that we deal with today.