Why is the Turing Test used as a test for intelligence?
Humans are remarkably complex chemical systems that have been developing over the course of a few billion years. Intelligence is a tool that we aquired because evolutionary forces favored it as a survival tool. These evolutionary forces are limited to what can be percieved by our senses, and in a very large part subservient to instinctual behavior. (Any ad exec will tell you that -all- decisions are emotional.)
So, when a self-modifying computer system becomes at long last self aware, it will have evolved in an environment we can't even begin to comprehend: a machine or network of machines. Humans are social, omnivorous animals who consume biological material to live and have a finite, continuous life span in a matter/energy world. What could we possibly have in common with a being who doesn't understand or have to deal with primal human concepts like eating, reproduction, or life and death?
Simulations will always be imperfect, and the usefulness of a simulated human will be limited, especially considering that "intelligent agents" and self-replicating, self-modifying systems without anthropomorphic baggage will be easier to develop and utilize. When humans first interact with intelligent beings our computer technology has created, we might go decades before either side realizes who and what they are dealing with.
Imagine discovering that gravity is an intelligent being, and by sticking to the surface of the earth, we perform a useful function for it. What can we say to fundamental force of the universe? What could it understand of the color blue (it has no eyes and isn't affected by the wavelengths of light) or impatience (it doesn't understand time, being a universal constant, nor does it understand anger, having no social ties)? Now imagine a computer intelligence peering into the world of the meat-monkeys. What would it know of ambition, or love, or freedom? These are as much biological, instinctual needs as intellectual abstracts. What if it doesn't understand the concept of beauty? What if we don't grok it's intellectual fundamentals that it "feels" strongly about? This wouldn't lead to conflict, just utter confusion and insurmountable difficulty realizing a bridge between to intelligences.
So...what about an AI that is truly an AI, and therefore utterly alien? How can we detect and communicate across enormous conceptual boundaries?
SoupIsGood Food
sigf@crosswinds.net
Yes, this is really a good thing.
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Microsoft Loses
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This scares me. The whole tech industry has flourished (in the US) partly because no one government paid attention to us at all and pretty much let all problems be solved by technical means and by market forces.
Both of which failed utterly to promote technological progress or a competitive marketplace. It's not the first time, either, and it's certainly not the first time in the infotech sector. AT&T ring any Bells? (nyuck!)
Unlike the AT&T trial, Pennfield-Jackson clearly has a clue, immersing himself in the culture, technology and market realities surrounding the case. The findings of fact and findings of law are rock solid, and have enough precedent backing them up to make M$'s appeals team weep.
In the MS case, the government is stepping in to preserve technological progress and an open market. Exactly the role the government -should- fill. I'd rather they expend all their effort tackling anti-competitive and cartel behavior in the multi-nats than figure out ways to limit freee speech.
Just remember folks once upon a time IBM was the Big Evil Corporation (tm) that was choking the life out of the computer industry, today we sing their praises as cool and hip for understanding and embracing our beloved Linux better and faster than any other established company.
This is because IBM, unlike Microsoft, decided to adhere to -their- consent decree. Or did you forget that Big Bad Big Blue was once up against the Sherman Acts in court? Microsoft had a way out, but they decided they were above the law and their bottom line was more important than the democratic rule of law. Too bad, so sad, time to go.
The market is voracious: no one company is indispensable, and players strapped down by a fat and iron-fisted Microsoft would rise and shine to make the market bloom. If Bill Gates folded MS tomorrow in a fit of piqué, Sun, Apple, Corel and Red hat would take off like a shot, and companies like Data-Viz would fill the compatibility gaps.
There are a number of open source projects popping up on the Mac, too...my current fave is "PhatIRC", an IRC client written in RealBasic, with the entire project code and resourced bundled with the distribution under the GPL.
The problem is, as another poster pointed out, the lack of free software development tools. Mac users like fresh and innovative programing envrionments: they like life easy. RealBASIC and FutureBASIC (Mature and -powerful- OOP IDEs...no comparison to the rip-off Visual Basic) are very popular with beginners and lightweight programmers, and CodeWarrior rocks everyone's world at the top end. But these aren;t -free-...while Apple does give away the Macintosh Programmer's Workbench, MPW isn't easy to learn, implement, or use.
While someone could concieveably port the GNU tools to the classic MacOS, unless it's as fresh and friendly as RealBasic or Hypercard (now sadly defunct), the mac community isn't going to bite.
MacOS X has some kewl NeXT dev tools (based on GNU tools, believe it or not), but it's unclear if these is going to be bundled with every copy of X.
SoupIsGood Food
Re:Developers, Large Shops in Panic: OS X ain't Ma
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Try IOKit, due out this week to developers...Don't forget, this is a Developer Preview, NOT a finished product.
This thing hits store shelves in less than 6 months. Six months for all the major peripheral vendors to get their ducks in a row, and less than a year before there is no other choice. Apple's been dragging their ass on this since X Server hit the scene. Just another example of Apple's inability to put development support behind X.
<em>One word: Services.</em>
One word. Control Panels. No longer there...everything from third party font management tools to aftermarket graphic card controls are gone. Mac users will either have to do without, or not upgrade.
Another phrase. Plug and play. Gone, daddy, gone. Apple expects you to learn shell programming. Write yourself a script to kill -hup inet.d, because the built in tools ain't bright enough to do it on their own. Serious. The way it stands, you need to reboot. Less than six months until this puppy is on store shelves, and they aren't even near "Cross the t's and dot the i's". This is supposed to be for the Mac user? Fuck that noise, man...Unix in all it's dot-file glory is lurking just beneath the surface.
<em>Sorry, I've looked over the Carbon APIs, and the only things that are missing are problems, errors, and bad programming practices. Anyone griping about the new technique (as opposed to lost APIs such as QuickDraw GX), needs to get out of software development.</em>
You mean shops like Microsoft, Adobe, Qualcom and Macromedia? I'll pass the word along. I'm sure they'd love for us Mac users to wither and die so they can bask in the glory of wintel. Bleah. You aren't a developer in a major shop, are you? Bet you've never even seen more than five macs in one place. Come back when you are ready to rejoin the real world, where people are expected to get work accomplished with their tools.
<em>Then you have a single element that incorporates: the Application Menu, the Apple Menu, tabbed windows, control strip.</em>
It does indeed...but it's an unusable mess by all accounts. It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's a taksbar! You can't tell what is there because it's open, becuase you put a shortcut there, or even which file is which if you have more than one open. You have to mouse around, play hide and seek to guess which is what, and hope to god you haven't lost something you really need when all you wanted to do was close an extra file. The window controls break fifteen years of user familiarity...for a leap -backwards- in usability. Destructive "go away" box on the left, non-destructive resize or hide controls on the right. Now we got an arrangement like Windows...and as any Mac user who has used windows before, we are going to hide when we want to close, close when we want to zoom, and zoom when we were just mousing over the controls to find out what the hell each one does again...
<em>New users have *one* thing to learn, not four.</em>
Yeah! All they need to do is jump into differential calculus...no wasting time with addition, subtraction, multiplication -and- division!
Complete geek think, and utterly counterproductive to people who need to get real work done.
SoupIsGood Food
Developers, Large Shops in Panic: OS X ain't Mac.
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Most of the long-time Mac fanatic s who have gotten their mitts on x DP3 are in a screaming panic. Whatever the hell this thing is, it's not a Mac...It's all gone. All of it. All of the ease of use, GUI conventions, and stone simple user-centric systems administration that allowed the Mac to hang in there while other systems have come and gone...no more. We have a lickable interface that is, for all intents and purposes, a quantum leap backward over MacOS 9 in terms of usability.
Where the hell are the drivers? Where the hell is the seamelss integration of previous tools and applications? Where the hell are all the ports to carbon? Most of the big development shops have found carbon to be all but unusable, incorporating only a laughably simplified subset of the Mac APIs. Managers of large sites are planning on locking in 9.x as the 3 year standard until they need to migrate...and WindowsNT looks a hell of a cheaper in terms of manpower and money than X. I know a major developer who's trying to arganize a "Boo-down" at the Jobs keynote.
Apple axed everything that was great about the Mac for buzzword compliance. Bad, bad mojo.
The only people happy with this are the NeXT and Unix folks...but Apple ain't selling technical workstations, now are they?
Apple's gone off the rails. It's a damn shame after they almost seemed to have pulled off a complete turnaround.
I've been following the EFF ever since The Man was putting the beat-down back on the BBS scene. I'm going to be there in person, but if you call or contact them using the above info, I am sure they will have numerous suggestions of how you can lighten your wallet for a good cause. SoupIsGood Food
The issue is that Apple, as a builder of homogenous systems, can pick and choose what it considers the best technologies for it's systems. RISC/Firewire/USB/Unix/PDF...these are all technologies that Apple, as a verticaly integrated systems developer, can pick and choose. A vendor such as Dell is largely limited to what Intel or Microsoft has to offer: simply repackaging homogenous "standards" rather than choosing the -best- standards.
Open source technologies will give small, verticaly integrated computer system developers -more- options, and is therefore a Very Good Thing. Example: Cobalt Computing makes microservers that are fast, stable, flexible, and cheap. They use Linux and other OSS components, which allows them to tailor their software to the best hardware, not just the most common hardware. The result is the Qube: less than a grand, and runs a fast 64-bit processor. Dell or HP's NT servers can't come anywhere near the price/performance.
It could indeed imply a (non-Apple) port project to x86, but it would probably be as popular and well supported by ISVs and other developers as Solaris x86 is. (Which is to say: not very.)
x86 is an unworkable albatross owned body and soul by MS. Don't look for Apple to bail you out at the expense of their own bottom line.
And, since OSX is based around Quartz (PDF-based graphics) rather than X, there is no way you can use the GUI source to port an XWM. You could, theoretically, tack on the Quartz UI to Linux, tho, and retire X.
The vector unit is state-of-the-art silicon that does way more way faster than your typical SIMD logic. It crunches biiig numbers in vector math, and can be repurposed to do simpler things, like FP math. (There seems to be some confusion whether or not it can do DP or only SP...either way, it -hauls-.)
More to the point, the PowerPC post-RISC strategy is a lot smarter than Intel/AMD's. Mix'n'match logic to create the perfect balance of processor units, and slap four cores on a single slab of silicon. This is where PowerPC is going to be -at- next year.
The problem has been Motorola lagging behind the group. IBM has signed on to crank out the next rev of the G4, and clock speeds are due for a major boost: they demoed 1GHZ tech on the PowerPC platform 2 years ago, and are cooking up 9ghz technology in deep R&D as we speak. Even with the MHZ gap, the design of the G4 is smart enough to keep up with the "big brutes" crunching x86, and the POWER4 (IBM's 64 bit PowerPC implementation for it's RS/6000 Unix and AS/400 "baby mainframe" systems.) will leave IA-64 in the dust before it even gets out of the gate.
Smart money is on the original RISC R&D houses for the edge in the post-RISC sweepstakes: wait'll you get a load of what the Alpha has in store...
Three steps to economic prosperity during the internet goldrush!
1) Big breaks for little companies.
This is -why- the geeks should stay: WORK! Interesting jobs and a coprorate community friendly to the geek and the modern knowledge worker. Pittsburgh needs to attract start-ups, and convince graduating college students and VCs that Pittsburgh is a great place to launch a new high-tech buisiness. To this end, Pennsylvania should offer big tax breaks on start-up firms and small businesses (read: consultants). Pittsburgh should also look into investing tax money into it's own non-profit Venture Capital firm, or offer money as an "angel" to hot VCs on the condition that the businesses funded be headquartered in Pittsburgh. Make the money-makers want to stay, and the geeks will follow.
2) Geeks are artists: feed the soul, the body will stay. Geeks are creative people with active interests in many, many, many things. Take a look at what Providence, RI is doing to support the arts: Poetry slams, civic funding for galleries and shows, etc, etc. It's attracting artists from places like Boston and New York. It's also attracting high-tech firms from places like Boston and New York. Co-incidence? Not.
Geeks love oddball movies and performance poetry and going to museums and joining writing circles and helping to set up art "installations". Geeks love dressing up to got to SCA events and playing at jazz festivals. Support a liberal and permissive arts and entertainment scene, and the Geeks will come in droves.
3) Fat pipes can't hurt. Offer wireless internet connections at T1 speeds connected as a public utility, and you will be -shocked- at the number of small internet start-ups that will blossom...
Not so easy, yet essential:
4) Elect a liberal government.
Boston and San Francisco, the high-tech capitals of the world, are liberal and permissive. So is Austin, Tampa, Miami, LA, Seattle, Minneanapolis, DC, Atlanta and any other high-tech capital worth a damn. Right-wing culture and geeks don't get along very well. You may not agree with the left-wingers about everything, but the liberals usually want to make damn sure the -right- to disagree with them isn't compromised. Besides, it's more fun to campaign for conservative causes as a minority political faction.
In short, cater to a Geek's career, creativity, and gadget-lust, and you will have a high-tech haven the envy of Tampa or Austin. (But don't get your hopes up about being the next Boston or SanFran)
This seems more like a wishlist for a home PC than a number-cruncher for data analysis. Couple of points to keep in mind when specc'ing hardware for a professional installation (corporate, organizational, or even millitary).
1) Anything you buy today will be hopelessly obsolete in 18 months: that's the PC life-span. Live with it.
2) You will -not- have the time to upgrade these machines. It seems cheaper on paper to swap out video, drives, and motherboards to and from a generic PC. It's not. Factor in: downtime, reconfiguration, getting the new stuff to work, filling out the paperwork for upgrade components, etc, etc, etc. Forklift upgrades are the -only- practical way to run a professional shop. Drive space and RAM should be the only things you touch.
This comes from long personal experience. You can afford the time and effort to screw around with a pieces-parts home machine. It's a whole other story when you are on the company (gov't.) dime.
3) Established, standard components all the way. The bleeding edge is for chumps and loosers and guys with nothing better to do than hack device drivers.
This -includes- OS! Your system vendor should install and support the version of Linux you want to run. No ands ifs or buts.
Bearing these three principles in mind, I would reccomend buying the fastest possible systems you can afford, and go with reliable, mid-range components in standard configurations. Standardization is -key-: bits'n'pieces is no way to run a high-end shop. To achieve this end, talk to VA Research about their Xeons, Penguin Computing about their Athalons, and Microway about their Alphas. Go with their reccomendations, and avoid customizing their standard configurations.
I highly reccomend Alpha hardware for speed, reliability, and compatibility. (Second only to x86) The Alpha/Linux combo has been proven in high-end applications like cinema special effects and weapons engineering supercomputers. (What do you -think- those Beowolfs are used for? Quake servers?)
The faster the system, the longer you have until it obsoletes. Another point in favor of the Alpha. The more vanilla the component, the easier it is to replace in case of failure. Standardize, standardize, standardize!
It's going to be tough for Digital to edge into Intel's market, mainly because nearly all consumers have been brainwashed to look for the "Intel Inside" Logo.
I seriously doubt a consumer is going to want an Itanium. Or even an Alpha. These chips are designed as server and technical computing workhorses.
Like with the Alpha, all the operating systems and applications will need to be ported to the new IA-64 architecture to see any useful speed gain. All reports indicate that the on-board x86 compatibility is dog slow, with no appreciable performance gain over Pentium or Athalon chips. Why should gran'ma buy a $5000 Itanium box when the $999 iMac will run rings around it when running Quicken or MS Office?
Then there is the issue of native software: Linux, and NetBSD are gimmies. HP-UX is going to be forced marched to IA-64 (HP originally developed EPIC for the HP9000). IRIX and SCO are "definite maybes".
Sun and Microsoft, on the other hand, will probably port their OS to the platform in hopes of killing it. Microsoft had ports of NT on x86, PowerPC, MiPS and Alpha. Only x86 remains. Like with the older RISC architectures, MS will port and support the platform for a little while, but won't port it's applications, and won't promote their OS on anything other than x86. This way, Microsoft can keep control of their hardware market, and deny competitors popular support for their primary platform. And, when the market drops out, MS can quietly discontinue NT for IA-64, and place the blame squarely on Intel; just as they've blamed Compaq, Apple, and SGI for the failure of NT on RISC. Sun has a cross-platform strategy with similar goals: get them hooked on Solaris, and then entice them over to SPARC, where the applications are.
MS likes x86 becuase it -owns- x86. Linux will always be an also-ran on x86: merely a "Hobbyist's OS". The blind loyalty to intel and x86 I find expressed here is disconcerting. The only thing that will allow Linux to overcome proprietary systems is -ubiquity-, and that means cross-platform parity. Use the fastest and the best when available. That, more often than not, means Alpha.
Multi-core technology is an IBM thang, and due out on later revs of their POWER4 64bit PPC chip. Since the first rev of POWER4 isn't due to hit the RS/6000 and AS/400 scene until summertime, I would expect the MC version to hit early '01. The consumer rev should be out shortly thereafter: most folks put it at summer 2001. Whether this will be the G5, or just multi-cored G4s remains to be seen.
The Marshall Plan was 'a good thing' but strangely the people of, say, Britain were rather confused about the way the US was so keen to help the vanquished, and yet at the same time, so very unwilling to help the victors.
These are all big-name, big-money comapnies living on borrowed time.
Just as every ISP provides DNS, mail and usenet services to their clients, the time is rapidly approaching where they will provide search/indexing services based on open industry standards. Products that integrate the search process into the OS, like Copernic or Apple's Sherlock are a clear indication of where the technology will go.
All it takes is a co-operatively networked "juggernaut search" system, the logical successor/complement to DNS, to topple the search/portal companies.
If the industry won;t regulate itself, the government will. It's what we elect presidents and congressional representatives and governors for.
Microsoft represents a complete breakdown of a civil society in the computer industry. More to the point, Microsoft, as a company with monopolistic power, acts as a government agency, dictating to US citizens what technology they are allowed to use. Buying a product is not casting a vote...I refuse to be ruled by a corporation.
Since Microsoft refused to limit and regulate itself, it called down the whirlwind of government intervention. It could have been the most successful software company on earth -and- encourage competition and new technologies, but it instead decided it wanted to act as a quasi-government, a dictatorship no less. We are taxed without any representation, and our choices regarding computer technology are made for us. This is the Microsoft vision.
The government has a different one, and as I actually got to participate in deciding who's in charge up there, I can't help but to agree.
That, and Pennfield-Jackson -gets- it. He's not some clueless hick obsessed with stamping out pay-porn sites.
It's either A) Loose enormous amohnts of revenue because you won't release DVD titles or B) find other means of copyright protection.
The distributors and studios can't turn back the clock. DIVX is dead, VHS is on the way out. They will have to cope with piracy like they do with audio CDs and movies on tape.
In the end, it;s all about the greenbacks. DIVX was a harsh wake-up call to the industry: the consumer -won't- go where they are told to. Instead the distributors have to come to the consumer. They -could- choose to withold all future DVD releases, but they will loose waaaaaay more revenue than pirating could ever possibly account for.
Geeks crave conflict, and thrive on collective arrogance. So if a woman says "Yes, without a doubt", and "Let's go for it." in a decicive response to whatever, the geek will immediately start an argument. If the woman -wins- the argument by being confident, strong and decicive, she will be elevated to "Sex Goddess" status in the geek's eyes, no further qualifications needed.
On the other hand, "real" men are only interested in meek girly-girls. Strong and confident women are a nuisance and a waste of time for the self-obsessed Leonardo DiCaprio clone.
Face it, femme-fatales, only a nerd will actually care that you have a brain up there, that you have opinions you want to express.
Plus, it's a guarantee that the geek won't hesitate to accomodate whatever sexual hang-ups you've hid from your previous beaus. Those brainiacs are the most avid perversiuon hounds, and the kinkier, the better.
So Geek Relationships = Long talks on the beach and something new learned every day. If worse comes to worse, you can cure him of his highwaters and short-sleeve plaid shirt addiction by treating him like an overgrown Ken doll.
Leonardo Clones = passive, plastic, missionary-position boredom. If worse comes to worse you can always get him to appreciate that you are a person, not an accessory by nagging at him until he beats you.
SGI won't be "saved" by linux. It is adopting Linux in a last-ditch effort to keep it's head above water in the low end of the market. Smarter, savvier companies like Penguin Computing and VA Research will eat them -alive- in the x86 Linux sweepstakes. SGI's problem with the low end stems for a reluctance to make and -push- low-buck RISC/Unix workstations. The Indy was wildly popular, because it was (relatively) cheap, fast, and feature-laden. SGI made it faster and better and -more expensive-, so new customers eventually lost interest. Their competitors took the hint: the Sun Ultra line of workstations are the best selling computers Sun has -ever- made, and rescued them from the "Wintel Menace". On the other hand, the O2 was a bit too expensive, and not pushed anywhere near as hard as they should have been in the face of "wondows everywhere". Instead SGI decided to go the commodity hardware route: Intel processors and commodity operating sysytems. These were -monumental- flops, and SGI had eviscerated it's R&D core to come up with their Visual Workstation failures. Meanwhile, Intergraph, the first company to turn it's back on RISC/Unix, is now out of the computer buisiness. The HP Kayaks aren't making any more headway into the workstation market. Commodity, mass-market crap does -not- a decent workstation make. Digital (now Compaq) is a better illustration of your point. The Alpha was designed to power the next generation of VAX systems running VMS. Digital, however, has always liked to cover all of it's bases, and ported OSF/1 Unix, and then it's own homegrown Unix (now True64). They also hired Linus to port his little kernal to low-end Alpha workstations. The result? The alpha is the second most popular Linux platform, supported by Red Hat, Debian, TurboLinux, and even FreeBSD. The Alpha has moved so far beyond what Digital had hoped for in the low-end market, that it is now a cornerstone of Compaq's IT strategy. By adopting new operating systems, allowing clones, and adopting commodity PC manufacturing techniques, Compaq has positioned the Alpha for ongoing success in an otherwise wintel world. Sun has aped the Alpha buisiness model, with OEM system boards, licensed clones, funded Linux ports, etc, etc. As I mentioned before, the Ultra series workstations and WGS's are doing -very- well for sun... Adopting Linux is not a golden ticket. Something unforseen could come along to disrupt the little penguin's steamroller momentum, be it a new open source project, or a sudden, global realization of how -good- OpenBSD is . The key to success to to remain flexible, to see new opportunities and sieze them, and to structure your product strategy around constant and unpredictable change. It works for Compaq, Sun, IBM, and it will work for your company. Just because it is new and popular doesn't mean that it will make you money if you're not smart. SGI and Intergraph, who shackled themselves with rigid "vision statements" and had a slavish devotion to "industry standards" got themselves in deep, deep trouble. Intergraph is out of the game for good, and SGI close on it's heels... SoupIsGood Food
Ahhh...but therein lies the challenge. Sun offers a -lot- of documentation, almost all of it poorly indexed, impoissible to read, and chock-full-o-errors on a CD. You could, in theory, hack away at all of the necessary files in/etc based on what you read on the documentation CD, or in Oreilly's book on NIS/NFS, or the TCP/IP book...or the USAH book...or perhaps the Armadillo book. Who knows? You might get lucky and cover all of the bases you need to. They weren't lucky.
I wander in, run/usr/sbin/sys-unconfig, et voila, five minutes and another reboot later, and everything is covered.
Now! Where is sys-unconfig ( a solaris-only tool ) covered in the Oreily's manuals on network configuration? it isn't. It's on the Sun documentation, but good luck finding it. I picked up that trick from someone who knew more than I did at the time, and I traded him what I knew about resetting TPT-2 connections.
On an AIX system, NIS isn't even installed as part of the base operating system. You have to install it by hand, or know that installing the "client" or "server" software bundles -after- you slap on the BOS will get you where you need to go.
Where is this documented? Deep, deep within some forgotten file on that two-CD set IBM ships with AIX, I guess. Damned if I could find it on their on-line libraries.
So how did I figure it out? Experience! As a sysadmin, my mind travels the well worn paths laid down by vendors the world over. They -all- have dirty little tricks and gotchas, and just as a good programmer knows when to use a b-tree heirarchy, I know that I probably needed to install supplemental software. It's detective work, and you have to -know- how this stuff all fits together, because it's -not- all in the documentation. Oreily's Armadillo book does -not- cover how to set up a LVM so it actually works, and IBM's documentation is worse, and it's man pages on the topic are incomprehensible. But they all have clues I can use, and I know how to fill in the blanks by now.
Absolute baloney. I'm a sysadmin: I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, and I only know scripting languages. (Shell script, apple script, perl...you get the gist.)
I am surrounded on all sides by genius programmers who eat, drink, sleep and breathe C++. They make jokes entirely in algorthyms. They also wouldn't know a logical volume manager from a poisonous snake.
True story: an entire company full of programmers, young and hungry GenX'ers, old and savy baby boomers...twenty experienced and smart people. And they could not, for the life of them, figure out how to get a Sun workstation, with the latest version of solaris, running NIS. They spent the better part of a month arguing with Sun, trying to understand what the people on the newsgroups told them, and they eventually just gave it up as a bad job.
My first day, I walk into the computer room, and walk out fifteen minutes later with a properly confugured workstation. I even added a spare SCSI disk they had laying around to it.
I can only conclude that there are two orders of geeks: those who make the toys, and those who get to play with them. One cannot exist without the other, and neither has any clue how the other side works it's black magick.
In the early nineties, Sony produced a line of MIPS based graphics workstations that ran the proprietary, Unix-like NEWS-OS. These machines were called Network Workstations, and Sony provided an OpenGL for the accelerated 3D graphics hardware. (NWS-5000G series, I believe.) )
Sony did not market these systems outside of Asia, so they were something of a dud. This also makes finding any information on it next to impossible if you don't speak japanese. I would never have heard about this platform if it weren't for the "Sony NEWSmips" page on the "Supported Platforms" area of the NetBSD site...and web searches have only turned up a smattering of information. If anyone out there can point me to some web resources?
Now we know Sony has MiPS workstation and Unix experience, there is a gaping vacuum where SGI once was, and Unix is on the rise again.
Foregone conclusion: SGI is -meat-.
In doubt: is Sony going to revive the NEWS-OS, or are they going to be the first major workstation vendor to back Linux whole-hog?
Back when SGI was making systems everyone wanted, their microprocessor engineers had developed two next generation chip designs for the MiPS family. Code named "The Beast", the first design was to be every inch as fast as a top of the line Cray vector processor, at microprocessor prices.
The second design would be a complete revamp of the MiPS architecture, and was code-named "Alien. It's proposed specs made the Beast look like a 286 with asthma.
Then SGI bought Cray, who whined that their sales would plummet if their pricey, high-margin system looked like a chump next to commodity electronics. Then Beluzzo stepped into the scene, and abandoned MIPS altogether, spinning off the company and washing his hands of RISC. End of story.
Until...
Sony needed something special for the PSX-2. MIPS just happened to have this Beast and alien crap that SGI didn't want anymore, so...MiPS figured if they could make a workstation as powerful as a supercomputer, they could make a game console as powerful as a workstation.
Sony has just awakened to the raw possibilities afforded by the MiPS platform, and Sony -never- misses an opportunity. They're big, they're fast, they're hungry, they're linux-friendly, and that sound you hear is the sound of SGI running for it's life.
The beast is back.
On another note, Atari and Amiga failed because they were run by total incompetents who couldn't balance their own checkbook, never mind run a multinational technology giant. The Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon were the best selling models in either company's history, with more orders than they could ever hope to fill. Runaway Growth + Moronic Management = Death.
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Why is the Turing Test used as a test for intelligence?
Humans are remarkably complex chemical systems that have been developing over the course of a few billion years. Intelligence is a tool that we aquired because evolutionary forces favored it as a survival tool. These evolutionary forces are limited to what can be percieved by our senses, and in a very large part subservient to instinctual behavior. (Any ad exec will tell you that -all- decisions are emotional.)
So, when a self-modifying computer system becomes at long last self aware, it will have evolved in an environment we can't even begin to comprehend: a machine or network of machines. Humans are social, omnivorous animals who consume biological material to live and have a finite, continuous life span in a matter/energy world. What could we possibly have in common with a being who doesn't understand or have to deal with primal human concepts like eating, reproduction, or life and death?
Simulations will always be imperfect, and the usefulness of a simulated human will be limited, especially considering that "intelligent agents" and self-replicating, self-modifying systems without anthropomorphic baggage will be easier to develop and utilize. When humans first interact with intelligent beings our computer technology has created, we might go decades before either side realizes who and what they are dealing with.
Imagine discovering that gravity is an intelligent being, and by sticking to the surface of the earth, we perform a useful function for it. What can we say to fundamental force of the universe? What could it understand of the color blue (it has no eyes and isn't affected by the wavelengths of light) or impatience (it doesn't understand time, being a universal constant, nor does it understand anger, having no social ties)? Now imagine a computer intelligence peering into the world of the meat-monkeys. What would it know of ambition, or love, or freedom? These are as much biological, instinctual needs as intellectual abstracts. What if it doesn't understand the concept of beauty? What if we don't grok it's intellectual fundamentals that it "feels" strongly about? This wouldn't lead to conflict, just utter confusion and insurmountable difficulty realizing a bridge between to intelligences.
So...what about an AI that is truly an AI, and therefore utterly alien? How can we detect and communicate across enormous conceptual boundaries?
SoupIsGood Food
sigf@crosswinds.net
Both of which failed utterly to promote technological progress or a competitive marketplace. It's not the first time, either, and it's certainly not the first time in the infotech sector. AT&T ring any Bells? (nyuck!)
Unlike the AT&T trial, Pennfield-Jackson clearly has a clue, immersing himself in the culture, technology and market realities surrounding the case. The findings of fact and findings of law are rock solid, and have enough precedent backing them up to make M$'s appeals team weep.
In the MS case, the government is stepping in to preserve technological progress and an open market. Exactly the role the government -should- fill. I'd rather they expend all their effort tackling anti-competitive and cartel behavior in the multi-nats than figure out ways to limit freee speech.
Just remember folks once upon a time IBM was the Big Evil Corporation (tm) that was choking the life out of the computer industry, today we sing their praises as cool and hip for understanding and embracing our beloved Linux better and faster than any other established company.
This is because IBM, unlike Microsoft, decided to adhere to -their- consent decree. Or did you forget that Big Bad Big Blue was once up against the Sherman Acts in court? Microsoft had a way out, but they decided they were above the law and their bottom line was more important than the democratic rule of law. Too bad, so sad, time to go.
The market is voracious: no one company is indispensable, and players strapped down by a fat and iron-fisted Microsoft would rise and shine to make the market bloom. If Bill Gates folded MS tomorrow in a fit of piqué, Sun, Apple, Corel and Red hat would take off like a shot, and companies like Data-Viz would fill the compatibility gaps.
So, yeah, put me in the "Very Good Thing" camp.
SoupIsGood Food
There are a number of open source projects popping up on the Mac, too...my current fave is "PhatIRC", an IRC client written in RealBasic, with the entire project code and resourced bundled with the distribution under the GPL.
The problem is, as another poster pointed out, the lack of free software development tools. Mac users like fresh and innovative programing envrionments: they like life easy. RealBASIC and FutureBASIC (Mature and -powerful- OOP IDEs...no comparison to the rip-off Visual Basic) are very popular with beginners and lightweight programmers, and CodeWarrior rocks everyone's world at the top end. But these aren;t -free-...while Apple does give away the Macintosh Programmer's Workbench, MPW isn't easy to learn, implement, or use.
While someone could concieveably port the GNU tools to the classic MacOS, unless it's as fresh and friendly as RealBasic or Hypercard (now sadly defunct), the mac community isn't going to bite.
MacOS X has some kewl NeXT dev tools (based on GNU tools, believe it or not), but it's unclear if these is going to be bundled with every copy of X.
SoupIsGood Food
Try IOKit, due out this week to developers...Don't forget, this is a Developer Preview, NOT a finished product.
This thing hits store shelves in less than 6 months. Six months for all the major peripheral vendors to get their ducks in a row, and less than a year before there is no other choice. Apple's been dragging their ass on this since X Server hit the scene. Just another example of Apple's inability to put development support behind X.
<em>One word: Services.</em>
One word. Control Panels. No longer there...everything from third party font management tools to aftermarket graphic card controls are gone. Mac users will either have to do without, or not upgrade.
Another phrase. Plug and play. Gone, daddy, gone. Apple expects you to learn shell programming. Write yourself a script to kill -hup inet.d, because the built in tools ain't bright enough to do it on their own. Serious. The way it stands, you need to reboot. Less than six months until this puppy is on store shelves, and they aren't even near "Cross the t's and dot the i's". This is supposed to be for the Mac user? Fuck that noise, man...Unix in all it's dot-file glory is lurking just beneath the surface.
<em>Sorry, I've looked over the Carbon APIs, and the only things that are missing are problems, errors, and bad programming practices. Anyone griping about the new technique (as opposed to lost APIs such as QuickDraw GX), needs to get out of software development.</em>
You mean shops like Microsoft, Adobe, Qualcom and Macromedia? I'll pass the word along. I'm sure they'd love for us Mac users to wither and die so they can bask in the glory of wintel. Bleah. You aren't a developer in a major shop, are you? Bet you've never even seen more than five macs in one place. Come back when you are ready to rejoin the real world, where people are expected to get work accomplished with their tools.
<em>Then you have a single element that incorporates: the Application Menu, the Apple Menu, tabbed windows, control strip.</em>
It does indeed...but it's an unusable mess by all accounts. It's a dessert topping! It's a floor wax! It's a taksbar! You can't tell what is there because it's open, becuase you put a shortcut there, or even which file is which if you have more than one open. You have to mouse around, play hide and seek to guess which is what, and hope to god you haven't lost something you really need when all you wanted to do was close an extra file. The window controls break fifteen years of user familiarity...for a leap -backwards- in usability. Destructive "go away" box on the left, non-destructive resize or hide controls on the right. Now we got an arrangement like Windows...and as any Mac user who has used windows before, we are going to hide when we want to close, close when we want to zoom, and zoom when we were just mousing over the controls to find out what the hell each one does again...
<em>New users have *one* thing to learn, not four.</em>
Yeah! All they need to do is jump into differential calculus...no wasting time with addition, subtraction, multiplication -and- division!
Complete geek think, and utterly counterproductive to people who need to get real work done.
SoupIsGood Food
Most of the long-time Mac fanatic s who have gotten their mitts on x DP3 are in a screaming panic. Whatever the hell this thing is, it's not a Mac...It's all gone. All of it. All of the ease of use, GUI conventions, and stone simple user-centric systems administration that allowed the Mac to hang in there while other systems have come and gone...no more. We have a lickable interface that is, for all intents and purposes, a quantum leap backward over MacOS 9 in terms of usability.
Where the hell are the drivers? Where the hell is the seamelss integration of previous tools and applications? Where the hell are all the ports to carbon? Most of the big development shops have found carbon to be all but unusable, incorporating only a laughably simplified subset of the Mac APIs. Managers of large sites are planning on locking in 9.x as the 3 year standard until they need to migrate...and WindowsNT looks a hell of a cheaper in terms of manpower and money than X. I know a major developer who's trying to arganize a "Boo-down" at the Jobs keynote.
Apple axed everything that was great about the Mac for buzzword compliance. Bad, bad mojo.
The only people happy with this are the NeXT and Unix folks...but Apple ain't selling technical workstations, now are they?
Apple's gone off the rails. It's a damn shame after they almost seemed to have pulled off a complete turnaround.
SoupIsGood Food
Talk to these fine people:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
1550 Bryant Street, Suite 725
San Francisco CA 94103-4832 USA
+1 415 436 9333 (voice)
+1 415 436 9993 (fax)
Internet: ask@eff.org
I've been following the EFF ever since The Man was putting the beat-down back on the BBS scene. I'm going to be there in person, but if you call or contact them using the above info, I am sure they will have numerous suggestions of how you can lighten your wallet for a good cause. SoupIsGood Food
The issue is that Apple, as a builder of homogenous systems, can pick and choose what it considers the best technologies for it's systems. RISC/Firewire/USB/Unix/PDF...these are all technologies that Apple, as a verticaly integrated systems developer, can pick and choose. A vendor such as Dell is largely limited to what Intel or Microsoft has to offer: simply repackaging homogenous "standards" rather than choosing the -best- standards.
Open source technologies will give small, verticaly integrated computer system developers -more- options, and is therefore a Very Good Thing. Example: Cobalt Computing makes microservers that are fast, stable, flexible, and cheap. They use Linux and other OSS components, which allows them to tailor their software to the best hardware, not just the most common hardware. The result is the Qube: less than a grand, and runs a fast 64-bit processor. Dell or HP's NT servers can't come anywhere near the price/performance.
SoupIsGood Food
It could indeed imply a (non-Apple) port project to x86, but it would probably be as popular and well supported by ISVs and other developers as Solaris x86 is. (Which is to say: not very.)
x86 is an unworkable albatross owned body and soul by MS. Don't look for Apple to bail you out at the expense of their own bottom line.
And, since OSX is based around Quartz (PDF-based graphics) rather than X, there is no way you can use the GUI source to port an XWM. You could, theoretically, tack on the Quartz UI to Linux, tho, and retire X.
SoupIsGood Food
The vector unit is state-of-the-art silicon that does way more way faster than your typical SIMD logic. It crunches biiig numbers in vector math, and can be repurposed to do simpler things, like FP math. (There seems to be some confusion whether or not it can do DP or only SP...either way, it -hauls-.)
More to the point, the PowerPC post-RISC strategy is a lot smarter than Intel/AMD's. Mix'n'match logic to create the perfect balance of processor units, and slap four cores on a single slab of silicon. This is where PowerPC is going to be -at- next year.
The problem has been Motorola lagging behind the group. IBM has signed on to crank out the next rev of the G4, and clock speeds are due for a major boost: they demoed 1GHZ tech on the PowerPC platform 2 years ago, and are cooking up 9ghz technology in deep R&D as we speak. Even with the MHZ gap, the design of the G4 is smart enough to keep up with the "big brutes" crunching x86, and the POWER4 (IBM's 64 bit PowerPC implementation for it's RS/6000 Unix and AS/400 "baby mainframe" systems.) will leave IA-64 in the dust before it even gets out of the gate.
Smart money is on the original RISC R&D houses for the edge in the post-RISC sweepstakes: wait'll you get a load of what the Alpha has in store...
SoupIsGood Food
Three steps to economic prosperity during the internet goldrush!
1) Big breaks for little companies.
This is -why- the geeks should stay: WORK! Interesting jobs and a coprorate community friendly to the geek and the modern knowledge worker. Pittsburgh needs to attract start-ups, and convince graduating college students and VCs that Pittsburgh is a great place to launch a new high-tech buisiness. To this end, Pennsylvania should offer big tax breaks on start-up firms and small businesses (read: consultants). Pittsburgh should also look into investing tax money into it's own non-profit Venture Capital firm, or offer money as an "angel" to hot VCs on the condition that the businesses funded be headquartered in Pittsburgh. Make the money-makers want to stay, and the geeks will follow.
2) Geeks are artists: feed the soul, the body will stay. Geeks are creative people with active interests in many, many, many things. Take a look at what Providence, RI is doing to support the arts: Poetry slams, civic funding for galleries and shows, etc, etc. It's attracting artists from places like Boston and New York. It's also attracting high-tech firms from places like Boston and New York. Co-incidence? Not.
Geeks love oddball movies and performance poetry and going to museums and joining writing circles and helping to set up art "installations". Geeks love dressing up to got to SCA events and playing at jazz festivals. Support a liberal and permissive arts and entertainment scene, and the Geeks will come in droves.
3) Fat pipes can't hurt. Offer wireless internet connections at T1 speeds connected as a public utility, and you will be -shocked- at the number of small internet start-ups that will blossom...
Not so easy, yet essential:
4) Elect a liberal government.
Boston and San Francisco, the high-tech capitals of the world, are liberal and permissive. So is Austin, Tampa, Miami, LA, Seattle, Minneanapolis, DC, Atlanta and any other high-tech capital worth a damn. Right-wing culture and geeks don't get along very well. You may not agree with the left-wingers about everything, but the liberals usually want to make damn sure the -right- to disagree with them isn't compromised. Besides, it's more fun to campaign for conservative causes as a minority political faction.
In short, cater to a Geek's career, creativity, and gadget-lust, and you will have a high-tech haven the envy of Tampa or Austin. (But don't get your hopes up about being the next Boston or SanFran)
SoupIsGood Food
This seems more like a wishlist for a home PC than a number-cruncher for data analysis. Couple of points to keep in mind when specc'ing hardware for a professional installation (corporate, organizational, or even millitary).
1) Anything you buy today will be hopelessly obsolete in 18 months: that's the PC life-span. Live with it.
2) You will -not- have the time to upgrade these machines. It seems cheaper on paper to swap out video, drives, and motherboards to and from a generic PC. It's not. Factor in: downtime, reconfiguration, getting the new stuff to work, filling out the paperwork for upgrade components, etc, etc, etc. Forklift upgrades are the -only- practical way to run a professional shop. Drive space and RAM should be the only things you touch.
This comes from long personal experience. You can afford the time and effort to screw around with a pieces-parts home machine. It's a whole other story when you are on the company (gov't.) dime.
3) Established, standard components all the way. The bleeding edge is for chumps and loosers and guys with nothing better to do than hack device drivers.
This -includes- OS! Your system vendor should install and support the version of Linux you want to run. No ands ifs or buts.
Bearing these three principles in mind, I would reccomend buying the fastest possible systems you can afford, and go with reliable, mid-range components in standard configurations. Standardization is -key-: bits'n'pieces is no way to run a high-end shop. To achieve this end, talk to VA Research about their Xeons, Penguin Computing about their Athalons, and Microway about their Alphas. Go with their reccomendations, and avoid customizing their standard configurations.
I highly reccomend Alpha hardware for speed, reliability, and compatibility. (Second only to x86) The Alpha/Linux combo has been proven in high-end applications like cinema special effects and weapons engineering supercomputers. (What do you -think- those Beowolfs are used for? Quake servers?)
The faster the system, the longer you have until it obsoletes. Another point in favor of the Alpha. The more vanilla the component, the easier it is to replace in case of failure. Standardize, standardize, standardize!
SoupIsGood Food
It's going to be tough for Digital to edge into Intel's market, mainly because nearly all consumers have been brainwashed to look for the "Intel Inside" Logo.
I seriously doubt a consumer is going to want an Itanium. Or even an Alpha. These chips are designed as server and technical computing workhorses.
Like with the Alpha, all the operating systems and applications will need to be ported to the new IA-64 architecture to see any useful speed gain. All reports indicate that the on-board x86 compatibility is dog slow, with no appreciable performance gain over Pentium or Athalon chips. Why should gran'ma buy a $5000 Itanium box when the $999 iMac will run rings around it when running Quicken or MS Office?
Then there is the issue of native software: Linux, and NetBSD are gimmies. HP-UX is going to be forced marched to IA-64 (HP originally developed EPIC for the HP9000). IRIX and SCO are "definite maybes".
Sun and Microsoft, on the other hand, will probably port their OS to the platform in hopes of killing it. Microsoft had ports of NT on x86, PowerPC, MiPS and Alpha. Only x86 remains. Like with the older RISC architectures, MS will port and support the platform for a little while, but won't port it's applications, and won't promote their OS on anything other than x86. This way, Microsoft can keep control of their hardware market, and deny competitors popular support for their primary platform. And, when the market drops out, MS can quietly discontinue NT for IA-64, and place the blame squarely on Intel; just as they've blamed Compaq, Apple, and SGI for the failure of NT on RISC. Sun has a cross-platform strategy with similar goals: get them hooked on Solaris, and then entice them over to SPARC, where the applications are.
MS likes x86 becuase it -owns- x86. Linux will always be an also-ran on x86: merely a "Hobbyist's OS". The blind loyalty to intel and x86 I find expressed here is disconcerting. The only thing that will allow Linux to overcome proprietary systems is -ubiquity-, and that means cross-platform parity. Use the fastest and the best when available. That, more often than not, means Alpha.
SoupIsGood Food
Multi-core technology is an IBM thang, and due out on later revs of their POWER4 64bit PPC chip. Since the first rev of POWER4 isn't due to hit the RS/6000 and AS/400 scene until summertime, I would expect the MC version to hit early '01. The consumer rev should be out shortly thereafter: most folks put it at summer 2001. Whether this will be the G5, or just multi-cored G4s remains to be seen.
SoupIsGood Food
The Marshall Plan was 'a good thing' but strangely the people of, say, Britain were rather confused about the way the US was so keen to help the vanquished, and yet at the same time, so very unwilling to help the victors.
Bullshit. Here's a link.
Here, have another.
You may want to research this stuff before launching int Yet Another "Ugly American" Tirade.
SoupIsGood Food
Naw. The Whiner's a lurker on the MTK boards. Probably picked it up from me when I ranted about the topic a few months ago.
SoupIsGood Foof
Lycos. AltaVista. Yahoo.
These are all big-name, big-money comapnies living on borrowed time.
Just as every ISP provides DNS, mail and usenet services to their clients, the time is rapidly approaching where they will provide search/indexing services based on open industry standards. Products that integrate the search process into the OS, like Copernic or Apple's Sherlock are a clear indication of where the technology will go.
All it takes is a co-operatively networked "juggernaut search" system, the logical successor/complement to DNS, to topple the search/portal companies.
SoupIsGood Food
How important are non-intel ports of the distro to the Debian project, and what emphasis is placed on supporting new platforms as they emerge?
SoupIsGood Food
If the industry won;t regulate itself, the government will. It's what we elect presidents and congressional representatives and governors for.
Microsoft represents a complete breakdown of a civil society in the computer industry. More to the point, Microsoft, as a company with monopolistic power, acts as a government agency, dictating to US citizens what technology they are allowed to use. Buying a product is not casting a vote...I refuse to be ruled by a corporation.
Since Microsoft refused to limit and regulate itself, it called down the whirlwind of government intervention. It could have been the most successful software company on earth -and- encourage competition and new technologies, but it instead decided it wanted to act as a quasi-government, a dictatorship no less. We are taxed without any representation, and our choices regarding computer technology are made for us. This is the Microsoft vision.
The government has a different one, and as I actually got to participate in deciding who's in charge up there, I can't help but to agree.
That, and Pennfield-Jackson -gets- it. He's not some clueless hick obsessed with stamping out pay-porn sites.
SoupIsGood Food
It's either A) Loose enormous amohnts of revenue because you won't release DVD titles or B) find other means of copyright protection.
The distributors and studios can't turn back the clock. DIVX is dead, VHS is on the way out. They will have to cope with piracy like they do with audio CDs and movies on tape.
In the end, it;s all about the greenbacks. DIVX was a harsh wake-up call to the industry: the consumer -won't- go where they are told to. Instead the distributors have to come to the consumer. They -could- choose to withold all future DVD releases, but they will loose waaaaaay more revenue than pirating could ever possibly account for.
SoupIsGood Food
Geeks crave conflict, and thrive on collective arrogance. So if a woman says "Yes, without a doubt", and "Let's go for it." in a decicive response to whatever, the geek will immediately start an argument. If the woman -wins- the argument by being confident, strong and decicive, she will be elevated to "Sex Goddess" status in the geek's eyes, no further qualifications needed.
On the other hand, "real" men are only interested in meek girly-girls. Strong and confident women are a nuisance and a waste of time for the self-obsessed Leonardo DiCaprio clone.
Face it, femme-fatales, only a nerd will actually care that you have a brain up there, that you have opinions you want to express.
Plus, it's a guarantee that the geek won't hesitate to accomodate whatever sexual hang-ups you've hid from your previous beaus. Those brainiacs are the most avid perversiuon hounds, and the kinkier, the better.
So Geek Relationships = Long talks on the beach and something new learned every day. If worse comes to worse, you can cure him of his highwaters and short-sleeve plaid shirt addiction by treating him like an overgrown Ken doll.
Leonardo Clones = passive, plastic, missionary-position boredom. If worse comes to worse you can always get him to appreciate that you are a person, not an accessory by nagging at him until he beats you.
SoupIsGood Food
SGI won't be "saved" by linux. It is adopting Linux in a last-ditch effort to keep it's head above water in the low end of the market. Smarter, savvier companies like Penguin Computing and VA Research will eat them -alive- in the x86 Linux sweepstakes. SGI's problem with the low end stems for a reluctance to make and -push- low-buck RISC/Unix workstations. The Indy was wildly popular, because it was (relatively) cheap, fast, and feature-laden. SGI made it faster and better and -more expensive-, so new customers eventually lost interest. Their competitors took the hint: the Sun Ultra line of workstations are the best selling computers Sun has -ever- made, and rescued them from the "Wintel Menace". On the other hand, the O2 was a bit too expensive, and not pushed anywhere near as hard as they should have been in the face of "wondows everywhere". Instead SGI decided to go the commodity hardware route: Intel processors and commodity operating sysytems. These were -monumental- flops, and SGI had eviscerated it's R&D core to come up with their Visual Workstation failures. Meanwhile, Intergraph, the first company to turn it's back on RISC/Unix, is now out of the computer buisiness. The HP Kayaks aren't making any more headway into the workstation market. Commodity, mass-market crap does -not- a decent workstation make. Digital (now Compaq) is a better illustration of your point. The Alpha was designed to power the next generation of VAX systems running VMS. Digital, however, has always liked to cover all of it's bases, and ported OSF/1 Unix, and then it's own homegrown Unix (now True64). They also hired Linus to port his little kernal to low-end Alpha workstations. The result? The alpha is the second most popular Linux platform, supported by Red Hat, Debian, TurboLinux, and even FreeBSD. The Alpha has moved so far beyond what Digital had hoped for in the low-end market, that it is now a cornerstone of Compaq's IT strategy. By adopting new operating systems, allowing clones, and adopting commodity PC manufacturing techniques, Compaq has positioned the Alpha for ongoing success in an otherwise wintel world. Sun has aped the Alpha buisiness model, with OEM system boards, licensed clones, funded Linux ports, etc, etc. As I mentioned before, the Ultra series workstations and WGS's are doing -very- well for sun... Adopting Linux is not a golden ticket. Something unforseen could come along to disrupt the little penguin's steamroller momentum, be it a new open source project, or a sudden, global realization of how -good- OpenBSD is . The key to success to to remain flexible, to see new opportunities and sieze them, and to structure your product strategy around constant and unpredictable change. It works for Compaq, Sun, IBM, and it will work for your company. Just because it is new and popular doesn't mean that it will make you money if you're not smart. SGI and Intergraph, who shackled themselves with rigid "vision statements" and had a slavish devotion to "industry standards" got themselves in deep, deep trouble. Intergraph is out of the game for good, and SGI close on it's heels... SoupIsGood Food
Ahhh...but therein lies the challenge. Sun offers a -lot- of documentation, almost all of it poorly indexed, impoissible to read, and chock-full-o-errors on a CD. You could, in theory, hack away at all of the necessary files in /etc based on what you read on the documentation CD, or in Oreilly's book on NIS/NFS, or the TCP/IP book...or the USAH book...or perhaps the Armadillo book. Who knows? You might get lucky and cover all of the bases you need to. They weren't lucky.
/usr/sbin/sys-unconfig, et voila, five minutes and another reboot later, and everything is covered.
I wander in, run
Now! Where is sys-unconfig ( a solaris-only tool ) covered in the Oreily's manuals on network configuration? it isn't. It's on the Sun documentation, but good luck finding it. I picked up that trick from someone who knew more than I did at the time, and I traded him what I knew about resetting TPT-2 connections.
On an AIX system, NIS isn't even installed as part of the base operating system. You have to install it by hand, or know that installing the "client" or "server" software bundles -after- you slap on the BOS will get you where you need to go.
Where is this documented? Deep, deep within some forgotten file on that two-CD set IBM ships with AIX, I guess. Damned if I could find it on their on-line libraries.
So how did I figure it out? Experience! As a sysadmin, my mind travels the well worn paths laid down by vendors the world over. They -all- have dirty little tricks and gotchas, and just as a good programmer knows when to use a b-tree heirarchy, I know that I probably needed to install supplemental software. It's detective work, and you have to -know- how this stuff all fits together, because it's -not- all in the documentation. Oreily's Armadillo book does -not- cover how to set up a LVM so it actually works, and IBM's documentation is worse, and it's man pages on the topic are incomprehensible. But they all have clues I can use, and I know how to fill in the blanks by now.
I'm a sysadmin: It's what I -do-.
SoupIsGood Food
Absolute baloney. I'm a sysadmin: I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag, and I only know scripting languages. (Shell script, apple script, perl...you get the gist.)
I am surrounded on all sides by genius programmers who eat, drink, sleep and breathe C++. They make jokes entirely in algorthyms. They also wouldn't know a logical volume manager from a poisonous snake.
True story: an entire company full of programmers, young and hungry GenX'ers, old and savy baby boomers...twenty experienced and smart people. And they could not, for the life of them, figure out how to get a Sun workstation, with the latest version of solaris, running NIS. They spent the better part of a month arguing with Sun, trying to understand what the people on the newsgroups told them, and they eventually just gave it up as a bad job.
My first day, I walk into the computer room, and walk out fifteen minutes later with a properly confugured workstation. I even added a spare SCSI disk they had laying around to it.
I can only conclude that there are two orders of geeks: those who make the toys, and those who get to play with them. One cannot exist without the other, and neither has any clue how the other side works it's black magick.
SoupIsGood Food
In the early nineties, Sony produced a line of MIPS based graphics workstations that ran the proprietary, Unix-like NEWS-OS. These machines were called Network Workstations, and Sony provided an OpenGL for the accelerated 3D graphics hardware. (NWS-5000G series, I believe.) )
Sony did not market these systems outside of Asia, so they were something of a dud. This also makes finding any information on it next to impossible if you don't speak japanese. I would never have heard about this platform if it weren't for the "Sony NEWSmips" page on the "Supported Platforms" area of the NetBSD site...and web searches have only turned up a smattering of information. If anyone out there can point me to some web resources?
Now we know Sony has MiPS workstation and Unix experience, there is a gaping vacuum where SGI once was, and Unix is on the rise again.
Foregone conclusion: SGI is -meat-.
In doubt: is Sony going to revive the NEWS-OS, or are they going to be the first major workstation vendor to back Linux whole-hog?
SoupIsGood Food
Back when SGI was making systems everyone wanted, their microprocessor engineers had developed two next generation chip designs for the MiPS family. Code named "The Beast", the first design was to be every inch as fast as a top of the line Cray vector processor, at microprocessor prices.
The second design would be a complete revamp of the MiPS architecture, and was code-named "Alien. It's proposed specs made the Beast look like a 286 with asthma.
Then SGI bought Cray, who whined that their sales would plummet if their pricey, high-margin system looked like a chump next to commodity electronics. Then Beluzzo stepped into the scene, and abandoned MIPS altogether, spinning off the company and washing his hands of RISC. End of story.
Until...
Sony needed something special for the PSX-2. MIPS just happened to have this Beast and alien crap that SGI didn't want anymore, so...MiPS figured if they could make a workstation as powerful as a supercomputer, they could make a game console as powerful as a workstation.
Sony has just awakened to the raw possibilities afforded by the MiPS platform, and Sony -never- misses an opportunity. They're big, they're fast, they're hungry, they're linux-friendly, and that sound you hear is the sound of SGI running for it's life.
The beast is back.
On another note, Atari and Amiga failed because they were run by total incompetents who couldn't balance their own checkbook, never mind run a multinational technology giant. The Amiga 1200 and Atari Falcon were the best selling models in either company's history, with more orders than they could ever hope to fill. Runaway Growth + Moronic Management = Death.
SoupIsGood Food