I already had an intuitive grasp of what he was talking about, and his numbers seemed ballpark correct to me. I too thought the result set bandwidth numbers looked a little fishy, but the others seemed fine.
You build something that uses a distributed algorithm to build a spanning tree. The nodes near the top of the spanning tree become the servers. You build the algorithm so that parents in your spanning tree will naturally have more bandwidth than you do.
I've been thinking about this for a long while.
Building the spanning tree isn't hard. Every node just selects one and only one parent node. They tell the parent that they're a child of that parent. You prevent cycles having a parent refuse to be a parent unless it also has a parent. If it loses its connection to its parent, it tells all the children that it no longer is a parent. One node 'seeds' the network as a root by saying it can be a parent without being a parent and not looking for a parent. Eventually it can delegate roothood to a child that has proven high bandwidth. It cannot cease being a root without doing this delegation.
You can have connections to nodes that are neither parents nor children, but search requests should not be propogated to those nodes unless you have no parent. Eventually a search request will make it onto the spanning tree and be efficiently distributed.
You can eventually elect servers who are near the top of the spanning tree. Nodes should, in general, elect parents that have more bandwidth than they do. This means that nodes near the top of the spanning tree should have the most bandwidth.
That is also 'intellectual property'. Patents and trademarks are handled by the same bit of buearacracy, the USPTO. Trademarks are the form of 'IP' that I have the least problem with though.
This is how I initially felt about it, and still do to an extent. He actually is upset that OpenSSH exists, and not just because of the name. He lets that slip into his message a couple of times. I also think he chose this method of informing people more because of the PR meltdown he knew would insue if he used a lawyer.
Overall, I think changing OpenSSH's name would be a good idea. The argument about SSH being the name of a protocol is well taken, and perhaps the name of the protocol also needs to be changed. If his program were an Open Source program, OpenSSH would be considered a fork, and would require a namechange. Of course, in the Open Source world, the distinction between SSH and OpenSSH would be enough.
FRESH has my vote, though, perhaps Liberated Encrypted SHell (LESH) would be better. It's shorter and uses the word 'liberated' instead of 'free'. It does have (un?)fortune associations with letch and lush though.:-)
Ahh, so we should all keep to using whatever compiler happens to compile the kernel, no matter how old it is. After all, we wouldn't want to give the kernel developers any incentive to clean up their code so it compiles properly with a newer, better optimizing, more standards compliant compiler.
I don't think Redhat was in the least bit disingenuous by calling the compiler that could compile the kernel 'kgcc'.
As for whether or not they should released a snapshopt of gcc... Well, I question the wisdom of that too. I would point at that almost all (maybe all?) of the (very few) bugs that caused bad code to be generated were in the C++ front end, not in C, which is the language most things depend on anyway.
Re:could a distributed parallel system be useful?
on
Genetic Stone Soup
·
· Score: 1
It's called 'Folding @ Home':-) Can't remember the URL just now. It runs a complex and fairly accurate protein folding model on your computer so scientists have better quality guesses as to how a particular protein folds.
If I'm not mistaken, the phase shift that inductance causes can be a big source of loss too. If your voltage and amperage waves are completely out of phase with eachother, you lose most of your power. So, I suspect in that way you can use capacitors to keep that from happening.
Or, I can complain, point out stupid flaws in the sytem, and generally make a pain of myself until the problem is fixed. Maybe I can even get a chance to fix the problem myself.
Suppose some other race came and landed here and started demanding royalties for all these technologies that they had invented previously that they owned patents to? Suppose they had had an agent infiltrate and file patents on the techologies 5 years ago with the USPTO.
Would this be fair or correct? Would you be happy paying them royalties? Aren't those ideas really their property? Aren't we violating their property rights and stealing from them? Isn't it just the same as invading their planet and taking land by force of arms? After all, those technologies were patented fair & square.
Patents are a way of encouraging a certain kind of involvement within a community. The source of our upset with the aliens would be the fact that they circumvented many of the implied contracts with society inherent in the vision of how patent law is supposed to work. I think this example is very analogous to RAMBUS's behavior, and that our upset is quite understandable.
As someone else pointed out, our wonderful USPTO keeps patent applications secret until they're granted. It's pretty easy to tie up the approval process until it's convenient to have your patent granted.
Then, it's time to invent memory that doesn't need RAMBUS's idiotic patents isn't it? Sadly, it appears the product cycle for this kind of thing is terribly long. I have half a mind to boycott PCs entirely until these patents expire so I won't be giving RAMBUS any of my money.
I actually would really hope that Micron and Hyundai would completely detroy their companies rather than give RAMBUS a cent. I would rather pay any amount of money for RAM that was not encumbered with stupid RAMBUS licensing fees. Their business model is evil and wrong and must be fought.
Many products are actually made from a trivial variety of materials. Most toys are made of plastic, and many toys don't really have many moving parts. For example, action figures. In fact, I think action figures would be especially vulnerable because a great deal of their cost is from movie industry royalty markup.
The technology will improve and get cheaper. I think at various steps along the curve, there will be new sets of things it makes economic sense to manufacture at home.
At some point, the technology will be good enough and cheap enough that you can fabricate fabricators. Prehaps, at first, this will result in a sort of analog degredation effect like you see with tapes, but eventually, it'll make more sense to get a fabricator from your neighbor than from the factory.
I would actually guess that the real overhead in many types of manufacturing comes from marketing and distribution (just like with music). Both of those costs would become unrecoverable with fabricator technology.
In short, I think you're being shortsighted.:-)
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 2
I pretty much agree with this. Even Ayn Rand agrees with you (read 'The Fountainhead', in which Ayn Rand mentions unions and what she sees as their proper role (which is NOT no role)).
The main problem is that Unions have had a history of being corrupt and promoting the interests of their management above the interests of their members. There has to be some recourse against behavior like that. For this reason, I think open shop laws are a good thing.
*sigh* I thought the Klein Stein would've been kind of a neat, geeky thing to own. Sure, since it's an object in three space it's not really a klein bottle, but who cares?
After checking the site, and going to the order page, I don't think it's a joke. The ordering instructions are just the kind of cobbled together thing I'd expect out of a place like that. Thank goodness I'll be able to get my Klein Stein someday.:-)
It's evil because the big corporations are eating the companies that sold the product I liked and replacing it with a product I don't like. It's a reduction of service without me having had any choice at all in the matter.
I see that there can be problems. Playing around with the engineering of replicating things is kind of worrisome from the perspective of the physical damage such things could cause. There is the particle physcisist's viewpoint that evolution has had a long time to create nasty replicators and we're unlikely to come up with something worse (the particle physics corollary being that the are lots of more energetic collisions happening in the Universe than what we make in our particle accelerators and they don't produce mini-black holes, or other forms of matter more stable than the forms we're familiar with). I think this argument holds less water for such complex things as replicators though.
We've already done some of that kind of engineering through breeding. Of course, change on the scale of what's possible with genetic engineering is somewhat foreign to us.
As far as humans go, there are two big problems that I see. One is a monoculture problem. Genetic engineering in some social environments will have the effect of severely diminishing genetic variability.
The other is a certain form of gene based classism that's not very distinguishable from racism.
Those are both social problems. I don't think America, in it's current state, is really capable of handling the genetic engineering of human beings. Luckily, it also probably won't happen here for awhile for some of the same reasons that we aren't socially ready for it.
I don't think they'll ever succeed
on
Spidergoats
·
· Score: 4
There's a lot more to spiders silk than just a few proteins. Spider's silk actually arranges those proteins in rather complex ways. If it were just a matter of producing some proteins and seperating them from a mixture, you could genetically engineer bacteria to do it.
As for ethical concerns...
Numerous SF stories have dealt with all the horrors and benfits of genetic engineering. I can't say as I'm all that worried about it. There are a few concerns I'd have if we started genetically engineering humans, but, in general, I wouldn't even be against that. I don't understand what the problem is here.
I know of one way in which the NT4 APIs are badly designed...
WaitForMultipleObjects
At first, I thought it was wonderful. What a nice way to combine the ability to wait on all synchronization primitives.
Then, I thought some more. I realized that this required all synchronization primitives make a system call. No spin locks. This is big. Spin locks are what make multi-threaded programming worth doing, instead of being merely an excercise in how to make your program both more intellectually challenging to debug, and slower. Oops.
And don't get me started on the wide variety of IPC 'primitives' that have no model (like sockets/file descriptors in Unix) that tie them all together.
Neither of these two things are inconsistencies. They're just badly thought out.
One other badly thought out thing. The API for opening up a directory and scanning it makes too many assumptions about why you might be doing that. I can only be vague here because I can't recall the API exactly, only that quality of it.
I carefully read over the post you pointed at, and all the reply threads. You are being premature, and are most likely wrong.
As far as I know, RedHat made a profit before they went IPO. SuSe makes a lot of money doing support and special customizations. Cygnus made money that same way.
Open Source has also been the host to many interesting innovations. DNS, for example, is a widely distributed database designed to handle a certain kind of hierarchical searching. Quite innovative for its time. D. J. Bernstein's software is Open Source, and is quite innovative in its approach to security issues.
I think Open Source represents a viable business model. If I can find a job doing Open Source, I'll take it. I currently do write stuff that's not yet very popular.
Some Linux companies have overextended themselves during the past few years of IPO madness. Some haven't bothered to figure out how to make money yet because of the aforementioned IPO madness. It doesn't mean they won't. No Linux company I know of has gone bankrupt yet.
As I said, I think your assessment is premature, and partially already disproven. You're letting your biases overly affect your perception.
While I think the BSD licence is a bad idea, I have no problems with people using it. I do have problems with them coming into a public forum and slamming the GPL for being less free and stating that everybody should switch to the BSD licence for some real freedom.
People have been taking code under the BSD licence, doing essentially nothing to it, spend tons of money on marketing, and reap the rewards. The only thing that brought free software out of the closet that those who would steal from the public domain shoved it into was the GPL. If it weren't for that licence, nobody would even know free software existed.
Saying the BSD licence is more free than the GPL is like saying that a state without laws against kidnapping is more free than a state that does have them.
This is precisely why I won't use any of the BSD variants. Their persistent belief that somehow, their licence is a good idea and that the GPL is a bad idea.
Saying the BSD licence is freer than the GPL is like saying a place without laws against kidnapping is freer than a place without.
Slashdot Mirror
I already had an intuitive grasp of what he was talking about, and his numbers seemed ballpark correct to me. I too thought the result set bandwidth numbers looked a little fishy, but the others seemed fine.
I've been thinking about this for months.
You build something that uses a distributed algorithm to build a spanning tree. The nodes near the top of the spanning tree become the servers. You build the algorithm so that parents in your spanning tree will naturally have more bandwidth than you do.
I've been thinking about this for a long while.
Building the spanning tree isn't hard. Every node just selects one and only one parent node. They tell the parent that they're a child of that parent. You prevent cycles having a parent refuse to be a parent unless it also has a parent. If it loses its connection to its parent, it tells all the children that it no longer is a parent. One node 'seeds' the network as a root by saying it can be a parent without being a parent and not looking for a parent. Eventually it can delegate roothood to a child that has proven high bandwidth. It cannot cease being a root without doing this delegation.
You can have connections to nodes that are neither parents nor children, but search requests should not be propogated to those nodes unless you have no parent. Eventually a search request will make it onto the spanning tree and be efficiently distributed.
You can eventually elect servers who are near the top of the spanning tree. Nodes should, in general, elect parents that have more bandwidth than they do. This means that nodes near the top of the spanning tree should have the most bandwidth.
That is also 'intellectual property'. Patents and trademarks are handled by the same bit of buearacracy, the USPTO. Trademarks are the form of 'IP' that I have the least problem with though.
This is how I initially felt about it, and still do to an extent. He actually is upset that OpenSSH exists, and not just because of the name. He lets that slip into his message a couple of times. I also think he chose this method of informing people more because of the PR meltdown he knew would insue if he used a lawyer.
Overall, I think changing OpenSSH's name would be a good idea. The argument about SSH being the name of a protocol is well taken, and perhaps the name of the protocol also needs to be changed. If his program were an Open Source program, OpenSSH would be considered a fork, and would require a namechange. Of course, in the Open Source world, the distinction between SSH and OpenSSH would be enough.
FRESH has my vote, though, perhaps Liberated Encrypted SHell (LESH) would be better. It's shorter and uses the word 'liberated' instead of 'free'. It does have (un?)fortune associations with letch and lush though. :-)
Ahh, so we should all keep to using whatever compiler happens to compile the kernel, no matter how old it is. After all, we wouldn't want to give the kernel developers any incentive to clean up their code so it compiles properly with a newer, better optimizing, more standards compliant compiler.
I don't think Redhat was in the least bit disingenuous by calling the compiler that could compile the kernel 'kgcc'.
As for whether or not they should released a snapshopt of gcc... Well, I question the wisdom of that too. I would point at that almost all (maybe all?) of the (very few) bugs that caused bad code to be generated were in the C++ front end, not in C, which is the language most things depend on anyway.
It's called 'Folding @ Home' :-) Can't remember the URL just now. It runs a complex and fairly accurate protein folding model on your computer so scientists have better quality guesses as to how a particular protein folds.
If I'm not mistaken, the phase shift that inductance causes can be a big source of loss too. If your voltage and amperage waves are completely out of phase with eachother, you lose most of your power. So, I suspect in that way you can use capacitors to keep that from happening.
Or, I can complain, point out stupid flaws in the sytem, and generally make a pain of myself until the problem is fixed. Maybe I can even get a chance to fix the problem myself.
Occasionally, it's tempting.
Suppose some other race came and landed here and started demanding royalties for all these technologies that they had invented previously that they owned patents to? Suppose they had had an agent infiltrate and file patents on the techologies 5 years ago with the USPTO.
Would this be fair or correct? Would you be happy paying them royalties? Aren't those ideas really their property? Aren't we violating their property rights and stealing from them? Isn't it just the same as invading their planet and taking land by force of arms? After all, those technologies were patented fair & square.
Patents are a way of encouraging a certain kind of involvement within a community. The source of our upset with the aliens would be the fact that they circumvented many of the implied contracts with society inherent in the vision of how patent law is supposed to work. I think this example is very analogous to RAMBUS's behavior, and that our upset is quite understandable.
As someone else pointed out, our wonderful USPTO keeps patent applications secret until they're granted. It's pretty easy to tie up the approval process until it's convenient to have your patent granted.
Then, it's time to invent memory that doesn't need RAMBUS's idiotic patents isn't it? Sadly, it appears the product cycle for this kind of thing is terribly long. I have half a mind to boycott PCs entirely until these patents expire so I won't be giving RAMBUS any of my money.
I actually would really hope that Micron and Hyundai would completely detroy their companies rather than give RAMBUS a cent. I would rather pay any amount of money for RAM that was not encumbered with stupid RAMBUS licensing fees. Their business model is evil and wrong and must be fought.
Many products are actually made from a trivial variety of materials. Most toys are made of plastic, and many toys don't really have many moving parts. For example, action figures. In fact, I think action figures would be especially vulnerable because a great deal of their cost is from movie industry royalty markup.
The technology will improve and get cheaper. I think at various steps along the curve, there will be new sets of things it makes economic sense to manufacture at home.
At some point, the technology will be good enough and cheap enough that you can fabricate fabricators. Prehaps, at first, this will result in a sort of analog degredation effect like you see with tapes, but eventually, it'll make more sense to get a fabricator from your neighbor than from the factory.
I would actually guess that the real overhead in many types of manufacturing comes from marketing and distribution (just like with music). Both of those costs would become unrecoverable with fabricator technology.
In short, I think you're being shortsighted. :-)
I pretty much agree with this. Even Ayn Rand agrees with you (read 'The Fountainhead', in which Ayn Rand mentions unions and what she sees as their proper role (which is NOT no role)).
The main problem is that Unions have had a history of being corrupt and promoting the interests of their management above the interests of their members. There has to be some recourse against behavior like that. For this reason, I think open shop laws are a good thing.
*sigh* I thought the Klein Stein would've been kind of a neat, geeky thing to own. Sure, since it's an object in three space it's not really a klein bottle, but who cares?
After checking the site, and going to the order page, I don't think it's a joke. The ordering instructions are just the kind of cobbled together thing I'd expect out of a place like that. Thank goodness I'll be able to get my Klein Stein someday. :-)
It's evil because the big corporations are eating the companies that sold the product I liked and replacing it with a product I don't like. It's a reduction of service without me having had any choice at all in the matter.
I see that there can be problems. Playing around with the engineering of replicating things is kind of worrisome from the perspective of the physical damage such things could cause. There is the particle physcisist's viewpoint that evolution has had a long time to create nasty replicators and we're unlikely to come up with something worse (the particle physics corollary being that the are lots of more energetic collisions happening in the Universe than what we make in our particle accelerators and they don't produce mini-black holes, or other forms of matter more stable than the forms we're familiar with). I think this argument holds less water for such complex things as replicators though.
We've already done some of that kind of engineering through breeding. Of course, change on the scale of what's possible with genetic engineering is somewhat foreign to us.
As far as humans go, there are two big problems that I see. One is a monoculture problem. Genetic engineering in some social environments will have the effect of severely diminishing genetic variability.
The other is a certain form of gene based classism that's not very distinguishable from racism.
Those are both social problems. I don't think America, in it's current state, is really capable of handling the genetic engineering of human beings. Luckily, it also probably won't happen here for awhile for some of the same reasons that we aren't socially ready for it.
There's a lot more to spiders silk than just a few proteins. Spider's silk actually arranges those proteins in rather complex ways. If it were just a matter of producing some proteins and seperating them from a mixture, you could genetically engineer bacteria to do it.
As for ethical concerns...
Numerous SF stories have dealt with all the horrors and benfits of genetic engineering. I can't say as I'm all that worried about it. There are a few concerns I'd have if we started genetically engineering humans, but, in general, I wouldn't even be against that. I don't understand what the problem is here.
Corel partly counts, but they haven't gone bankrupt. I forgot about Stormix.
I know of one way in which the NT4 APIs are badly designed...
WaitForMultipleObjects
At first, I thought it was wonderful. What a nice way to combine the ability to wait on all synchronization primitives.
Then, I thought some more. I realized that this required all synchronization primitives make a system call. No spin locks. This is big. Spin locks are what make multi-threaded programming worth doing, instead of being merely an excercise in how to make your program both more intellectually challenging to debug, and slower. Oops.
And don't get me started on the wide variety of IPC 'primitives' that have no model (like sockets/file descriptors in Unix) that tie them all together.
Neither of these two things are inconsistencies. They're just badly thought out.
One other badly thought out thing. The API for opening up a directory and scanning it makes too many assumptions about why you might be doing that. I can only be vague here because I can't recall the API exactly, only that quality of it.
I carefully read over the post you pointed at, and all the reply threads. You are being premature, and are most likely wrong.
As far as I know, RedHat made a profit before they went IPO. SuSe makes a lot of money doing support and special customizations. Cygnus made money that same way.
Open Source has also been the host to many interesting innovations. DNS, for example, is a widely distributed database designed to handle a certain kind of hierarchical searching. Quite innovative for its time. D. J. Bernstein's software is Open Source, and is quite innovative in its approach to security issues.
I think Open Source represents a viable business model. If I can find a job doing Open Source, I'll take it. I currently do write stuff that's not yet very popular.
Some Linux companies have overextended themselves during the past few years of IPO madness. Some haven't bothered to figure out how to make money yet because of the aforementioned IPO madness. It doesn't mean they won't. No Linux company I know of has gone bankrupt yet.
As I said, I think your assessment is premature, and partially already disproven. You're letting your biases overly affect your perception.
While I think the BSD licence is a bad idea, I have no problems with people using it. I do have problems with them coming into a public forum and slamming the GPL for being less free and stating that everybody should switch to the BSD licence for some real freedom.
People have been taking code under the BSD licence, doing essentially nothing to it, spend tons of money on marketing, and reap the rewards. The only thing that brought free software out of the closet that those who would steal from the public domain shoved it into was the GPL. If it weren't for that licence, nobody would even know free software existed.
Your argument is ridiculous and stupid.
Saying the BSD licence is more free than the GPL is like saying that a state without laws against kidnapping is more free than a state that does have them.
This is precisely why I won't use any of the BSD variants. Their persistent belief that somehow, their licence is a good idea and that the GPL is a bad idea.
Saying the BSD licence is freer than the GPL is like saying a place without laws against kidnapping is freer than a place without.