That article is about link spam, which is the older Google problem. The newer problem is "places" spam. Since Google merged Google Places results in with web search results, spammers have been hitting Google Places hard. Google Places spam involves both creating phony "place pages" and adding phony "recommendations". Recommendation spamming turns out to be easy and effective, easier than creating link farms.
For a good overview, see Mike Blumenthal's article on "Illusory Laptop Repair". He inserted a phony business into Google Places, locating it on a railroad crossing. He gave it some recommendations ("The best illusory repair shop ever!"). Search Google for "virus repair bradford pa", and there it is. Despite writeups of this in many SEO blogs, it's still live in Google.
I don't see what's so great about this. They have to bury a huge number of sensors in pavement, and they're wired devices; they are all on a coax cable. Buried cables in pavement are a huge maintenance headache. Freeze/thaw cycles and traffic pressure damage the cables over time.
UC Berkeley has developed a wireless sensor for such applications. It's an extremely low power device powered by the compression of the pavement as cars go by.
But the real competition is cameras. In the last ten years, the trend in California has been to replace traffic sensing loops with cameras and video processing. One camera can replace the loops for all lanes on an intersection face. Electronics is cheaper than all the pavement-cutting and wiring needed to get the traffic loops wired back to the controller. Finding open spaces in big outdoor parking lots can be done with a small number of cameras.
Patents aren't much of a problem for open source any more. Most of the technology in open source is old. Anything in use by 1990 is out of patent now. (The "submarine patent" problem used to be an issue, but for applications filed after June 8, 1995, it doesn't work any more. The patent term counts from the original date of application, regardless of continuation applications.) UNIX, after all, dates from the 1970s, and by 1990, UNIX-type operating systems were a mature technology.
This is a mature industry now. As with other industries, patents are a big issue in the early years, and cease to be a major concern as the technology matures.
I usually don't reply to people this stupid. But it's a slow night.
The 'byte stream' model is not from UNIX, its just the way the hardware is laid out physically.
No, the hardware isn't laid out that way. The byte stream model is a software-implemented convenience to hide things like disk blocks and packet sizes. There's overhead associated with that, in several senses. You usually have to impose some protocol on top of the stream just to define the boundaries between items. There have been non-UNIX systems where files were record-oriented, rather than stream-oriented.
UDP is transaction-oriented, although the transactions aren't reliable. QNX messaging is transaction-oriented and reliable, yet a transaction maps to one network packet if possible.
RDMA is pretty much a stable of high speed cluster computing, however its DMA that allows pretty much everything in your PC to work without slowing the processor down. Even your keyboard controller uses DMA to get the characters into somewhere useful.
Actually, DMA is part of the problem. The trouble is that most DMA is applied to real memory addresses; it doesn't pass through the MMU. This is a historical artifact of the minicomputer and PC world, which for cost reasons didn't have channel controllers like mainframes. As a result, DMA has to be managed by the OS. On IBM mainframes, the OS could give an application hardware access to a dedicated raw device, and that didn't allow the application to write outside its process, because the channel controller's memory mapping was set up by the OS.
Now that transistor counts in I/O controllers are no longer an issue, it's worth rethinking this. With the right hardware, two applications on different machines
should be able to communicate safely without OS intervention.
As far as what you're calling RDMA via Infiniband, I've seen massive clusters (some of the largest in the world) using it... safely.
Current Linux support for RDMA exists but has problems. RDMA and paging do not play well together.
There's a proposal to put support for something like that into Linux, but it's really ugly. It's called "ummunotify", which is intended to notify processes when their MMU state is being changed by the kernel. This is so they can coordinate with the other machine that has RDMA access into their address space.
Personally, I think it's time to get rid of paging. Historically, paging systems at best yield the effect of having twice as much RAM, and RAM is so cheap today as a fraction of system cost that it's a nonissue. If you don't have to worry about page fault delays, performance is far more repeatable.
In China, though, travel is going way up. Their National Trunk Highway System, very similar in road design to the US Interstate system, is up to 74,000 km and adding about 10,000 km per year, all built since 1988. That may do for China what the Interstate system did for the US - pull the country much closer together. China has historically had weak inter-provincial links and restrictions on inter-provincial trade. There are still trade barriers between provinces. Most provinces have their own auto manufacturers, protected by inter-provincial import duties. That probably won't last out this decade.
Few people spend more than 1 and 2 hours a day traveling, unless their work itself is moving themselves or stuff around. So as speeds max out, so does travel.
Both car travel and air travel have slowed down. Even subsonic jets used to fly faster, but the fuel consumption goes up as Mach 1 is approached. Airport time is much longer than it used to be. Road capacity maxes out at 35MPH; faster, and the cars are spaced out more, so vehicles per minute drops. (California uses metering lights to try to keep freeways at 35MPH under heavy load. Japan just sets low speed limits on urban expressways.)
And, of course, we have such good communications that going somewhere merely to talk to someone is rarely necessary.
For the cutting edge in this area, see what the "high frequency traders" are doing. Computers aren't fast enough for that any more. The trend is toward writing trading algorithms in VHDL and compiling them into FPGAs, so the actual trading decisions are made in special-purpose hardware. Transaction latency (from trade data in on the wire to action out) is dropping below 10 microseconds. In the high-frequency trading world, if you're doing less than 1000 trades per second, you're not considered serious.
More generally, we have a fundamental problem in the I/O area: UNIX. UNIX I/O has a very simple model, which is now used by Linux, DOS, and Windows. Everything is a byte stream, and byte streams are accessed by making read and write calls to the operating system. That was OK when I/O was slower. But it's a terrible way to do inter-machine communication in clusters today. The OS overhead swamps the data transfer. Then there's the interaction with CPU dispatching. Each I/O operation usually ends by unblocking some thread, so there's a pass through the scheduler at the receive end. This works on "vanilla hardware" (most existing computers), which is why it dominates.
Bypassing the read/write model is sometimes done by giving one machine remote direct memory access ("RDMA") into another. This is usually too brutal, and tends to be done in ways that bypass the MMU and process security. So it's not very general. Still, that's how most Ethernet packets are delivered, and how graphics units talk to CPUs.
The supercomputer interconnect people have been struggling with this for years, but nothing general has emerged.
RDMA via Infiniband is about where that group has ended up. That's not something a typical large hosting cluster could use safely.
Most inter-machine operations are of two types - a subroutine call to another machine, or a queue operation. Those give you the basic synchronous and asynchronous operations. A reasonable design goal is to design hardware which can perform those two operations with little or no operating system intervention once the connection has been set up, with MMU-level safety at both ends. When CPU designers have put in elaborate hardware of comparable complexity, though, nobody uses it. 386 and later machines have hardware for rings of protection, call gates, segmented memory, hardware context switching, and other stuff nobody uses because it doesn't map to vanilla C programming. That has discouraged innovation in this area. A few hardware innovations, like MMX, caught on, but still are used only in a few inner loops.
It's not that this can't be done. It's that unless it's supported by both Intel and Microsoft, it will only be a niche technology.
Colonizing Mars is just silly. The atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's. Enough to have sandstorms, not enough to be useful. And it's 95% carbon dioxide. If the pressure was higher, there'd be some hope of terraforming, but no.
The worst places on Earth are far easier to explore and colonize than Mars. Even Luna is easier to work with.
A base on Luna is mostly a logistic problem; with enough lift capacity, it could be done today. But none of this will ever happen with chemical rockets, except as a nationalistic ego trip.
Face it. There's no good off-Earth real estate in this solar system.
It's well known that stereoscopic images aligned "beyond infinity", which force the eyes to cross to fuse the image, induce headaches. This can happen inadvertently when images aligned for adult eye spacing are viewed by kids.
Then there's the problem that watching a stereoscopic image with the head angled induces eye alignment problems. That's unlikely in theaters, but lie on a couch and watch a 3D TV. You will not have a pleasant experience. Maybe stereo glasses should switch to mono mode when they're more than a few degrees off vertical.
Stereoscopy is kind of bogus, anyway. Beyond a few meters, real-world stereo effects are nil. Fake zoomed-in stereoscopy is inherently kind of weird. Incidentally, if you were bothered by Avatar, realize that Avatar is about as good as stereoscopic 3D gets. Cameron uses it well, with restraint. Nothing in Avatar appears in front of the screen. Most filmmakers overdo it. Most Disney "Real3D" is really fake 3D, applied by segmentation, depth adjustment, and compositing in post. It shows.
There's a worry that kids exposed to too much fake 3D early in life may never get the relationship between stereo separation, depth of focus, and stereo from motion firmly etched into their brains. We'll know in a decade.
Of course, the real win would be to get the Windows Update private key. That, and a BGP exploit, and you can rule the Windows world. I still consider Windows Update an unacceptable backdoor. Someday, that's going to backfire.
It's not like that everywhere and it's too bad that's the way North America has gone with recognition. I've heard (anecdotally) that Nobel Prize winners ( except perhaps for Peace) get rock star treatment in most Asian countries.
Why become a scientist in the US today? You go to school forever, spend years in a dead-end postdoc, and then can't get a tenured position. You're then 35, a decade behind in starting your career, and overqualified for most jobs.
The only reason it did well is that a lot of people needed to see something during the holiday season, and the competition is very weak.
"Yogi Bear", as a live action movie? Please.
"The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" is almost a video game movie, though based on a book. The party goes around collecting swords, and when they get enough swords, they pile them up, there's a pillar of fire effect, and they win. Now that's an 80s arcade game.
"Tangled" is probably the best of the lot of holiday movies.
It is a known fact (maybe not widely known) that a very large proportion of engine wear occurs in the first few seconds after startup.
It wouldn't be a big issue for a minute or so of shutdown. The cylinder walls will still be wet.
Many large engines (heavy equipment, locomotive, ship) have means for providing oil pressure prior to engine start. It's an available add-on for light aircraft. I'm not clear on why drag racers would want it; it's not like long engine life is a big issue in racing.
The Molycorp restart has been known for months. The IPO was back in July.
"Rare earths" aren't really that rare. There are many potential mining sites worldwide. They're sparse, in that huge amounts of rock have to be processed to get small amounts of metal. Because of that, rare earth mines produce vast amounts of useless tailings, contaminated with the chemicals used in extraction. That's why nobody wants one nearby. The big one in Inner Mongolia is considered an environmental disaster area even by Chinese standards.
The IR-1 is an older model centrifuge. It's basically a copy of an old URENCO design. Iran has an IR-2 and an IR-3 model, which use carbon fibre rotors, and new installations use those. Iran has at least three enrichment plants, incidentally, and they're all different. Various reports indicate replacement of the older models by newer ones, so some of this might be a routine phase-out.
So very cool. Just read this Rolling Stone Article associated with SAIL - frak me rotten.
I feel very old, reading that. I knew many of those people, places, and computers. I saw one of the first ARPANET IMPs in the 1960s. I had a demo of the original Dynabook from Alan Kay in the beanbag chair room at PARC in 1975. I first visited SAIL in 1978. I used to keep a horse stabled near the Stanford AI Lab. I've seen the SAIL PDP-10, and I've used the later SAIL DEC-20. I've played the original coin-op Spacewar at Stanford's Tressider Union. I've programmed an Alto.
(I was from the commercial and aerospace side, though, not the academic hacker culture. Many of the people I worked with had buzz cuts, some had flown fighter aircraft, and we all read Aviation Week.)
What I never expected was that computing would become a branch of the advertising industry.
I was dragged into helping to recover the Stanford SAIL-DART archives from the 1970s. Those were on 6250 BPI open-reel magnetic tape, which had been copied from the original 800 BPI tapes in a previous decade. The data was in a special character set only used at Stanford, and the format was nonstandard.
The first step was to just copy the tapes onto disks, with no translation. That was done with a tape drive used was from an old Sun-II rackmount system. It took about twenty minutes for each tape, and I was one of the people doing tape changing. The data was then shipped over the Internet to a big disk farm at IBM Almaden for further processing. Eventually, all the text files were converted to Unicode, and individuals were contacted to find out if it was OK to release their personal files from decades ago.
The oldest file I can find in that archive is this one from 1971. It's a list of the people responsible for each node on the ARPANET.
I have misgivings about the "daily build" mania. Like "extreme programming", it maps well to the class of problem which consists of a large number of loosely coupled features. Most web-based systems fall into that category. It's not a good model for, say, a compiler, a file system, a database, a solid geometric modeling system, or simulation system, or a real-time control system, where there are rigorous overall constraints and "features" don't dominate the problem.
(Most of the stuff Joel's company does isn't that advanced. Their products are a project management program, a front end to an existing version control system, and a "remote administration tool" which sounds like Back Orifice..)
What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
Making them look like fools is a good start. Communism didn't survive once people stopped believing, although it took a decade for the USSR to run down after that. We need to make Islam look ridiculous. An online sitcom about Mohammed's early life as a used camel dealer would be a good start. Something like Monty Python's "Life of Brian".
Slashdot Mirror
That article is about link spam, which is the older Google problem. The newer problem is "places" spam. Since Google merged Google Places results in with web search results, spammers have been hitting Google Places hard. Google Places spam involves both creating phony "place pages" and adding phony "recommendations". Recommendation spamming turns out to be easy and effective, easier than creating link farms.
For a good overview, see Mike Blumenthal's article on "Illusory Laptop Repair". He inserted a phony business into Google Places, locating it on a railroad crossing. He gave it some recommendations ("The best illusory repair shop ever!"). Search Google for "virus repair bradford pa", and there it is. Despite writeups of this in many SEO blogs, it's still live in Google.
Want to fix the problem? Google is trying to hire a "Program Manager, Evaluation, Search Quality".
I don't see what's so great about this. They have to bury a huge number of sensors in pavement, and they're wired devices; they are all on a coax cable. Buried cables in pavement are a huge maintenance headache. Freeze/thaw cycles and traffic pressure damage the cables over time.
UC Berkeley has developed a wireless sensor for such applications. It's an extremely low power device powered by the compression of the pavement as cars go by.
But the real competition is cameras. In the last ten years, the trend in California has been to replace traffic sensing loops with cameras and video processing. One camera can replace the loops for all lanes on an intersection face. Electronics is cheaper than all the pavement-cutting and wiring needed to get the traffic loops wired back to the controller. Finding open spaces in big outdoor parking lots can be done with a small number of cameras.
Patents aren't much of a problem for open source any more. Most of the technology in open source is old. Anything in use by 1990 is out of patent now. (The "submarine patent" problem used to be an issue, but for applications filed after June 8, 1995, it doesn't work any more. The patent term counts from the original date of application, regardless of continuation applications.) UNIX, after all, dates from the 1970s, and by 1990, UNIX-type operating systems were a mature technology.
This is a mature industry now. As with other industries, patents are a big issue in the early years, and cease to be a major concern as the technology matures.
We have no real idea if Facebook revenues are actually near $2 billion.
Correct. But Goldman does know. They will have had access to Facebooks' books before doing a deal like that.
I usually don't reply to people this stupid. But it's a slow night.
The 'byte stream' model is not from UNIX, its just the way the hardware is laid out physically.
No, the hardware isn't laid out that way. The byte stream model is a software-implemented convenience to hide things like disk blocks and packet sizes. There's overhead associated with that, in several senses. You usually have to impose some protocol on top of the stream just to define the boundaries between items. There have been non-UNIX systems where files were record-oriented, rather than stream-oriented. UDP is transaction-oriented, although the transactions aren't reliable. QNX messaging is transaction-oriented and reliable, yet a transaction maps to one network packet if possible.
RDMA is pretty much a stable of high speed cluster computing, however its DMA that allows pretty much everything in your PC to work without slowing the processor down. Even your keyboard controller uses DMA to get the characters into somewhere useful.
Actually, DMA is part of the problem. The trouble is that most DMA is applied to real memory addresses; it doesn't pass through the MMU. This is a historical artifact of the minicomputer and PC world, which for cost reasons didn't have channel controllers like mainframes. As a result, DMA has to be managed by the OS. On IBM mainframes, the OS could give an application hardware access to a dedicated raw device, and that didn't allow the application to write outside its process, because the channel controller's memory mapping was set up by the OS.
Now that transistor counts in I/O controllers are no longer an issue, it's worth rethinking this. With the right hardware, two applications on different machines should be able to communicate safely without OS intervention.
As far as what you're calling RDMA via Infiniband, I've seen massive clusters (some of the largest in the world) using it ... safely.
Current Linux support for RDMA exists but has problems. RDMA and paging do not play well together. There's a proposal to put support for something like that into Linux, but it's really ugly. It's called "ummunotify", which is intended to notify processes when their MMU state is being changed by the kernel. This is so they can coordinate with the other machine that has RDMA access into their address space.
Personally, I think it's time to get rid of paging. Historically, paging systems at best yield the effect of having twice as much RAM, and RAM is so cheap today as a fraction of system cost that it's a nonissue. If you don't have to worry about page fault delays, performance is far more repeatable.
One of the points mentioned is the desire to design for a 10,000 meter curve radius! Now that takes aggressive land acquisition.
Eventually, Google may have to realize that some of their products actually require customer support.
In China, though, travel is going way up. Their National Trunk Highway System, very similar in road design to the US Interstate system, is up to 74,000 km and adding about 10,000 km per year, all built since 1988. That may do for China what the Interstate system did for the US - pull the country much closer together. China has historically had weak inter-provincial links and restrictions on inter-provincial trade. There are still trade barriers between provinces. Most provinces have their own auto manufacturers, protected by inter-provincial import duties. That probably won't last out this decade.
Few people spend more than 1 and 2 hours a day traveling, unless their work itself is moving themselves or stuff around. So as speeds max out, so does travel.
Both car travel and air travel have slowed down. Even subsonic jets used to fly faster, but the fuel consumption goes up as Mach 1 is approached. Airport time is much longer than it used to be. Road capacity maxes out at 35MPH; faster, and the cars are spaced out more, so vehicles per minute drops. (California uses metering lights to try to keep freeways at 35MPH under heavy load. Japan just sets low speed limits on urban expressways.)
And, of course, we have such good communications that going somewhere merely to talk to someone is rarely necessary.
For the cutting edge in this area, see what the "high frequency traders" are doing. Computers aren't fast enough for that any more. The trend is toward writing trading algorithms in VHDL and compiling them into FPGAs, so the actual trading decisions are made in special-purpose hardware. Transaction latency (from trade data in on the wire to action out) is dropping below 10 microseconds. In the high-frequency trading world, if you're doing less than 1000 trades per second, you're not considered serious.
More generally, we have a fundamental problem in the I/O area: UNIX. UNIX I/O has a very simple model, which is now used by Linux, DOS, and Windows. Everything is a byte stream, and byte streams are accessed by making read and write calls to the operating system. That was OK when I/O was slower. But it's a terrible way to do inter-machine communication in clusters today. The OS overhead swamps the data transfer. Then there's the interaction with CPU dispatching. Each I/O operation usually ends by unblocking some thread, so there's a pass through the scheduler at the receive end. This works on "vanilla hardware" (most existing computers), which is why it dominates.
Bypassing the read/write model is sometimes done by giving one machine remote direct memory access ("RDMA") into another. This is usually too brutal, and tends to be done in ways that bypass the MMU and process security. So it's not very general. Still, that's how most Ethernet packets are delivered, and how graphics units talk to CPUs.
The supercomputer interconnect people have been struggling with this for years, but nothing general has emerged. RDMA via Infiniband is about where that group has ended up. That's not something a typical large hosting cluster could use safely.
Most inter-machine operations are of two types - a subroutine call to another machine, or a queue operation. Those give you the basic synchronous and asynchronous operations. A reasonable design goal is to design hardware which can perform those two operations with little or no operating system intervention once the connection has been set up, with MMU-level safety at both ends. When CPU designers have put in elaborate hardware of comparable complexity, though, nobody uses it. 386 and later machines have hardware for rings of protection, call gates, segmented memory, hardware context switching, and other stuff nobody uses because it doesn't map to vanilla C programming. That has discouraged innovation in this area. A few hardware innovations, like MMX, caught on, but still are used only in a few inner loops.
It's not that this can't be done. It's that unless it's supported by both Intel and Microsoft, it will only be a niche technology.
Just do the ball in CG. It's a made-for-TV event anyway. Going to Times Square on New Years Eve sucks.
Colonizing Mars is just silly. The atmospheric pressure is about 1% of Earth's. Enough to have sandstorms, not enough to be useful. And it's 95% carbon dioxide. If the pressure was higher, there'd be some hope of terraforming, but no.
The worst places on Earth are far easier to explore and colonize than Mars. Even Luna is easier to work with. A base on Luna is mostly a logistic problem; with enough lift capacity, it could be done today. But none of this will ever happen with chemical rockets, except as a nationalistic ego trip.
Face it. There's no good off-Earth real estate in this solar system.
It's well known that stereoscopic images aligned "beyond infinity", which force the eyes to cross to fuse the image, induce headaches. This can happen inadvertently when images aligned for adult eye spacing are viewed by kids.
Then there's the problem that watching a stereoscopic image with the head angled induces eye alignment problems. That's unlikely in theaters, but lie on a couch and watch a 3D TV. You will not have a pleasant experience. Maybe stereo glasses should switch to mono mode when they're more than a few degrees off vertical.
Stereoscopy is kind of bogus, anyway. Beyond a few meters, real-world stereo effects are nil. Fake zoomed-in stereoscopy is inherently kind of weird. Incidentally, if you were bothered by Avatar, realize that Avatar is about as good as stereoscopic 3D gets. Cameron uses it well, with restraint. Nothing in Avatar appears in front of the screen. Most filmmakers overdo it. Most Disney "Real3D" is really fake 3D, applied by segmentation, depth adjustment, and compositing in post. It shows.
There's a worry that kids exposed to too much fake 3D early in life may never get the relationship between stereo separation, depth of focus, and stereo from motion firmly etched into their brains. We'll know in a decade.
Do they really have Sony's signing key?
Of course, the real win would be to get the Windows Update private key. That, and a BGP exploit, and you can rule the Windows world. I still consider Windows Update an unacceptable backdoor. Someday, that's going to backfire.
It's not like that everywhere and it's too bad that's the way North America has gone with recognition. I've heard (anecdotally) that Nobel Prize winners ( except perhaps for Peace) get rock star treatment in most Asian countries.
At U.C. Berkeley, a Nobel gets you a reserved parking space.
Why become a scientist in the US today? You go to school forever, spend years in a dead-end postdoc, and then can't get a tenured position. You're then 35, a decade behind in starting your career, and overqualified for most jobs.
The notice references the National Common Language Law. Note that when the Government of China says "Chinese language", they mean Standard Mandarin. The big problem, as seen by Beijing, is not English. It's Cantonese. National policy is to migrate southern China to Mandarin, at least for written material. Policy is already to require that publications, signs, official TV, etc. be migrated to Mandarin.
The Beijing government has been trying to mandate Mandarin since 1909, and still hasn't been able to make it stick.
The movie is "meh". Wait for the DVD.
The only reason it did well is that a lot of people needed to see something during the holiday season, and the competition is very weak.
It is a known fact (maybe not widely known) that a very large proportion of engine wear occurs in the first few seconds after startup.
It wouldn't be a big issue for a minute or so of shutdown. The cylinder walls will still be wet.
Many large engines (heavy equipment, locomotive, ship) have means for providing oil pressure prior to engine start. It's an available add-on for light aircraft. I'm not clear on why drag racers would want it; it's not like long engine life is a big issue in racing.
The Molycorp restart has been known for months. The IPO was back in July.
"Rare earths" aren't really that rare. There are many potential mining sites worldwide. They're sparse, in that huge amounts of rock have to be processed to get small amounts of metal. Because of that, rare earth mines produce vast amounts of useless tailings, contaminated with the chemicals used in extraction. That's why nobody wants one nearby. The big one in Inner Mongolia is considered an environmental disaster area even by Chinese standards.
The IR-1 is an older model centrifuge. It's basically a copy of an old URENCO design. Iran has an IR-2 and an IR-3 model, which use carbon fibre rotors, and new installations use those. Iran has at least three enrichment plants, incidentally, and they're all different. Various reports indicate replacement of the older models by newer ones, so some of this might be a routine phase-out.
So very cool. Just read this Rolling Stone Article associated with SAIL - frak me rotten.
I feel very old, reading that. I knew many of those people, places, and computers. I saw one of the first ARPANET IMPs in the 1960s. I had a demo of the original Dynabook from Alan Kay in the beanbag chair room at PARC in 1975. I first visited SAIL in 1978. I used to keep a horse stabled near the Stanford AI Lab. I've seen the SAIL PDP-10, and I've used the later SAIL DEC-20. I've played the original coin-op Spacewar at Stanford's Tressider Union. I've programmed an Alto.
(I was from the commercial and aerospace side, though, not the academic hacker culture. Many of the people I worked with had buzz cuts, some had flown fighter aircraft, and we all read Aviation Week.)
What I never expected was that computing would become a branch of the advertising industry.
I was dragged into helping to recover the Stanford SAIL-DART archives from the 1970s. Those were on 6250 BPI open-reel magnetic tape, which had been copied from the original 800 BPI tapes in a previous decade. The data was in a special character set only used at Stanford, and the format was nonstandard.
The first step was to just copy the tapes onto disks, with no translation. That was done with a tape drive used was from an old Sun-II rackmount system. It took about twenty minutes for each tape, and I was one of the people doing tape changing. The data was then shipped over the Internet to a big disk farm at IBM Almaden for further processing. Eventually, all the text files were converted to Unicode, and individuals were contacted to find out if it was OK to release their personal files from decades ago.
The oldest file I can find in that archive is this one from 1971. It's a list of the people responsible for each node on the ARPANET.
I have misgivings about the "daily build" mania. Like "extreme programming", it maps well to the class of problem which consists of a large number of loosely coupled features. Most web-based systems fall into that category. It's not a good model for, say, a compiler, a file system, a database, a solid geometric modeling system, or simulation system, or a real-time control system, where there are rigorous overall constraints and "features" don't dominate the problem.
(Most of the stuff Joel's company does isn't that advanced. Their products are a project management program, a front end to an existing version control system, and a "remote administration tool" which sounds like Back Orifice..)
What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
Making them look like fools is a good start. Communism didn't survive once people stopped believing, although it took a decade for the USSR to run down after that. We need to make Islam look ridiculous. An online sitcom about Mohammed's early life as a used camel dealer would be a good start. Something like Monty Python's "Life of Brian".