:) Maybe what AMD is after is the code morphing tech. A 1.5Ghz chip, as expected to ship early next year, would be even cooler if it could run MacOS.
Hmm... Now I'm curious how well the TM Very Long Instruction Word approach would handle a RISC based system.. Maybe Solaris on AMD Sledgehammers, with a morph layer instead of a port? If this is a less expensive, or faster way to do it, why not? Pure speculation of course, but interesting none the less.
1. Whose stock? AMD is selling like hot-cakes, and TM has no stock to speak of until the IPO.
2. Maybe. The TM people are not stupid - I'm sure it's going to be either an equitable deal, or they're just cutting up the playing field.
3. "Hurting for cash" is a very relative term. They're not yet selling a product. If they had stuff on shelves, and were bleeding money, that's one thing. They've not sold chip One yet. Of course they have no income. You believe in Angels?
4. AMD doesn't need them on the desk-top. I'm sure AMD would LOVE to go portable, but they tend to blister fingers with their current designs.
5. Irrelevant.
IMO you're trollin. AMD and TM are shooting at different markets - the One they'd both like to bury is Intel. They'd like to hurt Motorola, but that's like gnats ramming into a rhino..
A few months ago, Ars speculated on where Transmeta might go. They said that, for the time being, they have their morphing logic in software, to conserve battery life, but could conceivably slide it into hardware to get intense performance numbers in desktop systems - where power and heat are not as big an issue.
Looks like someone at Transmeta was paying attention. Good for them. So long Intel!
"I see where you're going with this Mr. Feynmann, but it's turtles all the way down!"
If I recite a poem in a public place, or hum a melody to a friend, I should pay a royalty to the author? Or should I be paid for doing the promoting?
Metallica has a better point here than the RIAA. Metallica created the work, they SHOULD have the right to control it's distribution. But, open distribution is a method of promotion too, isn't it? The RIAA has WRONGFULLY (in the ethical sense IMO) duped Artists out of their rights via contracts. They are not the creators of content, and should die under a rock.
The point is that the very concept of IP - of copying data - is outdated by the technology. The fool.com article makes this point exceptionally clear.
What you're saying is that, since the 4th Commandment clearly states: "Thou shalt not kill!" then killing in self-defense, or even swatting a mosquito, is wrong. The context has changed and the concepts of IP no longer hold true.
Tried that, and it sometimes works. The bad stuff happens when the management, given a solid analysis of a proposed solution, chooses something else, totally out of thin air - just to assert control over the programmers.
Me: "We need to redesign our legacy database to NOT use user string data as primary keys. It's bad design, and it's going to bite us in the ass."
Manager: "Add some text fields to duplicate the data that we're currently using as keys. But don't change the keys."
I've had the unfortunate experience of being told (dictated to) how long my development effort SHOULD take, based on how long it took a stuporvisor to draw a mockup of the UI for the program using Visio. The woman was actually under the impression that all I had to do was 'redraw' her UI idea using a RAD tool, and it would all automagically work as intended.
No specs, not requirements, no nothing except "Put this button here, and this textbox here, and when I click, it should do something like this..."
I know this will come across as paranoid delusion, but bare with me:
Maybe Linus' stance on "Linux not being ready for the desktop for another 5 to 10 years" is part of a greater plan? Maybe the intention behind that statement is to divert attention from what Transmeta is currently working on - an embedded Linux for set-top consumer devices.
In 5 to 10 years, Linux may be a ripe alternative to Windows; but if Transmeta has it's way, there won't even BE a 'desktop' by then. The computer will be in your wall, your TV, your microwave, your car dashboard... All of them happily running Linux, networking and making life easier - While on the "desktop", everyone will still curse the Blue Screen of Death, none the wiser that Linux keeps humming and running the world, not even earnestly aiming for the 'desktop' niche.
We can only detect this sort of 'halo' when it's radiation reaches us. Our halo would only be visible to those observing from within 50 light years away. The original poster's point holds.
The light by which we know the stars are there left those stars tens, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many of those stars may not even be there now. The point of the propagation delay is still there, wether we're looking for a directed beam transmission (which implies that they know we're here, and they're aiming at us) or an onmi-directional 'halo'.
What we call it, and how we imagine it, makes little difference. In fact, the fact that it's a 'halo' makes no difference at all. It's a signal which will be coming from a point-source. It will be directional to us, even though it's expanding in all directions from it's transmitter.
We're not looking for a growing beach-ball. We're looking for a wave passing us by. If I speak to you in a large room, does it matter that my voice has also travelled just as far in the opposite direction? All that matters is that it got from me to you - and you can almost immediately home in on the direction from whence it came.
We are unfortunatelly bound by our technology at this time. We're stuck looking for (sub)luminar velocity signals, and the propagation delays suck.
Maybe that's the price of admission into the "Galactic Cafe"?? Once we learn to hear them, they'll start talking to us.:)
Once it's ported, it will be flaky. To make it 'stable', you'll have to get some proprietary libs, which will require a kernel recompile and break other things. But those won't be really good performers, unless you use the Monkey$oft distro of Linux - which won't feature Tux the penguin, but Bill the Dodo on the box - and it won't come with source.
M$ has cried "Wolf!" too many times. They've screwed over too many competitors using the E&E tactic. There is no reason what-so-ever for something like IE to require a 100MB install, but it does. Why? E&E. We would all do well to re-read the Halloween Documents, and realize that this is exactly what was proposed.
Anyone who aspires to run M$ software on a Linux box is selling themselves short. We can do better. If M$ really wanted to play nicely with the other kids, they would simply open up their file formats and standards - show us all those APIs, and leave it at that.
Even giving us all their source-code would be a dis-service. It would amount to a massive DoS against open source developers - who would be compelled by their nature to actually read that code, wasting untold time in the process.
M$, open your formats and APIs. That's all. The managers and non-techies will still use your software, and we won't bad-mouth you at every turn. And if you really want to be generous, give us money. Give us grants, so we can code in peace, without worrying about bills. Keep your Office.
Come on folks. The Japanese has a very regimented military for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They established a complex caste system, a dynastic/Imperial form of government and elaborate rituals (which obviously includes verbalization).
The very idea that they need English to communicate efficiently is ridiculous. You can not run an army without efficient communication. You can not build an empire on ambiguity. Just because their culture includes cordial formalisms that put English to shame, does not mean that Japanese is in any way ambiguous. On the contrary, the language is so effective that it was perfectly acceptable to make it ornamental and courteous.
Many Americans seem to think that the whole world used to live in caves before America came into being. The world on the far side of either pond has been there a lot longer than we have, and the only thing of ours anyone out there benefits from is dollars.
Programming languages were developed by English speakers, and reflect concepts represented in English.
If we were able to divorce ourselves from our language, and design a language centered on computational concepts, rather than linguistic ones, then that language would likely look a lot like APL, or LISP, or those funky squiggles we saw in The Matrix.
It's a hard thing for people to do, separating ourselves from language. Even those of us who speak more than one language fluently, tend to THINK IN A LANGUAGE. Yes, we all perceive concepts abstractly, but we formalise and represent them, inside our own heads, using a language. Communicating is something we do naturally, and we communicate with sounds and printable characters. It's just a part of our biological wiring.
One interesting line from The Matrix sticks out when we think about this: The first 'Matrix' failed because, "some thought we lacked the language to represent your puny little world".. Or something to that effect. The machines considered creating a new language that would have a greater level of semantic richness to describe the problem.
This is an interesting idea, since human languages, all of them, evolved to describe the 'natural world'. We have no problem with understanding the causality of if-then, do-while or has-a and is-a... Even the concepts of OOP are 'natural'. Encapsulation, inheritance, aggregation, these are all natural concepts derived from the natural world and described with natural language. Any human language should be able to describe the world, and so any can be used for programming. The structure of programming languages would not be very different, because they are developed by beings who think in a language used to describe the natural world. {whew}
Now the neat part: What would a language be like if it were designed from the ground-up to be centered on computational concepts, and not those of the 'natural' world?
It would look like APL, with it's huge number of characters used to describe complex ideas that take many words to explain to people. If-Then is easy to explain to a newbie. How do you explain tail-recursion, or semantic closure? How do you concisely respresent a colored-tree (tertiary or more) without using the metaphor of trees and colors?
A language developed in a natural language other than English would not be all that different that what we're used to. (Not that PERL looks anything like English to begin with.:P) The idea of regular expressions is a good example. It's mathematical, not 'natural' (not to be confused with "Natural" in the Kleene-star sense). We all understand regexp, but how much 'natural' language did this understanding cost?
A language designed around computational concepts would look cryptic and superbly compact. The idea of programming patterns could potentially be represented as a single character, or a small set of glyphs which would require a long verbalization to translate into a human language. Such a language would likely be LISPish in structure, where instructions and data would blend seamlessly into each other.
This language would probably use coding-time translation tables and run-length instruction encoding in source, and would build complex concepts from little ones whenever needed; much like we do with functions, but from a much finer, to a much broader scale. This language would be self-referential, self-describing and self-modifying.
A langauge like this could not be designed by a human, because we are by definition prejudiced towards 'natural' languages. A computationaly centrered language could only be written by a machine which itself would have the capacity for manipulating abstract concepts. A pretty tall order.
A programming language designed by the ancient Celts, the Arabs, the Japanese or Babylonians would certainly APPEAR very different from Java, but after translating it - it would be simple to understand. A language built on un-'natural' concepts might not be comprehensible because it might include concepts we can not conceive of.
Time to re-read "Godel, Escher, Bach" one more time.
I saw a Moneyline interview with the head of Contentville a few weeks back. The guy turned my stomach in general, but two particular phrases/concepts in particular stuck out:
1) He claimed that they are not actually selling copyrighted materials. What thay are selling is the convenience of being able to easily obtain materials that are available (often for free) elsewhere. You, the cusomer, pays for the convenience of the fact that you don't have to look as hard as you otherwise would.
This point is total BS, since a search engine like Google is quick and accurate, and keeps the $5 (approx) dollars in my pocket. BTW: In the case of non-freely available materials, they're going to buy them on your behalf, and pass the cost on to you, along with the 'nominal fee'. Afterwards, I'm sure they'll keep a copy of the materials - so they don't have to re-buy them next time - but will charge the next customer the same 'acquisition + nominal fee' amount.
2) The attitude that customers can buy the articles/papers/whatever from Contentville for a nominal fee, or they can go and "... buy it for free..." somewhere else.
"Buy it for free" elsewhere? That right there defined the character of the man for me. He's about money. He's not trying to do the right thing, or change the world, or even make research simpler for others. He's in it to get rich, and for some reason I found such a blatanly greedy attitude repugnant.
My father and I used to work for the same company. We both got a 'magazine' relevant to our 401k plan. It was the same magazine, right?
No - the cover on mine featured people my age, hiking, whitewater rafting, skydiving... Included articles on high-risk stock investment, international travel... Ads for sporty sedans.
My father's magazine had older people on the cover, enjoying a sunset, playing with grandchildren, walking along a beach... Included articles on refinancing an IRA, the importance of writing a Will, retirement housing in Florida... Ads for Viagra.
Digital/real-time broadcast media aren't the only ones invading privacy. In fact, those with internal knowledge of your fininces and lifestyle (do you own your home? Do you have dependants?) are able to target you very precisely.
My parents only tend to make long-distance phone calls to Poland. They have family there. They often get ATT/SPRINT/Whatever Corp calling them with "great phone rates to Europe". I never make those calls, I never get those offers.
I'm amazed each time I watch a sports event on TV (pretty rare occurence mind you) at the number of 'appropriate' adverts surrounding the players.
Take a hockey game for example. The backboards aroud the rink are always crammed with ads - as are the walls at a NASCAR race, figure skating... These are static images, easy to overlay in real time. If a computer could draw a real-time blur where the hockey puck is, then that same computer can just as easily replace a Coca-Cola logo with a Pepsi ad.
How else could SanFran's 49'er fans see local businesses advertized in the outfield of a game vs the Patriots, while Pat fans see their local businesses advertized in the same place during the same game?
Ad placement in content is one thing - but that's something I can handle just fine. Here's what worries me: Advertising auctions! Consider the possibility of real-time ad placement and the options it opens up. Adverts no longer need to be permanent; they can be time-sliced. Imagine watching a baseball game where, each time a pitch is thrown, there is a different advertisement behind the batter. Imagine companies bidding on ad placement spots and durations in real-time, given Nielsen viewer ratings to drive their advert buying decisions...
Say that a sports event suddenly goes into overtime, or is running real close in a pivotal game... The ability to slip a Budweiser ad into the last few shots would be very attractive to advertisers.
What do you say guys, you want to patent this idea and make a fortune? Or patent it to keep it from becoming reality?
CFO Magazine articles should be shunned because it't too easy for some industry analyst to make undocumented claims.
Folks, it's obvious that this is "yet another eye-ball catcher, ad revenue generating article" intended to spread FUD and cause IT managers to buy Micro$oft SMS software. After all, we know for a Fact(tm) that M$ does not have back-doors, errors or undocumented features to begin with, and so, by extension, it is Impossible(tm) to make undocumented changes to the OS.
M$ software, such as ISS, does NOT include an undocumented dll file the sole purpose of which is to introduce a back-door, and to mock Netscape coders.
M$ software, such as Excel, does NOT include an undocumented functional flight simulator accessible to those who know the secret key combination.
An IT staffer can NOT go to SysInternals and get a utility to change the size of a swap/working set, or a utility to change the NT timeslice; munge around in the server room and 'forget' to write it down somewhere.
An IT staffer can NOT deploy SP4 to 1500 workstations overnight without anyone's knowledge.
Article Executive Summary: "We're completely safe from the revolting techno-geeks, if we buy Micro$oft software. If we pay M$ $1000/PC for support, we don't have to hire an expensive technical staff - that might some day turn on us - and can get away staffing the server room with MIS interns. "
You no longer get the warm and fuzzies of seeing the cummulative effect, but you can still strive to have each and every post modded up. You just can't keep track very well.
As for the drive behind getting more Karma, I thin kyou're right on. We're a bunch of pack-rats, and Karma is sort of like the AD&D character score.:) It's a little contest that sort of sprang up.
In retrospect, Karma probably should have never been counted. It's where we are now, minus that little unchanging number. A comment deemed of worth still bubbles up.
As for the argument that people post only to score points... Well, don't they always, in one way or another. Karma is just a little more tangible than impressing people and earning their silent gratitude. Are you suggesting that the motivation for an action matteras as much, or more, than the action itself?:) Aristotle might have a little bit to say about that.
Interesting way to think of it all, isn't it?
The "Karma Whores" are frozen with their high karma. But this implies that everyone who got modded up past 50 is a Whore.
So to not be a Whore, you have to flame and troll for each time you are insightful and informative?
I see where this is going. I guess it's time for a little YANG, now that all YIN and no YANG doesn't pay.:) Open rebellion is needed. It doesn't pay to be a nice guy and not throw dung at the other monkeys - and hay, if I can keep my high Karma while flaming and pouring hot grits down Natallie Portman's pants, all the better.:)
Yes, the Suck piece was a parody, but every parody - by being a parody - brings attention to some aspect of reality. In every myth there is a kernel of truth.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates some aspect of the subject.
A truly successful parody is one which does not require excessive suspension of disbelief. Like a good Troll, it starts out totally plausible, and gets deeper and deeper - and you fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Only later, do you realize that it is in fact making drastic fun of something more subtle. That realization then makes you consider the subject being parodied - it forces you to think about an issue that you would normally overlook, or dismiss.
This is why a good parodical troll gets marked as informative, insightful, eventually funny and ultimately overrated and flamebait, without once earning the deserved Troll.:)
Everyone (almost) realized that the Suck piece was a parody - after all, it's on Suck! Duh! (Doing otherwise is like taking The Onion seriously. If they put big "blink" tag disclaimers on the article, saying "THIS IS A JOKE!", it would have ruined the joke, right?) The subsequent discussions and outbursts are centered on the issue the piece presented; the theme and not the plot, if you will; while continuing the plot. Give/.'ers a little credit, would'ya? We're not all idiots.
It's about time somebody said it.
Yes, money buys ethics, and it's even more true than you say. Money doesn't just buy the perception of ethics through marketting and advertisement, as you say. Money makes things right.
Witness the RIAA sponsored 'work for hire' copyright rider on the Satelite communications Law that was recently mentioned here on/.! Money bought a law.
Now Law is the definition of Ethics for our culture. Individuals define ethics and morality for themselves, but that's just an opinion. When you are in violation of The Law, you are in violation of what society thinks is right.
If money can buy a law, then money can define what society thinks is right, and furthermore, what wrong actions are penalized. "Oooh! He copied a song on Napster! He broke The Law!"
But then again, we've always know this to be true. We all know The Golden Rule - He (and it is invariably a He) who has the Gold, makes The Rules.
In and effort to instill proper family values amonth the computer-using community, the Christian Family Coalition, in an unprecedented foray into high-technology and inter-faith healing has announced a complete line of CPUs for the home user. Here's some features of the upcoming processors in the series:
* Moses: Has only 10 opcodes, burned directly into the silicon using patented "Finger of God" lasing technique.
* David: All web content appears as though run through www.askjesus.com.
* Maccabee: No irrational number mathematics permitted. No division by zero and no infinite loops. You must take all results on Faith.
* Joshua: Linux runs fine on this chip, but BSD will definitely NOT. Something about an inappropriate logo...
* Aaron: Any LONG pointers are immediately truncated. Pointers of unauthorized programs are set to null.
* Solomon: You can just FORGET running SATAN to scan your networks.
* Ruth: Children's games featuring the Telle-Tubbies crash inexplicably.
A new, 64-bit series of CPUs has also been announced. Features are unclear, but twelve distinct processors have been listed.
* Peter: Rock-solid performance. Water cooled.
* Thomas: The availability of this chip is somewhat doubtful.
* Judas: Special purpose hardware for network 'honeypot' machines. New, silver-based transistors.
* James I, James II, Matthew, Mark, Andrew and the rest are noted are general purpose and peripheral control processors at this time.
Why does the FBI get to choose the University that is going to review Carnivore in the first place? Why a University? It's like asking Bill Clinton to choose the person to investigate his latest impropriety (Ginger Lynn, the porn star... wait for it.) Or like Micro$oft appointing the Judge to preside over their anti-trust trial.
The decision of who and how will review Carnivore OUGHT to be made by a panel of SECURITY EXPERTS, not the people accused of 'wrongdoing' in the first place. I'd like the decision-maker to be Bruce Scheiner, and I'd like him to hand Carnivore over to the L0pht guys (umm, excuse me, @stake).
It should be the hacker community that gets to scrutinize Carnivore. Not because I'm a/. reader, but because the hackers and the Fed are natural adversaries. It's the only way to make sure Carnivore gets a thorough PEER-REVIEW. Hackers would really get under the thing's skin, while academics will complement it's object-oriented design, oogle the UML specs and give a favorable review in exchange for a research grant. The only hope is that, since this thing will end up at a University... Well, their security ain't the best.. We'll get to see it somehow.
In the very least, I hope a formidable research University gets the nod. Someplace like CMU, MIT, or UC Berkeley would/might do this right. I'm sorry but if they hand it to Harvard or Yale, our communal goose is cooked.
I agree, the JIT does a great job for performance, but the gcj is more along the lines of what I'm looking for in a Win32 environment.
Providing a self-contained executable, or a set of compiled files (a'la DLL and EXE) is much easier than making sure that a customer has a servicable JRE on his/her box. As it stands, dealing with distribution of Java programs is just as bad, if not worse, than handling VB programs. With VB all I had to worry about was providing the correct VBRUNxxx.dll, but with the recent (relatively, you must admit) switch to Java2 and the more recent addition of HotSpot in JDK1.3, things got complex.
Distributing the complete JRE each time, Just In Case, isn't going to cut it. Yes, the support stuff is in JARs, and these can all be conditionally installed - but that's a bit more to worry about than with an old fashioned EXE. Also, the fact that invoking a Java program involves not only starting the interpreter/JIT, but also setting a CLASSPATH, makes things icky - at least until Java makes adequate inroads that a CLASSPATH can be presumed. Sure, setting up a batch to do this is fine, but we're just compounding assumptions at that point. A binary executable is a lot more workable when doling out software to non-programmers.
The one argument for C#, and against Java, seems to be performance. If C# delivers better performance than Java, than C# will be better. I'd argue that, but I left my asbestos undies at home.
Well... Where are the Java bytecode-to-native compilers to make this a non-issue?
Seems to me that improving the performance of an existing language (albeit at the cost of platform independence, obviously) would be much simpler than developing a whole new language to include the piece that Java is missing - a native compiler.
Slashdot Mirror
:) Maybe what AMD is after is the code morphing tech. A 1.5Ghz chip, as expected to ship early next year, would be even cooler if it could run MacOS.
Hmm... Now I'm curious how well the TM Very Long Instruction Word approach would handle a RISC based system.. Maybe Solaris on AMD Sledgehammers, with a morph layer instead of a port? If this is a less expensive, or faster way to do it, why not? Pure speculation of course, but interesting none the less.
1. Whose stock? AMD is selling like hot-cakes, and TM has no stock to speak of until the IPO.
2. Maybe. The TM people are not stupid - I'm sure it's going to be either an equitable deal, or they're just cutting up the playing field.
3. "Hurting for cash" is a very relative term. They're not yet selling a product. If they had stuff on shelves, and were bleeding money, that's one thing. They've not sold chip One yet. Of course they have no income. You believe in Angels?
4. AMD doesn't need them on the desk-top. I'm sure AMD would LOVE to go portable, but they tend to blister fingers with their current designs.
5. Irrelevant.
IMO you're trollin. AMD and TM are shooting at different markets - the One they'd both like to bury is Intel. They'd like to hurt Motorola, but that's like gnats ramming into a rhino..
A few months ago, Ars speculated on where Transmeta might go. They said that, for the time being, they have their morphing logic in software, to conserve battery life, but could conceivably slide it into hardware to get intense performance numbers in desktop systems - where power and heat are not as big an issue.
Looks like someone at Transmeta was paying attention. Good for them. So long Intel!
"I see where you're going with this Mr. Feynmann, but it's turtles all the way down!"
If I recite a poem in a public place, or hum a melody to a friend, I should pay a royalty to the author? Or should I be paid for doing the promoting?
Metallica has a better point here than the RIAA. Metallica created the work, they SHOULD have the right to control it's distribution. But, open distribution is a method of promotion too, isn't it? The RIAA has WRONGFULLY (in the ethical sense IMO) duped Artists out of their rights via contracts. They are not the creators of content, and should die under a rock.
The point is that the very concept of IP - of copying data - is outdated by the technology. The fool.com article makes this point exceptionally clear.
What you're saying is that, since the 4th Commandment clearly states: "Thou shalt not kill!" then killing in self-defense, or even swatting a mosquito, is wrong. The context has changed and the concepts of IP no longer hold true.
Tried that, and it sometimes works. The bad stuff happens when the management, given a solid analysis of a proposed solution, chooses something else, totally out of thin air - just to assert control over the programmers.
Me: "We need to redesign our legacy database to NOT use user string data as primary keys. It's bad design, and it's going to bite us in the ass."
Manager: "Add some text fields to duplicate the data that we're currently using as keys. But don't change the keys."
You just want to beat them, you know?
I've had the unfortunate experience of being told (dictated to) how long my development effort SHOULD take, based on how long it took a stuporvisor to draw a mockup of the UI for the program using Visio. The woman was actually under the impression that all I had to do was 'redraw' her UI idea using a RAD tool, and it would all automagically work as intended.
No specs, not requirements, no nothing except "Put this button here, and this textbox here, and when I click, it should do something like this..."
This really IS what we are up against.
I know this will come across as paranoid delusion, but bare with me:
Maybe Linus' stance on "Linux not being ready for the desktop for another 5 to 10 years" is part of a greater plan? Maybe the intention behind that statement is to divert attention from what Transmeta is currently working on - an embedded Linux for set-top consumer devices.
In 5 to 10 years, Linux may be a ripe alternative to Windows; but if Transmeta has it's way, there won't even BE a 'desktop' by then. The computer will be in your wall, your TV, your microwave, your car dashboard... All of them happily running Linux, networking and making life easier - While on the "desktop", everyone will still curse the Blue Screen of Death, none the wiser that Linux keeps humming and running the world, not even earnestly aiming for the 'desktop' niche.
Is it the DeCSS C source as publicised, or the very concept of what DeCSS does?
If I were to develop a DeCSS work-alike tool in a different language...
We can only detect this sort of 'halo' when it's radiation reaches us. Our halo would only be visible to those observing from within 50 light years away. The original poster's point holds.
:)
The light by which we know the stars are there left those stars tens, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years ago. Many of those stars may not even be there now. The point of the propagation delay is still there, wether we're looking for a directed beam transmission (which implies that they know we're here, and they're aiming at us) or an onmi-directional 'halo'.
What we call it, and how we imagine it, makes little difference. In fact, the fact that it's a 'halo' makes no difference at all. It's a signal which will be coming from a point-source. It will be directional to us, even though it's expanding in all directions from it's transmitter.
We're not looking for a growing beach-ball. We're looking for a wave passing us by. If I speak to you in a large room, does it matter that my voice has also travelled just as far in the opposite direction? All that matters is that it got from me to you - and you can almost immediately home in on the direction from whence it came.
We are unfortunatelly bound by our technology at this time. We're stuck looking for (sub)luminar velocity signals, and the propagation delays suck.
Maybe that's the price of admission into the "Galactic Cafe"?? Once we learn to hear them, they'll start talking to us.
'nuff said, really.
Once it's ported, it will be flaky. To make it 'stable', you'll have to get some proprietary libs, which will require a kernel recompile and break other things. But those won't be really good performers, unless you use the Monkey$oft distro of Linux - which won't feature Tux the penguin, but Bill the Dodo on the box - and it won't come with source.
M$ has cried "Wolf!" too many times. They've screwed over too many competitors using the E&E tactic. There is no reason what-so-ever for something like IE to require a 100MB install, but it does. Why? E&E. We would all do well to re-read the Halloween Documents, and realize that this is exactly what was proposed.
Anyone who aspires to run M$ software on a Linux box is selling themselves short. We can do better. If M$ really wanted to play nicely with the other kids, they would simply open up their file formats and standards - show us all those APIs, and leave it at that.
Even giving us all their source-code would be a dis-service. It would amount to a massive DoS against open source developers - who would be compelled by their nature to actually read that code, wasting untold time in the process.
M$, open your formats and APIs. That's all. The managers and non-techies will still use your software, and we won't bad-mouth you at every turn. And if you really want to be generous, give us money. Give us grants, so we can code in peace, without worrying about bills. Keep your Office.
Come on folks. The Japanese has a very regimented military for hundreds, if not thousands of years. They established a complex caste system, a dynastic/Imperial form of government and elaborate rituals (which obviously includes verbalization).
The very idea that they need English to communicate efficiently is ridiculous. You can not run an army without efficient communication. You can not build an empire on ambiguity. Just because their culture includes cordial formalisms that put English to shame, does not mean that Japanese is in any way ambiguous. On the contrary, the language is so effective that it was perfectly acceptable to make it ornamental and courteous.
Many Americans seem to think that the whole world used to live in caves before America came into being. The world on the far side of either pond has been there a lot longer than we have, and the only thing of ours anyone out there benefits from is dollars.
Programming languages were developed by English speakers, and reflect concepts represented in English.
:P) The idea of regular expressions is a good example. It's mathematical, not 'natural' (not to be confused with "Natural" in the Kleene-star sense). We all understand regexp, but how much 'natural' language did this understanding cost?
If we were able to divorce ourselves from our language, and design a language centered on computational concepts, rather than linguistic ones, then that language would likely look a lot like APL, or LISP, or those funky squiggles we saw in The Matrix.
It's a hard thing for people to do, separating ourselves from language. Even those of us who speak more than one language fluently, tend to THINK IN A LANGUAGE. Yes, we all perceive concepts abstractly, but we formalise and represent them, inside our own heads, using a language. Communicating is something we do naturally, and we communicate with sounds and printable characters. It's just a part of our biological wiring.
One interesting line from The Matrix sticks out when we think about this: The first 'Matrix' failed because, "some thought we lacked the language to represent your puny little world".. Or something to that effect. The machines considered creating a new language that would have a greater level of semantic richness to describe the problem.
This is an interesting idea, since human languages, all of them, evolved to describe the 'natural world'. We have no problem with understanding the causality of if-then, do-while or has-a and is-a... Even the concepts of OOP are 'natural'. Encapsulation, inheritance, aggregation, these are all natural concepts derived from the natural world and described with natural language. Any human language should be able to describe the world, and so any can be used for programming. The structure of programming languages would not be very different, because they are developed by beings who think in a language used to describe the natural world. {whew}
Now the neat part: What would a language be like if it were designed from the ground-up to be centered on computational concepts, and not those of the 'natural' world?
It would look like APL, with it's huge number of characters used to describe complex ideas that take many words to explain to people. If-Then is easy to explain to a newbie. How do you explain tail-recursion, or semantic closure? How do you concisely respresent a colored-tree (tertiary or more) without using the metaphor of trees and colors?
A language developed in a natural language other than English would not be all that different that what we're used to. (Not that PERL looks anything like English to begin with.
A language designed around computational concepts would look cryptic and superbly compact. The idea of programming patterns could potentially be represented as a single character, or a small set of glyphs which would require a long verbalization to translate into a human language. Such a language would likely be LISPish in structure, where instructions and data would blend seamlessly into each other.
This language would probably use coding-time translation tables and run-length instruction encoding in source, and would build complex concepts from little ones whenever needed; much like we do with functions, but from a much finer, to a much broader scale. This language would be self-referential, self-describing and self-modifying.
A langauge like this could not be designed by a human, because we are by definition prejudiced towards 'natural' languages. A computationaly centrered language could only be written by a machine which itself would have the capacity for manipulating abstract concepts. A pretty tall order.
A programming language designed by the ancient Celts, the Arabs, the Japanese or Babylonians would certainly APPEAR very different from Java, but after translating it - it would be simple to understand. A language built on un-'natural' concepts might not be comprehensible because it might include concepts we can not conceive of.
Time to re-read "Godel, Escher, Bach" one more time.
I saw a Moneyline interview with the head of Contentville a few weeks back. The guy turned my stomach in general, but two particular phrases/concepts in particular stuck out:
..." somewhere else.
1) He claimed that they are not actually selling copyrighted materials. What thay are selling is the convenience of being able to easily obtain materials that are available (often for free) elsewhere. You, the cusomer, pays for the convenience of the fact that you don't have to look as hard as you otherwise would.
This point is total BS, since a search engine like Google is quick and accurate, and keeps the $5 (approx) dollars in my pocket. BTW: In the case of non-freely available materials, they're going to buy them on your behalf, and pass the cost on to you, along with the 'nominal fee'. Afterwards, I'm sure they'll keep a copy of the materials - so they don't have to re-buy them next time - but will charge the next customer the same 'acquisition + nominal fee' amount.
2) The attitude that customers can buy the articles/papers/whatever from Contentville for a nominal fee, or they can go and "... buy it for free
"Buy it for free" elsewhere? That right there defined the character of the man for me. He's about money. He's not trying to do the right thing, or change the world, or even make research simpler for others. He's in it to get rich, and for some reason I found such a blatanly greedy attitude repugnant.
Crash and burn, ContentVille! Die!
My father and I used to work for the same company. We both got a 'magazine' relevant to our 401k plan. It was the same magazine, right?
No - the cover on mine featured people my age, hiking, whitewater rafting, skydiving... Included articles on high-risk stock investment, international travel... Ads for sporty sedans.
My father's magazine had older people on the cover, enjoying a sunset, playing with grandchildren, walking along a beach... Included articles on refinancing an IRA, the importance of writing a Will, retirement housing in Florida... Ads for Viagra.
Digital/real-time broadcast media aren't the only ones invading privacy. In fact, those with internal knowledge of your fininces and lifestyle (do you own your home? Do you have dependants?) are able to target you very precisely.
My parents only tend to make long-distance phone calls to Poland. They have family there. They often get ATT/SPRINT/Whatever Corp calling them with "great phone rates to Europe". I never make those calls, I never get those offers.
But hey! It's a Free Country(tm)!
I'm amazed each time I watch a sports event on TV (pretty rare occurence mind you) at the number of 'appropriate' adverts surrounding the players.
Take a hockey game for example. The backboards aroud the rink are always crammed with ads - as are the walls at a NASCAR race, figure skating... These are static images, easy to overlay in real time. If a computer could draw a real-time blur where the hockey puck is, then that same computer can just as easily replace a Coca-Cola logo with a Pepsi ad.
How else could SanFran's 49'er fans see local businesses advertized in the outfield of a game vs the Patriots, while Pat fans see their local businesses advertized in the same place during the same game?
Ad placement in content is one thing - but that's something I can handle just fine. Here's what worries me: Advertising auctions! Consider the possibility of real-time ad placement and the options it opens up. Adverts no longer need to be permanent; they can be time-sliced. Imagine watching a baseball game where, each time a pitch is thrown, there is a different advertisement behind the batter. Imagine companies bidding on ad placement spots and durations in real-time, given Nielsen viewer ratings to drive their advert buying decisions...
Say that a sports event suddenly goes into overtime, or is running real close in a pivotal game... The ability to slip a Budweiser ad into the last few shots would be very attractive to advertisers.
What do you say guys, you want to patent this idea and make a fortune? Or patent it to keep it from becoming reality?
CFO Magazine articles should be shunned because it't too easy for some industry analyst to make undocumented claims.
Folks, it's obvious that this is "yet another eye-ball catcher, ad revenue generating article" intended to spread FUD and cause IT managers to buy Micro$oft SMS software. After all, we know for a Fact(tm) that M$ does not have back-doors, errors or undocumented features to begin with, and so, by extension, it is Impossible(tm) to make undocumented changes to the OS.
M$ software, such as ISS, does NOT include an undocumented dll file the sole purpose of which is to introduce a back-door, and to mock Netscape coders.
M$ software, such as Excel, does NOT include an undocumented functional flight simulator accessible to those who know the secret key combination.
An IT staffer can NOT go to SysInternals and get a utility to change the size of a swap/working set, or a utility to change the NT timeslice; munge around in the server room and 'forget' to write it down somewhere.
An IT staffer can NOT deploy SP4 to 1500 workstations overnight without anyone's knowledge.
Article Executive Summary: "We're completely safe from the revolting techno-geeks, if we buy Micro$oft software. If we pay M$ $1000/PC for support, we don't have to hire an expensive technical staff - that might some day turn on us - and can get away staffing the server room with MIS interns. "
Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.
It's a rule that has been around for OVER 2,000 years, and it holds even more true today.
[much pointless ramble on how much I agree deleted]
You no longer get the warm and fuzzies of seeing the cummulative effect, but you can still strive to have each and every post modded up. You just can't keep track very well.
:) It's a little contest that sort of sprang up.
:) Aristotle might have a little bit to say about that.
As for the drive behind getting more Karma, I thin kyou're right on. We're a bunch of pack-rats, and Karma is sort of like the AD&D character score.
In retrospect, Karma probably should have never been counted. It's where we are now, minus that little unchanging number. A comment deemed of worth still bubbles up.
As for the argument that people post only to score points... Well, don't they always, in one way or another. Karma is just a little more tangible than impressing people and earning their silent gratitude. Are you suggesting that the motivation for an action matteras as much, or more, than the action itself?
Interesting way to think of it all, isn't it?
:) Open rebellion is needed. It doesn't pay to be a nice guy and not throw dung at the other monkeys - and hay, if I can keep my high Karma while flaming and pouring hot grits down Natallie Portman's pants, all the better. :)
The "Karma Whores" are frozen with their high karma. But this implies that everyone who got modded up past 50 is a Whore.
So to not be a Whore, you have to flame and troll for each time you are insightful and informative?
I see where this is going. I guess it's time for a little YANG, now that all YIN and no YANG doesn't pay.
Yes, the Suck piece was a parody, but every parody - by being a parody - brings attention to some aspect of reality. In every myth there is a kernel of truth.
:)
/.'ers a little credit, would'ya? We're not all idiots.
Portraying Bill Clinton as a chubby, child-molesting hill-billy red-neck is a parody; but it focuses and exaggerates some aspect of the subject.
A truly successful parody is one which does not require excessive suspension of disbelief. Like a good Troll, it starts out totally plausible, and gets deeper and deeper - and you fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Only later, do you realize that it is in fact making drastic fun of something more subtle. That realization then makes you consider the subject being parodied - it forces you to think about an issue that you would normally overlook, or dismiss.
This is why a good parodical troll gets marked as informative, insightful, eventually funny and ultimately overrated and flamebait, without once earning the deserved Troll.
Everyone (almost) realized that the Suck piece was a parody - after all, it's on Suck! Duh! (Doing otherwise is like taking The Onion seriously. If they put big "blink" tag disclaimers on the article, saying "THIS IS A JOKE!", it would have ruined the joke, right?) The subsequent discussions and outbursts are centered on the issue the piece presented; the theme and not the plot, if you will; while continuing the plot. Give
Maybe you're the one who "didn't get it"?
It's about time somebody said it.
/.! Money bought a law.
Yes, money buys ethics, and it's even more true than you say. Money doesn't just buy the perception of ethics through marketting and advertisement, as you say. Money makes things right.
Witness the RIAA sponsored 'work for hire' copyright rider on the Satelite communications Law that was recently mentioned here on
Now Law is the definition of Ethics for our culture. Individuals define ethics and morality for themselves, but that's just an opinion. When you are in violation of The Law, you are in violation of what society thinks is right.
If money can buy a law, then money can define what society thinks is right, and furthermore, what wrong actions are penalized. "Oooh! He copied a song on Napster! He broke The Law!"
But then again, we've always know this to be true. We all know The Golden Rule - He (and it is invariably a He) who has the Gold, makes The Rules.
In and effort to instill proper family values amonth the computer-using community, the Christian Family Coalition, in an unprecedented foray into high-technology and inter-faith healing has announced a complete line of CPUs for the home user. Here's some features of the upcoming processors in the series:
* Moses: Has only 10 opcodes, burned directly into the silicon using patented "Finger of God" lasing technique.
* David: All web content appears as though run through www.askjesus.com.
* Maccabee: No irrational number mathematics permitted. No division by zero and no infinite loops. You must take all results on Faith.
* Joshua: Linux runs fine on this chip, but BSD will definitely NOT. Something about an inappropriate logo...
* Aaron: Any LONG pointers are immediately truncated. Pointers of unauthorized programs are set to null.
* Solomon: You can just FORGET running SATAN to scan your networks.
* Ruth: Children's games featuring the Telle-Tubbies crash inexplicably.
A new, 64-bit series of CPUs has also been announced. Features are unclear, but twelve distinct processors have been listed.
* Peter: Rock-solid performance. Water cooled.
* Thomas: The availability of this chip is somewhat doubtful.
* Judas: Special purpose hardware for network 'honeypot' machines. New, silver-based transistors.
* James I, James II, Matthew, Mark, Andrew and the rest are noted are general purpose and peripheral control processors at this time.
It's a consipiracy I tell you.
Why does the FBI get to choose the University that is going to review Carnivore in the first place? Why a University? It's like asking Bill Clinton to choose the person to investigate his latest impropriety (Ginger Lynn, the porn star... wait for it.) Or like Micro$oft appointing the Judge to preside over their anti-trust trial.
/. reader, but because the hackers and the Fed are natural adversaries. It's the only way to make sure Carnivore gets a thorough PEER-REVIEW. Hackers would really get under the thing's skin, while academics will complement it's object-oriented design, oogle the UML specs and give a favorable review in exchange for a research grant. The only hope is that, since this thing will end up at a University... Well, their security ain't the best.. We'll get to see it somehow.
The decision of who and how will review Carnivore OUGHT to be made by a panel of SECURITY EXPERTS, not the people accused of 'wrongdoing' in the first place. I'd like the decision-maker to be Bruce Scheiner, and I'd like him to hand Carnivore over to the L0pht guys (umm, excuse me, @stake).
It should be the hacker community that gets to scrutinize Carnivore. Not because I'm a
In the very least, I hope a formidable research University gets the nod. Someplace like CMU, MIT, or UC Berkeley would/might do this right. I'm sorry but if they hand it to Harvard or Yale, our communal goose is cooked.
I agree, the JIT does a great job for performance, but the gcj is more along the lines of what I'm looking for in a Win32 environment.
Providing a self-contained executable, or a set of compiled files (a'la DLL and EXE) is much easier than making sure that a customer has a servicable JRE on his/her box. As it stands, dealing with distribution of Java programs is just as bad, if not worse, than handling VB programs. With VB all I had to worry about was providing the correct VBRUNxxx.dll, but with the recent (relatively, you must admit) switch to Java2 and the more recent addition of HotSpot in JDK1.3, things got complex.
Distributing the complete JRE each time, Just In Case, isn't going to cut it. Yes, the support stuff is in JARs, and these can all be conditionally installed - but that's a bit more to worry about than with an old fashioned EXE. Also, the fact that invoking a Java program involves not only starting the interpreter/JIT, but also setting a CLASSPATH, makes things icky - at least until Java makes adequate inroads that a CLASSPATH can be presumed. Sure, setting up a batch to do this is fine, but we're just compounding assumptions at that point. A binary executable is a lot more workable when doling out software to non-programmers.
The one argument for C#, and against Java, seems to be performance. If C# delivers better performance than Java, than C# will be better. I'd argue that, but I left my asbestos undies at home.
Well... Where are the Java bytecode-to-native compilers to make this a non-issue?
Seems to me that improving the performance of an existing language (albeit at the cost of platform independence, obviously) would be much simpler than developing a whole new language to include the piece that Java is missing - a native compiler.