... as I care about JDK. Seeing how Larry axes one thing after another, I suppose they'll do the same with JDK somewhere down the road. And for me JDK is the most valuable thing of all their (Sun's) good stuff.
How is Cathrina-style rescue any better than earthquake in post-soviet country ?
My take is that after 20 years of (typical) ignorance government is now trying to grab control over Internet just as it now (indirectly) controls mainstream (corporate) media. They talk about abuse, cyber terrorism, child pornography, piracy etc. but what they really think is how to bar bloggers and independent media content/opinions from leaking into mainstream and how to bar people from self organizing against (criminal) acts of government and big business.
If all that Australia debacle does not scream you that (they put wikileaks and other organizations government didn't like onto the very first version of their website blacklist), I don't know what will.
Benito Mussolini used to say that facism should be called corporatism because it's a merger of state and corporations. Franklin D. Roosevelt also had in interesting observation in one of his speeches: "The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism—ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
Sticking to those (informal) definitions, US is a full fledged facist state today. Along with Russia, to some extent China and some others. It seems that facism sadly became a dominant form of government in the world.
You're missing the point entirely. The whole climate change debacle is now mainly focused on pushing carbon credits down to people's throats. It does not solve anything, as carbon credits "market" is designed by and for speculators in general and Goldman Sachs banksters in particular. It only means more wealth transfer from ordinary people to Goldman Sachs gang, Al Gore and their cronies. It can actually do more harm to environment as more producers in western countries (those still alive who tend to be more environment friendly) will be driven out of business by chinese manufacturers (who don't give a crap about environmental protection). And no, China will not reduce their emissions. They chose to ignore carbon credits. And if someone read their officials' position, there is ALREADY between the lines that they will cheat and lie. Forcing CFLs over traditional light bulbs in EU is also a fraud designed to feed some big & fat corporations holding patents on CFLs (Philips?).
Wanna real solutions ? Plant some trees. Or build a nuclear plant (oh, wait: those greenpeace idiots won't let you do this). Develop cleaner nuclear technology - LFTR reactors are propably cleaner (per megawatt) than wind turbines (bzzzt: LFTR progress is blocked by beurocrats in US, other countries also ignore this technology). You see, real solutions are ignored or suppressed
My point is that we chose to pursue real, working solutions and instead promote fraudulent wealth-transfer schemes based on fraudulently tampered data. Instead of perpetuating fraudulent carbon credits "market" we should mandate that any enterprise with footprint of, say X tons of CO2 should maintain a forest that is able to soak up some part of it. Even Chinese would accept this as a part of their stimulus as they are wery well aware of their environmental condition. We also should mandate that any product imported into our countries has to be produced in compliance to our (current) environmental protection laws. This would hike price of many products significantly but this is what I would accept - as opposed to giving my money to banksters in order to "save the earth" and being aware that little of none of this money will find its way to any environment friendly technology.
If we talk about languages, I prefer real LISP over JS. Not that JS is bad, but I still have to see language that matches LISP in many areas (see LISP macros). Most of today apps use JS in browser and something other on server. This is BAD, no matter how cool JS itself is.
While using Java Script on server is (some) option, there is also other way around - see GWT or Pyjamas. As browser is becoming a full-fledged platform, it is screaming for support of other languages along side with JS. While it is possible to compile other languages into JS, it's a kludge. The whole situation screams for splitting JS into lower level instruction set (along with object model implementing cool JavaScript features, like first class functions, prototypes and functional programming features) and JS language implementation on top of that. Other languages would compile to this intermediate representation as well. I would like to use my LISP for implementing in-browser code (Scriptjure does it but it is still in its infancy and it will become kludge, like GWT anyway)
Western countries have by far most access to cheap energy and cheap food. Yet their population diminshes and they (we) import immigrants to fill the gap. It is true for all advanced economies. Once a nation gets sophiscated enough to have people educated and equipped with birth control means, growth halts as people can "trade" number of children for economic conditions. Emerging countries will see the same thing once their societies will get sophiscated enough.
It's a shame that western nations keep so much countries in 3-rd world rank by manipulating/corrupting their governments, stealing their natural/energy resources and making them debt slaves. Excess population growth of many countries is actually an effect of those shameful actions. Cheap energy source and help in achieving real advancements (as opposite to this shameful circus performed by Bono, Geldof and other idiots) would solve the problem.
As a person who still remembers (late stages of) communism, those fat & lazy corporations resemble old (long dead) industry in communist states. So many things look exactly the same. High rank executives chasing phantom "results" just to get their bonuses, causing so much mayhem in the process. Middle rank managers who are interested in just blindly executing orders from their bosses and have to be clueless crooks to succeed, low level worker drones interested in setting up another "Q&A cell" to do some paperwork or being a salesman without any responsibility instead of doing something real.
For me, the main distinction between capitalism and communism (corporatism) is ownership. In capitalism the owner runs the business and risks its own property in the process - thus the owner is interested in well-being in the long run. In communism (or corporatism) the communist comisar (corporate executive) runs business that does not belong to him, does not risk anything and is interested in skimming some of it via bonus (for posting cooked results) or some form of fraud.
Using ownership distinction it is easy to explain why some corporations (Google, even Microsoft) are doing well (and have clean vision) while others (pre-Gerstner IBM, HP after Compaq merge) have no vision except next quarter results. Apple is a blatant example - founded by Jobs & co, then taken over by some classic corporate drones (and nearly killed in the process), then taken back by Jobs and regained all its shine (and some more). This also explains why large corporations like to merge creating larger (more poorly managed) ones - the larger (and less transparent), the more occasions for upper management to steal something.
... and their ill business model. The "industry" isn't going to think at all. It's a cartel full of idiot corporate executives incapable of thinking outside of their MS Excel sheets and bribing politicians. Provoking those crooks with things like Pirate Bay will only result with mayhem and more draconian laws. It's time to override them and invent better business models in a legal, indisputable way. Creative commons comes to my mind but it does not solve problem of financing a production. Things like this may be a good complement to CC - while Max Keiser is a kind of freak (and first films submitted on his site reflect this), idea of community financing via premium copies (and taking eventual profits) coupled with filmmaking costs dramatically lowered by today's technology may do the trick.
... with releasing their KX-6500 printer. First they released the printer along with cheap accesories (toner and drum module - sold separately). Two years later drum module price almost tripled and at this point its price became comparable with new printer price. Early users of this printer were basically screwed as drum had to be replaced after approx. two years of moderate use. Since then I don't touch Panasonic products, even with a ten foot pole.
Python code has no explicit type declarations. That means that generated (byte)code has to be type agnostic or the VM has to be able to generate concrete specializations on the fly. Type agnostic code kills performance (be it an interpreter or JIT generated code). Generating specializations consumes memory. This is why cpython interpreter is slow and psyco is a memory hog. Jython/IronPython variations propably have both drawbacks to some extent - faster than cpython but nowhere near fully optimized native code and quite memory hungry (as Java and.NET apps tend to be).
Porting python to LLVM will be a quite ambitious step with lots of work. I suppose they'll end up with a virtual machine having similiar performance characteristics to Jython/IronPython without overhead of Java/.NET/Java_programming_style. It will be suitable for server environments and this is what Google is paying for;)
Opening formats and protocols + getting rid of patents protecting them is crucial and it should be easy to deduce to any thinking person.
I wonder IF they are intentionally bringing up this browser nonsense to help Microsoft keeping formats and protocols hidden as long as possible. I'm very curious of it.
Microsoft stroke deals with hardware vendors to limit capacities of their netbook products. Asus is trying to pull off this market and sell bigger (and a bit more expensive) products. Are they scared that too many people will learn that a netbook is enough for them ?
We still don't have any better stuff for curing cancers. We use the same chemicals for 40 years, only dozes are now more precise. There are dozens of (potential) substances what COULD be better but FDA procedures block substantial progress. Many of them are patented anyway.
It is also possible to limit cancer epidemics and drive it to (relatively low) rates of 1940's by extensively testing all chemicals people are exposed (food conservants, household washing chemicals, cosmetics etc.) - that means, blocking new product if there are ANY signs of hazard, not only if it is proved that product is hazardous for sure. Most of these products can be replaced by less harmful chemicals which aren't much more expensive. Search for "Samuel Epstein" at video.google.com to see some interviews on this topic.
So, I don't see standards going up as society progresses. Our progress is now driven by harmful greed. Corporate drones are squeezing last buck without regard of customers' safety. American Cancer Association is interested in keeping cancer epidemics wild and collecting money, they are even hostile to any prevention initiatives.
In a world with standards are so "up" and few bucks being more important than people health, I would expect far too many problems with legalizing penicilin.
Wherever it looks like linking farm or not, I've bookmarked it. It is much more acurate than google.com in its own niche. Pretty much the same as freshmeat.net in open-source-software-projects niche.
If google search results and ads linking to sourcetool.com are properly described as a search/directory site, i won't mind seeing it in my search results.
Depending on how a real Larabee will work (compared to paper visions Intel shows today), it might render CUDA/StreamSDK efforts much less appealing. Even with a half (or a quarter) of performance of contemporary NV/ATI designs, it might be a strong competitor in general number crunching. And buliding it from x86-compatible cores is not so dumb move as it looks at first glance.
The major difference between Lafabee and contemporary GPUs is that Larabee is really fully programmable. It even supports multitasking and protection (it has paging system). It does not force programmer to use strictly data-parallel algorithms and does not make multipass algorithms so expensive (starting a task on Stream SDK is very costly - around 30ms or so, involvig X server and other unnecessary components on my Ubuntu box). Many algorithms (bitonic sort for example) are a joke on NV/ATI just because of a huge cost of starting subsequent stages of computation.
The only hope for NVidia and ATI in GPGPU area is making their devices more flexible and less pinned to traditional graphics processing, making them fully open and less dependent on X and proprietary drivers/extensions. I'm looking forward for fully open and programmable offerings from all three vendors, not for silly comments thrown at competitors.
It's just that software does not keep up with hardware advances. There are many semi-ai or ai things I would have running on my PC. Classical example is indexing images or videos. Being able to query "show me all pictures where my girlfriend wields watch on her left hand" etc.
My favorite would be a robot which will clean up my house. Not just hoover or clean up a floor. Also, clean up higher standing things, recognize what is a useful thing, what is a piece of rubbish and what I should decide if it should be tossed out. That kind of robot would also alert me that something needs to be repaired (like leaking roof), fix simple things (leaking pipes?), and generally take care of my property keeping it well by maintaining and fixing early enough, taking care of all living plants etc. And i would rather talk with this device using a natural language than program it by clicking or writing some kind of bizzare script;)
That kind of thing certainly needs enormous computational power. You need to recognize objects in images coming from its sensors (be it cameras, laser/infrared sensors etc.), solve a kinematic and dynamic equations of robot arms in realtime, have some advanced AI - both in solving basic problems of geometry and moving objects, and more sophiscated AI, including some non-trivial ontology-like database (so robot won't close a plant in a cabinet letting it die.
So, you need to crunch incredible amounts of data and do not consume too much power. I think that current designs still needs some work to keep with such kind of workload.
Re:Establishing de facto (open source) standard ?
on
ECMAScript 4.0 Is Dead
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Maybe. Remembering earlier articles about ES4 and political mess about this, I dunno what to think.
My opinion: I need a modern virtual machine with capabilities comparable with Flash/Silverlight applets and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. Compatible across browsers. Language independent (I would like to program this in Python) - maybe with some kind of intermediate representation (bytecode?). Capable to run bigger, non-trivial apps. Well designed. Open sourced and not patent encumbered.
Currently there is nothing satisfying my wishes. Pure javascript has somewhat limited capabilities (especially in multimedia area) and isn't fully compatible across browsers. Flash is proprietary and doesn't work well on some platforms and is just an applet (not well integrated with the browser itself). Silverlight is proprietary and does not work well outside windows. Java applets - along with their bad integration with browser itself and huge startup overhead - are IMO examples of bad design.
Any ideas ?
Slashdot Mirror
... as I care about JDK. Seeing how Larry axes one thing after another, I suppose they'll do the same with JDK somewhere down the road. And for me JDK is the most valuable thing of all their (Sun's) good stuff.
My take is that after 20 years of (typical) ignorance government is now trying to grab control over Internet just as it now (indirectly) controls mainstream (corporate) media. They talk about abuse, cyber terrorism, child pornography, piracy etc. but what they really think is how to bar bloggers and independent media content/opinions from leaking into mainstream and how to bar people from self organizing against (criminal) acts of government and big business.
If all that Australia debacle does not scream you that (they put wikileaks and other organizations government didn't like onto the very first version of their website blacklist), I don't know what will.
Sticking to those (informal) definitions, US is a full fledged facist state today. Along with Russia, to some extent China and some others. It seems that facism sadly became a dominant form of government in the world.
Wanna real solutions ? Plant some trees. Or build a nuclear plant (oh, wait: those greenpeace idiots won't let you do this). Develop cleaner nuclear technology - LFTR reactors are propably cleaner (per megawatt) than wind turbines (bzzzt: LFTR progress is blocked by beurocrats in US, other countries also ignore this technology). You see, real solutions are ignored or suppressed
My point is that we chose to pursue real, working solutions and instead promote fraudulent wealth-transfer schemes based on fraudulently tampered data. Instead of perpetuating fraudulent carbon credits "market" we should mandate that any enterprise with footprint of, say X tons of CO2 should maintain a forest that is able to soak up some part of it. Even Chinese would accept this as a part of their stimulus as they are wery well aware of their environmental condition. We also should mandate that any product imported into our countries has to be produced in compliance to our (current) environmental protection laws. This would hike price of many products significantly but this is what I would accept - as opposed to giving my money to banksters in order to "save the earth" and being aware that little of none of this money will find its way to any environment friendly technology.
While using Java Script on server is (some) option, there is also other way around - see GWT or Pyjamas. As browser is becoming a full-fledged platform, it is screaming for support of other languages along side with JS. While it is possible to compile other languages into JS, it's a kludge. The whole situation screams for splitting JS into lower level instruction set (along with object model implementing cool JavaScript features, like first class functions, prototypes and functional programming features) and JS language implementation on top of that. Other languages would compile to this intermediate representation as well. I would like to use my LISP for implementing in-browser code (Scriptjure does it but it is still in its infancy and it will become kludge, like GWT anyway)
Western countries have by far most access to cheap energy and cheap food. Yet their population diminshes and they (we) import immigrants to fill the gap. It is true for all advanced economies. Once a nation gets sophiscated enough to have people educated and equipped with birth control means, growth halts as people can "trade" number of children for economic conditions. Emerging countries will see the same thing once their societies will get sophiscated enough.
It's a shame that western nations keep so much countries in 3-rd world rank by manipulating/corrupting their governments, stealing their natural/energy resources and making them debt slaves. Excess population growth of many countries is actually an effect of those shameful actions. Cheap energy source and help in achieving real advancements (as opposite to this shameful circus performed by Bono, Geldof and other idiots) would solve the problem.
As a person who still remembers (late stages of) communism, those fat & lazy corporations resemble old (long dead) industry in communist states. So many things look exactly the same. High rank executives chasing phantom "results" just to get their bonuses, causing so much mayhem in the process. Middle rank managers who are interested in just blindly executing orders from their bosses and have to be clueless crooks to succeed, low level worker drones interested in setting up another "Q&A cell" to do some paperwork or being a salesman without any responsibility instead of doing something real.
For me, the main distinction between capitalism and communism (corporatism) is ownership. In capitalism the owner runs the business and risks its own property in the process - thus the owner is interested in well-being in the long run. In communism (or corporatism) the communist comisar (corporate executive) runs business that does not belong to him, does not risk anything and is interested in skimming some of it via bonus (for posting cooked results) or some form of fraud.
Using ownership distinction it is easy to explain why some corporations (Google, even Microsoft) are doing well (and have clean vision) while others (pre-Gerstner IBM, HP after Compaq merge) have no vision except next quarter results. Apple is a blatant example - founded by Jobs & co, then taken over by some classic corporate drones (and nearly killed in the process), then taken back by Jobs and regained all its shine (and some more). This also explains why large corporations like to merge creating larger (more poorly managed) ones - the larger (and less transparent), the more occasions for upper management to steal something.
... and their ill business model. The "industry" isn't going to think at all. It's a cartel full of idiot corporate executives incapable of thinking outside of their MS Excel sheets and bribing politicians. Provoking those crooks with things like Pirate Bay will only result with mayhem and more draconian laws. It's time to override them and invent better business models in a legal, indisputable way. Creative commons comes to my mind but it does not solve problem of financing a production. Things like this may be a good complement to CC - while Max Keiser is a kind of freak (and first films submitted on his site reflect this), idea of community financing via premium copies (and taking eventual profits) coupled with filmmaking costs dramatically lowered by today's technology may do the trick.
... with releasing their KX-6500 printer. First they released the printer along with cheap accesories (toner and drum module - sold separately). Two years later drum module price almost tripled and at this point its price became comparable with new printer price. Early users of this printer were basically screwed as drum had to be replaced after approx. two years of moderate use. Since then I don't touch Panasonic products, even with a ten foot pole.
Porting python to LLVM will be a quite ambitious step with lots of work. I suppose they'll end up with a virtual machine having similiar performance characteristics to Jython/IronPython without overhead of Java/.NET/Java_programming_style. It will be suitable for server environments and this is what Google is paying for ;)
I wonder IF they are intentionally bringing up this browser nonsense to help Microsoft keeping formats and protocols hidden as long as possible. I'm very curious of it.
... I think "Intellectual Vultures".
Microsoft stroke deals with hardware vendors to limit capacities of their netbook products. Asus is trying to pull off this market and sell bigger (and a bit more expensive) products. Are they scared that too many people will learn that a netbook is enough for them ?
It is also possible to limit cancer epidemics and drive it to (relatively low) rates of 1940's by extensively testing all chemicals people are exposed (food conservants, household washing chemicals, cosmetics etc.) - that means, blocking new product if there are ANY signs of hazard, not only if it is proved that product is hazardous for sure. Most of these products can be replaced by less harmful chemicals which aren't much more expensive. Search for "Samuel Epstein" at video.google.com to see some interviews on this topic.
So, I don't see standards going up as society progresses. Our progress is now driven by harmful greed. Corporate drones are squeezing last buck without regard of customers' safety. American Cancer Association is interested in keeping cancer epidemics wild and collecting money, they are even hostile to any prevention initiatives.
In a world with standards are so "up" and few bucks being more important than people health, I would expect far too many problems with legalizing penicilin.
Wherever it looks like linking farm or not, I've bookmarked it. It is much more acurate than google.com in its own niche. Pretty much the same as freshmeat.net in open-source-software-projects niche.
If google search results and ads linking to sourcetool.com are properly described as a search/directory site, i won't mind seeing it in my search results.
The major difference between Lafabee and contemporary GPUs is that Larabee is really fully programmable. It even supports multitasking and protection (it has paging system). It does not force programmer to use strictly data-parallel algorithms and does not make multipass algorithms so expensive (starting a task on Stream SDK is very costly - around 30ms or so, involvig X server and other unnecessary components on my Ubuntu box). Many algorithms (bitonic sort for example) are a joke on NV/ATI just because of a huge cost of starting subsequent stages of computation.
The only hope for NVidia and ATI in GPGPU area is making their devices more flexible and less pinned to traditional graphics processing, making them fully open and less dependent on X and proprietary drivers/extensions. I'm looking forward for fully open and programmable offerings from all three vendors, not for silly comments thrown at competitors.
My favorite would be a robot which will clean up my house. Not just hoover or clean up a floor. Also, clean up higher standing things, recognize what is a useful thing, what is a piece of rubbish and what I should decide if it should be tossed out. That kind of robot would also alert me that something needs to be repaired (like leaking roof), fix simple things (leaking pipes?), and generally take care of my property keeping it well by maintaining and fixing early enough, taking care of all living plants etc. And i would rather talk with this device using a natural language than program it by clicking or writing some kind of bizzare script ;)
That kind of thing certainly needs enormous computational power. You need to recognize objects in images coming from its sensors (be it cameras, laser/infrared sensors etc.), solve a kinematic and dynamic equations of robot arms in realtime, have some advanced AI - both in solving basic problems of geometry and moving objects, and more sophiscated AI, including some non-trivial ontology-like database (so robot won't close a plant in a cabinet letting it die. So, you need to crunch incredible amounts of data and do not consume too much power. I think that current designs still needs some work to keep with such kind of workload.
My opinion: I need a modern virtual machine with capabilities comparable with Flash/Silverlight applets and level of integration comparable with javascript engines shipped with browsers. Compatible across browsers. Language independent (I would like to program this in Python) - maybe with some kind of intermediate representation (bytecode?). Capable to run bigger, non-trivial apps. Well designed. Open sourced and not patent encumbered.
Currently there is nothing satisfying my wishes. Pure javascript has somewhat limited capabilities (especially in multimedia area) and isn't fully compatible across browsers. Flash is proprietary and doesn't work well on some platforms and is just an applet (not well integrated with the browser itself). Silverlight is proprietary and does not work well outside windows. Java applets - along with their bad integration with browser itself and huge startup overhead - are IMO examples of bad design. Any ideas ?