are several things that we need: 1) more hardware acceleration features at a higher level in the protocol and better OpenGL support
This is already there, altho' not really in XFree86 - SGI's GLX extensions work great and allow a remotely executing client to use the local X server's hardware acceleration capabilities.
WBXML compresses XML down to bytecodes. It's used in WAP and other places. It works off the DTD, assigning bytes to represent the various tags and attributes
That might help, but you're still shipping a lot of redundant metadata around.
But even if it were plain old text XML, it still poses some real advantages, not least of which you could transport it over SSL, web proxies and other barriers that would stop an X-session cold.
You can quite happily tunnel anything you want over HTTP, even X11.
If the schema had sophisticated drawing primitives ala SVG you might find it is considerably faster than X which might be forced to move bitmap data around for similar operations.
Not if you want to remain fully compatible with existing XLib code.
When is anybody going to just start from scratch, like Apple did with OS X?/i
Umm, Apple didn't start from scratch. They bought an existing platform - OpenStep - and customized it. OpenStep and NeXTStep before it were both mature products in the MCCA space (mission critical custom app) for example financial applications, telecomms, etc.
As an old NeXTStep user, in many ways OSX was a step backwards... still it is good to see that Apple are able to make a more of a mainstream success than NeXT did. NeXTStep was a great OS that should have owned the business desktop in the early 90s, if Jobs hadn't screwed up marketing it so badly. Businesses were banging on his door to buy it back then and he said no, we only sell to education, but he priced his machines at $10,000!
XML is a good choice for storing data when you might want to extend the attributes of a record/properties of an object without breaking existing applications. That's inherent to the design of XML - so long as you query your documents in a structured way - say with a DOM parser and XPath - then "extra" tags don't make a blind bit of difference, except for taking up some memory and some processor time.
But it's an extremely bad choice if you want to move lots of the same type of data around, when you know the format of the data in advance, and you do if what you're sending is drawing primitives, GUI widgets from a standard toolkit, etc etc. That is because of all the redundant metadata. If you are sending (for example) a CSV file the metadata comes once, in the header, and all the rest is pure data. An XML file stores the structure with the data - if you did this in a CSV file, it would mean repeating the header every other line, doubling the size if your file (or stream) for no advantage. It's worse with XML where you might have <somelongtagname>1</somelongtagname> - that is, your metada being far larger than your data. All compression does is add both processor and memory overhead at both ends, assuming the network isn't already saturated.
I know that XML is "trendy" but it's the wrong tool here - a binary protocol should be used.
And if you were confident enough in the reliability, you could even put a bouncer on earth, which goal would only be to resend the stream to the satellite and keep it looping.
I remember Scotty did this in an episode of Star Trek, he bounced back and forth as a transporter beam for 70-odd years until Georgy La Forge came along rematerialized him.
After years of using computers almost exclusively for written communication, my manual writing skills have atrophied to the point of near uselessness. My handwriting - never my strong point - now makes a doctor's look like calligraphy, and my hand starts cramping up almost instantly.
It's not just the physical act of writing that I can't do any more. Over a decade of using a word processor has led to me thinking in an "inside out" fashion about writing - I write say the main sentence of a paragraph, then add more before and after to fill in the rest of the point I'm trying to make. Or I write a document in a different order, perhaps writing the discussion first, then the background beforehand, then the conclusion then the introduction. Having a medium where you can't jump back and forth at will within the text, adding and moving at will, makes it almost impossible for me to compose a document by hand, unless I start off with one paragraph per page, written in the middle and take it from there, which means several drafts written out by hand before I get the final version.
When I need to hand write, for example a personal letter, I'll often write it out in a word processor, then hand copy it!
Immediately start finding ways to ship people and supplies to the Space Station without using the Shuttle. Never again use the Shuttle for any mission that could be done by, say, a Russian rocket.
You know, the original plan for the ISS was to assemble the whole thing on Earth in a collapsible form, strap it to the back of a shuttle booster in place of the shuttle itself and launch the whole thing in one go, unmanned. NASA's engineers thought this was a good idea, Lockheed-Martin's engineers thought this was a good idea, the independant review board at MIT thought this was a good idea. NASA, however, felt the need to justify its great white elephant, the shuttle, so the idea was killed.
Conclusion: don't give any additional money to NASA, and don't ask NASA to design any new spacecraft.
Damn right. NASA is an obstacle to space exploration, the sooner it is disbanded the better for everyone - apart from useless career bureaucrats that is.
The politics of today are focussed on military expenditures, and doing whatever it takes to contue justifying the existence of the military industrial complex.
You are forgetting where all the dollars spent on the space race actually went: into the so-called "military industrial complex". Saying that politics today is all about that is missing the point; the politics of the 1960s were all about that too!
The finish line is a permanent installation on the moon, and a year or two from now, we'll find out if there's more than one competitor in this race.
No, the finish line of this particular race is a permanent settlement on Mars. There's simply too little by way of resources to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, sure you've got a lot of silicon and oxygen, but it's all in a very hard to get at form, and there's no readily accessible carbon, hydrogen, etc etc. Dr Robert Zubrin has written extensively on the feasibility of colonizing Mars using present-day technology - there's surprisingly little that we'd need to do that we can't already do, if the will was there. His main idea is to do it in small stages - there is a proven process for generating rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, so the first thing to do is to send an automated fuel extraction plant, and set it running. Once it's up and running, the manned mission won't have to carry fuel for the return trip. Supplies such as food can also be sent in an unmanned module, and cached on the surface waiting for the astronauts to arrive.
According to Zubrin, however, NASA has too much ego tied up in using one vast spaceship to go there and come back, assembled in orbit. They'll never adopt an incremental strategy because too many managers have staked their careers on orbiting shipyards and the like. If NASA is left in charge, the US has already lost the space race.
Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.
SQL> select name from phonebook where number ='123456';
Computationally, this is no more difficult than looking up a number from a name, so long as you have an index on that column.
He can't mention it without risking that someone will come along and implement the feature before he gets a chance to be paid for it, just to prove a "software should be free as in beer" point.
No, the best way to motivate people is with opportunity for self-actualization.
For some that's money... for some it's training, for some it's working with cutting-edge-tech, for some it's tuition subsidy, for some it's on-site childcare, etc etc. You need to sit down and work out "what sort of people do I want, and what motivates those kinds of people".
Throwing money at academics doesn't work as well as throwing money at bankers. And bankers couldn't care less if you expect them to show up at 7.30AM for work, but hackers would rebel. Those are just a couple of examples...
The problem is that in most companies, upper management makes decisions that affect the underlings, and unfortunatly, keeping the underlings in the dark is the only way to control them. Rarely do you see upper management being open with subordinates.
It's not as simple as you make out. Under present laws, there are events a company can't tell employees about until it has told shareholders (of course, these days there is often an overlap). That's why you might find news of layoffs in the paper before employees are officially told - it's been announced the previous evening just after trading hours. That way the obligations to shareholders are fulfilled, but the risk of panic selling is reduced a little, since investors have a night to think about it calmly.
If you don't like it, either don't work for a publicly-traded company or campaign for the law to be changed. Complaining that "upper management" is evil is just childish.
You're all over the map. First you say heating the brain makes it work better, then you say that the point of a fever is to raise your temp so the rest of your body works better although it might cook your brain.
Heating it a little seems to help - heating too much damages it.
It hurts the bacteria.
The rationale is, who needs a brain if the body is dead? So let's risk a little brain damage and optimize for fighting infection. So we cool the heads of people with fevers and let it run its course, usually, unless there is risk to another organ.
Cell phone *sharpens* the senses? Seems just a little crazy to me.
Heating the brain a little is how it does it. Some of the body's subsystems work more efficiently when warmer than normal operating temperature (that's what a fever is: your body optimizing for fighting infection). Unfortunately, the optimal temperature is not the same for every subsystem, which is why the normal overall blood temperature is 37C. And there's no feedback between the subsystems: to fight infection, your immune system doesn't care if it damages your brain - that's why we cool the heads of people with fevers. So while one part of your brain may work better when a little warmer, there's no telling what the long term effects might be on other parts.
Even if this mysterious honest recruitment firm did exist, they'd still be taking a lot of money that could be going to your salary (they have to make a profit somehow), and they'll always be bad at matching you up with a company
Umm, headhunters are paid a percentage of your starting salary. It's in their best interest to negotiate this up for you, and they'll do their best to do so.
Sure, grids are cool, but when can we download a safe piece of software which to use for distributed calculations? When I'm not it need of doing stuff myself it would use my idle time for other people's calculations, and vice versa.
You can get it here along with some case studies of how it's used in production.
Distributed backups is another thing I'd like to have now, rather than tomorrow...
And Picard gives him the lecture about how "we're past all that now" and "it's about bettering yourself, etc.", essentially saying, "Stop being a greedy bastard."
I always thought that was one of the lamest episodes ever. Because there are plenty of crap jobs on Star Trek, even within Star Fleet - you even see them from time to time, people bored out of their minds on some remote outpost or other. Why do that when in this "utopia" you could spend your whole time on the Holiday Deck with Romulan love-slaves? Why would you do the grunt work so people like Riker can swan about the galaxy in their fancy-schmancy Starships, getting all the alien babes he can handle?
And how does the Federation decide whether to do stuff? It doesn't have infinite resources... so it has to decide what to do and when. How does it decide where it can best use its resources without an accounting unit, i.e. a currency? And how does it decide who gets to spend all their time on the Holiday Deck, and how many Holiday Decks are built, and how many Starships, etc etc?
Capitalism will be obsolete when energy supply, manufacturing capability, availability of raw materials and logistics capacity all outstrip all possible demand. But that's far further in the future than Star Trek, if ever.
Wealth always has been and always will be created by governments. The first millionaires in the United States built their wealth through legalized piracy (er, privateering) under charter from the government during and following the revolution and subsequent conflicts with European powers.
You fail to understand the difference between getting wealth and creating wealth.
Inflation is the result of the supply of money (which is a commodity as subject to supply and demand as anything else) outstripping the creation of wealth. It doesn't mean that wealth isn't created.
You just have to compare what you can buy today for x amount of money compared with 10, 50, 100 years ago. Or just compare how much computing power you can buy for $1000 today compared to 10 years ago. Or look at all the products that were once preserves of the very rich - like cars and TVs - that are everyday items now.
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extremely useful comments because they have unique experiences and are willing to share them
I agree with second and third parts, but not necessarily the first...
are several things that we need: 1) more hardware acceleration features at a higher level in the protocol and better OpenGL support
This is already there, altho' not really in XFree86 - SGI's GLX extensions work great and allow a remotely executing client to use the local X server's hardware acceleration capabilities.
WBXML compresses XML down to bytecodes. It's used in WAP and other places. It works off the DTD, assigning bytes to represent the various tags and attributes
That might help, but you're still shipping a lot of redundant metadata around.
But even if it were plain old text XML, it still poses some real advantages, not least of which you could transport it over SSL, web proxies and other barriers that would stop an X-session cold.
You can quite happily tunnel anything you want over HTTP, even X11.
If the schema had sophisticated drawing primitives ala SVG you might find it is considerably faster than X which might be forced to move bitmap data around for similar operations.
Not if you want to remain fully compatible with existing XLib code.
When is anybody going to just start from scratch, like Apple did with OS X?/i
Umm, Apple didn't start from scratch. They bought an existing platform - OpenStep - and customized it. OpenStep and NeXTStep before it were both mature products in the MCCA space (mission critical custom app) for example financial applications, telecomms, etc.
As an old NeXTStep user, in many ways OSX was a step backwards... still it is good to see that Apple are able to make a more of a mainstream success than NeXT did. NeXTStep was a great OS that should have owned the business desktop in the early 90s, if Jobs hadn't screwed up marketing it so badly. Businesses were banging on his door to buy it back then and he said no, we only sell to education, but he priced his machines at $10,000!
XML is a good choice for storing data when you might want to extend the attributes of a record/properties of an object without breaking existing applications. That's inherent to the design of XML - so long as you query your documents in a structured way - say with a DOM parser and XPath - then "extra" tags don't make a blind bit of difference, except for taking up some memory and some processor time.
But it's an extremely bad choice if you want to move lots of the same type of data around, when you know the format of the data in advance, and you do if what you're sending is drawing primitives, GUI widgets from a standard toolkit, etc etc. That is because of all the redundant metadata. If you are sending (for example) a CSV file the metadata comes once, in the header, and all the rest is pure data. An XML file stores the structure with the data - if you did this in a CSV file, it would mean repeating the header every other line, doubling the size if your file (or stream) for no advantage. It's worse with XML where you might have <somelongtagname>1</somelongtagname> - that is, your metada being far larger than your data. All compression does is add both processor and memory overhead at both ends, assuming the network isn't already saturated.
I know that XML is "trendy" but it's the wrong tool here - a binary protocol should be used.
And if you were confident enough in the reliability, you could even put a bouncer on earth, which goal would only be to resend the stream to the satellite and keep it looping.
I remember Scotty did this in an episode of Star Trek, he bounced back and forth as a transporter beam for 70-odd years until Georgy La Forge came along rematerialized him.
Bill Nighy is the front runner.
The only logical choice for the new Dr Who is that quintessential English gentleman, Chris Eubank.
Did any of you moderators click those links? LOL!
After years of using computers almost exclusively for written communication, my manual writing skills have atrophied to the point of near uselessness. My handwriting - never my strong point - now makes a doctor's look like calligraphy, and my hand starts cramping up almost instantly.
It's not just the physical act of writing that I can't do any more. Over a decade of using a word processor has led to me thinking in an "inside out" fashion about writing - I write say the main sentence of a paragraph, then add more before and after to fill in the rest of the point I'm trying to make. Or I write a document in a different order, perhaps writing the discussion first, then the background beforehand, then the conclusion then the introduction. Having a medium where you can't jump back and forth at will within the text, adding and moving at will, makes it almost impossible for me to compose a document by hand, unless I start off with one paragraph per page, written in the middle and take it from there, which means several drafts written out by hand before I get the final version.
When I need to hand write, for example a personal letter, I'll often write it out in a word processor, then hand copy it!
Immediately start finding ways to ship people and supplies to the Space Station without using the Shuttle. Never again use the Shuttle for any mission that could be done by, say, a Russian rocket.
You know, the original plan for the ISS was to assemble the whole thing on Earth in a collapsible form, strap it to the back of a shuttle booster in place of the shuttle itself and launch the whole thing in one go, unmanned. NASA's engineers thought this was a good idea, Lockheed-Martin's engineers thought this was a good idea, the independant review board at MIT thought this was a good idea. NASA, however, felt the need to justify its great white elephant, the shuttle, so the idea was killed.
Conclusion: don't give any additional money to NASA, and don't ask NASA to design any new spacecraft.
Damn right. NASA is an obstacle to space exploration, the sooner it is disbanded the better for everyone - apart from useless career bureaucrats that is.
The politics of today are focussed on military expenditures, and doing whatever it takes to contue justifying the existence of the military industrial complex.
You are forgetting where all the dollars spent on the space race actually went: into the so-called "military industrial complex". Saying that politics today is all about that is missing the point; the politics of the 1960s were all about that too!
The finish line is a permanent installation on the moon, and a year or two from now, we'll find out if there's more than one competitor in this race.
No, the finish line of this particular race is a permanent settlement on Mars. There's simply too little by way of resources to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon, sure you've got a lot of silicon and oxygen, but it's all in a very hard to get at form, and there's no readily accessible carbon, hydrogen, etc etc. Dr Robert Zubrin has written extensively on the feasibility of colonizing Mars using present-day technology - there's surprisingly little that we'd need to do that we can't already do, if the will was there. His main idea is to do it in small stages - there is a proven process for generating rocket fuel from the Martian atmosphere, so the first thing to do is to send an automated fuel extraction plant, and set it running. Once it's up and running, the manned mission won't have to carry fuel for the return trip. Supplies such as food can also be sent in an unmanned module, and cached on the surface waiting for the astronauts to arrive.
According to Zubrin, however, NASA has too much ego tied up in using one vast spaceship to go there and come back, assembled in orbit. They'll never adopt an incremental strategy because too many managers have staked their careers on orbiting shipyards and the like. If NASA is left in charge, the US has already lost the space race.
it shows that you look for the cheapest and easiest way of getting a piece of paper rather than looking to obtain a real qualification.
Agreed. In a age where real universities such as City and Oxford do part-time courses, it's very difficult to justify a "rubber stamping" course.
Imagine looking for a person when only knowing their phone number. Today we look through the phonebook one name at a time, but with quantum computing, we'd look at the entire phonebook at once.
SQL> select name from phonebook where number ='123456';
Computationally, this is no more difficult than looking up a number from a name, so long as you have an index on that column.
Which project is it?
He can't mention it without risking that someone will come along and implement the feature before he gets a chance to be paid for it, just to prove a "software should be free as in beer" point.
The best way to motivate people is with money.
No, the best way to motivate people is with opportunity for self-actualization.
For some that's money... for some it's training, for some it's working with cutting-edge-tech, for some it's tuition subsidy, for some it's on-site childcare, etc etc. You need to sit down and work out "what sort of people do I want, and what motivates those kinds of people".
Throwing money at academics doesn't work as well as throwing money at bankers. And bankers couldn't care less if you expect them to show up at 7.30AM for work, but hackers would rebel. Those are just a couple of examples...
The problem is that in most companies, upper management makes decisions that affect the underlings, and unfortunatly, keeping the underlings in the dark is the only way to control them. Rarely do you see upper management being open with subordinates.
It's not as simple as you make out. Under present laws, there are events a company can't tell employees about until it has told shareholders (of course, these days there is often an overlap). That's why you might find news of layoffs in the paper before employees are officially told - it's been announced the previous evening just after trading hours. That way the obligations to shareholders are fulfilled, but the risk of panic selling is reduced a little, since investors have a night to think about it calmly.
If you don't like it, either don't work for a publicly-traded company or campaign for the law to be changed. Complaining that "upper management" is evil is just childish.
You're all over the map. First you say heating the brain makes it work better, then you say that the point of a fever is to raise your temp so the rest of your body works better although it might cook your brain.
Heating it a little seems to help - heating too much damages it.
It hurts the bacteria.
The rationale is, who needs a brain if the body is dead? So let's risk a little brain damage and optimize for fighting infection. So we cool the heads of people with fevers and let it run its course, usually, unless there is risk to another organ.
Cell phone *sharpens* the senses? Seems just a little crazy to me.
Heating the brain a little is how it does it. Some of the body's subsystems work more efficiently when warmer than normal operating temperature (that's what a fever is: your body optimizing for fighting infection). Unfortunately, the optimal temperature is not the same for every subsystem, which is why the normal overall blood temperature is 37C. And there's no feedback between the subsystems: to fight infection, your immune system doesn't care if it damages your brain - that's why we cool the heads of people with fevers. So while one part of your brain may work better when a little warmer, there's no telling what the long term effects might be on other parts.
Even if this mysterious honest recruitment firm did exist, they'd still be taking a lot of money that could be going to your salary (they have to make a profit somehow), and they'll always be bad at matching you up with a company
Umm, headhunters are paid a percentage of your starting salary. It's in their best interest to negotiate this up for you, and they'll do their best to do so.
Sure, grids are cool, but when can we download a safe piece of software which to use for distributed calculations? When I'm not it need of doing stuff myself it would use my idle time for other people's calculations, and vice versa.
You can get it here along with some case studies of how it's used in production.
Distributed backups is another thing I'd like to have now, rather than tomorrow...
Uuencode, split, and post to Usenet...
I actually paid $150 for a copy of Windows. Can you believe it? $150 for an operating system?
Almost as outrageous as people paying good money for a copy of Red Hat!
It must've cost about $0.05 for the media, plus a few bucks for the programmer who copied the code from VMS, BSD, and MacOS.
Or downloaded it from the net...
And Picard gives him the lecture about how "we're past all that now" and "it's about bettering yourself, etc.", essentially saying, "Stop being a greedy bastard."
I always thought that was one of the lamest episodes ever. Because there are plenty of crap jobs on Star Trek, even within Star Fleet - you even see them from time to time, people bored out of their minds on some remote outpost or other. Why do that when in this "utopia" you could spend your whole time on the Holiday Deck with Romulan love-slaves? Why would you do the grunt work so people like Riker can swan about the galaxy in their fancy-schmancy Starships, getting all the alien babes he can handle?
And how does the Federation decide whether to do stuff? It doesn't have infinite resources... so it has to decide what to do and when. How does it decide where it can best use its resources without an accounting unit, i.e. a currency? And how does it decide who gets to spend all their time on the Holiday Deck, and how many Holiday Decks are built, and how many Starships, etc etc?
Capitalism will be obsolete when energy supply, manufacturing capability, availability of raw materials and logistics capacity all outstrip all possible demand. But that's far further in the future than Star Trek, if ever.
Wealth always has been and always will be created by governments. The first millionaires in the United States built their wealth through legalized piracy (er, privateering) under charter from the government during and following the revolution and subsequent conflicts with European powers.
You fail to understand the difference between getting wealth and creating wealth.
that's incorrect. we have inflation all the time.
Inflation is the result of the supply of money (which is a commodity as subject to supply and demand as anything else) outstripping the creation of wealth. It doesn't mean that wealth isn't created.
You just have to compare what you can buy today for x amount of money compared with 10, 50, 100 years ago. Or just compare how much computing power you can buy for $1000 today compared to 10 years ago. Or look at all the products that were once preserves of the very rich - like cars and TVs - that are everyday items now.