Personally I think it's a perfect example of why the government should not create rules which govern Internet communications.
I agree. I think what Harris seem to have misunderstood is that ISPs and mail admins have a choice as to whether they pull the MAPS list or not, and can always negate certain hosts if there is a requirement to receive mail from a certain company that MAPS has listed. My personal take on this is that this is another example of an organisation just not getting it when it comes to the Internet.
Ahhhh... I long for a return to the days where archie and gopher were cool, running a full Usenet feed wouldn't mean you'd be breaking several laws no matter where you were in the world and the content was interesting... I say we shoot all the guys on the net who can't explain how a subnet mask is actually used (complete with explanation of bitwise AND operations). Yes, that means you.
Well, seeing as everybody is having problems defining the first OS, perhaps we should look at the first stored-program computer and see what that was running. The first "programmable logic calculator" and there were 10 of them in operation at Bletchley Park during WWII working on breaking the German Enigma cipher.
The "OS" on Colussus as I understand it, was simply the function of a group of valves. There was hardware checking other hardware, but to my knowledge there was no software running on Colussus other than the algorithm used to break Enigma. Input was by way of punched paper tape containing cipher read a few thousand characters a second (I've seen the rebuild running, and yes it is scary watching paper tape at that speed), output was buffered onto relays which meant a typewrite was printing out onto paper roll. The "processor" was just 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shit register. I suspect the "OS" was hardware and people making sure that none of the 2,500 valves blew up. All programming was by way of hard wiring, so it's hard to determine what the OS was here. There is some really cool information about Colussus here if you're interested.
Next there was ENIAC, which due to the fact the British Government kept Colussus an Official Secret, was considered for a long time to be the first ever computer. ENIAC seemed suprisingly similar (when I read the specs anyway) in terms of internal function to Colussus - no OS there at all. So, we still haven't found anything...
Then there was the Baby built by Manchester University in the UK. The rebuild of the Baby now sits in the Manhester Science and Industry museum. It's a curious piece of kit to say the least. It's memory consisted of a radar screen showing an array of bits, and whether each bit was on or not was picked up by a piece of gauze in front od the screen. Because phosphor on the screen takes a while to fade, you could just fire it, and not worry for a few hundred milliseconds about refreshing it.
The baby didn't require anything to hard wired at all. There was a group of toggle switches on the front to program the machine, and there was a sense of "state" when no program was loaded or running. Therefore, I think whatever it was running on the Baby probably has claim to being the first ever OS. There is some nice stuff on the Baby (or officially the Manchester Mark 1) over here for you to peruse at your pleasure.
So, my vote is that whatever was running on the Baby was the first OS. But then, I don't know as much about ENIAC as I do about Colussus and the Mark 1. Please feel free to correct me if the ENIAC had code running before a program was loaded.
For some reason people are obsessed about guessing our future, and determining how our lives will be affected and what technologies will be in use. The simple truth of the matter though, is we are really, really bad at doing it.
In the 1950's and 1960's a lot of predictions (many of which you have probably seen yourselves) were made as to how we would live in the year 2000. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm not wearing silver jump boots and driving my hover car to work yet, and I still have to cook all by myself. It was foolish to try and predict 40 or 50 years into the future, and we've learnt our lesson. So now, a design team want to get some publicity and attempt to predict where our computers are going to be in 10 years time. There are some flaws though.
1. Why do I want a computer shaped like a frisbee in the first place? Too big to carry around, too small to make it look like it deserves a space in my office.
2. All of these technologies are still on drawing boards and we won't see prototypes until 2010 at the earliest. In addition better and more useful technologies are likely to emerge between now and 2010 meaning some of these components may never get the R&D required to develop them.
3. Desks as screens is the most stupid thing I've ever heard in my life. After a weeks use, the cramp and pain in my neck would probably become unbearable. It's also an "illegal" position for visual display equipment to be placed in under the Health and Safety at Work Act in the UK. But hey, that nasty dude with the supercomputer in Tron had one, right?
4. More powerful computers doesn't mean smarter computers. The article implies that because this machines will have equivalent power to something like a Cray J90 or somesuch that it will therefore make our environments "smart". So, does that mean they are predicting advancements in artificial intelligence as well? Funny that, because for the last 2 decades people have been saying that in 10 years time we'll have smart machines.
In short, I think that this is possibly the worst article I have ever seen concerning the future of computers over the next ten years. Seeing as it's completely publicity-generating pie-in-the-sky and not clearly thought out by anybody who understands these issues, why am I even bothering writing this reply? Because I've got nothing better to do? In that case, I think I'll go and design my house of the future (*yawn*).....
Believe it or not, I actually take quite an intrest in the workings and dynamics of work spaces. I'm not an architect, but I find what different architects do to solve this problem quite fascinating.
I've seen and worked in a variety of spaces. Cubicles are cool if they're large enough because it's a little like having your own office, but it's more open than that. I've also worked in places where desks are just shoved where they will fit without partitions (quite usual in the UK), and that allows a bit more social interaction, but can be distracting if you're coding. Great for being an admin in though.
One of the more intriguing options I've seen is hot-desking. The concept sounds... different. With no desk of your own, or space of your own, you are expected to just work wherever you want with a laptop and mobile phone. Although a lot of people find it liberating (especially in media companys), I think for geeks, it would actually be quite constraining - you can't have your manuals nearby.
I've seen it go the other way as well. Every member of staff gets their own office that they are free to personalise as they want. Some companies have even allowed budgets to be given for people to spend on decorating their office. I seem to remember the company that "pioneered" this approach was an advertising agency that wanted offices full of toys and fun things to act as a stimulus to the imaginiation. Oh, they had a basketball court in the foyer as well for meetings.
Personally, I work from home and myself and cow-worker use a spare bedroom in my flat. There are pluses and minuses with the situation, but not having to commute is fantastic. I haven't been in a car or on public transport in several weeks. I live in a city center so I'm near most things.
I suppose the ideal working space for me would be a mixture of the above ideas. I like the idea of having space to personalise, but I also like the idea of being able to move over to a sofa with a laptop on a coffee table for a bit if I choose to. I think gimmicks like free food and drink are good, as is the idea of being able to shoot some hoops whilst discussing database design internals. Perhaps a mix like that is the best solution. Well, it sounds like fun to me.:-)
I think our American friends are probably not aware of who Tesco is, and what they represent. Tesco introduced loyalty card and "point" schemes to the UK supermarket industry several years ago, and there has been a great deal of debate as to what they do with the information that they collect about people's shopping habits. There have even been guides as to how to disrupt this shopping behaviour in the past along the lines of swapping cards with the next person in the queue, applying for multiple cards, etc. in order to get the discounts offered but to also disrupt the data mining conducted on the data.
You may also not be aware that Tesco are the only company offering on-line grocery shopping in the UK. There is another company (Iceland) that offer on-line frozen food shopping, but if you want anything else, you have to use Tesco. Myself, I work 12 hour days and live in a city center where the local supermarket is small and doesn't stock all the things I need. Therefore, I have no choice but to use Tesco on-line. If it wasn't there, my diet would consist 90% of take away food and I would be dead by the time I'm 40.
The issue of privacy in this context is a big one. I can't swap my card with the next person in the queue, and it is even easier for them to track my shopping habits on-line than off-line ("Aahhh, he went to the frozen food section first, then to the fresh fruit section, and then...."), and to be honest, I don't really like it. I'm not saying that Tesco don't have the right to make a profit, and perhaps understand overall trends of shopping, but the fact that they are able to produce a highly detailed dossier on me, my diet, how I shop, how many pets I'm likely to own (pet food), whether I'm vegetarian (Quorn rather than beef), whether I have a female partner living with me (sanitary products), am sexually active (condoms), etc. and that it is all directly targetted towards me and may be held for many years, is a little disconcerting.
Like I said, if I want a reasonable diet in the UK living in the center of Manchester, I have no real choice. It also annoys me that I have to move to the Windows machine to use the service, but I can live with that. I agree with the poster - why is it I can do my banking on-line without hassle but not my shopping?
It sounds to me that by passing laws that they know will get thrown out in court, the government is demonstrating that it has no respect for the legal system. Not that I can point the finger since the U.S. Congress does the same thing, but your argument is somewhat flawed. There are certain factions in all governments that would be happy to sacrifice the necessary checks and balances on the state for short-term gains.
Well, I think the problem with RIP is that the government didn't want to loose face but knew it was in trouble (IIRC, it got through with a majority of one vote), and to be honest they never wanted to admit that they were technically incompetent. If they had, they wouldn't have let this one through. It was a rush job put through a bit of gentle pressure from the law enforcement agenices who wanted to be seen to be doing something. Expect a new RIP bill to be presented to parliament within 5 years at a guess.
I'm sorry, I have to take exception to this. I also live in the UK, and I've been an admin of an ISP or two in the last few years as well. I have also worked within the civil service, and can see things from both sides of the fence. To be blunt, I think you're being hysterical.
To say that we live in a state where "law enfocement bodies now have the right to walk all over us" is a redundant and rather stupid statement. We live in a state whereby democratic politics is allowed. Would you rather live in a country where surveillance is carried out, but you're never told about it? Or would you rather have the ability to state that the laws are wrong and vote for those parties that promise to abolish those laws once you vote for them? Oh, I know, we don't have any of those rights do we. Except that "Mother of all Parliaments" thing that we have.
I find your attitude (in that you imply the suggestion we are unable to do anything about laws to which we are morally repulsed) quite hilarious. You don't happen to be a researcher on the Mark Thomas Comedy product do you?
Secondly, everybody knows that the RIP bill is unenforcable, and will fall at the first hurdle when tested in a court of law. To think otherwise is again, stupid and mildy amusing on your part. Yet again, you have assumed that The Government will show no respect for the legal system, and will just bang us all up in prison for even suggesting that they should give us freedoms. Oh, and they'll probably stop us from being able to vote as well. Britain is soooo like that.
What I always find really, really, really amusing about all these people (like yourself) who complain about the RIP bill, is that you didn't realise that the Interception of Communications Act had been in place for years. The only differene between the RIP bill and the IOCA is that the RIP bill extended responsibility for interception to ISPs as well as Telcos, the IOCA required a secretary of state to sign the warrant rather than senior police officer, and the RIP bill discusses crypto. If somebody wanted to intercept your traffic, they always could, it's just now going to be the case that the operations will be cheaper to run. Oh, and they'll tell you about wanting your key rather than finding it themselves on a supercomputer somewhere....
Oh, and there is one more thing. Do you honestly think that the Police or the Government really have the time, resources, or even slight inclination to give a damn about you? They're stretched to the teeth already - this law is designed to assist in the capture of major drug smugglers and their kin, not some warez kiddie who posts hilarious and ridiculous political statements on slashdot. If you're not a criminal, this law will never even affect you - ever. As an ISP admin, it may affect me, and I am prepared to install any equipment that the Government ask me to install, and run any interception required providing that the appropriate warrants have been filled in correctly and in adequate time.
This attitude really annoys me. Retailers dictate which OSes are good, and which are bad. If I'm paying a few thousand on a top-notch box, I expect to be able to have it come pre-installed with any OS I choose, whether it be Plan 9, QNX, Linux, Win2K, Solaris x86, GEOS, whatever.
The attitude that people who build and shift boxes should have some insight as to what OS is going to suit me most is pretty sickening to be honest. The market is getting more competitive, and retailers like Dell are going to have to start being more accomodationg towards what the customer wants if they wish to retain market share. In fact, I suspect that a retailer with the $$$ to be able to offer any OS required pre-installed will probably steal a lot of market share in most of North America and Western Europe. But hey, who cares as long as you get invited around to Bill's house once in a while.
A more interesting question is, does this technology mean that on-line storage (currently hard disks) might become faster? If you could have several gigs of magnetic storage in your machine accessible at RAM speeds (lets be sluggish and call it 80ns), then that would mean some very, very, very high-performance systems become viable.
I'm assuming that MRAM is going to hit the market at around the same price as normal memory, so it's going to be a lot more $/Mb than hard disks, but it still presents some interesting oppurtunities.
Quite evidently he's an idiot then. Being able to identify those journalists that are complete morons is a very useful thing to do. In fact, I think I can see an idea for a website here.
There are very few journos who I actually rate in any way. ZDnet UK's Guy Kewney used to be good when I read the UK PC Magazine years ago, but with that exception, generally, I have to say, journos suck. Firstly, they aren't trained or have any experience in working in the industry generally. They have either learnt everything they know from press releases and back publications of their own magazine, or they really do work somewhere in the IT industry - but hey, how many tech savvy guys do you have working for you whose opinion you rate, and who has the time to be writing articles on new technologies? I'd love to write down some of the stuff I get upto in my job, but I just don't have time. I don't think any of us really do, which is why that 15 minutes messing about on slashdot is a nice release.;-)
Why don't we all stop trying to push as much juice as possible through our kit, and try instead to get exactly the same performance, but at lower power consupmtion which would be a far more useful and valid project. Image a sort of "OK, I still get the same number of MIPS on this kit, but by dropping the voltage and using this low power cooling system, I can overclock it still and use less electric!". Now that I will respect. But not this - hey guys, why don't we all just cut to the chase and flop 'em out on the table next to a ruler and see who has got the biggest?:-) (like every man on this earth I wish I had 12 inches - not this enormous thing I've got right now! <cue cymbal crash>).
To be fair though (and I do mean fair), Linux doesn't cut it in the real Unix world. It's not as stable as Solaris - on which you can run an SS7 switch with some cisco hardware, nor is as secure as OpenBSD which although another free 'nix is far closer to being "real Unix" than Linux is, and it's not as powerful as.... (here comes the flamebait)... BSD.
Sorry, but you guys seem to think Linux == Unix. It doesn't - I think even Linus would descirbe it as a Unix-like OS. I don't want to turn this into my OS is better than your OS war (although we haven't had one on/. for at least a fortnight), but I can see why people hate Linux, and why they love it. I just don't think we should be getting into that argument when the context of the original story was about Unix. I accept that there is a huge proportion of/. readers whose only experience with Unix-like tools is with Linux, and it's good that as a result they might go onto play with Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Digital Unix, maybe even some of the more mature BSDs, and perhaps then they'll realise that in actual fact Linux really does suck and that the world is bigger than the creations of Linus, RMS and a few people who really should know better.:-)
Incidentally, QNX is kinda nice, and so is Plan 9 in it's own little way. Windows has apps, and MacOS is great for my Mum (who has problems with using a mobile phone), and Linux like I've said is a great way to cut yer teeth on real computing, so don't think that I'm trying to be biggoted about my choice of OS here.;-)
Well, indeed I would agree that Jeeves is not a very good example of an intelligent search engine. Jeeves really is a fake, however, I think I might have found something a little more interesting. A project known as Start based at MIT.
At first I thought that this again was a hoax, or that perhaps the knowledge tree was so carefully defined that it couldn't really be intelligent. So, seeing as it's knowledge tree is pretty much geography orientated, I'd thought I would try and trip it up. If you ask what the capital of Holland is, it correctly identifies that Amsterdam is indeed the capital of the Netherlands. A subtle, but valuable trick.
The real info on how all this works is given here by way of a paper written by Boris Katz. No, BORIS Katz.:-)
Read, enjoy, realise that f2k could be a reality seeing as the cpu cycles are there. Oh and if you're really interested in "chatterbots" from a semi-academic point of view, I'd reccomend highly Simon Laven's homepage which links to several sites discussing bots from Eliza to the John Lennon Aritifical Intelligence Project. It doesn't however cover the f2k and meaningoflife.com type of bots (perhaps because they're fake?:-P ).
I'm just wondering what the benefit in on-line voting is? I can't really imagine that turnout is going to increase, especially in countries where a large proportion of the population are not net-connected yet (most of Europe). Those individuals who are not able to travel to the polling station through work or disability in the UK are entitled to a postal vote. Given these two facts, why would a government want to introduce a new form of voting other than because it makes them look as though they are embracing new technologies?
With regards to how you can secure this system, well, you certainly can't do it over the net until governments start recognising electronic signatures and biometric authentication is more common. At the moment, if all a website does is ask me for my electoral role number, then I can pretend to be anybody on the electoral role. It's a bit like the Amazon system whereby you can submit a review as the author, and the authentication to make sure you are the author is a form that pops up saying "Are you really the author of this book? Yes/No". Not exactly the best way to run a democracy.
In the case of digitizable art, such as digital music, the infrastructure already exists to deliver it to many people at very low costs. If I listen to a song, I am not depriving anyone else of the song. It is not a depletable resource. It is bits which can be duplicated over and over and over with trivial cost. The best outcome for the consumer is a maximal amount of art that they enjoy at the lowest possible price.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*. At the moment the primary form of music distribution in most countries is still through the "hump boxes onto a truck, drive them out to store, unpack and sell CDs in store" which costs money. The music itself also costs money to produce professionally, studio time, promotion (no good in making music if nobody knows it's out there, right?), and the artist might want to do some live stuff that needs to be managed. All in all it's pretty expensive.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Your last point about maximal amount of art at the lowest possible price is fair. What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free. It will always cost money, even if it's a small amount and there are reasons for that. Even if we started seeing an uprise in GPL'ed music (for want of a better description), just like GPL software, somebody, somewhere pays for it. It might be the author who puts in the money he has earned in his real job, or it may require the intervention of a company to assist that project. Either way there is always some commercial element to it. It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
All I'm saying, is if you want good music, don't winge when it costs you less than 0.5% of your monthly salary. If you do, you don't deserve it.
Trciky one this. The exec hasn't made himself clear. The media, distribution of media, etc. is all non-free. The people who sell you the music in the store want to make money, the artist who recorded it wants to make money, the execs who look after the logistics (and they do matter - do you think that your favourite artists really could organise world tours, album launches, etc. on their own) all require a salary.
To argue that all music should be free is a romantic notion, but one that is actually pretty hypocritical when you think about it. I like to drink lots of water, and water is free, and if anybody tried arguing against that I'd get really upset. I'm still prepared to pay for a bottle of Perrier though. In the same sense, the majority of/. readers spend their lives writing algorithms. They spend their time effectively regurgitating mathematics. They often get paid for it. Hang on, does that mean that we are all claiming that mathematical algos. are not free? That you have to pay us for them? Dispicable! Well, in that case, I'd best ask my boss not to pay me anymore because all this stuff should be free.
It is very easy for Prince to argue that the music industry is all messed up and that Napster is fantastic. It's easy because he's so damned rich that he doesn't need any more money. How did he get this money? By any chance would it be because of those execs down at the record company pushing his music? So, after he's made all this money (note: he didn't complain at the time, did he?) he now makes a sweep at the record company. He score a few popularity points, gets his name in the media, and everybody thinks he's great. Does he give his money back to the fans? Ummmm...
Ultimately, the fact music is not, and never will be, free is not due to a limitation of technology. It's because the people who make music have to eat. I know there have been some rumours going around that Michael Jackson is actually run from mains electricity, but it's not true. He eats and craps on the toilet and pays taxes and has friends and family just like the rest of us. Get used to the fact that you have no right to listen to his or any other artists performances, in exactly the same way my boss does not have the right to expect me to write code whenever he wants free of charge.
I hate this argument already. It's so clear to me now that those who insist that music should be free just haven't thought about what the consequences of that.
Because our context has changed. Skip back a few years to when webpages were grey backgrounds and Time New Roman everywhere, and where all images that were links had huge blue borders round them. In effect, the infancy of the Web. At that time, you couldn't make money out of the net if you tried. There were a few big companies giving it a go and on the whole losing money hand over fist (Yahoo, Amazon), but that was OK because everybody thought it was impossible to make money out of the net.
At this time, if there is little point in throwing money into setting up an on-line presence because you aren't going to make profit for 10 years+ then you may as well establish a presence but make it all free. The setup costs are lower (no merchant accounts, secure servers etc.) and because you're not going to make money anyway.
There was also the greatest scam ever pulled over the public and website operators at this time - security companies were shouting about how unsecure the Internet was. It was just as secure to send your credit card details then with SSL as it is now with SSL. The only difference is that a few hundred million has been spent with the security companies.
If we now move forward to today, website operators are thinking that they should be seeing revenue covering their costs if not making profit within 2-3 years from startup. Customers are happier to send their credit card details over the Internet. The market has become more competitive and there is far more content people are prepared to pay to see these days. In short, the world has found the Internet an acceptable but new and original way of being able to satisfy their greed.
With regards to those amongst us who are winging about bandwidth charges and costs of servers, etc. all I have to say is that co-location is now so ridiculously cheap that if you're shifting more than your allocated bandwidth, the revenue you could generate from banner ads will actually cover your costs. Honestly. Yes, even on a 0.3% click-through rate.:-)
Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell?
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Looking Back At NeXT
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1. You don't have to wear a suit to be a suit.
2. His companies always slightly under-perform where you think a company with the products, creativity and mindset that places like Apple should be. Think about the companies he's been involved in, compare them to comparatively no-brainer outfits that don't require that level of creativity (Yahoo, Amazon), go figure.
I'm not saying this is all bad, I'm just answering the question of the previous poster as to why Jobs always seems to fail.
Re:Does Jobs bugger everything all to hell?
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Looking Back At NeXT
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I thought that it was people like Woz that came up with the really cool stuff, and Jobs was just the man in the suit who sells it to the masses...
I think the problem with Jobs is that he has suffered from a syndrome that he shares with Richard Branson. Because the companies he works for and has helped build are relatively high-profile in terms of branding and advertising, there is a media perception that he must be successful. In fact, Branson's companies aren't making profit at all but people perceive Virgin to be a success, and similarly people thought Apple was a great success when in fact whilst he was there the first time, it's fiscals didn't look anywhere near as good as they should have done.
Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job - because the media have told you he's wonderful and it's just that everybody else is out to get him, you believe that he is indeed wonderful.
I know I'm going to get flamed to hell for this from the die-hard Mac fans out there, but sorry, I just don't think that spin makes up for substance and as yet I've seen little from the Jobs camp apart from spin and the ability to have smart techs around him a lot of the time that come up with cool stuff.
First of all, this doesn't sound much like a calculator. It sounds more like a PDA. I mean the thing can play mp3s - at some point you can't call it a calculator anymore.
It does sound like a calculator, and I imagine it definitely will be. Your point about it playing mp3s really uncovers the opinion that most people have about mp3s - that they exist purely for listening to and the transportation of music. When you actually think about it, the ability to be able to give some sort of sound output might be quite useful - the ability to be able to load a program onto the thing that demonstrates a particular set of functions or area of mathematics, guided along by a helpful voice is something I would imagine that a lot of teachers would love to see.
To be honest, there is little work that I do these days that requires this sort of power and functionality (bit of sysadmin, bit of project management, all can be done on a 4-function calc or in Excel for the project stuff) and to be honest the only thing I could see myself doing is x^y stuff for interest rate calculation (not worth the rumoured $250 price tag), but I can see why this little beast is going to be desirable. However, I'd say that if HP are doing this, then there is a good chance TI will be upping the ante at some point soon. Calculator Wars - you've gotta love it!:-)
Re:The above comment missed the point
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Hacker Crackdown?
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While it is important for people to be aware of the potential uses of their creations, the leaders
who gave the orders to drop the atomic bomb are to blame, not the scientists who designed it or the works who built it.
There is a story I can tell here that links the software creativity "conundrum" and the very example you've just given. I used to know a guy who went to join the RAF as a trainee Pilot. In his interview they asked him how we would react if he were given the order to press the button to drop a bomb on a small village, and whether he would have any moral or ethical hangups over it. The answer he gave was that he was just part of a chain - he could not and would not take the sole responsibility for the dropping of that bomb as the ability for him to do so was shared amongst the scientists who created it, the commanders who ordered the bombing, even the woman who cooked him his eggs that morning in the canteen.
In many ways it's exactly the same with software. If I write a piece of code that could be used maliciously (depending on what your definition of malicious is), am I really that responsible for it's use if there are other people who market that code, or who themselves take the source and adapt it so that it is even more malicious? In fact, would my parents not also be responsilbe for encouraging my interest in computers and technology when I was a teenager, and wouldn't those around me encouraging me to progress my careers also be responsible?
My personal feeling is that if one person and one person alone develops a piece of software with deliberate malicious intent and then without encouragment uses that code for malicious purposes, they deserve everything that is coming to them. However, if a developer puts a bug in place by accident in a routine handling safety procedures at a nuclear power plant, is it not also the responsibility of his managment, his testing team, the people who taught him how to code and how to test his code as well as his own fault that the bug got through into a production system?
I wonder what protocol they're using to upgrade their software. It's gotta be some kind of stateless connection (imagine it: SYN ACK...). Maybe just a radio broadcast, with something like a FIN containing the checksum of the received data. Anyone have any clues?
Well according to their website here it is indeed radio based and you should be thinking in terms of giving commands to your TV with a remote control rather than expecting a SYN ACK-type scenario. It also seems that to press the buttons on your remote control, requires 6 or more teams. Madness.
Now, this might get moderated down as flamebait or as troll, but I have to say this: I don't think you guys should be allowed to run a *nix of any description if you are going to start installing stuff left, right and centre without knowing what files are going where. You're all going to think I'm crazy, but I really think the 5 or 10 minutes or so it takes to read and understand what happens when you type 'make install' is worth it. This is not Windows. You are trying to make Linux aspire to be Windows. This is not a Good Thing. It's not that you should make the interface neccessarily easier, but that you should attempt to make the user more clued up. I'd much rather see comprehensive documentation on the lines of "Makefiles for Dummies" being shipped about for the newbies than some new package format being created.
But seriously, to just randomly pull down a package from a site you don't know from Adam, and then as root say "Oh, go on then, do whatever you want" is plain madness, but then, you guys are going to flame me to death anyway, so perhaps I should just go and be quiet somewhere.:-)
I'm not trying to undermine the efforts of these guys, because I'm sure what they're doing is valid and is actually quite interesting in itself, but I'm having problems trying to see the commercial benefit of doing this. Above we are told that the purpose of this project is to "boot Linux on bigger systems", but that doesn't really same like a viable piece of research in many ways.
Commercially, if I want lots of nodes (16 nodes here), with Linux, I'm more likely to think Beowulf. If I want them to all appear as one machine, to be honest if I'm spending this sort of money I can see the benefits on going with Sun and Solaris. If I want lots of virtual linux machines running on one large easily-managable system then we already have Linux on S/390..
Can anybody tell me what the real commercial incentive is to run Linux on bigger systems? I'm just curious that's all. Perhaps I'm missing something here (almost certainly I'm sure).:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Which of course is the correct pronounciation! :-) Did the original Cambridge network have routers? If it did, then that proves it!
Seriously though, I almost start puking when I hear people talking about "row-ters" because it just seems so... so... American. Anyway....
Personally I think it's a perfect example of why the government should not create rules which govern Internet communications.
I agree. I think what Harris seem to have misunderstood is that ISPs and mail admins have a choice as to whether they pull the MAPS list or not, and can always negate certain hosts if there is a requirement to receive mail from a certain company that MAPS has listed. My personal take on this is that this is another example of an organisation just not getting it when it comes to the Internet.
Ahhhh... I long for a return to the days where archie and gopher were cool, running a full Usenet feed wouldn't mean you'd be breaking several laws no matter where you were in the world and the content was interesting... I say we shoot all the guys on the net who can't explain how a subnet mask is actually used (complete with explanation of bitwise AND operations). Yes, that means you.
Well, seeing as everybody is having problems defining the first OS, perhaps we should look at the first stored-program computer and see what that was running. The first "programmable logic calculator" and there were 10 of them in operation at Bletchley Park during WWII working on breaking the German Enigma cipher.
The "OS" on Colussus as I understand it, was simply the function of a group of valves. There was hardware checking other hardware, but to my knowledge there was no software running on Colussus other than the algorithm used to break Enigma. Input was by way of punched paper tape containing cipher read a few thousand characters a second (I've seen the rebuild running, and yes it is scary watching paper tape at that speed), output was buffered onto relays which meant a typewrite was printing out onto paper roll. The "processor" was just 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shit register. I suspect the "OS" was hardware and people making sure that none of the 2,500 valves blew up. All programming was by way of hard wiring, so it's hard to determine what the OS was here. There is some really cool information about Colussus here if you're interested.
Next there was ENIAC, which due to the fact the British Government kept Colussus an Official Secret, was considered for a long time to be the first ever computer. ENIAC seemed suprisingly similar (when I read the specs anyway) in terms of internal function to Colussus - no OS there at all. So, we still haven't found anything...
Then there was the Baby built by Manchester University in the UK. The rebuild of the Baby now sits in the Manhester Science and Industry museum. It's a curious piece of kit to say the least. It's memory consisted of a radar screen showing an array of bits, and whether each bit was on or not was picked up by a piece of gauze in front od the screen. Because phosphor on the screen takes a while to fade, you could just fire it, and not worry for a few hundred milliseconds about refreshing it.
The baby didn't require anything to hard wired at all. There was a group of toggle switches on the front to program the machine, and there was a sense of "state" when no program was loaded or running. Therefore, I think whatever it was running on the Baby probably has claim to being the first ever OS. There is some nice stuff on the Baby (or officially the Manchester Mark 1) over here for you to peruse at your pleasure.
So, my vote is that whatever was running on the Baby was the first OS. But then, I don't know as much about ENIAC as I do about Colussus and the Mark 1. Please feel free to correct me if the ENIAC had code running before a program was loaded.
For some reason people are obsessed about guessing our future, and determining how our lives will be affected and what technologies will be in use. The simple truth of the matter though, is we are really, really bad at doing it.
In the 1950's and 1960's a lot of predictions (many of which you have probably seen yourselves) were made as to how we would live in the year 2000. Now, I don't know about you guys, but I'm not wearing silver jump boots and driving my hover car to work yet, and I still have to cook all by myself. It was foolish to try and predict 40 or 50 years into the future, and we've learnt our lesson. So now, a design team want to get some publicity and attempt to predict where our computers are going to be in 10 years time. There are some flaws though.
1. Why do I want a computer shaped like a frisbee in the first place? Too big to carry around, too small to make it look like it deserves a space in my office.
2. All of these technologies are still on drawing boards and we won't see prototypes until 2010 at the earliest. In addition better and more useful technologies are likely to emerge between now and 2010 meaning some of these components may never get the R&D required to develop them.
3. Desks as screens is the most stupid thing I've ever heard in my life. After a weeks use, the cramp and pain in my neck would probably become unbearable. It's also an "illegal" position for visual display equipment to be placed in under the Health and Safety at Work Act in the UK. But hey, that nasty dude with the supercomputer in Tron had one, right?
4. More powerful computers doesn't mean smarter computers. The article implies that because this machines will have equivalent power to something like a Cray J90 or somesuch that it will therefore make our environments "smart". So, does that mean they are predicting advancements in artificial intelligence as well? Funny that, because for the last 2 decades people have been saying that in 10 years time we'll have smart machines.
In short, I think that this is possibly the worst article I have ever seen concerning the future of computers over the next ten years. Seeing as it's completely publicity-generating pie-in-the-sky and not clearly thought out by anybody who understands these issues, why am I even bothering writing this reply? Because I've got nothing better to do? In that case, I think I'll go and design my house of the future (*yawn*).....
Believe it or not, I actually take quite an intrest in the workings and dynamics of work spaces. I'm not an architect, but I find what different architects do to solve this problem quite fascinating.
:-)
I've seen and worked in a variety of spaces. Cubicles are cool if they're large enough because it's a little like having your own office, but it's more open than that. I've also worked in places where desks are just shoved where they will fit without partitions (quite usual in the UK), and that allows a bit more social interaction, but can be distracting if you're coding. Great for being an admin in though.
One of the more intriguing options I've seen is hot-desking. The concept sounds... different. With no desk of your own, or space of your own, you are expected to just work wherever you want with a laptop and mobile phone. Although a lot of people find it liberating (especially in media companys), I think for geeks, it would actually be quite constraining - you can't have your manuals nearby.
I've seen it go the other way as well. Every member of staff gets their own office that they are free to personalise as they want. Some companies have even allowed budgets to be given for people to spend on decorating their office. I seem to remember the company that "pioneered" this approach was an advertising agency that wanted offices full of toys and fun things to act as a stimulus to the imaginiation. Oh, they had a basketball court in the foyer as well for meetings.
Personally, I work from home and myself and cow-worker use a spare bedroom in my flat. There are pluses and minuses with the situation, but not having to commute is fantastic. I haven't been in a car or on public transport in several weeks. I live in a city center so I'm near most things.
I suppose the ideal working space for me would be a mixture of the above ideas. I like the idea of having space to personalise, but I also like the idea of being able to move over to a sofa with a laptop on a coffee table for a bit if I choose to. I think gimmicks like free food and drink are good, as is the idea of being able to shoot some hoops whilst discussing database design internals. Perhaps a mix like that is the best solution. Well, it sounds like fun to me.
I think our American friends are probably not aware of who Tesco is, and what they represent. Tesco introduced loyalty card and "point" schemes to the UK supermarket industry several years ago, and there has been a great deal of debate as to what they do with the information that they collect about people's shopping habits. There have even been guides as to how to disrupt this shopping behaviour in the past along the lines of swapping cards with the next person in the queue, applying for multiple cards, etc. in order to get the discounts offered but to also disrupt the data mining conducted on the data.
You may also not be aware that Tesco are the only company offering on-line grocery shopping in the UK. There is another company (Iceland) that offer on-line frozen food shopping, but if you want anything else, you have to use Tesco. Myself, I work 12 hour days and live in a city center where the local supermarket is small and doesn't stock all the things I need. Therefore, I have no choice but to use Tesco on-line. If it wasn't there, my diet would consist 90% of take away food and I would be dead by the time I'm 40.
The issue of privacy in this context is a big one. I can't swap my card with the next person in the queue, and it is even easier for them to track my shopping habits on-line than off-line ("Aahhh, he went to the frozen food section first, then to the fresh fruit section, and then...."), and to be honest, I don't really like it. I'm not saying that Tesco don't have the right to make a profit, and perhaps understand overall trends of shopping, but the fact that they are able to produce a highly detailed dossier on me, my diet, how I shop, how many pets I'm likely to own (pet food), whether I'm vegetarian (Quorn rather than beef), whether I have a female partner living with me (sanitary products), am sexually active (condoms), etc. and that it is all directly targetted towards me and may be held for many years, is a little disconcerting.
Like I said, if I want a reasonable diet in the UK living in the center of Manchester, I have no real choice. It also annoys me that I have to move to the Windows machine to use the service, but I can live with that. I agree with the poster - why is it I can do my banking on-line without hassle but not my shopping?
It sounds to me that by passing laws that they know will get thrown out in court, the government is demonstrating that it has no respect for the legal system. Not that I can point the finger since the U.S. Congress does the same thing, but your argument is somewhat flawed. There are certain factions in all governments that would be happy to sacrifice the necessary checks and balances on the state for short-term gains.
Well, I think the problem with RIP is that the government didn't want to loose face but knew it was in trouble (IIRC, it got through with a majority of one vote), and to be honest they never wanted to admit that they were technically incompetent. If they had, they wouldn't have let this one through. It was a rush job put through a bit of gentle pressure from the law enforcement agenices who wanted to be seen to be doing something. Expect a new RIP bill to be presented to parliament within 5 years at a guess.
I'm sorry, I have to take exception to this. I also live in the UK, and I've been an admin of an ISP or two in the last few years as well. I have also worked within the civil service, and can see things from both sides of the fence. To be blunt, I think you're being hysterical.
To say that we live in a state where "law enfocement bodies now have the right to walk all over us" is a redundant and rather stupid statement. We live in a state whereby democratic politics is allowed. Would you rather live in a country where surveillance is carried out, but you're never told about it? Or would you rather have the ability to state that the laws are wrong and vote for those parties that promise to abolish those laws once you vote for them? Oh, I know, we don't have any of those rights do we. Except that "Mother of all Parliaments" thing that we have.
I find your attitude (in that you imply the suggestion we are unable to do anything about laws to which we are morally repulsed) quite hilarious. You don't happen to be a researcher on the Mark Thomas Comedy product do you?
Secondly, everybody knows that the RIP bill is unenforcable, and will fall at the first hurdle when tested in a court of law. To think otherwise is again, stupid and mildy amusing on your part. Yet again, you have assumed that The Government will show no respect for the legal system, and will just bang us all up in prison for even suggesting that they should give us freedoms. Oh, and they'll probably stop us from being able to vote as well. Britain is soooo like that.
What I always find really, really, really amusing about all these people (like yourself) who complain about the RIP bill, is that you didn't realise that the Interception of Communications Act had been in place for years. The only differene between the RIP bill and the IOCA is that the RIP bill extended responsibility for interception to ISPs as well as Telcos, the IOCA required a secretary of state to sign the warrant rather than senior police officer, and the RIP bill discusses crypto. If somebody wanted to intercept your traffic, they always could, it's just now going to be the case that the operations will be cheaper to run. Oh, and they'll tell you about wanting your key rather than finding it themselves on a supercomputer somewhere....
Oh, and there is one more thing. Do you honestly think that the Police or the Government really have the time, resources, or even slight inclination to give a damn about you? They're stretched to the teeth already - this law is designed to assist in the capture of major drug smugglers and their kin, not some warez kiddie who posts hilarious and ridiculous political statements on slashdot. If you're not a criminal, this law will never even affect you - ever. As an ISP admin, it may affect me, and I am prepared to install any equipment that the Government ask me to install, and run any interception required providing that the appropriate warrants have been filled in correctly and in adequate time.
This attitude really annoys me. Retailers dictate which OSes are good, and which are bad. If I'm paying a few thousand on a top-notch box, I expect to be able to have it come pre-installed with any OS I choose, whether it be Plan 9, QNX, Linux, Win2K, Solaris x86, GEOS, whatever.
The attitude that people who build and shift boxes should have some insight as to what OS is going to suit me most is pretty sickening to be honest. The market is getting more competitive, and retailers like Dell are going to have to start being more accomodationg towards what the customer wants if they wish to retain market share. In fact, I suspect that a retailer with the $$$ to be able to offer any OS required pre-installed will probably steal a lot of market share in most of North America and Western Europe. But hey, who cares as long as you get invited around to Bill's house once in a while.
A more interesting question is, does this technology mean that on-line storage (currently hard disks) might become faster? If you could have several gigs of magnetic storage in your machine accessible at RAM speeds (lets be sluggish and call it 80ns), then that would mean some very, very, very high-performance systems become viable.
I'm assuming that MRAM is going to hit the market at around the same price as normal memory, so it's going to be a lot more $/Mb than hard disks, but it still presents some interesting oppurtunities.
Quite evidently he's an idiot then. Being able to identify those journalists that are complete morons is a very useful thing to do. In fact, I think I can see an idea for a website here.
;-)
There are very few journos who I actually rate in any way. ZDnet UK's Guy Kewney used to be good when I read the UK PC Magazine years ago, but with that exception, generally, I have to say, journos suck. Firstly, they aren't trained or have any experience in working in the industry generally. They have either learnt everything they know from press releases and back publications of their own magazine, or they really do work somewhere in the IT industry - but hey, how many tech savvy guys do you have working for you whose opinion you rate, and who has the time to be writing articles on new technologies? I'd love to write down some of the stuff I get upto in my job, but I just don't have time. I don't think any of us really do, which is why that 15 minutes messing about on slashdot is a nice release.
Why don't we all stop trying to push as much juice as possible through our kit, and try instead to get exactly the same performance, but at lower power consupmtion which would be a far more useful and valid project. Image a sort of "OK, I still get the same number of MIPS on this kit, but by dropping the voltage and using this low power cooling system, I can overclock it still and use less electric!". Now that I will respect. But not this - hey guys, why don't we all just cut to the chase and flop 'em out on the table next to a ruler and see who has got the biggest? :-) (like every man on this earth I wish I had 12 inches - not this enormous thing I've got right now! <cue cymbal crash>).
To be fair though (and I do mean fair), Linux doesn't cut it in the real Unix world. It's not as stable as Solaris - on which you can run an SS7 switch with some cisco hardware, nor is as secure as OpenBSD which although another free 'nix is far closer to being "real Unix" than Linux is, and it's not as powerful as.... (here comes the flamebait)... BSD.
/. for at least a fortnight), but I can see why people hate Linux, and why they love it. I just don't think we should be getting into that argument when the context of the original story was about Unix. I accept that there is a huge proportion of /. readers whose only experience with Unix-like tools is with Linux, and it's good that as a result they might go onto play with Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Digital Unix, maybe even some of the more mature BSDs, and perhaps then they'll realise that in actual fact Linux really does suck and that the world is bigger than the creations of Linus, RMS and a few people who really should know better. :-)
;-)
Sorry, but you guys seem to think Linux == Unix. It doesn't - I think even Linus would descirbe it as a Unix-like OS. I don't want to turn this into my OS is better than your OS war (although we haven't had one on
Incidentally, QNX is kinda nice, and so is Plan 9 in it's own little way. Windows has apps, and MacOS is great for my Mum (who has problems with using a mobile phone), and Linux like I've said is a great way to cut yer teeth on real computing, so don't think that I'm trying to be biggoted about my choice of OS here.
Well, indeed I would agree that Jeeves is not a very good example of an intelligent search engine. Jeeves really is a fake, however, I think I might have found something a little more interesting. A project known as Start based at MIT.
:-)
:-P ).
At first I thought that this again was a hoax, or that perhaps the knowledge tree was so carefully defined that it couldn't really be intelligent. So, seeing as it's knowledge tree is pretty much geography orientated, I'd thought I would try and trip it up. If you ask what the capital of Holland is, it correctly identifies that Amsterdam is indeed the capital of the Netherlands. A subtle, but valuable trick.
The real info on how all this works is given here by way of a paper written by Boris Katz. No, BORIS Katz.
Read, enjoy, realise that f2k could be a reality seeing as the cpu cycles are there. Oh and if you're really interested in "chatterbots" from a semi-academic point of view, I'd reccomend highly Simon Laven's homepage which links to several sites discussing bots from Eliza to the John Lennon Aritifical Intelligence Project. It doesn't however cover the f2k and meaningoflife.com type of bots (perhaps because they're fake?
I'm just wondering what the benefit in on-line voting is? I can't really imagine that turnout is going to increase, especially in countries where a large proportion of the population are not net-connected yet (most of Europe). Those individuals who are not able to travel to the polling station through work or disability in the UK are entitled to a postal vote. Given these two facts, why would a government want to introduce a new form of voting other than because it makes them look as though they are embracing new technologies?
With regards to how you can secure this system, well, you certainly can't do it over the net until governments start recognising electronic signatures and biometric authentication is more common. At the moment, if all a website does is ask me for my electoral role number, then I can pretend to be anybody on the electoral role. It's a bit like the Amazon system whereby you can submit a review as the author, and the authentication to make sure you are the author is a form that pops up saying "Are you really the author of this book? Yes/No". Not exactly the best way to run a democracy.
In the case of digitizable art, such as digital music, the infrastructure already exists to deliver it to many people at very low costs. If I listen to a song, I am not depriving anyone else of the song. It is not a depletable resource. It is bits which can be duplicated over and over and over with trivial cost. The best outcome for the consumer is a maximal amount of art that they enjoy at the lowest possible price.
OK, firstly the infrastructure costs money. It's not free. You have to pay for it *somehow*. At the moment the primary form of music distribution in most countries is still through the "hump boxes onto a truck, drive them out to store, unpack and sell CDs in store" which costs money. The music itself also costs money to produce professionally, studio time, promotion (no good in making music if nobody knows it's out there, right?), and the artist might want to do some live stuff that needs to be managed. All in all it's pretty expensive.
Even if we say that we can reduce all these costs by making all music purchasable on-line, somebody somewhere is going to have to pay for servers and bandwidth. A popular artist is going to use a lot of bandwidth. Especially if we're talking about 6Mb tracks.
Your last point about maximal amount of art at the lowest possible price is fair. What I was trying to get across originally was that music will not, and will never, be free. It will always cost money, even if it's a small amount and there are reasons for that. Even if we started seeing an uprise in GPL'ed music (for want of a better description), just like GPL software, somebody, somewhere pays for it. It might be the author who puts in the money he has earned in his real job, or it may require the intervention of a company to assist that project. Either way there is always some commercial element to it. It's called capitalism, it works, and it benefits those who contribute to "the system".
All I'm saying, is if you want good music, don't winge when it costs you less than 0.5% of your monthly salary. If you do, you don't deserve it.
Trciky one this. The exec hasn't made himself clear. The media, distribution of media, etc. is all non-free. The people who sell you the music in the store want to make money, the artist who recorded it wants to make money, the execs who look after the logistics (and they do matter - do you think that your favourite artists really could organise world tours, album launches, etc. on their own) all require a salary.
/. readers spend their lives writing algorithms. They spend their time effectively regurgitating mathematics. They often get paid for it. Hang on, does that mean that we are all claiming that mathematical algos. are not free? That you have to pay us for them? Dispicable! Well, in that case, I'd best ask my boss not to pay me anymore because all this stuff should be free.
To argue that all music should be free is a romantic notion, but one that is actually pretty hypocritical when you think about it. I like to drink lots of water, and water is free, and if anybody tried arguing against that I'd get really upset. I'm still prepared to pay for a bottle of Perrier though. In the same sense, the majority of
It is very easy for Prince to argue that the music industry is all messed up and that Napster is fantastic. It's easy because he's so damned rich that he doesn't need any more money. How did he get this money? By any chance would it be because of those execs down at the record company pushing his music? So, after he's made all this money (note: he didn't complain at the time, did he?) he now makes a sweep at the record company. He score a few popularity points, gets his name in the media, and everybody thinks he's great. Does he give his money back to the fans? Ummmm...
Ultimately, the fact music is not, and never will be, free is not due to a limitation of technology. It's because the people who make music have to eat. I know there have been some rumours going around that Michael Jackson is actually run from mains electricity, but it's not true. He eats and craps on the toilet and pays taxes and has friends and family just like the rest of us. Get used to the fact that you have no right to listen to his or any other artists performances, in exactly the same way my boss does not have the right to expect me to write code whenever he wants free of charge.
I hate this argument already. It's so clear to me now that those who insist that music should be free just haven't thought about what the consequences of that.
Because our context has changed. Skip back a few years to when webpages were grey backgrounds and Time New Roman everywhere, and where all images that were links had huge blue borders round them. In effect, the infancy of the Web. At that time, you couldn't make money out of the net if you tried. There were a few big companies giving it a go and on the whole losing money hand over fist (Yahoo, Amazon), but that was OK because everybody thought it was impossible to make money out of the net.
:-)
At this time, if there is little point in throwing money into setting up an on-line presence because you aren't going to make profit for 10 years+ then you may as well establish a presence but make it all free. The setup costs are lower (no merchant accounts, secure servers etc.) and because you're not going to make money anyway.
There was also the greatest scam ever pulled over the public and website operators at this time - security companies were shouting about how unsecure the Internet was. It was just as secure to send your credit card details then with SSL as it is now with SSL. The only difference is that a few hundred million has been spent with the security companies.
If we now move forward to today, website operators are thinking that they should be seeing revenue covering their costs if not making profit within 2-3 years from startup. Customers are happier to send their credit card details over the Internet. The market has become more competitive and there is far more content people are prepared to pay to see these days. In short, the world has found the Internet an acceptable but new and original way of being able to satisfy their greed.
With regards to those amongst us who are winging about bandwidth charges and costs of servers, etc. all I have to say is that co-location is now so ridiculously cheap that if you're shifting more than your allocated bandwidth, the revenue you could generate from banner ads will actually cover your costs. Honestly. Yes, even on a 0.3% click-through rate.
1. You don't have to wear a suit to be a suit.
2. His companies always slightly under-perform where you think a company with the products, creativity and mindset that places like Apple should be. Think about the companies he's been involved in, compare them to comparatively no-brainer outfits that don't require that level of creativity (Yahoo, Amazon), go figure.
I'm not saying this is all bad, I'm just answering the question of the previous poster as to why Jobs always seems to fail.
I thought that it was people like Woz that came up with the really cool stuff, and Jobs was just the man in the suit who sells it to the masses...
I think the problem with Jobs is that he has suffered from a syndrome that he shares with Richard Branson. Because the companies he works for and has helped build are relatively high-profile in terms of branding and advertising, there is a media perception that he must be successful. In fact, Branson's companies aren't making profit at all but people perceive Virgin to be a success, and similarly people thought Apple was a great success when in fact whilst he was there the first time, it's fiscals didn't look anywhere near as good as they should have done.
Jobs messes up, because he isn't actually that good at the job - because the media have told you he's wonderful and it's just that everybody else is out to get him, you believe that he is indeed wonderful.
I know I'm going to get flamed to hell for this from the die-hard Mac fans out there, but sorry, I just don't think that spin makes up for substance and as yet I've seen little from the Jobs camp apart from spin and the ability to have smart techs around him a lot of the time that come up with cool stuff.
First of all, this doesn't sound much like a calculator. It sounds more like a PDA. I mean the thing can play mp3s - at some point you can't call it a calculator anymore.
:-)
It does sound like a calculator, and I imagine it definitely will be. Your point about it playing mp3s really uncovers the opinion that most people have about mp3s - that they exist purely for listening to and the transportation of music. When you actually think about it, the ability to be able to give some sort of sound output might be quite useful - the ability to be able to load a program onto the thing that demonstrates a particular set of functions or area of mathematics, guided along by a helpful voice is something I would imagine that a lot of teachers would love to see.
To be honest, there is little work that I do these days that requires this sort of power and functionality (bit of sysadmin, bit of project management, all can be done on a 4-function calc or in Excel for the project stuff) and to be honest the only thing I could see myself doing is x^y stuff for interest rate calculation (not worth the rumoured $250 price tag), but I can see why this little beast is going to be desirable. However, I'd say that if HP are doing this, then there is a good chance TI will be upping the ante at some point soon. Calculator Wars - you've gotta love it!
While it is important for people to be aware of the potential uses of their creations, the leaders
who gave the orders to drop the atomic bomb are to blame, not the scientists who designed it or the works who built it.
There is a story I can tell here that links the software creativity "conundrum" and the very example you've just given. I used to know a guy who went to join the RAF as a trainee Pilot. In his interview they asked him how we would react if he were given the order to press the button to drop a bomb on a small village, and whether he would have any moral or ethical hangups over it. The answer he gave was that he was just part of a chain - he could not and would not take the sole responsibility for the dropping of that bomb as the ability for him to do so was shared amongst the scientists who created it, the commanders who ordered the bombing, even the woman who cooked him his eggs that morning in the canteen.
In many ways it's exactly the same with software. If I write a piece of code that could be used maliciously (depending on what your definition of malicious is), am I really that responsible for it's use if there are other people who market that code, or who themselves take the source and adapt it so that it is even more malicious? In fact, would my parents not also be responsilbe for encouraging my interest in computers and technology when I was a teenager, and wouldn't those around me encouraging me to progress my careers also be responsible?
My personal feeling is that if one person and one person alone develops a piece of software with deliberate malicious intent and then without encouragment uses that code for malicious purposes, they deserve everything that is coming to them. However, if a developer puts a bug in place by accident in a routine handling safety procedures at a nuclear power plant, is it not also the responsibility of his managment, his testing team, the people who taught him how to code and how to test his code as well as his own fault that the bug got through into a production system?
I wonder what protocol they're using to upgrade their software. It's gotta be some kind of stateless connection (imagine it: SYN ACK ...). Maybe just a radio broadcast, with something like a FIN containing the checksum of the received data. Anyone have any clues?
Well according to their website here it is indeed radio based and you should be thinking in terms of giving commands to your TV with a remote control rather than expecting a SYN ACK-type scenario. It also seems that to press the buttons on your remote control, requires 6 or more teams. Madness.
Now, this might get moderated down as flamebait or as troll, but I have to say this: I don't think you guys should be allowed to run a *nix of any description if you are going to start installing stuff left, right and centre without knowing what files are going where. You're all going to think I'm crazy, but I really think the 5 or 10 minutes or so it takes to read and understand what happens when you type 'make install' is worth it. This is not Windows. You are trying to make Linux aspire to be Windows. This is not a Good Thing. It's not that you should make the interface neccessarily easier, but that you should attempt to make the user more clued up. I'd much rather see comprehensive documentation on the lines of "Makefiles for Dummies" being shipped about for the newbies than some new package format being created.
:-)
But seriously, to just randomly pull down a package from a site you don't know from Adam, and then as root say "Oh, go on then, do whatever you want" is plain madness, but then, you guys are going to flame me to death anyway, so perhaps I should just go and be quiet somewhere.
I'm not trying to undermine the efforts of these guys, because I'm sure what they're doing is valid and is actually quite interesting in itself, but I'm having problems trying to see the commercial benefit of doing this. Above we are told that the purpose of this project is to "boot Linux on bigger systems", but that doesn't really same like a viable piece of research in many ways.
:-)
Commercially, if I want lots of nodes (16 nodes here), with Linux, I'm more likely to think Beowulf. If I want them to all appear as one machine, to be honest if I'm spending this sort of money I can see the benefits on going with Sun and Solaris. If I want lots of virtual linux machines running on one large easily-managable system then we already have Linux on S/390..
Can anybody tell me what the real commercial incentive is to run Linux on bigger systems? I'm just curious that's all. Perhaps I'm missing something here (almost certainly I'm sure).