no, my premise is that it is no longer possible for smaller companies to bring stuff to market because the first (even failed) lawsuit will probably put them out of business, and because insurance companies will not cover product related liability at a price that will make the product still affordable because of the absolutely ridiculous amounts that are routinely awarded in product liability cases.
Around the turn of the century people accepted that new technologies and their development incurred a certain amount of risk taking on the part of the public, nowadays we expect to be absolutely safe from the cradle to the grave.
Lawyers have heavily capitalized on this (especially in the US) with all kinds of bogus lawsuits about product 'failures' (you probably know the various examples as well as I do.)
This is keeping a whole pile of potentially interesting devices of the market or from being developed at all because the would be developers feel that actually selling their work would expose them to all kinds of harm (especially if they are somewhat successful).
The 'I'll sue you' attitude is becoming more and more widespread and is having an ever stifling effect on development.
The only way we are going to go forward is by making mistakes (accidents) and taking risk, not by taking a risk, getting into an accident and then to sue left right and center just to either make a buck or to soothe some inner child that feels wronged.
Large corporations see the new legal culture as a new form of tax, smaller corporations simply go under (or never even get off the ground).
It's evident that robotic technology will initially at least lead to all kinds of exposure to risk, especially if we let the devices loose in our urban jungles. But if we do not then we'll never learn what to fix, and the development will be slowed down to the point where you'll be hard put to mark any progress at all since a device will have to be absolutely bullet proofed before it can be sold.
as long as it is outside of the range of fax/telephone machines I think we'd be safe, so almost any 'heavenly body' would do. Then we can finally get on with this terrible business called innovation.
Consider this: an American corporation came up with a pretty good idea for a low cost windmill but because they can not get product liability insurance (pretty much a must in todays climate) the product got axed. Makes you weep.
This is really cool... but other than that the general state of robotics is more and more hampered by legalities, such as liability insurance for the 'owner/operator' of any kind of robot.
It's funny how if you look back at the turn of the century there was no legal barrier to try out new technological stuff, but just try to imagine the then inventors of automobiles selling their first rickety inventions in todays unbelievably hostile legal climate. The whole technological and transportation revolution would simply not have happened
That's why we see robots for use on other planets, but we'll probably not see them on this one (unless of course we ship all the lawyers to some other planet first).
Generators that are 'running' but not 'loaded' consume much less power than when they are 'loaded', no electricity 'dissipates into the ether' (since there is no such thing as ether anyway).
What happens is that the energy needed to keep this machinery going is dissipated by bearings, transformers and so on, much like it does when there is a load. It's a bit like a car running idle, it still uses energy, but not nearly as much as when you floor the pedal, and actually go somewhere.
no such thing, cd players have all the electronics on one board, the da convertor is a single chip and it all shares the same supply rail. that said it's still pretty good, but certainly not perfect.
right, but it wouldn't make much difference to the crowd here, as much as rigged elections in the real world make (none).
Think about it: How many people would it need to care about rigged elections in order for it to be brought to light ? There is lots of evidence that the 2000 elections were less than proper, but so far there has been very little response to these allegations. A normal reaction would be absolute outrage by ALL politicians and an inquiry that brings up every last bit of evidence. The fact that this has not happened shows that politicians are happy with the status quo (two parties, for outsiders absolutely indistinguishable that exchange the baton every four to eight years).
As if the only subjects you can differ on are abortion, healthcare and whether or not we should endorse a government religion.
plan 9 is a computer program and as such does not have a 'will' or a 'want'.
The micro-macro debate never ended, it's just that the macro camp has a head start in terms of programmer experience and installed base.
Plan 9 has not been tested for scaleability outside of it's development lab, but on paper it scales better than anything that is in the marketplace right now, if only because the clustering is built in right at the lowest level.
The real 'unlock' for microkernels is advances in message passing techniques, which so far caused overhead to be added to every message passed.
With the new page table based message passing algorithms (where the message is 'moved' by mapping a page from the sender to the receiver instead of by a byte-by-byte copy) the playing field has been equalized and micro kernels using message passing are now competitive performance wise. Newer technologies allow such memory management tricks to be played transparently over the network, but this will come with a penalty (same with a macro kernel).
After the QNX thread a bit ago, this is probably the best news possible. Plan 9 is a nicely evolved version of UNIX, it is very scaleable, and 'orthogonal' (you can run a new version of the window manager in a window in the old one!).
If there ever was a viable alternative to the monolithic unices then Plan 9 is probably it.
Macro kernels are pretty much like turtles and sharks, very well adapted to living today, but dinosaurs nonetheless. Let's give this one the attention it deserves and see how it stacks up against the 'hurd', time to evolve !
this seems to be the most enlightened thread in here, so I guess this is the best place to ask this:
Is there any chance that losses 'left' us with nohting but the very brief pulses to look at ?
If you compare that to any other wave analogy, you could say that a wave has 'tops', and the smaller the slice of the tops the shorter the 'pulse' would seem, but it doesn't say anything about the size of the wave underneath it (but the PERIOD does!).
Re:Why does everyone expect a Neuromancer redux?
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Pattern Recognition
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hell no, they shouldn't write it themselves, just read it again:)
unfortunately you are wrong, only a very very small fraction of the amount that it would cost to make this product locally makes it to the foreign country, the rest ends in the pockets of the 'exploiters', after all they first try to save on labour locally, and then they try to save again when they are spending their money abroad (most of those asian sweatshops are owned by the west, not by the east).
There ought to be some kind of law that states that any product can not be shipped more than 1,000 miles from the point of the production:) Gone corporate citizens !
just wait until they invent the cross breed between child labour and outsourcing, that'll be a party.
On a more serious note though, keep in mind that the only reason these outsourcing projects look enticing - any kind of them, white collar work, blue collar work, that's irrellevant - is because the wealth in the world is distributed unevenly.
hehe. Well, you know I really hope that a lot of corps will outsource their stuff to India for a while, that will make a lot of work for folks here in trying to untangle the mess.
I have seen one of these projects up close, and I can tell you it wasn't pretty. Probably there are examples to the contrary, but in this particular case they ended up spending roughly double what it would have cost them to do it locally in the first place.
gcc could do with some competition, yes its stable, no it is not at the leading edge of performance any more, processor optimization is at least a generation behind what's commonly available and ignores some architectures completely.
I'm looking forward to someone benchmarking gcc vs watcom to see how they do.
If you limit yourself to static stuff then you can cram any amount of traffic out of very limited boxes.
Even google does everything they can to cache stuff and turn dynamic requests into static ones, and they actually have a reason (lotsa traffic, complicated requests).
The fact that you can use java to write speedy code doesn't prove a thing either, it only says that it is now no longer a bottleneck.
You can probably saturate a decent sized pipe using -- aaarghh -- VB or something asinine like that as long as you do 'pictures and pages'.
yep, and there is a forth running on the novix and sun has some experimental java chip. Some of that stuff is 20 years old. (The novix powers the cruise missile if I'm not mistaken).
re-implementing all kinds of languages in other languages usually comes at a pretty high performance hit (there always is some cross compiler for machines like that but everybody that is serious about them programs them native).
Even the java virtual machine is a forth engine at heart.
An os will always be written in some language or other, but if you think you have a virus / security issue now wait until what happens when you blur the lines further.
Note that NONE of these hybrids has ever been used in a hostile environment like the internet, unless they were running on some other os.
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no, my premise is that it is no longer possible for smaller companies to bring stuff to market because the first (even failed) lawsuit will probably put them out of business, and because insurance companies will not cover product related liability at a price that will make the product still affordable because of the absolutely ridiculous amounts that are routinely awarded in product liability cases.
Around the turn of the century people accepted that new technologies and their development incurred a certain amount of risk taking on the part of the public, nowadays we expect to be absolutely safe from the cradle to the grave.
Lawyers have heavily capitalized on this (especially in the US) with all kinds of bogus lawsuits about product 'failures' (you probably know the various examples as well as I do.)
This is keeping a whole pile of potentially interesting devices of the market or from being developed at all because the would be developers feel that actually selling their work would expose them to all kinds of harm (especially if they are somewhat successful).
The 'I'll sue you' attitude is becoming more and more widespread and is having an ever stifling effect on development.
The only way we are going to go forward is by making mistakes (accidents) and taking risk, not by taking a risk, getting into an accident and then to sue left right and center just to either make a buck or to soothe some inner child that feels wronged.
Large corporations see the new legal culture as a new form of tax, smaller corporations simply go under (or never even get off the ground).
It's evident that robotic technology will initially at least lead to all kinds of exposure to risk, especially if we let the devices loose in our urban jungles. But if we do not then we'll never learn what to fix, and the development will be slowed down to the point where you'll be hard put to mark any progress at all since a device will have to be absolutely bullet proofed before it can be sold.
as long as it is outside of the range of fax/telephone machines I think we'd be safe, so almost any 'heavenly body' would do. Then we can finally get on with this terrible business called innovation.
Consider this: an American corporation came up with a pretty good idea for a low cost windmill but because they can not get product liability insurance (pretty much a must in todays climate) the product got axed. Makes you weep.
This is really cool... but other than that the general state of robotics is more and more hampered by legalities, such as liability insurance for the 'owner/operator' of any kind of robot.
It's funny how if you look back at the turn of the century there was no legal barrier to try out new technological stuff, but just try to imagine the then inventors of automobiles selling their first rickety inventions in todays unbelievably hostile legal climate. The whole technological and transportation revolution would simply not have happened
That's why we see robots for use on other planets, but we'll probably not see them on this one (unless of course we ship all the lawyers to some other planet first).
Generators that are 'running' but not 'loaded' consume much less power than when they are 'loaded', no electricity 'dissipates into the ether' (since there is no such thing as ether anyway).
What happens is that the energy needed to keep this machinery going is dissipated by bearings, transformers and so on, much like it does when there is a load. It's a bit like a car running idle, it still uses energy, but not nearly as much as when you floor the pedal, and actually go somewhere.
it's a pity you're ac, I'd nominate you for the pullitzer prize myself...
bbc case was plastic (abs)
no such thing, cd players have all the electronics on one board, the da convertor is a single chip and it all shares the same supply rail. that said it's still pretty good, but certainly not perfect.
everyone knows it's swallows, not pigeons...
right, but it wouldn't make much difference to the crowd here, as much as rigged elections in the real world make (none).
Think about it: How many people would it need to care about rigged elections in order for it to be brought to light ? There is lots of evidence that the 2000 elections were less than proper, but so far there has been very little response to these allegations. A normal reaction would be absolute outrage by ALL politicians and an inquiry that brings up every last bit of evidence. The fact that this has not happened shows that politicians are happy with the status quo (two parties, for outsiders absolutely indistinguishable that exchange the baton every four to eight years).
As if the only subjects you can differ on are abortion, healthcare and whether or not we should endorse a government religion.
yes, but most computers are on 24x7, not just a few hours per day
this makes you wonder how long it will be before information surpasses transportation as the largest consumer of energy on the planet
plan 9 is a computer program and as such does not have a 'will' or a 'want'.
The micro-macro debate never ended, it's just that the macro camp has a head start in terms of programmer experience and installed base.
Plan 9 has not been tested for scaleability outside of it's development lab, but on paper it scales better than anything that is in the marketplace right now, if only because the clustering is built in right at the lowest level.
The real 'unlock' for microkernels is advances in message passing techniques, which so far caused overhead to be added to every message passed.
With the new page table based message passing algorithms (where the message is 'moved' by mapping a page from the sender to the receiver instead of by a byte-by-byte copy) the playing field has been equalized and micro kernels using message passing are now competitive performance wise. Newer technologies allow such memory management tricks to be played transparently over the network, but this will come with a penalty (same with a macro kernel).
After the QNX thread a bit ago, this is probably the best news possible. Plan 9 is a nicely evolved version of UNIX, it is very scaleable, and 'orthogonal' (you can run a new version of the window manager in a window in the old one!).
If there ever was a viable alternative to the monolithic unices then Plan 9 is probably it.
Macro kernels are pretty much like turtles and sharks, very well adapted to living today, but dinosaurs nonetheless. Let's give this one the attention it deserves and see how it stacks up against the 'hurd', time to evolve !
all trolls should move to IraqOpinions so the rest of us can have a decent day here on /.
Is there any chance that losses 'left' us with nohting but the very brief pulses to look at ?
If you compare that to any other wave analogy, you could say that a wave has 'tops', and the smaller the slice of the tops the shorter the 'pulse' would seem, but it doesn't say anything about the size of the wave underneath it (but the PERIOD does!).
hell no, they shouldn't write it themselves, just read it again :)
There ought to be some kind of law that states that any product can not be shipped more than 1,000 miles from the point of the production
jk
moderation sucks... this got moderated to flamebait ? It's one of the best posts so far. Someone correct this please...
On a more serious note though, keep in mind that the only reason these outsourcing projects look enticing - any kind of them, white collar work, blue collar work, that's irrellevant - is because the wealth in the world is distributed unevenly.
I have seen one of these projects up close, and I can tell you it wasn't pretty. Probably there are examples to the contrary, but in this particular case they ended up spending roughly double what it would have cost them to do it locally in the first place.
I'm looking forward to someone benchmarking gcc vs watcom to see how they do.
I used the watcom tools extensively on QNX and they were of excellent quality, this is really good news !
Hopefully this sets a trend.
If you limit yourself to static stuff then you can cram any amount of traffic out of very limited boxes.
Even google does everything they can to cache stuff and turn dynamic requests into static ones, and they actually have a reason (lotsa traffic, complicated requests).
The fact that you can use java to write speedy code doesn't prove a thing either, it only says that it is now no longer a bottleneck.
You can probably saturate a decent sized pipe using -- aaarghh -- VB or something asinine like that as long as you do 'pictures and pages'.
150 hits / second on a bad day
re-implementing all kinds of languages in other languages usually comes at a pretty high performance hit (there always is some cross compiler for machines like that but everybody that is serious about them programs them native).
Even the java virtual machine is a forth engine at heart.
An os will always be written in some language or other, but if you think you have a virus / security issue now wait until what happens when you blur the lines further.
Note that NONE of these hybrids has ever been used in a hostile environment like the internet, unless they were running on some other os.