I was mainly responding to the AC(s?) who were making unwarranted assumptions about kernel developer's motivations. I used your case as the only example in evidence.
I agree with one of the other posts here, that even if you don't get a response, the fact that you've posted the issue to the right mailing list may help someone else, even before the patch is accepted. You could take this a step further, and set up a web page describing the issue in more detail for people who might not be in a position to fix the problem themselves. I know I have benefited from that kind of thing on a number of occasions.
Having read just two of the messages of yours that have been referred to here, I wonder if you couldn't have done a bit more digging by asking questions on the list like "Who is the maintainer of trap.c?" That's an easier question for people to deal with quickly, and might have led you down the right road. But maybe you did that.
It's an occupational hazard, some of my clients are VCs and fund managers. Sorry to have complicated the discussion with facts.
My point was just that if the poster I replied to had the idea that Slashdot was a non-commercial organization of some kind (he didn't actually say what he was thinking), then he hasn't been paying attention.
BTW, careful who you call a jackass. I might have been that 20-24 year-old dominatrix you're seeking.
> Which, of course, means that they should ignore him. Clearly, he's not kewl enough.
No, it means that because (a) significant time investment may be required and (b) kernel developers have many, many other emails and issues to deal with and (c) the original email, in this instance, didn't even identify who should look at it - because of all this, it really wasn't worth anyone's time unless they happened to have a particular interest in the bug in question.
> Noone ever bothered to acknowledge this guys effort. A simple "I looked, and you're a pinhead" would be enough. But all this guy got for his efforts was silence.
But even "I looked" takes time (did you read the original email, referenced elsewhere? I estimate a few hours work at least to really evaluate it properly.) There's a serious one-to-many effect at work here - few kernel developers, and many, many people with problems, agendas, and pet issues. And the reason there aren't a lot of kernel developers has nothing to do with the politics, and everything to do with who has the time and commitment to devote serious and ongoing effort to that kind of development.
> In my real job, when a peer spends this kind of time to identify a problem, I get spanked if I don't at least reply
You're making a lot of assumptions here. How does that peer communicate with you? Directly, or by dumping a message on a mailing list that he assumes you read? And if the item he's talking about doesn't fit the agenda for the project you're working to release, then your reply should be "sorry, can't work on that now." Which is the reply this issue might have gotten if the submitter had identified a person to submit it to.
> No wonder so many in the real world equate "Open Source" with "Childish Egomaniacs".
It seems to me that it takes a certain amount of self-centeredness to post a patch or bug report and then assume that you've been judged unkewl just because no-one answers. The issue you happen to have raised just may not be that interesting or important to anyone else. That's why I referred to "throwing a patch or bug report over the wall" - if you don't make any effort to actually find someone who might be interested, you shouldn't be offended when the person you haven't bothered to look for doesn't answer.
If you take silence from incredibly busy and dedicated people as a snub, then it's not them who are freezing you out, you're freezing yourself out. Step back and try to look at the situation objectively for a minute.
For the record, I have nothing to do with Linux development. I have worked as a lead developer on commercial projects with tens of thousands of users, though, so I have a bit of an idea what it's like to have hundreds of people all trying to get their own agendas realized.
> I realize that my posting to linux-kernel, linux-scsi, linux-net, and net-dev hasn't been prolific, and thus, my name probably doesn't stand out to the main developers when I do post, but I always thought that one of the points of the hacker/open source "community" is that it's based on what you're doing now, not what you did in the past, or how good you are at self-promotion.
I think this is one of the central issues: if the developers don't recognize your name, they don't have any way to assess the validity of what you've posted, other than potentially spending significant time reviewing your bug or patch. You might think you've found an esoteric bug, and even fixed it, but you might be completely wrong (and this does happen, I've seen it.) Or, your fix might be undesirable in some way. Or, it just may not be that important - if no-one else has reported it, and there are hundreds or thousands of other problems known to affect thousands of people, which ones should be fixed first?
After all, the people intimately involved with the kernel can't be expected to, and shouldn't, automatically apply every patch posted to the list. There needs to be some review. The problem in the case mentioned in the article is really that the developer didn't catch the attention of anyone willing to take the time to review his patch. Instead of throwing it out there, he could perhaps have tried to find the person or persons most likely to be familiar with the problem he was addressing, and ask that person directly if he would be willing to review his patch.
Open Source and/or Free Software requires intelligent actions amongst its contributors. Throwing a patch or bug report over the wall doesn't necessarily count.
In what sense? Slashdot is owned by a public corporation. It was purchased back in '99 by Andover.net, which subsequently went public. Shortly after its IPO, Andover was acquired by another public corporation, VA Linux, for cash and stock reportedly worth around $900 million.
I have a Creative Labs DVD drive on an NT4 machine - it works fine for watching movies.
The drive came with Creative's Dxr3 decoder card, which is actually the Hollywood Plus card. Laptops are probably a different situation, though, if they don't have a hardware decoder or don't have NT drivers for it.
I took this to mean "how do we know that the client we're running isn't secretly gathering all our email etc. to submit to the NSA/FBI/ATF/CIA for monitoring?", i.e. the Echelon/Carnivore data gathering process would become much simpler, not needing all that pesky paperwork to authorize in advance...
But where's their next $1 million going to come from? The point is that a major source of their revenue was damaged by Microsoft's actions. $1 million might pay the salary of a dozen or employees for a year, but that's about it. The truth is, the $1 million award is just as symbolic as $1, in many ways, except that the shareholders might actually notice the results of that filter through to their dividend. It can't possibly have an impact on the viability of an IPO.
Doubt it. Its only been going out for a week or so
Don't be fooled - the aliens might be using their ozone-destroying ray in timewarp mode to destroy life on earth before our first-posting technology poses a threat to them!
And it can't be a coincidence that both major U.S. political parties currently have presidential candidates that are clearly alien robots!
Acutally I am. Im using a 1000W magnetron to repeadly send out the binary for "First Post!" over and over. The only problem is that I keep killing birds that get in the way of the beam. Crap! There goes another one!
Um, has it occurred to you that alien galactic moderators may use planet-destroying beams as a way of bitchslapping unruly planets? Maybe that's what's been happening to our ozone layer, and the North Pole!
We're looking for a specific signal, deliberately transmitted to us, on a specific frequency, by a civilization that has enough power to burn, to send this signal with enough energy that would power the United States. Continuously.
But the problem is that we're not transmitting such a signal. So if the above is accurate, we're basically looking for signals from civilizations quite a bit more advanced, or who place more emphasis on communicating with ETs, than ours. There could be thousands of civilizations a lot like ours that aren't detectable, most of whose members could care less about communicating with ETs and thus aren't putting any effort into sending out a message.
From reading the actual paper on which the space.com article was based, I think I've figured out the real point. As I understand it:
Many low luminosity galaxies, although showing evidence of having very massive black holes at their center, appear less bright than expected given the calculated size of their black holes. This has been explained by models which assume that the black holes in question are "underfed", i.e. that there's no longer enough matter close enough to the holes to create larger amounts of radiation.
However, the galaxy described in this paper, NGC4395, is an exception to this scenario, which is why it is interesting. Although it is of similar low luminosity to the galaxies described above, according to this paper, it shows evidence of containing a much smaller black hole than other low-luminosity galaxies. This smaller hole is from 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses, which is small for a galactic-core black hole.
The paper concludes that NGC4395 behaves more like a brighter galaxy with a larger hole, but because its hole is small, it appears dimmer. Attempting to apply the massive-underfed-hole model to this galaxy, based on it having low luminosity, gives incorrect results; instead, the model that applies is that of brighter galaxies with larger holes, except that in this case, the hole is smaller and thus the galaxy dimmer.
The space.com article actually did manage to say something along these lines, but you have to completely ignore the first half of the article, which is confused nonsense, and read the following paragraphs:
Until now, scientists had speculated that black holes residing in galaxies with dim cores - such as NGC 4395 - were either too old or too small to quickly eat up lots of material, as more massive black holes do on a regular basis. But now it seems that "mid-mass" black holes (a new nickname for the smallest type of supermassive black holes) may simply be more efficient matter-eaters.
"We now see that the nuclear source in NGC 4395 is a scaled-down version of black holes found in the most luminous of galaxies," said, Andrew Fabian, another Institute of Astronomy researcher who worked on the discovery. "Everything is the same, only it is smaller."
As a result, some astronomers now think that the total output of X-rays from accreting matter may therefore be more a product of how massive the black hole is, rather than of the luminosity of the region surrounding the black hole, as it once was thought.
As has been pointed out, black holes have neither infinite mass nor infinite gravity; just enough mass, compacted in a small enough volume, that light (or anything else) which penetrates the "event horizon" cannot escape. IOW, the "escape velocity" of a black hole is greater than the speed of light.
As a matter of interest, you referred to the concept of a "value of infinite that is greater than other black holes". This has little to do with black holes, but it's worth noting that in number theory, there are indeed infinities that are bigger than other infinities. The proof of this is fairly easy to understand - if you're interested, try this page for a very accessible explanation.
You'll notice I didn't say how big a planet was needed... But the advice of an old colleague of mine comes to mind: "You can't win arguments if you don't exaggerate!":)
> What I meant to say was: "The whole idea of competition is counterintuitive to the OSS development process"
> Corporate development is driven by competition..OSS development is driven by cooperation, not competition.
This really pinpoints the underlying difference in your position vs. that of open source advocates. One of the things that some companies seem to be starting to recognize is that there can be value in cooperation, with respect to open source software. This especially applies to corporations which are currently locked into a single vendor's product strategy. Using open source potentially gives a company much more control over its own destiny, since it will no longer be at the mercy of the deliberately anticompetitive lock-in practices that all large vendors indulge in, in their (probably misguided) attempt to maximize short-term revenues.
Using and developing Open Source in corporations is about striking a balance between cooperation and competition. There are many ways in which this can happen. You're effectively suggesting that there's no possible intersection of the approaches. The Forrester report is saying that there is such an intersection, and furthermore, that intersection is going to be a good place for a company to be. They're likely to be right - to a large extent, this is about enlightened self-interest, the idea that cooperation in some areas can help a company to compete in other areas. If cooperation replaces competition in a particular area, the competition merely shifts to other areas, such as a shift to an emphasis on service revenue over license revenue, for example.
> It would be far better to just focus all that energy out the back of some ship and be pushed along.
No question about it! That's true in general, whether you're dealing with energy or mass, because gravity is such a weak force (it takes the entire Earth just to keep you from floating out into space - it would take another whole planet hovering above your head to levitate you.) The basic Newtonian action/reaction rocket propulsion approach will always outperform any gravity-based solution, unless we figure out some way to generate and focus "gravitons" on demand. Since we haven't ever even detected gravitons, and aren't really sure that they exist, that's gonna be tough.
> e=MC2 - I read that as 'It takes an enormous amount of energy to create a small amount of mass, both have the same gravity footprint.'
This is somewhat beside the point, but from a certain perspective it can be argued that energy only appears large in relationship to the equivalent mass to us, because we move around so slowly. In relativistic physics, the value for the speed of light, c, is often set to 1, which turns Einstein's equation into simply E=m, energy equals mass. Unfortunately, when you're stopped by a cop for breaking the speed limit, it doesn't seem to help to say "but officer, I was only doing 150 billionth of the speed of light!"
I haven't read the book you mention, but zero-point energy is one of those concepts, with a basis in real physics, which has become a favorite of crackpots and proponents of the paranormal, for which all sorts of possibilities are claimed with little theoretical basis or evidence.
Scientific American has a fairly balanced article on the subject, Exploiting Zero-Point Energy. By balanced, I mean it's probably excessively generous in allowing that there might be something in some of the crackpot theories of zero-point energy.
The suggestion given about using zero-point energy to affect gravity makes no sense to me. If it was taken from that book, I would suggest that you consider the book highly suspect, or at least speculative to the point of fantasy.
Most supposed exploitations of zero-point energy ignore what we really do know about it, namely that Heisenberg's principle means that by definition, it manifests in really, really small quantities. The only known and peer-verified effect that's commonly attributed to zero-point energy is the Casimir effect, which as described in the Scientific American article, is capable of generating mere nanonewtons of force - the weight of a blood cell in the Earth's gravitational field.
Zero-point energy proponents make all sorts of assumptions about things that we can't possibly test, nor do we have any reason to believe that they're true. For example, the idea that there's an infinite reservoir of energy orthorgonal to the dimensions we live in, that might somehow be tapped. The zero-point energy of real physics implies nothing of the kind, and there is no evidence of this. This idea comes from a naive conception of energy and its creation - "there are very small amounts of energy everywhere in the universe at all times, therefore it must be coming from an infinitely huge reservoir."
In fact, the best quantum theory interpretations
imply that zero-point energy is actually created and destroyed in the vacuum, i.e. the energy does
not lead a separate existence (as in a reservoir) outside of the particle-antiparticle generation and annihilation that occurs continually at the levels which Heisenberg's principle predicts. Further, these interactions are theoretically limited in size, since if they exceeded Heisenberg's limits they would violate what we know about conservation of energy. So what we really know about zero-point energy is that you would have to "farm" unimaginably huge volumes of space to obtain useful amounts of energy, and that there are any number of more practical energy sources around us.
But let's assume I'm completely wrong and you could somehow extract large amounts of energy from an arbitrary point in space. It still wouldn't create the gravity warping machine described. Once fully present in our universe, this large amount of energy would radiate like any other large energy source - you'd effectively have created a small star in your vicinity, although one which burns without the need for pesky raw materials. Yes, this virtual star would affect spacetime (and therefore gravity) around it, but I suspect your elation at the levitation effect thus achieved would be rather diminished by your imminent demise as you and everything around you is fried to a crisp.
Of course, regardless of its impracticality as a gravitational generator, being able to extract large amounts of energy from nothing seems like it might be useful. But, even if this were possible (and all evidence and current knowledge indicates otherwise), you'd still face the same problems that are faced by builders of fusion reactors - how to contain and tap that energy. After all, "hot" fusion is already capable of providing huge amounts of energy using minimal raw materials, without the dangerous waste produced by nuclear fission; but unfortunately, no-one has yet been able to come up with a way to actually implement a practical fusion reactor.
Are you aware of anyone who has had success with hot-desking? The only example I've ever heard of was Chiat/Day's experiment which failed dismally, to the point that they abandoned their Gehry-designed building and the company was eventually sold. Wired has a post-mortem about it.
The article is worth reading, if you're interested in the subject. Seems like Jay Chiat was the ultimate PHB, imposing his limited personal vision on his entire company, and brooking no disagreement.
The original poster is correct on an important point, though: epicycles and hidden dimensions share a crucial characteristic, in that neither were directly testable at the time they were proposed. Both are examples of a "hidden variable" approach to physical explanation. In the past, especially during the development of quantum theory, hidden variable approaches were generally acknowledged to be unacceptable because the existence of the hidden variables could not be empirically verified.
The interesting thing about string theory is that we may now be running into some serious limits on the degree to which we can experimentally verify our theories. Some of these limits may be fundamental, and tied into the theories themselves (as with Heisenberg's principle), but they may also be economic or otherwise practical - the problems involved in building accelerators with high enough energies to detect some of the artifacts of these theories may become insurmountable in future.
Even if string theory succeeds (which it hasn't yet) in providing a perfect explanation which integrates and explains all forces and dimensions, we still may not know whether the entities it postulates actually exist in any real sense. Unless we can get some kind of fairly direct (experimental) evidence of the hidden dimensions and strings (or branes), we won't know whether perhaps there's an entirely different mathematical solution waiting in the wings, which may use different undetectable entities to explain the same phenomena. In either case, the question of whether those entities truly exist becomes rather irrelevant, if we can't detect them directly. All we can say is that "the universe behaves as if our theory is valid, and therefore the entities it proposes may have some physical correlate".
This bears some resemblance to what the Copenhagen interpretation says of quantum theory, so this philosophical ground has been covered before. However, quantum theory has the benefit that all the objects it proposes have either been experimentally detected, or else are not central to the theory, but rather predicted by it. With string theory, we are indeed returning to the era of epicycles and hidden variables.
Of course, we hope that this situation will change in future, whether because of new experiments or different theories. Until this happens, lay people and physicists alike are right to treat string theory with a greater degree of skepticism than even the notoriously unintuitive quantum theories.
Slashdot Mirror
I was mainly responding to the AC(s?) who were making unwarranted assumptions about kernel developer's motivations. I used your case as the only example in evidence.
I agree with one of the other posts here, that even if you don't get a response, the fact that you've posted the issue to the right mailing list may help someone else, even before the patch is accepted. You could take this a step further, and set up a web page describing the issue in more detail for people who might not be in a position to fix the problem themselves. I know I have benefited from that kind of thing on a number of occasions.
Having read just two of the messages of yours that have been referred to here, I wonder if you couldn't have done a bit more digging by asking questions on the list like "Who is the maintainer of trap.c?" That's an easier question for people to deal with quickly, and might have led you down the right road. But maybe you did that.
My point was just that if the poster I replied to had the idea that Slashdot was a non-commercial organization of some kind (he didn't actually say what he was thinking), then he hasn't been paying attention.
BTW, careful who you call a jackass. I might have been that 20-24 year-old dominatrix you're seeking.
No, it means that because (a) significant time investment may be required and (b) kernel developers have many, many other emails and issues to deal with and (c) the original email, in this instance, didn't even identify who should look at it - because of all this, it really wasn't worth anyone's time unless they happened to have a particular interest in the bug in question.
> Noone ever bothered to acknowledge this guys effort. A simple "I looked, and you're a pinhead" would be enough. But all this guy got for his efforts was silence.
But even "I looked" takes time (did you read the original email, referenced elsewhere? I estimate a few hours work at least to really evaluate it properly.) There's a serious one-to-many effect at work here - few kernel developers, and many, many people with problems, agendas, and pet issues. And the reason there aren't a lot of kernel developers has nothing to do with the politics, and everything to do with who has the time and commitment to devote serious and ongoing effort to that kind of development.
> In my real job, when a peer spends this kind of time to identify a problem, I get spanked if I don't at least reply
You're making a lot of assumptions here. How does that peer communicate with you? Directly, or by dumping a message on a mailing list that he assumes you read? And if the item he's talking about doesn't fit the agenda for the project you're working to release, then your reply should be "sorry, can't work on that now." Which is the reply this issue might have gotten if the submitter had identified a person to submit it to.
> No wonder so many in the real world equate "Open Source" with "Childish Egomaniacs".
It seems to me that it takes a certain amount of self-centeredness to post a patch or bug report and then assume that you've been judged unkewl just because no-one answers. The issue you happen to have raised just may not be that interesting or important to anyone else. That's why I referred to "throwing a patch or bug report over the wall" - if you don't make any effort to actually find someone who might be interested, you shouldn't be offended when the person you haven't bothered to look for doesn't answer.
If you take silence from incredibly busy and dedicated people as a snub, then it's not them who are freezing you out, you're freezing yourself out. Step back and try to look at the situation objectively for a minute.
For the record, I have nothing to do with Linux development. I have worked as a lead developer on commercial projects with tens of thousands of users, though, so I have a bit of an idea what it's like to have hundreds of people all trying to get their own agendas realized.
I think this is one of the central issues: if the developers don't recognize your name, they don't have any way to assess the validity of what you've posted, other than potentially spending significant time reviewing your bug or patch. You might think you've found an esoteric bug, and even fixed it, but you might be completely wrong (and this does happen, I've seen it.) Or, your fix might be undesirable in some way. Or, it just may not be that important - if no-one else has reported it, and there are hundreds or thousands of other problems known to affect thousands of people, which ones should be fixed first?
After all, the people intimately involved with the kernel can't be expected to, and shouldn't, automatically apply every patch posted to the list. There needs to be some review. The problem in the case mentioned in the article is really that the developer didn't catch the attention of anyone willing to take the time to review his patch. Instead of throwing it out there, he could perhaps have tried to find the person or persons most likely to be familiar with the problem he was addressing, and ask that person directly if he would be willing to review his patch.
Open Source and/or Free Software requires intelligent actions amongst its contributors. Throwing a patch or bug report over the wall doesn't necessarily count.
Mr. Alienmole Ultra-Mega-Special Agent Zeroth International Free Computing Task Force
I'm emailing you the Snow Crash virus under separate cover.
Sibling rivalry at its worst!
In what sense? Slashdot is owned by a public corporation. It was purchased back in '99 by Andover.net, which subsequently went public. Shortly after its IPO, Andover was acquired by another public corporation, VA Linux, for cash and stock reportedly worth around $900 million.
The drive came with Creative's Dxr3 decoder card, which is actually the Hollywood Plus card. Laptops are probably a different situation, though, if they don't have a hardware decoder or don't have NT drivers for it.
I took this to mean "how do we know that the client we're running isn't secretly gathering all our email etc. to submit to the NSA/FBI/ATF/CIA for monitoring?", i.e. the Echelon/Carnivore data gathering process would become much simpler, not needing all that pesky paperwork to authorize in advance...
So that's why there's all that water on the floor in our server room!
But where's their next $1 million going to come from? The point is that a major source of their revenue was damaged by Microsoft's actions. $1 million might pay the salary of a dozen or employees for a year, but that's about it. The truth is, the $1 million award is just as symbolic as $1, in many ways, except that the shareholders might actually notice the results of that filter through to their dividend. It can't possibly have an impact on the viability of an IPO.
...Slashdot karma!
Don't be fooled - the aliens might be using their ozone-destroying ray in timewarp mode to destroy life on earth before our first-posting technology poses a threat to them!
And it can't be a coincidence that both major U.S. political parties currently have presidential candidates that are clearly alien robots!
Um, has it occurred to you that alien galactic moderators may use planet-destroying beams as a way of bitchslapping unruly planets? Maybe that's what's been happening to our ozone layer, and the North Pole!
But the problem is that we're not transmitting such a signal. So if the above is accurate, we're basically looking for signals from civilizations quite a bit more advanced, or who place more emphasis on communicating with ETs, than ours. There could be thousands of civilizations a lot like ours that aren't detectable, most of whose members could care less about communicating with ETs and thus aren't putting any effort into sending out a message.
Many low luminosity galaxies, although showing evidence of having very massive black holes at their center, appear less bright than expected given the calculated size of their black holes. This has been explained by models which assume that the black holes in question are "underfed", i.e. that there's no longer enough matter close enough to the holes to create larger amounts of radiation.
However, the galaxy described in this paper, NGC4395, is an exception to this scenario, which is why it is interesting. Although it is of similar low luminosity to the galaxies described above, according to this paper, it shows evidence of containing a much smaller black hole than other low-luminosity galaxies. This smaller hole is from 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses, which is small for a galactic-core black hole.
The paper concludes that NGC4395 behaves more like a brighter galaxy with a larger hole, but because its hole is small, it appears dimmer. Attempting to apply the massive-underfed-hole model to this galaxy, based on it having low luminosity, gives incorrect results; instead, the model that applies is that of brighter galaxies with larger holes, except that in this case, the hole is smaller and thus the galaxy dimmer.
The space.com article actually did manage to say something along these lines, but you have to completely ignore the first half of the article, which is confused nonsense, and read the following paragraphs:
Until now, scientists had speculated that black holes residing in galaxies with dim cores - such as NGC 4395 - were either too old or too small to quickly eat up lots of material, as more massive black holes do on a regular basis. But now it seems that "mid-mass" black holes (a new nickname for the smallest type of supermassive black holes) may simply be more efficient matter-eaters.
"We now see that the nuclear source in NGC 4395 is a scaled-down version of black holes found in the most luminous of galaxies," said, Andrew Fabian, another Institute of Astronomy researcher who worked on the discovery. "Everything is the same, only it is smaller."
As a result, some astronomers now think that the total output of X-rays from accreting matter may therefore be more a product of how massive the black hole is, rather than of the luminosity of the region surrounding the black hole, as it once was thought.
As a matter of interest, you referred to the concept of a "value of infinite that is greater than other black holes". This has little to do with black holes, but it's worth noting that in number theory, there are indeed infinities that are bigger than other infinities. The proof of this is fairly easy to understand - if you're interested, try this page for a very accessible explanation.
You'll notice I didn't say how big a planet was needed... But the advice of an old colleague of mine comes to mind: "You can't win arguments if you don't exaggerate!" :)
How does it feel to be a federal criminal?
> Corporate development is driven by competition ..OSS development is driven by cooperation, not competition.
This really pinpoints the underlying difference in your position vs. that of open source advocates. One of the things that some companies seem to be starting to recognize is that there can be value in cooperation, with respect to open source software. This especially applies to corporations which are currently locked into a single vendor's product strategy. Using open source potentially gives a company much more control over its own destiny, since it will no longer be at the mercy of the deliberately anticompetitive lock-in practices that all large vendors indulge in, in their (probably misguided) attempt to maximize short-term revenues.
Using and developing Open Source in corporations is about striking a balance between cooperation and competition. There are many ways in which this can happen. You're effectively suggesting that there's no possible intersection of the approaches. The Forrester report is saying that there is such an intersection, and furthermore, that intersection is going to be a good place for a company to be. They're likely to be right - to a large extent, this is about enlightened self-interest, the idea that cooperation in some areas can help a company to compete in other areas. If cooperation replaces competition in a particular area, the competition merely shifts to other areas, such as a shift to an emphasis on service revenue over license revenue, for example.
No question about it! That's true in general, whether you're dealing with energy or mass, because gravity is such a weak force (it takes the entire Earth just to keep you from floating out into space - it would take another whole planet hovering above your head to levitate you.) The basic Newtonian action/reaction rocket propulsion approach will always outperform any gravity-based solution, unless we figure out some way to generate and focus "gravitons" on demand. Since we haven't ever even detected gravitons, and aren't really sure that they exist, that's gonna be tough.
> e=MC2 - I read that as 'It takes an enormous amount of energy to create a small amount of mass, both have the same gravity footprint.'
This is somewhat beside the point, but from a certain perspective it can be argued that energy only appears large in relationship to the equivalent mass to us, because we move around so slowly. In relativistic physics, the value for the speed of light, c, is often set to 1, which turns Einstein's equation into simply E=m, energy equals mass. Unfortunately, when you're stopped by a cop for breaking the speed limit, it doesn't seem to help to say "but officer, I was only doing 150 billionth of the speed of light!"
Scientific American has a fairly balanced article on the subject, Exploiting Zero-Point Energy. By balanced, I mean it's probably excessively generous in allowing that there might be something in some of the crackpot theories of zero-point energy.
The suggestion given about using zero-point energy to affect gravity makes no sense to me. If it was taken from that book, I would suggest that you consider the book highly suspect, or at least speculative to the point of fantasy.
Most supposed exploitations of zero-point energy ignore what we really do know about it, namely that Heisenberg's principle means that by definition, it manifests in really, really small quantities. The only known and peer-verified effect that's commonly attributed to zero-point energy is the Casimir effect, which as described in the Scientific American article, is capable of generating mere nanonewtons of force - the weight of a blood cell in the Earth's gravitational field.
Zero-point energy proponents make all sorts of assumptions about things that we can't possibly test, nor do we have any reason to believe that they're true. For example, the idea that there's an infinite reservoir of energy orthorgonal to the dimensions we live in, that might somehow be tapped. The zero-point energy of real physics implies nothing of the kind, and there is no evidence of this. This idea comes from a naive conception of energy and its creation - "there are very small amounts of energy everywhere in the universe at all times, therefore it must be coming from an infinitely huge reservoir."
In fact, the best quantum theory interpretations imply that zero-point energy is actually created and destroyed in the vacuum, i.e. the energy does not lead a separate existence (as in a reservoir) outside of the particle-antiparticle generation and annihilation that occurs continually at the levels which Heisenberg's principle predicts. Further, these interactions are theoretically limited in size, since if they exceeded Heisenberg's limits they would violate what we know about conservation of energy. So what we really know about zero-point energy is that you would have to "farm" unimaginably huge volumes of space to obtain useful amounts of energy, and that there are any number of more practical energy sources around us.
But let's assume I'm completely wrong and you could somehow extract large amounts of energy from an arbitrary point in space. It still wouldn't create the gravity warping machine described. Once fully present in our universe, this large amount of energy would radiate like any other large energy source - you'd effectively have created a small star in your vicinity, although one which burns without the need for pesky raw materials. Yes, this virtual star would affect spacetime (and therefore gravity) around it, but I suspect your elation at the levitation effect thus achieved would be rather diminished by your imminent demise as you and everything around you is fried to a crisp.
Of course, regardless of its impracticality as a gravitational generator, being able to extract large amounts of energy from nothing seems like it might be useful. But, even if this were possible (and all evidence and current knowledge indicates otherwise), you'd still face the same problems that are faced by builders of fusion reactors - how to contain and tap that energy. After all, "hot" fusion is already capable of providing huge amounts of energy using minimal raw materials, without the dangerous waste produced by nuclear fission; but unfortunately, no-one has yet been able to come up with a way to actually implement a practical fusion reactor.
The article is worth reading, if you're interested in the subject. Seems like Jay Chiat was the ultimate PHB, imposing his limited personal vision on his entire company, and brooking no disagreement.
The interesting thing about string theory is that we may now be running into some serious limits on the degree to which we can experimentally verify our theories. Some of these limits may be fundamental, and tied into the theories themselves (as with Heisenberg's principle), but they may also be economic or otherwise practical - the problems involved in building accelerators with high enough energies to detect some of the artifacts of these theories may become insurmountable in future.
Even if string theory succeeds (which it hasn't yet) in providing a perfect explanation which integrates and explains all forces and dimensions, we still may not know whether the entities it postulates actually exist in any real sense. Unless we can get some kind of fairly direct (experimental) evidence of the hidden dimensions and strings (or branes), we won't know whether perhaps there's an entirely different mathematical solution waiting in the wings, which may use different undetectable entities to explain the same phenomena. In either case, the question of whether those entities truly exist becomes rather irrelevant, if we can't detect them directly. All we can say is that "the universe behaves as if our theory is valid, and therefore the entities it proposes may have some physical correlate".
This bears some resemblance to what the Copenhagen interpretation says of quantum theory, so this philosophical ground has been covered before. However, quantum theory has the benefit that all the objects it proposes have either been experimentally detected, or else are not central to the theory, but rather predicted by it. With string theory, we are indeed returning to the era of epicycles and hidden variables.
Of course, we hope that this situation will change in future, whether because of new experiments or different theories. Until this happens, lay people and physicists alike are right to treat string theory with a greater degree of skepticism than even the notoriously unintuitive quantum theories.