1) DMCA, Copyright law is all moving towards the idea that only corporations have the right to own property, but you do not.
So this means, if you buy something you do not actually own it, your just "renting" it and you pay each time you use it.
You have no rights whatsoever because it isn't yours.
If you believe in this sort of thing, then it should not come as a surprise that the iPOD you thought you owned, isn't really when you decide there is a cool hack for turning it into a PDA or whatever.
2) Patent law is now enduring some interesting changes as well. Now, not only is the corporation the only one permitted to own property, but even the ideas to MAKE products aren't even yours to keep that you may buy. Furthermore, changes to patent and copyright law are insuring that the ideas will never ever be retained by anyone except the said company. (Patent law changes are on the books for 75-100 year expiration periods. This insures companies CEO's and top brass do not have to do anything except manage the checks comming in on licensing fees etc.) It is much easier to collect a Patent royalty than it is too design a new product...
Just ask Daryl McBride, CEO of SCO.
For those in the crowd saying anyone can hold a patent, that is just lip service to the poor masses to throw them a bone.
EVERYONE here knows that whoever has the biggest legal team gets to write or rewrite patents the way they see fit. Period.
We need to build eco systems in space so we can live off world, just as easily as on.
The reason for space travel is more than just adventurism I am afraid.
Perhaps if this was 1500AD we could argue about adventurism...
But in an age where there are no absolute truths, religion is being perverted, and anything goes depending on your perspective of so called human rights, technology provides us with a momentous decision.
Apply it and diversify the human race, or apply it and nuke ourselves into ruin all in the name of a perverse religion, ideology or the doctrine of submission to some of the worlds worst organizations such as the United Nations.
We need to leave this place soon, and establish a real outpost in space before we lack the resources to do so.
When I mean resources I mean many things, such as moral resources, financial, military and the list is quite long...
Desperate times might call for desperate measures. To insure our survival, we might need to make some short term decisions that may be painful.
Such as, diverting funds from social programs, including social security, medicare. Besides social programs we might have to sacrifice security. We may loose whole cities if we reduced the military program to pay for the outpost. With little security, nations might decide to take advantage of the situation.
Would you be willing to see the United States fall? How about Europe? All in the name of preserving the human race off world? It would not be a sacrifice in vain.
At least as the world fell into ruin, technology and our history would have a chance to be preserved.
Other sacrifices would have to be made....who will go? Families may never see their relatives or whole family trees ever again.
How would we select people? All races would need to participate, even those who may not always get along.
Life will be hard....the outpost will be a free floating structure in space, perhaps many miles in diameter. The entire colony of perhaps 1 million people would be entirely devoted to sustaining the structure and society. Resources and comforts will probably be not affordable. Class structure and ruling class/structure of power would have to be very rigid. Human achievment and what can be done would have to govern societies existence. Contribution would be key driving force in society in technological progress. Ideas and thier successful implementation to preserve the outpost would be the new currency, not wealth or power.
Such a society in a position like this would die too quickly over such details as money and conquest of any kind.
There are many reasons to go, none of them I would describe as adventurous. It would be a struggle to survive.
Advances in science and technology at a pace that would literally be hudreds of times faster than it occurs now would be key to surviving every day that passes. Technology and Science would have to be the driving force for a millenia or more to insure the outpost survival so it can grow.
Education would take on a new meaning, if children of the outpost are not properly educated, the next generation might not be able to sustain the technological pace required to keep the outpost healthy. Everyone could die if technological problems, social problems are not solved and solved quickly.
Such a life is not imaginable by many, but I would risk everything in my life in a second if such a project needed volunteers.
A "Homeworld" in space. With so much at steak in the 21st century, the future is looking very bleak.
Even now the Dragon is waking and it is very hungry. Soon its eyes will wonder...I pity the nation it first sets it eyes on to devore.
Anyone here who purchases google stock at 108 a share is stupid as a rock.
The share price is going to drop like a rock within the first year, almost assuredly.
The Nasdaq is still WAY over valued as well as the big board.
In general stocks are going to burn badly in the next 2-4 years.
If you are considering investing, don't do it in American companies, do it overseas in the far east. Far more growth potential over there to offset any losses you will accumulate in stocks.
I like google, I use it daily. But I think the technology is WAY over hyped.
I am preparing a summary right now that recommends dumping a large bulk of Cisco hardware and replacing them with Linux boxes.....all really software firewalls and software base VPN connectivity.
Cisco router/security gear in the lower to mid tier range is way over priced.
The concentrator equipment is nice though including the 2948G's they use to sell and the current 2950's.
Both are my favorite concentrator for copper and fiber...or the Cisco 5000 series for fiber.
In any case, I thought it was interesting that someone proposed that throwing away your Cisco router and security equipment for a software wholly replacement is off the wall.
It isn't. Many cases Linux will do the job very nicely....if not better cheaper, faster.
Been running Oracle 9iRelease 2 on Kernel 2.6.6 quite nicely.
No problems yet!
The real problem I have is if I want to use the Java utils with 9i, which given the compiler and lib requirements with Oracle's jre, can get quite dicey.
I rarely use the Java admin utils but they are nice to play with.
"Because its slow, and takes completely the wrong approach. Java is not about running native code apps, its about shipping portable binaries. Its about giving your users and customers the choice of where they run your code without having to compile. Its about shipping a single JAR or WAR file that runs at close to C++ speed on any platform or app server."
I beg to differ here. Java isn't about a right or wrong approach to compiler toolsets. In fact, if you want to assign any sort of generalization to Java with respect to the language itself, it is to provide flexibility in running in native and byte code formats. You yourself say it is about choice. I think that is what Java is about, choice. Not an dogmatic "approach". Given the fact that Java is increasingly being used in embedded applications, native compiler sets for a target embedded processor would reduce system requirements much more so in this case than shipping a class file and Virtual machine and expect a ARM processor device to run the java app with such limited resources.
"Fundamentally wrong. Java is NOT a compiler. Its a language + byte code specification + compatibility specification + guaranteed core library set."
I never said Java was a compiler. I was referring to the fact that gcj as a compiler toolset has the same requirements imposed on it to compile the Java language.
"Nonsense. VM technology has been around for a long time (P-code for example), but only with Java has it been developed so that it is suitable for real high-performance code, and can deal with multi-processing and real-time multithreading. This is very hard, and has required years of intensive research and a lot of funding. There are many languages which have VMs (Such as Smalltalk) than have not achieved this even after decades of development."
Reread what I said, I said Virtual machine technology has been around for a long time and that Java VM's and VM's like java owe much of their success due to hardware advances. Multithreading is not a mystery, it was done in the 1970's pretty much the same way it is done today. But you need VERY powerful hardware and instruction set sophistication to make that work practically. It takes for example lots of memory to run multithreaded applications. Lots of memory hasn't been around till about 1993 on a desktop scale to make it practical to even consider running 32bit cpu architectures and all of the advanced instruction sets micro's up until then, didn't have.
Is it a cooincidence Java VM's just became available 2 years later? I don't think so.
"There have been major incompatibility issues with different versions of GCC, forks of GCC and incompatible versions of Perl. Even highly popular systems like Python have split into 3 forks, and you can't write to a single 'Python' standard."
There are incompatibilities between Java Platform 2 releases as well. So whats your point?
"Just not true. See above."
Yes it is true because if it wasn't true, and you say Gcc had a ton of forks with fundamental incompatibilities, we couldn't have a practical make/autoconfig environment we have today. Of course, that is not true, as I can easily build apache web server for example on my Redhat 7.3 machine, 8.0 machine and my Suse 9.0 and 9.1 distro..which is basically a fork of Linux distro's.
I think forking in general is very healthy, and there are all sorts of mechanisms in place to deal with unlimited forking chaos that you are suggestions that are currently too complex to discuss in Email. But they keep the Linux kernel, mozilla browser, apache web server...etc all happily from forking into oblivion as you suggest.
It now means for a ever increasingly large percentage of fields, going into debt and not being assured a means of paying it back.
There simply is not enough jobs.
This is a problem, and I am not sure how it will be addressed.
It would seem even the medical field won't be immune for long...
In the next 10 years it is going to be increasingly possible for a doctor in Japan to diagnose and operate on a patient in Ohio for example.
The medical field kinda reminds me of where computers where in the early 1990's. Who can forget Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" ?
In that book he predicted a massive layoff trend as India and the Far east matured....exactly what is happening now, and we haven't seen ANYTHING yet.
In fact in many ways, if Yourdon could have predicted just how large of an impact the internet will have on job displacement in the technology and scientific fields...I think he is probably thinking too himself I underestimated the impact by several orders of magnitude.
There are just not enough jobs for everyone and it won't matter if you have a BS, MS, PhD or no degree at all.
I will say this. It is very important to network, and get out there and do! In this new era that is comming you will be judged privately by who you know and not just what you have done. Who you know is very important to eliminate the risk of employment for the few jobs there are.
Batton down the hatches and prepare to weather the worse as we are in the eye of the storm at the moment, sortof a silent calm before we emerge again in the storm that has been the past 3-4 years.
Don't give up, network and start a open source project!
"I'm sure they are listening to your every word. I'll bet they'll be calling you up any minute with a job offer based on your lucid analysis..."
I wouldn't work for SUN. Too tisky. I have my own practice and although I have been offerred some jobs lately....unlike a lot of IT people in the US, I haven't taken the bite.
The US technology market is in decline and is ready for something new...if I was you I would start practicing your chinese if you want to write software in the 21st century.:-)
"Oh, gimme a break."
So you don't see gcj as relevant? Why not?
"Well, blow me. I did not know that you were Lord High Chief of Open Source, and in a position to declare what the 'Community' will or will not tolerate. I must have missed something..."
No, but I think that comment is obvious and is probably on the mind of any Open Source community member.
"But... I guess you must have the millions of dollars of financing to design, code, test and fine-tune Java VMs for hundreds of different processor architectures. I guess you are prepared to ensure that all java apps run in compatible fashion on all those processors. I guess you have designs for java-specific CPUs ready to be manufactured."
Oh your being stupid now. Java has the same engineering requirements really as any compiler toolset. Virtual machine technology goes way back and there isn't any mystery anymore too it. There never really was, from a software perspective it was simply a matter of hardware powerful enough to run VM's in the first place!
Sun could do themselves a big favor and release the source so they do not have to spend the millions for ports and testing for Java.
gcc and equivalent large edifices of code have been around for a long time and we do not have a billion flavors of gcc.
The OSC community has proven it can work together and utilize standards bodies to insure all software works pretty much the same everywhere.
I would like to say to any Sun employees that the very fate of your jobs hang in the balance here...if not the survivability of the company.
If Java is not opened up gcj will replace it and you will loose relevance.
As is now, gcj is on par with a good 85% plus of the Java class package sets for jdk 1.4.2 as well as native binary executables of Tomcat 4.x are just around the corner, if not produceable already.
You can work with the Open Source community to define what Java will be in the future, or risk becomming a SCO placard if you decide to sue us later on for open sourcing the language itself.
So, your fears about forking Java are already acting on that future by not doing so. Many like myself want to see gcj project move forward quickly due to Sun's questionable financial future and its historic reluctance from management to work with us.
In the end the OSC will have what we want: complete ownership of our own source code and the absolute right for anyone to possess it when the sale of development or software shrinkwrap is completed.
You can join with us and work toward setting standards for the language and the class sets...
OR
We will continue with gcj project backend for the gcc compiler toolsets and insure projects such as Tomcat and Jeromino have safe futures....with or without Sun Microsystems.
We welcome all companies to join us on this crusade to liberate source code in the sale of software and services...and any company that joins us we will utilize such services they offer.
The longer you delay, the further in doubt Sun's future existence is questioned and the more risk you put upon the open source projects.
The OSC community will not tolerate the questionable future of Java very much longer given the spectacular decline of SUN in the past 4-5 years financially and the waffling of key technologists that have built the company. (Joy's on and OFF again relationship for example...)
Investment of time and resources into the Apacje Tomcat project is too valuable now...
Will you come with us or will we leave you behind?
Confusion of outcome and reality of the mathematics that drive it....OH REALLY NOW...who is truly confused?
There are some things you shouldn't bet on no matter what the odds. They represent certain pieces of our framework for existing, and trying to live our lives with some sort of certainty.
Do not attempt to gamble with those things.
You, I, WE have been warned. The bones of beasts long ago are buried deep in the earth and they are a sign, a warning. The dark layer or KT boundry seperating us from THEM tell us the outcome has nothing to do with probability of the event.
It has nothing to do with mathematics.
For a better term...who cares what the probability of Shiva God of Creation and Destruction or the Lord of Chaos Abraxus actually exist? When the outcome for provoking their wrath is the same?
Why worry about the math?
Just don't do it, Don't bet on it, and do everything you can to avoid it.
What I suggest is that we as a species define what that certainty is, and it has nothing to do with the mechanics of probability.
If we choose to not address some of these issues and live our lives as beasts of the field, then we shall suffer the same fate.
There are certain risks to our existence we are talking about here that make your 9-5 job meaningless, Einsteins work irrelevent and my book I am writing a waste of time.
I won't bet these things at ANY ODDS.
There are not very many of these kinds of special risks, but they do exist. Asteroid Impact is one of them. My point I was hoping you would see is that those risks that doom us must be addresses in SOME WAY, regardless of the mathematics or probability of outcome.
Certain stakes in the game, we could rationalize the outcome of a plane crash, or sky diving...by all means live your life and fly or sky dive.
But if you fall and you die, I am comfortable with the outcome of the event. (Although you may not be or your loved ones...I will send flowers...)
We already KNOW what the outcome is with this very special risk is. We shall cease to exist, our history shall cease to exist and 80-90% of all life will be exstinguished from the surface of our planet.
I like the Earth it is home. One day it will be preserved, we shall build a sun to replace the one that burns out and live here and when all the Hydrogen is gone in the Universe...we shall create another universe and bring the Earth with us and perhaps.:-)
Stats although a purely mathematical concept of probability, is very different when measuring a event such as an asteroid strike.
Probaility of an event is only one issue.
True, we have wars constantly going on, and will continue, but they do not wipe out humanity or even 90% of life on earth.
I think, very few people understand what we are talking about really when we talk about asteroid impacts.
Why? Well, because the event unleashes energies we have no experience with. Energies that by there very nature represent the hand of God in many ways.
Even if we were to build 10,000's of SS20 missiles, widely known as bastards of human minds ability to detroy, and detonated them all at once. It would pale in comparison to some of the impacts that have happened historically in the fossil record.
So when we talk about mathematical probability, with respect to action, it is foolish to think that a x in x chance over 10000 years represents an asteroid impact and it is very low on the risk scale.
True, probability tells us, and so does the fossil record, that this risk is low from year to year.
But unlike a full nuclear war, which has never happened by the way, this probability is deavious in its ways that calm the mind, into complacency.
Unlike nuclear war, we actually do have proof of no less than 4 major events that have hacked the tree of life on this planet to its stump.
We know it is a singular event, and once it happens 80-90% of all life stands no chance against it.
This kind of probability is different than plane crashes, nuclear war or even floods or earthquakes. We have nothing really, to compare it too.
So, you cannot weigh the outcome of such an event simply by talking about the numbers, you need to look at the evidence, fossil records, you need to look at the mathematics or stats.
I would fly in a plane with a 1 and 10,000 chance that it would crash, but I would NEVER bet my species survival in a 1 10,000 bet with ANYONE.
In fact, that is something I would NEVER bet with ANY ODDS, not even a 1 in a googleplex.
I wonder why the publishers didn't band together and prevent the use of Web server software, widespread use of the IP protocol?
They could have said: "If you do not buy an encyclopedia the publishing industry will be ruined. Besides, free information is "unamerican".
Did you know that using a web browser is illegal?
Sort of brings such things to mind when I compare the music publishing industry with the print media industry, which by all accounts is still doing well.
The legal tactics the RIAA is using is something they as publishers of Encyclopedias could have used, in the early times of the web.
But, they got smart these publishers, and decided to reshape the product and build interactive educational CD's.
Also, they lowered the prices on the materials as well.
Anyone see the same possibilities that the RIAA currently uses to keep an old archaic system from dieing, that the publishing industry could have employed to keep encyclopedias in print?
The Motorola line had avery easy to use instruction set, I agree.
I also agree with all the screwy legacy memory modes the x86 instruction set had, it was anything but easy to scale programs that required lots of memory.
I don't want to get into a debate about science costing money.
Of course it does. How do we pay for it?
Well, do we shut up all research and make it cost money to do it?
Do you really only want those who can pay to play in seats of scientific research?
As is, people in leather covered board rooms are at this very moment determining the fate of the human genome hundreds of years into the future.
If we want to prevent the money, those in power from making these choices wholly themselves, then we have to change how science gets funded.
I think the Open Source model is a beautiful one to make that happen.
You get intellectual property, copyrights and all that wonderful stuff using Open Source Software, without the restrictions on the evolutionary aspects of technology.
I mean insuring that the basic technology is always out in the open for everyone to see after they purchase it.
This idea to hide information in a technology based society is a method for those in seats of power to insure the power doesn't change hands, and furthermore to insure that the money never leaves the top 2% of the families in this country that own 90% of everything else.
The Nobles and Clergy in the Middle Ages also thought teaching EVERYONE how to read and write was evil. (i.e. if everyone was educated everyone would question why they are plowing fields while the people up in the Castle were warm, dry and didn't really contribute to society.)
WHat particular ones? Are you talking about Mr. Turings work perhaps?
Or Von Neumann's?
I am a computer scientist, but I am not a mathematician. The insights I refer too are do to the fact Mr. Wolfram draws it all out, and puts it altogether using:
1) Experiments.
2) Suggested Application areas in bracnhes of Science.
3) Very thourough references to previous work if you wish to understand the details.
Very few pieces of research do that, they usually just discuss the salient points and leave practical applications out of the picture.
That is what I liked about his book, and that is what I meant by fascinating insights.
The Dinosaurs survived quite well, with no brains, or very little brains for a time scale that makes our existence fairly insignificant by comparison.
I would also like to point out, that the estimated age of the Universe is 14 Billion years.
For about 10 billion of those years we assume, the earth wasn't formed.
Well, when the Earth did form, many billions of years went by, about 3 billion, before we had any complex life forms.
After they arrived we had one very sophisticated life form/species called the Dinosaurs.
What makes the interesting:
1) Longest lived of the complex forms, that we know of. They were phenominally successful.
2) They occupied just about every niche, on land, in the sea and in the air.
3) They did so for I think about 250 Million years.
4) Intelligent, no, probably not and dumb as your average house cat some of the smartest ones.
Point is, that they survived for quite a while with no brains.
I also point out that like Stephan J Gould once said, "Intelligence has yet to be proven as an advantage to a species."
I actually think, given the number of species over the time scales we are talking about, that intelligence is fairly rare.
If we are to believe the latest theories regarding the evolution of life, natural selection tends to select species that can survive and flourish.
If this is true, it doesn't bode well for intelligence. For if we truly believe in the scientific principles of Darwinism, then intelligence must be a trait that is detrimental, and tends to kill off species.
Our planet has had billions of years, many billions of species, and only one we know of is intelligent.
If we truly believe that our planet is not special, and that once a Universe forms, scientific principles that govern that Universe are true whereever and whenever.
I think it is safe to say given our planet as a quite ordinary planet around a quite ordinary star, that life is probably common, complex life is also too, common.
But Intelligent life that is self aware borders on the impossible or quirk and probably is very short lived.
(i.e. It develops technology that exstinguishes its existence within 250,000 years after it becomes self aware.)
Mathematically this makes sense because we should be visited by now if there are any other civilizations in this Galaxy.
So I think as a Niche, we compared to other species are very extinguishable, and I do not believe technology offers us any advantages.
That has yet to be seen.
Like I said, the Dino's had no technology and they were far more succesful than we have ever been.
I understand everyone has to make a living. When I read his work, I was interested in his unique view that complexity arises from simplicity and that he had combined a large field into a view of complexity all his own.
The insights are fascinating, especially the ability to build computational systems with simple repeating rules....(i.e. multiplication tables...etc.) from graphical representations.
The biggest disappointment is that he didn't provide enough practical research in testable form in the book to double check his experiments, some of them very heavily numerical in composition, which would require a lot of programming to confirm.
My biggest problem is that he uses a $1500-$3000 dollar Mathematics tool, he says he invented himself, that he profits from, to confirm his research.
That I do find a bit hard to swallow, including the license required to run Mathematica.
Science shouldn't operate on the principle of PAY to play. Anyone should have access to any and all information for free.
The labor to create it however, should not be free, and we have plenty of avenues in the free market place to do that just like Open Source Software companies have shown such as RedHat.
The book does give a very large impression that Mr. Wolfram discovered these things all by himself...you have to follow the booknotes to find out who's shoulders he is standing on.
In the end, he is sort of like a Newton who is focusing the worlds attention on the fundamentals of complex systems theory and what it is, and how we can use it to improve the scientific method. He is using a large amount of research though that many have contrinuted too.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all....
some general observations:
1) DMCA, Copyright law is all moving towards the idea that only corporations have the right to own property, but you do not.
So this means, if you buy something you do not actually own it, your just "renting" it and you pay each time you use it.
You have no rights whatsoever because it isn't yours.
If you believe in this sort of thing, then it should not come as a surprise that the iPOD you thought you owned, isn't really when you decide there is a cool hack for turning it into a PDA or whatever.
2) Patent law is now enduring some interesting changes as well. Now, not only is the corporation the only one permitted to own property, but even the ideas to MAKE products aren't even yours to keep that you may buy. Furthermore, changes to patent and copyright law are insuring that the ideas will never ever be retained by anyone except the said company. (Patent law changes are on the books for 75-100 year expiration periods. This insures companies CEO's and top brass do not have to do anything except manage the checks comming in on licensing fees etc.) It is much easier to collect a Patent royalty than it is too design a new product...
Just ask Daryl McBride, CEO of SCO.
For those in the crowd saying anyone can hold a patent, that is just lip service to the poor masses to throw them a bone.
EVERYONE here knows that whoever has the biggest legal team gets to write or rewrite patents the way they see fit. Period.
(Hint: It isn't the little guy.)
-Hack
Man, there are so many Puns in that line I am having a problem sorting them in my binary tree...
-Hack
If we don't do it, we are fossils already.
All poetry, mathematics for nothing.
Just dust.
We need to build eco systems in space so we can live off world, just as easily as on.
The reason for space travel is more than just adventurism I am afraid.
Perhaps if this was 1500AD we could argue about adventurism...
But in an age where there are no absolute truths, religion is being perverted, and anything goes depending on your perspective of so called human rights, technology provides us with a momentous decision.
Apply it and diversify the human race, or apply it and nuke ourselves into ruin all in the name of a perverse religion, ideology or the doctrine of submission to some of the worlds worst organizations such as the United Nations.
We need to leave this place soon, and establish a real outpost in space before we lack the resources to do so.
When I mean resources I mean many things, such as moral resources, financial, military and the list is quite long...
Desperate times might call for desperate measures. To insure our survival, we might need to make some short term decisions that may be painful.
Such as, diverting funds from social programs, including social security, medicare. Besides social programs we might have to sacrifice security. We may loose whole cities if we reduced the military program to pay for the outpost. With little security, nations might decide to take advantage of the situation.
Would you be willing to see the United States fall? How about Europe? All in the name of preserving the human race off world? It would not be a sacrifice in vain.
At least as the world fell into ruin, technology and our history would have a chance to be preserved.
Other sacrifices would have to be made....who will go? Families may never see their relatives or whole family trees ever again.
How would we select people? All races would need to participate, even those who may not always get along.
Life will be hard....the outpost will be a free floating structure in space, perhaps many miles in diameter. The entire colony of perhaps 1 million people would be entirely devoted to sustaining the structure and society. Resources and comforts will probably be not affordable. Class structure and ruling class/structure of power would have to be very rigid. Human achievment and what can be done would have to govern societies existence. Contribution would be key driving force in society in technological progress. Ideas and thier successful implementation to preserve the outpost would be the new currency, not wealth or power.
Such a society in a position like this would die too quickly over such details as money and conquest of any kind.
There are many reasons to go, none of them I would describe as adventurous. It would be a struggle to survive.
Advances in science and technology at a pace that would literally be hudreds of times faster than it occurs now would be key to surviving every day that passes. Technology and Science would have to be the driving force for a millenia or more to insure the outpost survival so it can grow.
Education would take on a new meaning, if children of the outpost are not properly educated, the next generation might not be able to sustain the technological pace required to keep the outpost healthy. Everyone could die if technological problems, social problems are not solved and solved quickly.
Such a life is not imaginable by many, but I would risk everything in my life in a second if such a project needed volunteers.
A "Homeworld" in space. With so much at steak in the 21st century, the future is looking very bleak.
Even now the Dragon is waking and it is very hungry. Soon its eyes will wonder...I pity the nation it first sets it eyes on to devore.
-Hackus
Anyone here who purchases google stock at 108 a share is stupid as a rock.
The share price is going to drop like a rock within the first year, almost assuredly.
The Nasdaq is still WAY over valued as well as the big board.
In general stocks are going to burn badly in the next 2-4 years.
If you are considering investing, don't do it in American companies, do it overseas in the far east. Far more growth potential over there to offset any losses you will accumulate in stocks.
I like google, I use it daily. But I think the technology is WAY over hyped.
-Hack
Interesting point.....actually...
I am preparing a summary right now that recommends dumping a large bulk of Cisco hardware and replacing them with Linux boxes.....all really software firewalls and software base VPN connectivity.
Cisco router/security gear in the lower to mid tier range is way over priced.
The concentrator equipment is nice though including the 2948G's they use to sell and the current 2950's.
Both are my favorite concentrator for copper and fiber...or the Cisco 5000 series for fiber.
In any case, I thought it was interesting that someone proposed that throwing away your Cisco router and security equipment for a software wholly replacement is off the wall.
It isn't. Many cases Linux will do the job very nicely....if not better cheaper, faster.
-Hack
Been running Oracle 9iRelease 2 on Kernel 2.6.6 quite nicely.
No problems yet!
The real problem I have is if I want to use the Java utils with 9i, which given the compiler and lib requirements with Oracle's jre, can get quite dicey.
I rarely use the Java admin utils but they are nice to play with.
-Hack
"Because its slow, and takes completely the wrong approach. Java is not about running native code apps, its about shipping portable binaries. Its about giving your users and customers the choice of where they run your code without having to compile. Its about shipping a single JAR or WAR file that runs at close to C++ speed on any platform or app server."
I beg to differ here. Java isn't about a right or wrong approach to compiler toolsets. In fact, if you want to assign any sort of generalization to Java with respect to the language itself, it is to provide flexibility in running in native and byte code formats. You yourself say it is about choice. I think that is what Java is about, choice. Not an dogmatic "approach". Given the fact that Java is increasingly being used in embedded applications, native compiler sets for a target embedded processor would reduce system requirements much more so in this case than shipping a class file and Virtual machine and expect a ARM processor device to run the java app with such limited resources.
"Fundamentally wrong. Java is NOT a compiler. Its a language + byte code specification + compatibility specification + guaranteed core library set."
I never said Java was a compiler. I was referring to the fact that gcj as a compiler toolset has the same requirements imposed on it to compile the Java language.
"Nonsense. VM technology has been around for a long time (P-code for example), but only with Java has it been developed so that it is suitable for real high-performance code, and can deal with multi-processing and real-time multithreading. This is very hard, and has required years of intensive research and a lot of funding. There are many languages which have VMs (Such as Smalltalk) than have not achieved this even after decades of development."
Reread what I said, I said Virtual machine technology has been around for a long time and that Java VM's and VM's like java owe much of their success due to hardware advances. Multithreading is not a mystery, it was done in the 1970's pretty much the same way it is done today. But you need VERY powerful hardware and instruction set sophistication to make that work practically. It takes for example lots of memory to run multithreaded applications. Lots of memory hasn't been around till about 1993 on a desktop scale to make it practical to even consider running 32bit cpu architectures and all of the advanced instruction sets micro's up until then, didn't have.
Is it a cooincidence Java VM's just became available 2 years later? I don't think so.
"There have been major incompatibility issues with different versions of GCC, forks of GCC and incompatible versions of Perl. Even highly popular systems like Python have split into 3 forks, and you can't write to a single 'Python' standard."
There are incompatibilities between Java Platform 2 releases as well. So whats your point?
"Just not true. See above."
Yes it is true because if it wasn't true, and you say Gcc had a ton of forks with fundamental incompatibilities, we couldn't have a practical make/autoconfig environment we have today. Of course, that is not true, as I can easily build apache web server for example on my Redhat 7.3 machine, 8.0 machine and my Suse 9.0 and 9.1 distro..which is basically a fork of Linux distro's.
I think forking in general is very healthy, and there are all sorts of mechanisms in place to deal with unlimited forking chaos that you are suggestions that are currently too complex to discuss in Email. But they keep the Linux kernel, mozilla browser, apache web server...etc all happily from forking into oblivion as you suggest.
-Hack
Is a problem.
It now means for a ever increasingly large percentage of fields, going into debt and not being assured a means of paying it back.
There simply is not enough jobs.
This is a problem, and I am not sure how it will be addressed.
It would seem even the medical field won't be immune for long...
In the next 10 years it is going to be increasingly possible for a doctor in Japan to diagnose and operate on a patient in Ohio for example.
The medical field kinda reminds me of where computers where in the early 1990's. Who can forget Yourdon's "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" ?
In that book he predicted a massive layoff trend as India and the Far east matured....exactly what is happening now, and we haven't seen ANYTHING yet.
In fact in many ways, if Yourdon could have predicted just how large of an impact the internet will have on job displacement in the technology and scientific fields...I think he is probably thinking too himself I underestimated the impact by several orders of magnitude.
There are just not enough jobs for everyone and it won't matter if you have a BS, MS, PhD or no degree at all.
I will say this. It is very important to network, and get out there and do! In this new era that is comming you will be judged privately by who you know and not just what you have done. Who you know is very important to eliminate the risk of employment for the few jobs there are.
Batton down the hatches and prepare to weather the worse as we are in the eye of the storm at the moment, sortof a silent calm before we emerge again in the storm that has been the past 3-4 years.
Don't give up, network and start a open source project!
-Hack
"I'm sure they are listening to your every word. I'll bet they'll be calling you up any minute with a job offer based on your lucid analysis..."
:-)
I wouldn't work for SUN. Too tisky. I have my own practice and although I have been offerred some jobs lately....unlike a lot of IT people in the US, I haven't taken the bite.
The US technology market is in decline and is ready for something new...if I was you I would start practicing your chinese if you want to write software in the 21st century.
"Oh, gimme a break."
So you don't see gcj as relevant? Why not?
"Well, blow me. I did not know that you were Lord High Chief of Open Source, and in a position to declare what the 'Community' will or will not tolerate. I must have missed something..."
No, but I think that comment is obvious and is probably on the mind of any Open Source community member.
"But... I guess you must have the millions of dollars of financing to design, code, test and fine-tune Java VMs for hundreds of different processor architectures. I guess you are prepared to ensure that all java apps run in compatible fashion on all those processors. I guess you have designs for java-specific CPUs ready to be manufactured."
Oh your being stupid now. Java has the same engineering requirements really as any compiler toolset. Virtual machine technology goes way back and there isn't any mystery anymore too it. There never really was, from a software perspective it was simply a matter of hardware powerful enough to run VM's in the first place!
Sun could do themselves a big favor and release the source so they do not have to spend the millions for ports and testing for Java.
gcc and equivalent large edifices of code have been around for a long time and we do not have a billion flavors of gcc.
The OSC community has proven it can work together and utilize standards bodies to insure all software works pretty much the same everywhere.
-Hack
It should be done immediately.
I would like to say to any Sun employees that the very fate of your jobs hang in the balance here...if not the survivability of the company.
If Java is not opened up gcj will replace it and you will loose relevance.
As is now, gcj is on par with a good 85% plus of the Java class package sets for jdk 1.4.2 as well as native binary executables of Tomcat 4.x are just around the corner, if not produceable already.
You can work with the Open Source community to define what Java will be in the future, or risk becomming a SCO placard if you decide to sue us later on for open sourcing the language itself.
So, your fears about forking Java are already acting on that future by not doing so. Many like myself want to see gcj project move forward quickly due to Sun's questionable financial future and its historic reluctance from management to work with us.
In the end the OSC will have what we want: complete ownership of our own source code and the absolute right for anyone to possess it when the sale of development or software shrinkwrap is completed.
You can join with us and work toward setting standards for the language and the class sets...
OR
We will continue with gcj project backend for the gcc compiler toolsets and insure projects such as Tomcat and Jeromino have safe futures....with or without Sun Microsystems.
We welcome all companies to join us on this crusade to liberate source code in the sale of software and services...and any company that joins us we will utilize such services they offer.
The longer you delay, the further in doubt Sun's future existence is questioned and the more risk you put upon the open source projects.
The OSC community will not tolerate the questionable future of Java very much longer given the spectacular decline of SUN in the past 4-5 years financially and the waffling of key technologists that have built the company. (Joy's on and OFF again relationship for example...)
Investment of time and resources into the Apacje Tomcat project is too valuable now...
Will you come with us or will we leave you behind?
-Hackus
with free and open standards home built...
Sounds like WE will be the ones isolated not THEM.
-Hack
THANK GOD.
At least I have location now to move my website too without someone claiming my XML publishing engine I wrote violates thier patent.
In fact, maybe I will just move myself AND my website to germany....
-Hackus
Your both wrong.
The four corners of the earth are a reference to the creation of our solar system, and placing the path of the sun in the sky.
The corners in Genesis represent the four cardinal points of the earth with respect to the calendar.
Only the "Gods" know the secrets of the calendar and in this case, especially when God is talk to Job in the Book of Job, it means the four seasons.
Therefore the four corners of the earth are: the spring and summer equinoxes and the winter and summer solstice.
You are fools and you are bigger fools to not realize many of the religions today direct quote scientific facts whe discussing mysteries of existence.
Christ said while he was here that you shall see, but not understand, read but not comprehend.
God brings this point up to Job for example in the Christian/Hebrew religion because the four corners of the earth ARE IMPORTANT.
They represent the basis of a calendar and modern civilization is impossible without the basic means of measuring time.
Fools, idiots.
-Hack
I am in the middle actually, of replacing a application called LyTEC, rebuilding it using a Java Tomcat MySQL.
-Hack
Confusion of outcome and reality of the mathematics that drive it....OH REALLY NOW...who is truly confused?
:-)
There are some things you shouldn't bet on no matter what the odds. They represent certain pieces of our framework for existing, and trying to live our lives with some sort of certainty.
Do not attempt to gamble with those things.
You, I, WE have been warned. The bones of beasts long ago are buried deep in the earth and they are a sign, a warning. The dark layer or KT boundry seperating us from THEM tell us the outcome has nothing to do with probability of the event.
It has nothing to do with mathematics.
For a better term...who cares what the probability of Shiva God of Creation and Destruction or the Lord of Chaos Abraxus actually exist? When the outcome for provoking their wrath is the same?
Why worry about the math?
Just don't do it, Don't bet on it, and do everything you can to avoid it.
What I suggest is that we as a species define what that certainty is, and it has nothing to do with the mechanics of probability.
If we choose to not address some of these issues and live our lives as beasts of the field, then we shall suffer the same fate.
There are certain risks to our existence we are talking about here that make your 9-5 job meaningless, Einsteins work irrelevent and my book I am writing a waste of time.
I won't bet these things at ANY ODDS.
There are not very many of these kinds of special risks, but they do exist. Asteroid Impact is one of them. My point I was hoping you would see is that those risks that doom us must be addresses in SOME WAY, regardless of the mathematics or probability of outcome.
Certain stakes in the game, we could rationalize the outcome of a plane crash, or sky diving...by all means live your life and fly or sky dive.
But if you fall and you die, I am comfortable with the outcome of the event. (Although you may not be or your loved ones...I will send flowers...)
We already KNOW what the outcome is with this very special risk is. We shall cease to exist, our history shall cease to exist and 80-90% of all life will be exstinguished from the surface of our planet.
I like the Earth it is home. One day it will be preserved, we shall build a sun to replace the one that burns out and live here and when all the Hydrogen is gone in the Universe...we shall create another universe and bring the Earth with us and perhaps.
-Hack
Your both wrong actually.
Stats although a purely mathematical concept of probability, is very different when measuring a event such as an asteroid strike.
Probaility of an event is only one issue.
True, we have wars constantly going on, and will continue, but they do not wipe out humanity or even 90% of life on earth.
I think, very few people understand what we are talking about really when we talk about asteroid impacts.
Why? Well, because the event unleashes energies we have no experience with. Energies that by there very nature represent the hand of God in many ways.
Even if we were to build 10,000's of SS20 missiles, widely known as bastards of human minds ability to detroy, and detonated them all at once. It would pale in comparison to some of the impacts that have happened historically in the fossil record.
So when we talk about mathematical probability, with respect to action, it is foolish to think that a x in x chance over 10000 years represents an asteroid impact and it is very low on the risk scale.
True, probability tells us, and so does the fossil record, that this risk is low from year to year.
But unlike a full nuclear war, which has never happened by the way, this probability is deavious in its ways that calm the mind, into complacency.
Unlike nuclear war, we actually do have proof of no less than 4 major events that have hacked the tree of life on this planet to its stump.
We know it is a singular event, and once it happens 80-90% of all life stands no chance against it.
This kind of probability is different than plane crashes, nuclear war or even floods or earthquakes. We have nothing really, to compare it too.
So, you cannot weigh the outcome of such an event simply by talking about the numbers, you need to look at the evidence, fossil records, you need to look at the mathematics or stats.
I would fly in a plane with a 1 and 10,000 chance that it would crash, but I would NEVER bet my species survival in a 1 10,000 bet with ANYONE.
In fact, that is something I would NEVER bet with ANY ODDS, not even a 1 in a googleplex.
I hope I am making myself clear.
-Hack
I wonder why the publishers didn't band together and prevent the use of Web server software, widespread use of the IP protocol?
They could have said: "If you do not buy an encyclopedia the publishing industry will be ruined. Besides, free information is "unamerican".
Did you know that using a web browser is illegal?
Sort of brings such things to mind when I compare the music publishing industry with the print media industry, which by all accounts is still doing well.
The legal tactics the RIAA is using is something they as publishers of Encyclopedias could have used, in the early times of the web.
But, they got smart these publishers, and decided to reshape the product and build interactive educational CD's.
Also, they lowered the prices on the materials as well.
Anyone see the same possibilities that the RIAA currently uses to keep an old archaic system from dieing, that the publishing industry could have employed to keep encyclopedias in print?
-Hackus
Well, I have looked at his BLOG and I find his depth perception about the entire debate about IQ very disturbing.
First of all, if we actually KNEW what intelligence actually is, we would have a definitive test for it and could code it.
That is how computers work. Algorithm understood = code or program that runs on a computer.
Mr. Raymond thinks IQ is a reputable measure of intelligenc?
Oh Dear.
ESR how thou hath fallen...time to join Lucifer and his bunch.
-Hack
The Motorola line had avery easy to use instruction set, I agree.
I also agree with all the screwy legacy memory modes the x86 instruction set had, it was anything but easy to scale programs that required lots of memory.
-Hack
I don't want to get into a debate about science costing money.
Of course it does. How do we pay for it?
Well, do we shut up all research and make it cost money to do it?
Do you really only want those who can pay to play in seats of scientific research?
As is, people in leather covered board rooms are at this very moment determining the fate of the human genome hundreds of years into the future.
If we want to prevent the money, those in power from making these choices wholly themselves, then we have to change how science gets funded.
I think the Open Source model is a beautiful one to make that happen.
You get intellectual property, copyrights and all that wonderful stuff using Open Source Software, without the restrictions on the evolutionary aspects of technology.
I mean insuring that the basic technology is always out in the open for everyone to see after they purchase it.
This idea to hide information in a technology based society is a method for those in seats of power to insure the power doesn't change hands, and furthermore to insure that the money never leaves the top 2% of the families in this country that own 90% of everything else.
The Nobles and Clergy in the Middle Ages also thought teaching EVERYONE how to read and write was evil. (i.e. if everyone was educated everyone would question why they are plowing fields while the people up in the Castle were warm, dry and didn't really contribute to society.)
-Hack
That is probably true.
But Like I said, I am a computer scientist, not a mathematician.
There are many I am sure in Science that hold similair views.
Some people like to focus the topic matter a little better by painting a history of the research, and why it matters in various branches of physics.
Mr. Wolfram did this, and very few other researchers did not.
He also applied these methods in the construction of certain pieces of software, namely proprietary ones, unfortunately that have real applications.
Few researchers get to put pure research into practical use, by there own design.
So I am not just talking about repeating patterns, and if you read his book, you would realize there is of course, more to it than that.
-Hack
WHat particular ones? Are you talking about Mr. Turings work perhaps?
Or Von Neumann's?
I am a computer scientist, but I am not a mathematician. The insights I refer too are do to the fact Mr. Wolfram draws it all out, and puts it altogether using:
1) Experiments.
2) Suggested Application areas in bracnhes of Science.
3) Very thourough references to previous work if you wish to understand the details.
Very few pieces of research do that, they usually just discuss the salient points and leave practical applications out of the picture.
That is what I liked about his book, and that is what I meant by fascinating insights.
-Hack
its all in M68K assmebly language...
We might as well start from scratch...
unless of course u own a AMIGA, then it is very useful.
-Hack
Well, not so fast.
The Dinosaurs survived quite well, with no brains, or very little brains for a time scale that makes our existence fairly insignificant by comparison.
I would also like to point out, that the estimated age of the Universe is 14 Billion years.
For about 10 billion of those years we assume, the earth wasn't formed.
Well, when the Earth did form, many billions of years went by, about 3 billion, before we had any complex life forms.
After they arrived we had one very sophisticated life form/species called the Dinosaurs.
What makes the interesting:
1) Longest lived of the complex forms, that we know of. They were phenominally successful.
2) They occupied just about every niche, on land, in the sea and in the air.
3) They did so for I think about 250 Million years.
4) Intelligent, no, probably not and dumb as your average house cat some of the smartest ones.
Point is, that they survived for quite a while with no brains.
I also point out that like Stephan J Gould once said, "Intelligence has yet to be proven as an advantage to a species."
I actually think, given the number of species over the time scales we are talking about, that intelligence is fairly rare.
If we are to believe the latest theories regarding the evolution of life, natural selection tends to select species that can survive and flourish.
If this is true, it doesn't bode well for intelligence. For if we truly believe in the scientific principles of Darwinism, then intelligence must be a trait that is detrimental, and tends to kill off species.
Our planet has had billions of years, many billions of species, and only one we know of is intelligent.
If we truly believe that our planet is not special, and that once a Universe forms, scientific principles that govern that Universe are true whereever and whenever.
I think it is safe to say given our planet as a quite ordinary planet around a quite ordinary star, that life is probably common, complex life is also too, common.
But Intelligent life that is self aware borders on the impossible or quirk and probably is very short lived.
(i.e. It develops technology that exstinguishes its existence within 250,000 years after it becomes self aware.)
Mathematically this makes sense because we should be visited by now if there are any other civilizations in this Galaxy.
So I think as a Niche, we compared to other species are very extinguishable, and I do not believe technology offers us any advantages.
That has yet to be seen.
Like I said, the Dino's had no technology and they were far more succesful than we have ever been.
-Hack
Well,
.02.
I understand everyone has to make a living. When I read his work, I was interested in his unique view that complexity arises from simplicity and that he had combined a large field into a view of complexity all his own.
The insights are fascinating, especially the ability to build computational systems with simple repeating rules....(i.e. multiplication tables...etc.) from graphical representations.
The biggest disappointment is that he didn't provide enough practical research in testable form in the book to double check his experiments, some of them very heavily numerical in composition, which would require a lot of programming to confirm.
My biggest problem is that he uses a $1500-$3000 dollar Mathematics tool, he says he invented himself, that he profits from, to confirm his research.
That I do find a bit hard to swallow, including the license required to run Mathematica.
Science shouldn't operate on the principle of PAY to play. Anyone should have access to any and all information for free.
The labor to create it however, should not be free, and we have plenty of avenues in the free market place to do that just like Open Source Software companies have shown such as RedHat.
The book does give a very large impression that Mr. Wolfram discovered these things all by himself...you have to follow the booknotes to find out who's shoulders he is standing on.
In the end, he is sort of like a Newton who is focusing the worlds attention on the fundamentals of complex systems theory and what it is, and how we can use it to improve the scientific method. He is using a large amount of research though that many have contrinuted too.
My
-Hack