As I noted to the AC, don't rely on the web page listing supported platforms. If it's listed there, you know it's there, but if it's missing, it could be lax maintenance. The only safe guide is the source code itself. The Freshmeat updates (which I maintain) will sometimes list added chips and mainboards, but the fact that Coreboot's developers are all on caffeine drips often means they've posted 50-100 patchsets between Freshmeat posts. If I'd overflow the allowed space or would die from webpage overload, I do a quick post and spend the saved time on playing Oolite.
Let's see. It's not listed specifically on the webpage, but the webpage always lags behind the patches, so unless you've downloaded a copy, you can't be certain the support hasn't been added.
Secondly, I don't know if the specs match another configuration that is named as supported, but if it does, the label doesn't matter.
Thirdly, there are a hell of a lot of motherboards out there. Let's say Coreboot supported 99% of all motherboards. There would still then be 1 in every 100 that they didn't, by definition. This would include older boards as well as newer ones, especially in the case of something as fugly as ASUS.
Fourthly, since you can slap together basic support by putting together a profile that defines the processor, support chips and other ultra-standard parts, you could have offered a starter profile for them at any time. You still could. Why are you posting about what Coreboot doesn't list, when you could be extending that very list at any moment?
No default GNOME shell? Going for lightweight, rather than modular? I don't see this as a logical direction for Ubuntu.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be. The only exception is a daemon or other service that creates a large amount of state at start-time. Then, you simply create your clean image to exclude such services and start them once the image is in place.
An alternative would be to do something similar, but instead of actually loading the software, you load and freeze hooks. This won't be quite as fast, but a frozen image of application hooks and corresponding DLL hooks (and perhaps the filesystem kernel modules) should be small enough to fit into a flash chip. This would "pre-boot" the computer without having to actually parse the init scripts and without having to have a full ramfs boot stage.
In both these cases, I'm picturing that when you change any init script or any of the packages involved, the machine would need to rebuild the fast-boot images. This means that updating low-level packages would place a LOT more strain on the system. On the other hand, disk access is slow, scripts are slow and starting heavier applications is also slow. Cutting two of these three out would massively boost startup times, cutting all three out would be damn-near instant-on.
(You actually could get instant-on with Coreboot + a running system image, and given that thumb drives have a larger capacity than older desktop systems, it's not impossible to imagine having such a system. Oh, and Coreboot works on a hell of a lot of platforms these days, for those who dismiss it as architecture-impaired. It's not perfect and it can be a pain at times as-is, but the one thing it's not short of is supported platforms.)
What a curious response. The Big Bang is entirely in compliance with empirical observation. The only issue left to be resolved is whether it originated as a singularity, the result of two membranes colliding, or the result of a Big Crunch in imaginary time (a proposal by Professor Hawking a while back).
Relativistic gravity is a problem only in that it is IMPOSSIBLE for both relativistic gravity and QM gravity to be correct. Whichever one is right will automatically make the other wrong, and superstring theory is currently the only viable QM gravity candidate. The problem with superstrings is that you can't have a 12-dimensional universe. It's geometrically impossible. 4, 8, 16, and any other power of 2 is valid. Absolutely no other value can be correct. There is no working model for a 16-dimensional space/time. That superstrings have not been observed is not an issue, as we haven't achieved nearly the sensitivity needed to observe one. No empirical claim can be made until such time that such energies are reached - a point I already made, though one you may have missed in your desire to troll.
The expanding universe is in full compliance with empirical science, which shows the Hubble Constant to be nearly (or actually) 1. Had the universe not been expanding, the empirical science would show this value to be considerably below 1. It is worth noting that as the universe ages, the ability to measure the Hubble Constant declines, so civilizations two or three solar lifetimes after ours (about double the current age of the universe) may not be able to observe the expansion so easily. There won't be enough matter in the visible universe to be certain if the apparent expansion is genuine or a statistical aberration, until such time as it is possible to observe the expansion within the quantum foam.*
*Because the universe is expanding, the virtual particles within quantum foam must logically be subject to an extremely weak version of the effect behind Black Hole evaporation and Hawking Radiation. Thus, space/time must emit an extremely faint glow in direct proportion to the rate of expansion. If there's virtually no matter in the neighbourhood, it may be possible to detect this glow and infer the expansion of the universe from that.
None of this is rocket-science, it ALL stands or falls by empirical science. The Steady-State Theory, for example, was utterly crushed from it being impossible for the theory to compensate for new data. The same is true of Copernican circular orbits, the moon being a captured satellite, etc.
The LoC alters in its dimensions according to temperature, making it a difficult unit to use unless it is defined for standard temperature and pressure.
Re:That word... he doesn't seem to know what it me
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Hacking Vim 7.2
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Kim Kimberley. Wasn't she the detective in the Level 9 adventure Snowball?
Pushing galaxy formation earlier isn't merely a case of getting a more obscene number. It's giving the models we use to analyze galaxies a serious work-out. Same with spotting ever-earlier stars. In the case of stars, we're pushing the limits of what existing models permit for star formation. If we go much further back there, then the models have an error. Which is good. Science gets booooring when the models are correct and everything matches predictions. Adventure, Excitement and Really Wild Things are only possible when the old models fail and have to either be re-tuned or replaced.
(This is why the failure to detect Dark Matter was so important. Dark Matter is absolutely mandatory for certain models to predict correctly how the universe works. Failure in science is not a bad thing, it is an extraordinarily GOOD thing, as it requires people to revisit past assumptions and past data, to see why the discrepancy exists. It also requires scientists to develop new ideas of what to look for. Some things, we don't know what scale we should be looking at. The Higg's Boson is an example. We've a good idea the LHC will see evidence of it, provided all the numbers are right, but we can't be sure. Gravity waves are tougher - we really should be seeing those by now but aren't. However, all modern gravity wave detectors are merely oversized Michelson-Morley experiments, which Einstein demonstrated could never observe the theorized medium of the ether, no matter how accurate they were. It is therefore possible that gravity waves aren't detectable because the experiments are the wrong ones. It is also possible that they aren't detectable because they aren't there. What isn't possible is for both theory and experiment to be correct.
The ideal in science is to find things that break the current model, but not by too much. Just enough to do interesting work, but not enough that they have to dodge apples falling upwards.
Tell you what, you figure out a way for me to have several millions (after tax), and I'll set up X-Prizes on a whole slew of areas that I think are of exceptional interest, of which some form of analysis of IT security techniques in a biological system would be one. (Both founders of modern technology - Alan Turing and Von Neumann - started by treating computers as equivalent to idealized biological systems. This is precisely why Alan Turing worked on the question of whether the human brain was a Turing Machine, and why Von Neumann wanted to figure out the abstract model for a DNA-like system - before DNA had even been identified.)
I'll throw in a bonus. Find me $100,000,000,000, a few thousand pure mathematicians, a few thousand Software Architects/Engineers, and as many programmers as mathematicians and SA/Es combined, and I can have Linux A1/CC7-compliant and nine 9's reliable within a year - guaranteed.
The problem is not one of thinking of ways to do things. That's never the problem. It's not even a case of it being a problem thinking of ideas that are highly valuable and beneficial. The problem is that most ideas will never get any kind of time or money invested in them, and that of the ideas explored, only one in a thousand will ever be implemented in a way that works (lack of money, lack of interest, lack of supporting technology, lack of ideas to bridge the gap between start and finish), and of those ideas that are implemented soundly, perhaps one in a thousand will ever find its way to anyone who can actually make any real use of it.
This is why patent-farms and patent-trolling are extremely popular. It's very very easy to churn out enough of a game plan to file a patent. You don't have to actually build it or even know how to, since the patent system works entirely on a good-faith principle. Then when someone actually DOES build the idea, either the patent or a license can be sold. If the patent-farm is run well, the fee for the inventor just buying the patent will be less than the cost of overturning the patent and filing a new one. Totally immoral, certainly unethical, probably in violation of some patent law or other, possibly in violation of laws the courts actually take seriously, but it's a huge revenue stream for many corporate giants.
Garage developers can do a hell of a lot - and often do. These people, though, rarely do the fundamental research. They're taking that fundamental research and making it practical, but they're not where you see the blue-sky work being done.
"Blue-sky" Armchair Inventors and Armchair Investigators are confined to those armchairs. They will never have the means to actually do the work, their personal merit and the merit of their ideas are worth NOTHING to the outside world. What can, sometimes, happen though is that those ideas (when circulated) can trigger thoughts by others - essentially a mental version of the Butterfly Effect. (This is always going to be true, which is why meritocracies will never actually exist - you will never be able to reliably associate the merit with the person. Chaotic systems can't be reversed.)
The original thoughts may or may not (in themselves) ever get used, but so long as they feed into a cascade, where one or more branches within that cascade actually DOES produce something viable, the original thought was worth expressing.
The problem of simply collecting such thoughts into some giant thought-pool is that there's going to be a lot of crap and a few gems. Even those ideas that are good, if they're not created by someone with deep understanding, they will have a good deal of crap surrounding the nuggets of gold. Nobody would trawl through Sourceforge looking for brilliant algorithms, although I can guarantee that there are going to be absolute gems somewhere in there.
So either you'd need experts to wash the crud off, so that all that was left was the prize stuff (but you'd need so many experts that the only way to make this pay for itself would be to actually build the ideas, making the po
Again, this is exceptionally interesting and because it doesn't directly attack the virus itself but attacks a vector being used, there is a greatly reduced risk of the virus mutating to work around the fix. It's a relatively novel approach, which in my opinion is critical to any actual solution. And because it's effectively for building a bullet-proof T-Cell, it shows that my thinking wasn't totally off in left field, that closing attack vectors is an area researchers consider interesting.
I don't know how long people have known enough to work with Zinc fingers or have even known the mechanism existed, that's not something I've looked at outside the linked article, but I do know that most of what we know about the epigenome and the non-encoding regions has been learned very very recently. They're all very fresh areas with vast amounts of promise, making them ripe for major discoveries.
If they ran an X-Prize-style contest on the most creative use of Zinc fingers in intra-cellular medicine, I think it far more likely you'd get results that could be used to fight AIDS than with the contest being run.
Can't help but wonder, though, if they're trying to solve the wrong problem. There's research out that suggests that virus-related cancers are exploiting what are effectively a small set of security holes in the way DNA handles the "junk" portions. HIV is a retrovirus, IIRC, which also means it installs itself into the DNA. The first line of attack I'd have thought of, based on those two pieces of information alone, would be to see if the SAME security holes are responsible for both the virus-caused cancers and HIV breaking into the DNA. If there is a common attack vector, across multiple viruses, then that attack vector becomes far more interesting than the specifics of each virus.
Assuming the attack vector cannot actually be patched in mainstream cells, to fix the flaw, then perhaps it can be fixed in T-Cells, which are essentially disposable and it doesn't matter a whole lot if they're non-standard. HIV crashes the immune system through a massive DDoS attack via the immune system itself, by using the T-Cells. If the T-Cells are closed to that specific attack, then the virus can mutate all it likes but it can't crash the immune system. IF it is invariant across multiple viruses, then it's likely invariant across all of HIV strains. Merely preventing a DDoS on the immune system should massively slow the virus down and improve the chances of additional treatments actually ridding the body of the virus.
The ideal would be to fix the security hole in total, for all cells. I'm not sure that's possible, as evolution has required the mechanism to inject new code into the DNA strands. Indeed, a lot of evolution would be impossible without such a mechanism, and you can't exactly install X.509 certificates into all harmless or potentially beneficial RNA and DNA sources on the off-chance they need to integrate. Besides, cell defenses don't usually include SSL. The best I think you can probably do is bio-engineer a new DNA strand, which you can install in an organelle (organelles are just places where cells used to have DNA before all the useful bits were pushed over into the nucleic DNA), which provides some sort of Intrusion Detection System. As I see it, you've two options - a honey-pot (an extra-vulnerable DNA strand that causes the whole cell to self-destruct if infected by a retrovirus), or a Tripwire-like IDS that looks for mutations in any given strand of nucleic DNA =and= monitors for virus-production. If both conditions are satisfied (ie: it's not a benign insert, but a malign one), then the strand is broken up.
Again, not sure if this is remotely possible. Sure, there are enzymes which break up DNA - they're used all the time for sequencing, as you can't sequence long strands. But to identify a malign region in the DNA =and= have the enzyme only break the DNA at that point =and= have this done in a way that won't cause the end result to do strange and undesirable things -- that's going to be tough.
So if this approach is so tough, why go for it? Because researchers have tried targeting the virus directly and have failed utterly. Deactivating it only results in it reactivating itself, making vaccines extremely hard to produce. When they are produced, the virus has mutated and the vaccine is useless. In other cases, the virus has even used the immune response to hijack more immune system cells, so as to spread faster. It also mutates so fast that what worked one week won't work the next. Direct attacks have no serious shelf-life and just won't work.
That leaves indirect attacks. To beat the mutation problem, you need some aspect of the virus that will never change. If one such aspect is the mechanism for breaking into nucleic DNA and inserting rogue sequences, controlling that entry-point will not only beat AIDS, but it will beat some cancers too. Since uncontrolled entry into DNA is why some gene therapies cause cancers, controlling the entry point will also be critical to gene therapy being successful for a wide range of conditions.
Is it really that different from the Vikings, given the Nordic experiments in international trade? The British Empire also ran out of places to invade and ran out of ways to pay for a gigantic military infrastructure. If you look at the Hittite Empire, we still don't know much about the collapse other than their expansion started to decline and they plunged into a bunch of civil wars soon after.
I'm going to offer the following conjecture: that ANY militaristic power above a certain size, in order to survive, MUST grow OR collapse, that the cost of maintaining the military will exceed the disposable resources in the event of any unusual domestic expenditure, and that as the militaristic power grows, the size of event required to throw the system out-of-kilter grows smaller. Expansion (the confiscation of other people's disposable resources) is the only way to keep the power from disintegrating under the strain.
I'll offer a much more controversial conjecture as well: that ANY power of ANY kind, above a certain size, in which some specific domain provides a significant net drain on resources, will be equally unstable and MUST expand within that domain for the same reason as above. Thus, an intellectual society MUST expand knowledge fast enough to be able to cover the costs of that focus by borrowing from what the society is learning. An engineering society must further its skill in that domain continuously or implode.
To a lesser degree, this must also be true of any differences in abilities between any two fields, no matter what they are. The greater the gap, the greater the odds that society will run into a situation where one needs to borrow from the other to avert decay or collapse, but can't. It must also be true whether the gap is caused by excessive expansion in one area, OR excessive decline in another. You end up with a gap either way.
Thus, if this is correct, all other collapses of all other societies MUST eventually be traceable to distorted progress in some way, no matter what the primary cause is, what technology available is, or what kind of society it is. (If there exists even one collapse of any society anywhere at any time that cannot be shown to fit this pattern, then the generalization is invalid.)
From the above, and assuming nobody can think of a counter-example, I will propose one of the laws of Asimov's concept of Psychohistory: No matter what the details, the stability of a culture is inversely proportional to the RMS of the standard deviation of ability across all fields of endeavor with respect to all other fields of endeavor.
The aliens gave the Mayans BluRay DVDs. That's why the calendars are round, and why when the Spaniards burned the licenses the disks became unreadable.
So you're saying they understood the law of conservation of energy? (Blood is warm, so if you put enough blood on the pyramid and ground and allow the blood to cool, the water must warm up.)
I've noticed that whenever I fry the crap out of delinquent thinkers on one thread, I get these sorts of even-more-mindless posts from ever-more delinquent thinkers. Dunno if it's a case of flushing the vermin out of the woodwork, or merely a case of me not being "one of you", that gets your snot-filled attitude going. But frankly it pisses me off.
Adversity to change is indeed a fictitious problem, as far as this is concerned. The difference between Unixes is so utterly insignificant that the IBCS module was capable of running Solaris, SunOS, Xenix and Wyse binaries as if native. It didn't have to re-implement stuff, as with Wine, it just had to do a few minor tweaks and things Just Worked. Thus, there IS NO CHANGE. You can't be adverse to something that doesn't bloody well exist.
Marketing is also irrelevant as Unix vendors all market about the same, if you include non-traditional forms.
You notice a certain vendor missing, such as Microsoft? Hmmm? This is because I BLOODY WELL WASN'T TALKING ABOUT THEM! I referred solely to domination in the Unix world, and ONLY the Unix world, EXCLUSIVELY the Unix world, and NOTHING BUT the Unix world.
So wake up and smell the coffee. Oh, you're still off-planet. Better wait until you're at least at a planet that has coffee.
I'll wait until we're in the same galaxy, never mind on the same planet, before ripping this post to shreds. For now, I'll start with asking where this supposed rant is.
"GCC is =THE= benchmark to beat" is oh so very very condemning, I must say.
For BSD, "Very good development" and the developers are "magnificent". Hmmm. Yes, I could see how this could be taken as a put-down. What of, I'm not sure, as it clearly doesn't include the development or the developers, but probably something could be found.
As for the Linux kernel being "as capable as any commercial offering, albeit minus a few "Enterprise" features" --- ooooh, nasty attack there, I must say. Aside from the occasional data centre and Government departments, does anyone actually give a rat's ass about Linux being Carrier-Grade, FAA-certified or Common Criteria-Certified? These badges aren't exactly core to most people's uses of the system.
As for your bit about Windows, I fail to see the significance. I never mentioned Windows. I expressly and specifically referred to commercial Unixes, which either use the stock System V base or the stock BSD 4.4 base as a starting point. It does not make any sense to ask about Windows being around, since Windows and the *BSDs aren't even in the same market, but it DOES make sense to ask about BSD-vs-BSD or BSD-vs-SysV, as these ARE the same market.
And, let's face it, Solaris has had very little serious effort put into it for a very long time. I forget when Sun actually started the Solaris product line (which ran alongside SunOS for a while), but it isn't significantly older than 386BSD (from which FreeBSD came).
But look at the difference in effort! There are Open Source BSDs that will run on everything (and the kitchen sink port is due soon). There are Open Source BSDs where the entire kernel has been at least as well audited as Trusted Solaris. There are Open Source BSDs that have greater networking ability and performance than Solaris. Open Source BSDs were seriously looked at by DARPA because they're so damn good, and are used by mainstream desktop OS' and data centre firewalls.
(These compliments are seeeeerious examples of my staggering hostility to Open Source, I must say.)
Open Solaris exists solely because Open Source OS' were seriously competing with regular Solaris, especially on the x86 platform (but Linux works perfectly well on the Sparcs too). Clearly, then, there has been some impact. Sun didn't revise their service model for amusement.
However, the combined skills across the entire BSD and Linux spectrum far and away outstrips anything Sun could have ever thrown at Solaris, and one need only compare the 30+ specialist filesystems for Linux to the meagre generic offerings of Solaris to see that this talent has produced results. Tangible, real, solid, measurable results.
My complaint is not that Open Source isn't perfect (although indeed my post made it very clear it was damn close to perfect), my complaint is that stupid infighting, vicious and pointless hostility (of which your post is a great example) and other such drivel is why Linux and the *BSDs are why these OS' aren't the sole survivors of the OS wars.
Open Source is not the problem. Adversity to change (which is irrelevant) is not the problem. Marketing is not the problem. Attitudes like yours which create fictitious problems for the sole purpose of spewing at them - THAT is the problem. It is the ONLY problem. Everything else was fixed years ago.
Fair point, but look at some of the contributors to Linux: IBM, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle. They contributed largely in the spirit of openly contributing (highly commendable) but they also contributed because they were going to get some sort of return on that investment, no matter how indirect or long-term it might be. This was certainly not the reason Linux became what it is, but to ignore the fact that they help sustain Linux would be plain folly. Indeed, there was quite a dramatic pick-up of interest after the IBCS patch showed that the kernel was as capable as any commercial offering, albeit minus a few "Enterprise" features. (IBCS is how Oracle first ran on Linux, as a Linux port didn't exist at the time.) That's when pressure for such extras built up and the itches got scratched.
Similar things could be said of Apache. SGI has contributed much, including a high-performance accelerator that the Apache team rejected. (Interestingly, the next generation of Apache web servers was dramatically slower. Probably coincidental, but pissing off people with the arcane skill in optimizing is never a good idea.)
What of the GNU compiler collection? Well, I'll be generous and not say too much about the disastrous folly that caused EGCS to form, or the equally disastrous failures in Gnu Fortran which resulted in large-scale defections to the G95 project. I'm also deeply concerned about the whole PGCC fiasco (Intel's patches were superb on Intel hardware, great contribution from that perspective, but why the hell was it working worse on non-Intel hardware?), the bit-rot that caused various older compiler back-ends to be dropped from GCC, the huge maintenance problems being faced by people like the D frontend for GCC, and so on. It is superb, it's a magnificent testament to Open Source that GCC is =THE= benchmark to beat by compilers at the Supercomputer conference (you don't benchmark against things considered junk), and it is progressing. However, there is clearly a long history of conflicting egos and conflicting goals that have been as damaging to the product as productive.
And the BSD kernels? Very good development, but again a lot of fragmentation due to clashes. Individuals doing superb work, I'm not going to question the amazing technology that is inside FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, or any other *BSD. But there's way way too much bitterness, hostility and rivalry that goes well beyond the spirit of competition. They're all perfectly self-sustaining, I'm not going to even try to dispute that. The developers are highly passionate about what they do and what they do is magnificent. But, frankly, there have been times when I wish someone would slip some Prozac to those guys. The *BSD effort started TWO YEARS before Linux, it should be running the world by now, but it isn't. The kernels are all good, are all worthy equals to Linux, but damnit they had huge chunks already done AND a two year head-start. There shouldn't be any commercial UNIXes any more. Why does Solaris still exist? Why was all of this advantage squandered?
When only criminals can watch movies and everyone else has returned theirs, Hollywood need only point to the number of people watching movies as "proof" that as piracy has gone up, sales have gone down.
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As I noted to the AC, don't rely on the web page listing supported platforms. If it's listed there, you know it's there, but if it's missing, it could be lax maintenance. The only safe guide is the source code itself. The Freshmeat updates (which I maintain) will sometimes list added chips and mainboards, but the fact that Coreboot's developers are all on caffeine drips often means they've posted 50-100 patchsets between Freshmeat posts. If I'd overflow the allowed space or would die from webpage overload, I do a quick post and spend the saved time on playing Oolite.
Let's see. It's not listed specifically on the webpage, but the webpage always lags behind the patches, so unless you've downloaded a copy, you can't be certain the support hasn't been added.
Secondly, I don't know if the specs match another configuration that is named as supported, but if it does, the label doesn't matter.
Thirdly, there are a hell of a lot of motherboards out there. Let's say Coreboot supported 99% of all motherboards. There would still then be 1 in every 100 that they didn't, by definition. This would include older boards as well as newer ones, especially in the case of something as fugly as ASUS.
Fourthly, since you can slap together basic support by putting together a profile that defines the processor, support chips and other ultra-standard parts, you could have offered a starter profile for them at any time. You still could. Why are you posting about what Coreboot doesn't list, when you could be extending that very list at any moment?
No default GNOME shell? Going for lightweight, rather than modular? I don't see this as a logical direction for Ubuntu.
For instant-on, you could have the computer boot in a completely clean state then freeze that state to file. I practically guarantee that unthawing that state, then tweaking it afterwards (kill -HUP is your friend) will be faster than any staged booting or threaded booting could ever be. The only exception is a daemon or other service that creates a large amount of state at start-time. Then, you simply create your clean image to exclude such services and start them once the image is in place.
An alternative would be to do something similar, but instead of actually loading the software, you load and freeze hooks. This won't be quite as fast, but a frozen image of application hooks and corresponding DLL hooks (and perhaps the filesystem kernel modules) should be small enough to fit into a flash chip. This would "pre-boot" the computer without having to actually parse the init scripts and without having to have a full ramfs boot stage.
In both these cases, I'm picturing that when you change any init script or any of the packages involved, the machine would need to rebuild the fast-boot images. This means that updating low-level packages would place a LOT more strain on the system. On the other hand, disk access is slow, scripts are slow and starting heavier applications is also slow. Cutting two of these three out would massively boost startup times, cutting all three out would be damn-near instant-on.
(You actually could get instant-on with Coreboot + a running system image, and given that thumb drives have a larger capacity than older desktop systems, it's not impossible to imagine having such a system. Oh, and Coreboot works on a hell of a lot of platforms these days, for those who dismiss it as architecture-impaired. It's not perfect and it can be a pain at times as-is, but the one thing it's not short of is supported platforms.)
What a curious response. The Big Bang is entirely in compliance with empirical observation. The only issue left to be resolved is whether it originated as a singularity, the result of two membranes colliding, or the result of a Big Crunch in imaginary time (a proposal by Professor Hawking a while back).
Relativistic gravity is a problem only in that it is IMPOSSIBLE for both relativistic gravity and QM gravity to be correct. Whichever one is right will automatically make the other wrong, and superstring theory is currently the only viable QM gravity candidate. The problem with superstrings is that you can't have a 12-dimensional universe. It's geometrically impossible. 4, 8, 16, and any other power of 2 is valid. Absolutely no other value can be correct. There is no working model for a 16-dimensional space/time. That superstrings have not been observed is not an issue, as we haven't achieved nearly the sensitivity needed to observe one. No empirical claim can be made until such time that such energies are reached - a point I already made, though one you may have missed in your desire to troll.
The expanding universe is in full compliance with empirical science, which shows the Hubble Constant to be nearly (or actually) 1. Had the universe not been expanding, the empirical science would show this value to be considerably below 1. It is worth noting that as the universe ages, the ability to measure the Hubble Constant declines, so civilizations two or three solar lifetimes after ours (about double the current age of the universe) may not be able to observe the expansion so easily. There won't be enough matter in the visible universe to be certain if the apparent expansion is genuine or a statistical aberration, until such time as it is possible to observe the expansion within the quantum foam.*
*Because the universe is expanding, the virtual particles within quantum foam must logically be subject to an extremely weak version of the effect behind Black Hole evaporation and Hawking Radiation. Thus, space/time must emit an extremely faint glow in direct proportion to the rate of expansion. If there's virtually no matter in the neighbourhood, it may be possible to detect this glow and infer the expansion of the universe from that.
None of this is rocket-science, it ALL stands or falls by empirical science. The Steady-State Theory, for example, was utterly crushed from it being impossible for the theory to compensate for new data. The same is true of Copernican circular orbits, the moon being a captured satellite, etc.
STP for Triton, naturally.
The LoC alters in its dimensions according to temperature, making it a difficult unit to use unless it is defined for standard temperature and pressure.
Kim Kimberley. Wasn't she the detective in the Level 9 adventure Snowball?
Wrong units. To convert to distance, it would need to be Library of Congresses per Punch-Tape Spool.
Pi! Hmmm, there's probably some mathematically mystical explanation for that.
Pushing galaxy formation earlier isn't merely a case of getting a more obscene number. It's giving the models we use to analyze galaxies a serious work-out. Same with spotting ever-earlier stars. In the case of stars, we're pushing the limits of what existing models permit for star formation. If we go much further back there, then the models have an error. Which is good. Science gets booooring when the models are correct and everything matches predictions. Adventure, Excitement and Really Wild Things are only possible when the old models fail and have to either be re-tuned or replaced.
(This is why the failure to detect Dark Matter was so important. Dark Matter is absolutely mandatory for certain models to predict correctly how the universe works. Failure in science is not a bad thing, it is an extraordinarily GOOD thing, as it requires people to revisit past assumptions and past data, to see why the discrepancy exists. It also requires scientists to develop new ideas of what to look for. Some things, we don't know what scale we should be looking at. The Higg's Boson is an example. We've a good idea the LHC will see evidence of it, provided all the numbers are right, but we can't be sure. Gravity waves are tougher - we really should be seeing those by now but aren't. However, all modern gravity wave detectors are merely oversized Michelson-Morley experiments, which Einstein demonstrated could never observe the theorized medium of the ether, no matter how accurate they were. It is therefore possible that gravity waves aren't detectable because the experiments are the wrong ones. It is also possible that they aren't detectable because they aren't there. What isn't possible is for both theory and experiment to be correct.
The ideal in science is to find things that break the current model, but not by too much. Just enough to do interesting work, but not enough that they have to dodge apples falling upwards.
IFFEN(Nawt Sek Ewer) DEN Apply(Bite) ADN Apply(PoynteeEnds)
Tell you what, you figure out a way for me to have several millions (after tax), and I'll set up X-Prizes on a whole slew of areas that I think are of exceptional interest, of which some form of analysis of IT security techniques in a biological system would be one. (Both founders of modern technology - Alan Turing and Von Neumann - started by treating computers as equivalent to idealized biological systems. This is precisely why Alan Turing worked on the question of whether the human brain was a Turing Machine, and why Von Neumann wanted to figure out the abstract model for a DNA-like system - before DNA had even been identified.)
I'll throw in a bonus. Find me $100,000,000,000, a few thousand pure mathematicians, a few thousand Software Architects/Engineers, and as many programmers as mathematicians and SA/Es combined, and I can have Linux A1/CC7-compliant and nine 9's reliable within a year - guaranteed.
The problem is not one of thinking of ways to do things. That's never the problem. It's not even a case of it being a problem thinking of ideas that are highly valuable and beneficial. The problem is that most ideas will never get any kind of time or money invested in them, and that of the ideas explored, only one in a thousand will ever be implemented in a way that works (lack of money, lack of interest, lack of supporting technology, lack of ideas to bridge the gap between start and finish), and of those ideas that are implemented soundly, perhaps one in a thousand will ever find its way to anyone who can actually make any real use of it.
This is why patent-farms and patent-trolling are extremely popular. It's very very easy to churn out enough of a game plan to file a patent. You don't have to actually build it or even know how to, since the patent system works entirely on a good-faith principle. Then when someone actually DOES build the idea, either the patent or a license can be sold. If the patent-farm is run well, the fee for the inventor just buying the patent will be less than the cost of overturning the patent and filing a new one. Totally immoral, certainly unethical, probably in violation of some patent law or other, possibly in violation of laws the courts actually take seriously, but it's a huge revenue stream for many corporate giants.
Garage developers can do a hell of a lot - and often do. These people, though, rarely do the fundamental research. They're taking that fundamental research and making it practical, but they're not where you see the blue-sky work being done.
"Blue-sky" Armchair Inventors and Armchair Investigators are confined to those armchairs. They will never have the means to actually do the work, their personal merit and the merit of their ideas are worth NOTHING to the outside world. What can, sometimes, happen though is that those ideas (when circulated) can trigger thoughts by others - essentially a mental version of the Butterfly Effect. (This is always going to be true, which is why meritocracies will never actually exist - you will never be able to reliably associate the merit with the person. Chaotic systems can't be reversed.)
The original thoughts may or may not (in themselves) ever get used, but so long as they feed into a cascade, where one or more branches within that cascade actually DOES produce something viable, the original thought was worth expressing.
The problem of simply collecting such thoughts into some giant thought-pool is that there's going to be a lot of crap and a few gems. Even those ideas that are good, if they're not created by someone with deep understanding, they will have a good deal of crap surrounding the nuggets of gold. Nobody would trawl through Sourceforge looking for brilliant algorithms, although I can guarantee that there are going to be absolute gems somewhere in there.
So either you'd need experts to wash the crud off, so that all that was left was the prize stuff (but you'd need so many experts that the only way to make this pay for itself would be to actually build the ideas, making the po
Again, this is exceptionally interesting and because it doesn't directly attack the virus itself but attacks a vector being used, there is a greatly reduced risk of the virus mutating to work around the fix. It's a relatively novel approach, which in my opinion is critical to any actual solution. And because it's effectively for building a bullet-proof T-Cell, it shows that my thinking wasn't totally off in left field, that closing attack vectors is an area researchers consider interesting.
I don't know how long people have known enough to work with Zinc fingers or have even known the mechanism existed, that's not something I've looked at outside the linked article, but I do know that most of what we know about the epigenome and the non-encoding regions has been learned very very recently. They're all very fresh areas with vast amounts of promise, making them ripe for major discoveries.
If they ran an X-Prize-style contest on the most creative use of Zinc fingers in intra-cellular medicine, I think it far more likely you'd get results that could be used to fight AIDS than with the contest being run.
Can't help but wonder, though, if they're trying to solve the wrong problem. There's research out that suggests that virus-related cancers are exploiting what are effectively a small set of security holes in the way DNA handles the "junk" portions. HIV is a retrovirus, IIRC, which also means it installs itself into the DNA. The first line of attack I'd have thought of, based on those two pieces of information alone, would be to see if the SAME security holes are responsible for both the virus-caused cancers and HIV breaking into the DNA. If there is a common attack vector, across multiple viruses, then that attack vector becomes far more interesting than the specifics of each virus.
Assuming the attack vector cannot actually be patched in mainstream cells, to fix the flaw, then perhaps it can be fixed in T-Cells, which are essentially disposable and it doesn't matter a whole lot if they're non-standard. HIV crashes the immune system through a massive DDoS attack via the immune system itself, by using the T-Cells. If the T-Cells are closed to that specific attack, then the virus can mutate all it likes but it can't crash the immune system. IF it is invariant across multiple viruses, then it's likely invariant across all of HIV strains. Merely preventing a DDoS on the immune system should massively slow the virus down and improve the chances of additional treatments actually ridding the body of the virus.
The ideal would be to fix the security hole in total, for all cells. I'm not sure that's possible, as evolution has required the mechanism to inject new code into the DNA strands. Indeed, a lot of evolution would be impossible without such a mechanism, and you can't exactly install X.509 certificates into all harmless or potentially beneficial RNA and DNA sources on the off-chance they need to integrate. Besides, cell defenses don't usually include SSL. The best I think you can probably do is bio-engineer a new DNA strand, which you can install in an organelle (organelles are just places where cells used to have DNA before all the useful bits were pushed over into the nucleic DNA), which provides some sort of Intrusion Detection System. As I see it, you've two options - a honey-pot (an extra-vulnerable DNA strand that causes the whole cell to self-destruct if infected by a retrovirus), or a Tripwire-like IDS that looks for mutations in any given strand of nucleic DNA =and= monitors for virus-production. If both conditions are satisfied (ie: it's not a benign insert, but a malign one), then the strand is broken up.
Again, not sure if this is remotely possible. Sure, there are enzymes which break up DNA - they're used all the time for sequencing, as you can't sequence long strands. But to identify a malign region in the DNA =and= have the enzyme only break the DNA at that point =and= have this done in a way that won't cause the end result to do strange and undesirable things -- that's going to be tough.
So if this approach is so tough, why go for it? Because researchers have tried targeting the virus directly and have failed utterly. Deactivating it only results in it reactivating itself, making vaccines extremely hard to produce. When they are produced, the virus has mutated and the vaccine is useless. In other cases, the virus has even used the immune response to hijack more immune system cells, so as to spread faster. It also mutates so fast that what worked one week won't work the next. Direct attacks have no serious shelf-life and just won't work.
That leaves indirect attacks. To beat the mutation problem, you need some aspect of the virus that will never change. If one such aspect is the mechanism for breaking into nucleic DNA and inserting rogue sequences, controlling that entry-point will not only beat AIDS, but it will beat some cancers too. Since uncontrolled entry into DNA is why some gene therapies cause cancers, controlling the entry point will also be critical to gene therapy being successful for a wide range of conditions.
Thus, this is the obvious place to focus on. Ign
Is it really that different from the Vikings, given the Nordic experiments in international trade? The British Empire also ran out of places to invade and ran out of ways to pay for a gigantic military infrastructure. If you look at the Hittite Empire, we still don't know much about the collapse other than their expansion started to decline and they plunged into a bunch of civil wars soon after.
I'm going to offer the following conjecture: that ANY militaristic power above a certain size, in order to survive, MUST grow OR collapse, that the cost of maintaining the military will exceed the disposable resources in the event of any unusual domestic expenditure, and that as the militaristic power grows, the size of event required to throw the system out-of-kilter grows smaller. Expansion (the confiscation of other people's disposable resources) is the only way to keep the power from disintegrating under the strain.
I'll offer a much more controversial conjecture as well: that ANY power of ANY kind, above a certain size, in which some specific domain provides a significant net drain on resources, will be equally unstable and MUST expand within that domain for the same reason as above. Thus, an intellectual society MUST expand knowledge fast enough to be able to cover the costs of that focus by borrowing from what the society is learning. An engineering society must further its skill in that domain continuously or implode.
To a lesser degree, this must also be true of any differences in abilities between any two fields, no matter what they are. The greater the gap, the greater the odds that society will run into a situation where one needs to borrow from the other to avert decay or collapse, but can't. It must also be true whether the gap is caused by excessive expansion in one area, OR excessive decline in another. You end up with a gap either way.
Thus, if this is correct, all other collapses of all other societies MUST eventually be traceable to distorted progress in some way, no matter what the primary cause is, what technology available is, or what kind of society it is. (If there exists even one collapse of any society anywhere at any time that cannot be shown to fit this pattern, then the generalization is invalid.)
From the above, and assuming nobody can think of a counter-example, I will propose one of the laws of Asimov's concept of Psychohistory: No matter what the details, the stability of a culture is inversely proportional to the RMS of the standard deviation of ability across all fields of endeavor with respect to all other fields of endeavor.
I dunno. The Europeans turned them into Death Metal bands and Isle of Man TT racers.
The aliens gave the Mayans BluRay DVDs. That's why the calendars are round, and why when the Spaniards burned the licenses the disks became unreadable.
So you're saying they understood the law of conservation of energy? (Blood is warm, so if you put enough blood on the pyramid and ground and allow the blood to cool, the water must warm up.)
I've noticed that whenever I fry the crap out of delinquent thinkers on one thread, I get these sorts of even-more-mindless posts from ever-more delinquent thinkers. Dunno if it's a case of flushing the vermin out of the woodwork, or merely a case of me not being "one of you", that gets your snot-filled attitude going. But frankly it pisses me off.
Adversity to change is indeed a fictitious problem, as far as this is concerned. The difference between Unixes is so utterly insignificant that the IBCS module was capable of running Solaris, SunOS, Xenix and Wyse binaries as if native. It didn't have to re-implement stuff, as with Wine, it just had to do a few minor tweaks and things Just Worked. Thus, there IS NO CHANGE. You can't be adverse to something that doesn't bloody well exist.
Marketing is also irrelevant as Unix vendors all market about the same, if you include non-traditional forms.
You notice a certain vendor missing, such as Microsoft? Hmmm? This is because I BLOODY WELL WASN'T TALKING ABOUT THEM! I referred solely to domination in the Unix world, and ONLY the Unix world, EXCLUSIVELY the Unix world, and NOTHING BUT the Unix world.
So wake up and smell the coffee. Oh, you're still off-planet. Better wait until you're at least at a planet that has coffee.
I'll wait until we're in the same galaxy, never mind on the same planet, before ripping this post to shreds. For now, I'll start with asking where this supposed rant is.
"GCC is =THE= benchmark to beat" is oh so very very condemning, I must say.
For BSD, "Very good development" and the developers are "magnificent". Hmmm. Yes, I could see how this could be taken as a put-down. What of, I'm not sure, as it clearly doesn't include the development or the developers, but probably something could be found.
As for the Linux kernel being "as capable as any commercial offering, albeit minus a few "Enterprise" features" --- ooooh, nasty attack there, I must say. Aside from the occasional data centre and Government departments, does anyone actually give a rat's ass about Linux being Carrier-Grade, FAA-certified or Common Criteria-Certified? These badges aren't exactly core to most people's uses of the system.
As for your bit about Windows, I fail to see the significance. I never mentioned Windows. I expressly and specifically referred to commercial Unixes, which either use the stock System V base or the stock BSD 4.4 base as a starting point. It does not make any sense to ask about Windows being around, since Windows and the *BSDs aren't even in the same market, but it DOES make sense to ask about BSD-vs-BSD or BSD-vs-SysV, as these ARE the same market.
And, let's face it, Solaris has had very little serious effort put into it for a very long time. I forget when Sun actually started the Solaris product line (which ran alongside SunOS for a while), but it isn't significantly older than 386BSD (from which FreeBSD came).
But look at the difference in effort! There are Open Source BSDs that will run on everything (and the kitchen sink port is due soon). There are Open Source BSDs where the entire kernel has been at least as well audited as Trusted Solaris. There are Open Source BSDs that have greater networking ability and performance than Solaris. Open Source BSDs were seriously looked at by DARPA because they're so damn good, and are used by mainstream desktop OS' and data centre firewalls.
(These compliments are seeeeerious examples of my staggering hostility to Open Source, I must say.)
Open Solaris exists solely because Open Source OS' were seriously competing with regular Solaris, especially on the x86 platform (but Linux works perfectly well on the Sparcs too). Clearly, then, there has been some impact. Sun didn't revise their service model for amusement.
However, the combined skills across the entire BSD and Linux spectrum far and away outstrips anything Sun could have ever thrown at Solaris, and one need only compare the 30+ specialist filesystems for Linux to the meagre generic offerings of Solaris to see that this talent has produced results. Tangible, real, solid, measurable results.
My complaint is not that Open Source isn't perfect (although indeed my post made it very clear it was damn close to perfect), my complaint is that stupid infighting, vicious and pointless hostility (of which your post is a great example) and other such drivel is why Linux and the *BSDs are why these OS' aren't the sole survivors of the OS wars.
Open Source is not the problem. Adversity to change (which is irrelevant) is not the problem. Marketing is not the problem. Attitudes like yours which create fictitious problems for the sole purpose of spewing at them - THAT is the problem. It is the ONLY problem. Everything else was fixed years ago.
Fair point, but look at some of the contributors to Linux: IBM, SGI, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle. They contributed largely in the spirit of openly contributing (highly commendable) but they also contributed because they were going to get some sort of return on that investment, no matter how indirect or long-term it might be. This was certainly not the reason Linux became what it is, but to ignore the fact that they help sustain Linux would be plain folly. Indeed, there was quite a dramatic pick-up of interest after the IBCS patch showed that the kernel was as capable as any commercial offering, albeit minus a few "Enterprise" features. (IBCS is how Oracle first ran on Linux, as a Linux port didn't exist at the time.) That's when pressure for such extras built up and the itches got scratched.
Similar things could be said of Apache. SGI has contributed much, including a high-performance accelerator that the Apache team rejected. (Interestingly, the next generation of Apache web servers was dramatically slower. Probably coincidental, but pissing off people with the arcane skill in optimizing is never a good idea.)
What of the GNU compiler collection? Well, I'll be generous and not say too much about the disastrous folly that caused EGCS to form, or the equally disastrous failures in Gnu Fortran which resulted in large-scale defections to the G95 project. I'm also deeply concerned about the whole PGCC fiasco (Intel's patches were superb on Intel hardware, great contribution from that perspective, but why the hell was it working worse on non-Intel hardware?), the bit-rot that caused various older compiler back-ends to be dropped from GCC, the huge maintenance problems being faced by people like the D frontend for GCC, and so on. It is superb, it's a magnificent testament to Open Source that GCC is =THE= benchmark to beat by compilers at the Supercomputer conference (you don't benchmark against things considered junk), and it is progressing. However, there is clearly a long history of conflicting egos and conflicting goals that have been as damaging to the product as productive.
And the BSD kernels? Very good development, but again a lot of fragmentation due to clashes. Individuals doing superb work, I'm not going to question the amazing technology that is inside FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, or any other *BSD. But there's way way too much bitterness, hostility and rivalry that goes well beyond the spirit of competition. They're all perfectly self-sustaining, I'm not going to even try to dispute that. The developers are highly passionate about what they do and what they do is magnificent. But, frankly, there have been times when I wish someone would slip some Prozac to those guys. The *BSD effort started TWO YEARS before Linux, it should be running the world by now, but it isn't. The kernels are all good, are all worthy equals to Linux, but damnit they had huge chunks already done AND a two year head-start. There shouldn't be any commercial UNIXes any more. Why does Solaris still exist? Why was all of this advantage squandered?
When only criminals can watch movies and everyone else has returned theirs, Hollywood need only point to the number of people watching movies as "proof" that as piracy has gone up, sales have gone down.
I'm pretty sure they had 3D and silly glasses in 60s movies.
No, pay and pray that they don't burn you at the stake anyway. (See: Sony's virus-containing DRM.)