I completely agree with you that money and greed dominate what the commercial channels will show you in the States, and yes that we can turn to other news outlets. I guess my point goes a little further, though. If the majority of Americans did turn to news outlets in other countries, to fill in the gaps, people would become more aware and less easily swayed by corporate censorship. Maybe - and this is just a hope - sufficient awareness would blunt the impact and also blunt the profits.
Censorship is not about Governments. Anybody can censor. Anybody at all. The film board that orders cuts is a corporate organization. Hell, each of us self-censors when we don't say what we mean. Censorship also does not mean cutting something out because of a political agenda, it merely means cutting something out. So, yes, this is censorship. But, then, so is absolutely everything else in life. Nothing is truly uncensored.
The next question is whether it matters to Americans. Well, if the media wanted to make something matter, it could. Very few people in this world truly pick and choose their own concerns. Their concerns are usually dictated by culture, religion, experience, popular opinion, manner of presentation, ad nausium. The individual is truly a very small part of the equation. Why do people still remember Jessica Lynch? Because she was significant? No. She was knocked unconscious in a car crash. There are probably hundreds of people who suffer that or worse every day on roads around the world. No, she's remembered because some people worked damn hard to make sure she was remembered - to the point of hiring a Hollywood director to perfect the footage.
Ok, then if these things could be made interesting and memorable, then why did nobody do so? Some are crackpot conspiracy theories, so no great surprise nobody gives a damn about those. Others are just more scandals and abuses of power that are no different from any of the other scandals and abuses of power that have been taking place. Nothing new there. There were a few - a very few - stories of genuine concern and those have been covered extensively by foreign news services. Personally, everyone I know in the States listens to the BBC and a few read German newspapers online as well.
So what we end up with is this: Yes, a few important news items didn't get covered by the American media when they should have been. Too bad. They were covered by other media, so any ignorance that exists is ignorance by choice. Nobody made you watch Fox' Fair and Mentally Unbalanced News. Nobody compelled you to only tune into CNN. Yes, I do blame the American media for not being informative enough and for limiting news that could undermine their sponsorship. However, if the majority wanted PBS to rival the major networks, it would have happened by now. There's no such desire. People have voted with their pockets for what exists, and if what exists is crap, then don't blame the commercial networks for being commercial.
Of course, in this day and age, why are people so bothered about the mainstream outlets anyway? If you've a laptop, a car and a good camera with something similar to steadicam, then be your own freelance journalist. Most of those who go to high-risk parts of Iraq are freelance. So you won't get to go to press conferences, because you're not backed by the right people. So? Nobody learns anything useful from those anyway. The real nitty-gritty is never the stuff the press is allowed first access to, so who cares? If all you want are the PR stunts, then you're reporting nothing new.
That, to me, is where the crux of the matter lies. People like to complain. The English complain about the weather, the Americans about the news. But nobody wants to do anything about it. If they could and did, that would remove the only real conversation piece they had.
Oh, I dunno. Survivalists, anarchists and even the occasional New Zealand jet engineer have shown how to build very advanced weaponry, and history is filled with accounts of peasants who have overrun warlords. I'd hate to call the significant figures of the past 10,000 years "pretentious, delusional fantasist"s.
3D is huge-ish in the medical field (eg: reverse computed tomography), the aerospace industry (eg: CFDs), the military, some engineering disciplines and maybe with some architects. Except for military applications, it's generally static data that can be rotated in 3D, and the 3D is not great. You can forget the output of BMRT - as great as it is, nobody but nobody does that level of 3D in the real world. The (relatively) mediocre 3D of "Elephant's Dream" (which is still damn good) apparently took many, many months to render.
However, all the above fields combined count for some really tiny, insignificant percent of the whole IT industry. It's really cool stuff, sure. It's a great field to be in, if you can get the work - it pays some of the bigger bucks. Toolkits like VTk, OpenGL, OpenDX - or even older stuff like PHIGS - are a marvel to use. But as a market, it's barely breathing. SGI no longer do much graphics, the number of graphics card manufacturers has dwindled to next to nothing, updates to libraries are measured in years or decades, innovations are rare and inventions are all but non-existent.
In the same time as it took OpenGL to do a simple update, computers have moved from single processor, single core machines with dumb terminals to becoming superclusters equal to any modern mini-computer or even super-computer, busses have been replaced with multi-hostable switched networks, graphics cards rival their hosts in compute power, VIA was replaced with RDMA and SDP, internal bandwidth has reached 80 gigabits per second, LAN bandwidth has hit 60 gigabits per second (Infiniband, 10 gigabits per second for Ethernet - 100 Gb/s if you channel bond), and your average LAN party has better sound and video than a 1990s multiplex.
Why so long? Because it was hard? No, because it wasn't priority for anyone. If it had been priority, they'd have had the API finalized in a matter of days.
First, the RFCs only refer to IP as IPv4 relatively late on. Second, you will see the majority of dual stack systems referring to "IP and IPv6". Third, when people talk of IP networks, they are referring to IPv4-only networks. Lastly, a lot of people are stupid and/or ignorant when it comes to networking.
...any transport can encapsulate IP. Or anything else. Networking is highly recursive - almost any output can be hooked into the input of any layer within any other stack, and you can do this as many times as you like. Netfilters in Linux uses this to have hooks in a whole bunch of places. The Intermediate Queueing Device is another ingenious use. MPLS creates as many virtual circuits as you like on a physical network. The list is endless.
Infiniband, however, is a true replacement for layer 4 as well as layers 2 and 3. The protocol is rich, sophisticated and fully routeable - to a target connection, a target multicast group or even a location in the target computer's memory. Indeed, Infiniband was designed with the intention of being totally interchangeable with IPv6 - a proxy could replace one with the other with almost no effort and with no loss of functionality or information. Likewise, Myrinet's MX and GM protocols need nothing on top of them, the way ethernet would, to be routed or delivered to a specific endpoint.
IPv4 and IPv6 are superfluous in such systems, except in their ability to handle legacy protocols. Well, IPv6 has its uses - it has a lot of features that are hard to reproduce on other networks, and it's relatively lightweight - but IPv4 has no value aside from being able to run stuff built for IPv4 alone.
It's almost impossible to say what the pros and cons are, when people usually stack or otherwise mix-n-match database products according to need. Even within the same organization, even within the same department, there will likely be servers that would benefit (if they're not already) and servers that would benefit from something else.
And that's before you get into "which MySQL are we talking about anyway" debates. There are multiple configurations for how the tables are stored, for example. Then there's MySQL vs. MySQL Max (which is a different product).
Oh, and the data is very important. Not everyone knows how to draw up an entity-relationship diagram, let alone build an optimized database from one, and different databases will lean towards different optimization methods.
The sheer number of permutations of configuring MySQL, of using MySQL, and of using MySQL in conjunction with other products, is so great that a simple list is useless. What would be more useful for people would be a sizable table which lists different types of scenario and different types of usage against different database engines.
Not quite a parallel. The ruling basically says that legal terminology which applies to the ignorant cannot be directly applied to the knowledgeable. With signage, it would be similar - if you can read the "keep off the grass" signs, you are in a different category from those who cannot - but the reverse.
I did say pure parallel programming. There's a major distinction between that and merely sharing some data and a few resources. If you can name me one genuinely parallel database in existance - Oracle RAC doesn't qualify - then you may have a point. However, I don't think you can because you're confusing pure parallelism with resource sharing, load balancing and other such stuff.
So what makes something "pure"? It's probably easier to say what it isn't, initially. It isn't about locks. You can write MPP applications that have no locks and yet are totally reliable and coherent. It isn't about shared resources - most resources are sequential by nature, sharing them doesn't change that.
Ok, so when is something "purely" parallel? After all, when you break any application down far enough, it becomes serial. A pure parallel program is one in which there is a clean break between what is parallel and what is sequential. The two are not mixed, there is no hybridization, there is no bastardization, it's pure. There is also exactly one break. On one side, code is parallel and only parallel. On the other side, code is sequential and only sequential. Above all else, a purely parallel program cannot be sequentially coherent from a programmatic standpoint, ONLY from an end-user's standpoint.
Now we get to the OS. Can an OS parallelize? Yes. Automatic parallelizing by OS', in which nominally sequential code is parallelized by the OS on the application's behalf, has existed since the 90s. It's not a big deal any more. This isn't merely about splitting up the odd instruction here or syscall there. We're talking genuine parallelization.
Perhaps more common, though, are parallelizing compilers. These take nominally sequential code and - as part of basic optimization - convert the output into a highly parallelized binary. The earliest compilers I know of that did this were research compilers at my old University, back in 1974. Earlier examples probably exist. These days, many people use message passing libraries and/or OpenMP, but those produce generally inferior code. True parallel optimization has no markup in the code and requires no heavy layering of libraries.
But what of parallel programmers? People who actually write parallel code? Name me one major application in Occam. Just one will do. No? Parlog? Parallel C? Hell, does anyone on Slashdot have UPC even installed on their machine, used or not? What about parallel environments - anyone here using OpenMOSIX or Kerrighed? I seem to remember a couple of folks who used Rocks. Out of the hundred thousand Slashdot readership. Impressive percentage.
Does anyone need to go to that level, though, these days? There are plenty of middleware layers that handle all that. Sure there are. But then you're no longer talking a purely parallel environment, as most of the middleware layers are designed to make things easy, not parallel. Many are sequential (violating the strict two-layer model required for pure parallelism) and many are nothing more than complex wrappers that hide the very parallelism they supposedly promote. They are generally heavyweight - RPC has how many layers? And that's one of the lighter systems! - but offer nothing useful that a plain sockets call couldn't have done. Ok, they can convert data types. And how many hybrid 32-bit/64-bit or little-endian/big-endian clusters do you use on a regular basis?
The vertical app writers had better damn well worry about it. If you write sequential code on top of parallel code, you get marginal speedups. If you write parallel code on top of parallel code, you get giant speedups. Any programmer who writes inefficient code will produce inefficient results.
There is no good news in parallelism, there is however considerable despair and despondency as some trivial load-balancer gets sold as a parallel system (which it isn't), and ethernet-based clusters are touted as fast. (Multi-millisecond latencies just don't compare with 2.5-8 microsecond latencies of Myrinet or
Yes, in the HPC world, Fortran 90 and Fortran 95 are still significant players. If you use the Gnu compiler collection for Fortran, there's an addon - G95 - which I've found produces better results than the standard GFortran. For maths code, Fortran is at least equal to, if not superior to, C. (Did I really write that last statement?:) However, the market isn't growing relative to the growth of the IT market as a whole. It's not shrinking, either, which is what would happen if Fortran really were dead.
Partly due to the lack of really good Fortran compilers for Linux, and also partly due to modern CPUs being designed around many of the concepts of C, there are some areas I would expect to see Fortran but don't. FFTW, ATLAS, OIL and GSL are all based in C with maybe some hand-turned assembly.
You go left-to-right, rotate the page 180', then go right to left, rotate the page 180', and so on. This is the only script I know that does that, but there ARE a number of scripts which go left-to-right and right-to-left on alternate lines. Neither of these would be difficult to support in any system that already supports bidi.
Cobol has died back as much as it's going to, same as Fortran. It won't reduce in scale any further, because of maintenance requirements, so it is meaningless to say it is "dying". It's a stagnant segment, but it's a perfectly stable segment.
Non-IP networks are dying? Must tell that to makers of Infiniband cards, who are carving out a very nice LAN niche and are set on moving into the WAN market. Also need to tell that to xDSL providers, who invariably use ATM, not IP. And if you consider IP to mean IPv4, then the US Government should be informed forthwith that its migration to IPv6 is "dead". Oh, and for satellite communication, they've only just got IP to even work. Since they weren't using string and tin cans before, I can only assume most in use are controlled via non-IP protocols and that this will be true for a very long time. More down-to-earth, PCI's latest specs allows for multiple hosts and is becoming a LAN protocol. USB, FireWire and Bluetooth are all networks of a sort - Bluetooth has a range of a mile, if you connect the devices via rifle.
C programming. Well, yes, the web is making pure C less useful for some applications, but I somehow don't think pure C developers will be begging in the streets any time soon. Device driver writers are in heavy demand, and you don't get far with those if you're working in Java. There are also an awful lot of patches/additions to Linux (a pure C environment), given this alleged death of C. I'd love to see someone code a hard realtime application (again, something in heavy demand) in AJAX. What about those relational databases mentioned earlier in the story? Those written in DHTML? Or do I C an indication of other languages at work?
Netware - well, given the talk about non-IP dying, this is redundant and just a filler. It's probably right, but it has no business being there with the other claim. One should go.
What should be there? Well, Formal Methods is dying, replaced by Extreme Programming. BSD is dying, but only according to Netcraft. Web programming is dying - people no longer write stuff, they use pre-built components. Pure parallel programming is dying -- it's far more efficient to have the OS divide up the work and rely on multi-CPU, multi-core, hyperthreaded systems to take care of all the tracking than it is to mess with very advanced programming techniques, message-passing libraries and the inevitable deadlock issues. Asynchronous hardware is essentially dead. Object-Oriented Databases seem to be pretty much dead. 3D outside of games seems to be dead. Memory-efficient and CPU-efficient programming methods are certainly dead. I guess that would be my list.
I beg to correct your accidental typo. That should be "Commodore Cereal Disk Drives" (it took several months to get anything useful from them and the people designing them were clearly involved in some grass derivative at the time).
The earlier Commodore IEEE-488 drives were not only larger, but faster and capable of carrying out operations without CPU intervention.
Actually, the Sumerians (who invented farming, shipping, bricks, writing and education) did far more stealing, burning, pillaging, etc, than any of the barbarian hordes around them. They were invaded a few times, but only after they'd nearly wiped themselves out in genocidal wars on each occasion.
Education, per se, is no guarantee of being civilized in the modern sense, and an educated person can utilize far more devastating weapons than any uneducated warlord. That has, throughout history, been an important lesson. Education can protect you - from disease, assailants and many other woes. Education can also produce far more efficient, far more effective tyrants than mere brutality. Brutality and savagery aren't very effective, and that's all your local warlord is capable of.
Your post then needs rewriting: He eats until the local warlord comes along and attempts to steal his animals. His counter-offensive wipes out the warlord, his retinue and a chunk of the surrounding landscape. Realizing his superiority, he proceeds to invade all of the other warlord-held territories in the area, developing an ever-larger following. At which point, he invades the neighboring countries and eventually creates a substantial mini-empire.
Since nobody reads linux.com, here's a (trivially improved) copy of my posting there. It covers the main defects I saw in the article and the issues that the laptop HAS to satisfy before it is genuinely practical for its intended users.
The review seemed selective, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. (Having said that, I recently worked for a place that paid the Wall Street Journal to run an "article" for them, so I tend to be more skeptical than I used to be.)
First, if the laptop is aimed at overseas users, is the technical support going to be capable of handling that?
Second, also for overseas use, this will be sent to people who have never seen a computer - big or otherwise - and are probably unfamiliar with the notion of GUIs or possibly even typing. In fact, you can't rely on anything we take for granted being known. Some of it probably will, but you can't know which bits for which people. Is the interface culturally-neutral?
Third, two hours doesn't seem like a lot, when the nearest wall socket in Africa might be several week's walk. Is there an alternative power system? Doesn't matter what - solar cells, power crank, whatever. Without power, it's a lump of plastic-coated spare parts.
Fourth, how is the internationalization? IIRC, Hebrew and Chinese are written right to left - does the typing tutor know this? Are the desktop icons themable to something meaningful in each culture? Did you look to see that the SIL packages and fonts for internationalization were there?
Fifth, you mention wireless issues. But this would likely have been in a home with a wireless access point, or near a metro-provided WAP. This would be pretty useless in a school with no WAP, but only laptops. That would also be useless for mobile populations, where connections between groups will be at indeterminate times and places, but will need to be recognized and supported whenever they exist.
Even in England, you have over a hundred thousand "Travellers" who would benefit from dynamic wireless routing, Mobile IP and NEMO support. Is the wireless support for these sorts of things there?
Lastly, there's the durability. Three kids in a suburban, air-conditioned home is one thing. Whether you are talking about English Travellers, Mexican street kids or Tibetan Sherpas, the climates are more extreme, the stresses are infinitely worse, and the availability of replacements is next to zero.
In the real world, you are looking at external temperatures ranging from -40 to +120. Usually not on the same day, but that can happen. You are looking at shocks that could exceed 6G. Water won't be a spilled glass of coca cola, it's more likely to be monsoon season. The case won't be so much scratched by bumping into a wall as it will be stabbed by the occasional 6' mugger's knife.
When you get into the real-world situations, where "ruggedized" is really pushed to the limits, will this machine really stand up to the punishments it will receive? Or is it merely going to be a way for Intel to pocket some cash, with the customer ending up both financially and intellectually the poorer for it?
All I ask of reviewers, OLPC, Intel or any other person involved is to convince me. Why me, in particular? Because I'm demanding but stay within the limits of what is practical, and am knowledgeable enough to set the limits to what is practical. So can many others - I'm nothing special - it's that I'm posting a set of measurable benchmarks and criteria, and that could theoretically be useful.
Advertisers will accept anything, if they think they can make someone else believe (and pay) all the more. Yes, a great many people are probably being bilked and scammed vast sums of money, but so long as the right people get paid their cut, nothing is going to happen about it. It took years before anything was done about cybersquatting, and to this day MANY sites (including Slashdot) are subject to shadowy ad-ridden spamsites exploiting mis-spelling at every opportunity.
Fraud? Yes. Tolerated? Well, yes. And therein lies the real problem.
If the lawyers win and become sufficiently stinking rich, we might be able to persuade them to all retire and move somewhere else like Barbados or something.
That's what it comes down to. Do ideas evolve and become something new, over time, or are they something that spontaneously appear?
It's not about mimicking someone, but about preferring to stand on the shoulders of giants -- even if said giants are just other people standing on other shoulders. Innovation does involve something new being added. It is also not merely adding something for the sake of adding something - it can't be "Embrace and Extend". What was there before has to have a definite, identifiable, significant limitation or flaw and the new solution has to have a definite, identifiable, significant remedy that is genuinely unique and quite possibly inspired.
There is almost nothing in the world that didn't have a predecessor. Modern writing evolved from early phonetic syllaberies which evolved from symbols representing words/ideas which evolved from pictures representing entire scenes/concepts. Each stage came from something older, but each stage required a truly amazing intellectual leap.
Now, I personally draw a distinction between innovation and invention. To me, "invention" can only really refer to the first step in any such chain. All other steps are innovative, but they are not inventive. To me, an invention can have no true precursor. There may be something that an inventor uses as a source of inspiration, some personal Muse, but the source cannot be a true predecessor. The most it can be is inspiration.
Inventions, by my definition, are extremely rare, and are almost certainly invented by individuals. Innovations, by definition, are the work of not only the innovator(s) but all predecessors as well. As such, they are by definition not the work of individuals.
Also by my definition, inventors are very much a breed apart. The way most people think precludes them from ever inventing anything - they simply cannot imagine something from scratch, they can only imagine in derivative terms. Nothing wrong with that, and for most of life it is infinitely preferable. To think totally outside the box, totally in non-derivative terms, requires a brain that has some combination of higher-functioning autism, schizo-effective disorder and borderline personality disorder, and is yet functional enough in the real world to do anything meaningful.
Inventors are almost never successful, rarely have more than one true invention in their entire life, and historically have either descended further into madness, died young as a result of that illness, and/or died in abject poverty as a result of that illness. These days, you will most likely find true inventors living homeless on the streets, suffering from alcoholism and terrible ill-health. They will not be living in the condos of Silicon Valley, sipping champagne for breakfast. The reason there are more artistic inventors than technological inventors is that the homeless can usually scrounge chalk or paints far more easily than they can chip fabrication plants.
Countries that tend to provide better services for those who can barely function in life are frequently cited for having an extraordinary number of true inventors. This isn't because they really have more, it's because their inventors are more likely to live long enough and have the means to circulate their ideas. Countries known to provide only limited or non-existent help are known for their innovators (who are often world-class) but almost never for true invention. Generally, no country can afford to fund both inventors and innovators, and almost nobody tries.
But I can think of some potential customers if reports of this movie ever reaches the Bible Belt in the US. (For those not wanting to read the article, it's a movie about a guy trying to have sex with God. Try to imagine all the possible ways this could get people offended.)
Frankly, I don't care which of busses, trains or monorails is cheaper. What I care about is that many States either provide service that is positively puke-worthy or don't provide any service at all. America's relationship with mass transit can be summed up by examining CTRAN (a service in the Vancouver area of Washington State), which is nearly bankrupt because voters keep rejecting giving them any more money, or the light-rail link between North Charleston, Charleston and Mount Pleasant in South Carolina. There isn't one. Too expensive? No, the Feds would have paid for virtually all of it. The plan was rejected by all three cities because nobody wanted light-rail there.
Even places that do have such services (Portland, Oregon, has a very nice mass-transit system called Trimet) underfund them, over-restrict them and generally miss the entire point of such a system. It's a fiasco. (In the case of Trimet, the light-rail system is restricted to 50 mph in the open, and about 3 mph in towns.)
The British system has many flaws - the wrong type of snow...???!!! - and is regarded as a joke. Nonetheless, Manchester's tram reduced traffic along its route by almost a third, Busy Bee ran a minibus service that operated as much like a taxi as a bus service, and the local trains were fast enough that they needed two or three miles - not feet - to stop. Like I said, this is regarded as somewhat of a joke - not because nobody wants it, but because it's not reliable enough or fast enough.
To bring the American mass-transit system up to this kind of level would take decades of concerted effort just to get people to understand what is possible and/or practical.
Going back to the original issue of metro WiFi -- consider the problem. Many people understand transit, but most are lacking in understanding on mass-transit issues as relate to metro areas in the US. Far, far fewer people understand Mobile IP and mesh network topologies. So what fraction of those are going to have any understanding of Metro WiFi for American cities? WiFi is a complex field. There are many topologies, over 250 routing protocols, 3 forms of anonymity/security which would still allow public access, countless deployment strategies, multitudes of ways to pay for it all, and a near-infinite number of ways to provide the hard bandwidth that's needed to feed the system. You imagine any mayor is going to understand all that? You imagine any net admin the mayor could hope to afford is going to understand all that? You imagine that the State or local council will permit either an adequate budget or the use of advanced enough services to carry out such a vision correctly, even if the vision were to be any good?
(Remember, Government has to go with the lowest bidder, not the most cost-effective one. TCO, ROI and service provided are not factors taken into account. The Government is required by law to pay the least, no matter what the long-term cost. That's why nothing the Government ever does can ever be any good. When it comes to physical hardware, you get what you pay for. I'd prefer a system that did what was truly needed, devil take the price tag, because in my opinion Government is only meaningful for projects that can't be afforded - and if it can't be afforded, what difference does the price make?)
Ok, I can accept that. Whether Microsoft will is another matter... If their lawsuit isn't aimed at customers, I just can't find a single other target that Microsoft would want to attack right now.
I absolutely hate linking to stores, but I can't find a good review of a book that covers this issue well anywhere else. There are probably much better books out there, but this is the best one I know of.
Apparently they didn't read the same history as the ancient Greeks did, either. (Ok, ok, the Sumerians invented politics in general, but the Greeks invented both politics and science as we know them today - and mixed them freely. Usually with martinis. Or mead. One of the two.)
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I completely agree with you that money and greed dominate what the commercial channels will show you in the States, and yes that we can turn to other news outlets. I guess my point goes a little further, though. If the majority of Americans did turn to news outlets in other countries, to fill in the gaps, people would become more aware and less easily swayed by corporate censorship. Maybe - and this is just a hope - sufficient awareness would blunt the impact and also blunt the profits.
The next question is whether it matters to Americans. Well, if the media wanted to make something matter, it could. Very few people in this world truly pick and choose their own concerns. Their concerns are usually dictated by culture, religion, experience, popular opinion, manner of presentation, ad nausium. The individual is truly a very small part of the equation. Why do people still remember Jessica Lynch? Because she was significant? No. She was knocked unconscious in a car crash. There are probably hundreds of people who suffer that or worse every day on roads around the world. No, she's remembered because some people worked damn hard to make sure she was remembered - to the point of hiring a Hollywood director to perfect the footage.
Ok, then if these things could be made interesting and memorable, then why did nobody do so? Some are crackpot conspiracy theories, so no great surprise nobody gives a damn about those. Others are just more scandals and abuses of power that are no different from any of the other scandals and abuses of power that have been taking place. Nothing new there. There were a few - a very few - stories of genuine concern and those have been covered extensively by foreign news services. Personally, everyone I know in the States listens to the BBC and a few read German newspapers online as well.
So what we end up with is this: Yes, a few important news items didn't get covered by the American media when they should have been. Too bad. They were covered by other media, so any ignorance that exists is ignorance by choice. Nobody made you watch Fox' Fair and Mentally Unbalanced News. Nobody compelled you to only tune into CNN. Yes, I do blame the American media for not being informative enough and for limiting news that could undermine their sponsorship. However, if the majority wanted PBS to rival the major networks, it would have happened by now. There's no such desire. People have voted with their pockets for what exists, and if what exists is crap, then don't blame the commercial networks for being commercial.
Of course, in this day and age, why are people so bothered about the mainstream outlets anyway? If you've a laptop, a car and a good camera with something similar to steadicam, then be your own freelance journalist. Most of those who go to high-risk parts of Iraq are freelance. So you won't get to go to press conferences, because you're not backed by the right people. So? Nobody learns anything useful from those anyway. The real nitty-gritty is never the stuff the press is allowed first access to, so who cares? If all you want are the PR stunts, then you're reporting nothing new.
That, to me, is where the crux of the matter lies. People like to complain. The English complain about the weather, the Americans about the news. But nobody wants to do anything about it. If they could and did, that would remove the only real conversation piece they had.
Oh, I dunno. Survivalists, anarchists and even the occasional New Zealand jet engineer have shown how to build very advanced weaponry, and history is filled with accounts of peasants who have overrun warlords. I'd hate to call the significant figures of the past 10,000 years "pretentious, delusional fantasist"s.
However, all the above fields combined count for some really tiny, insignificant percent of the whole IT industry. It's really cool stuff, sure. It's a great field to be in, if you can get the work - it pays some of the bigger bucks. Toolkits like VTk, OpenGL, OpenDX - or even older stuff like PHIGS - are a marvel to use. But as a market, it's barely breathing. SGI no longer do much graphics, the number of graphics card manufacturers has dwindled to next to nothing, updates to libraries are measured in years or decades, innovations are rare and inventions are all but non-existent.
In the same time as it took OpenGL to do a simple update, computers have moved from single processor, single core machines with dumb terminals to becoming superclusters equal to any modern mini-computer or even super-computer, busses have been replaced with multi-hostable switched networks, graphics cards rival their hosts in compute power, VIA was replaced with RDMA and SDP, internal bandwidth has reached 80 gigabits per second, LAN bandwidth has hit 60 gigabits per second (Infiniband, 10 gigabits per second for Ethernet - 100 Gb/s if you channel bond), and your average LAN party has better sound and video than a 1990s multiplex.
Why so long? Because it was hard? No, because it wasn't priority for anyone. If it had been priority, they'd have had the API finalized in a matter of days.
First, the RFCs only refer to IP as IPv4 relatively late on. Second, you will see the majority of dual stack systems referring to "IP and IPv6". Third, when people talk of IP networks, they are referring to IPv4-only networks. Lastly, a lot of people are stupid and/or ignorant when it comes to networking.
Infiniband, however, is a true replacement for layer 4 as well as layers 2 and 3. The protocol is rich, sophisticated and fully routeable - to a target connection, a target multicast group or even a location in the target computer's memory. Indeed, Infiniband was designed with the intention of being totally interchangeable with IPv6 - a proxy could replace one with the other with almost no effort and with no loss of functionality or information. Likewise, Myrinet's MX and GM protocols need nothing on top of them, the way ethernet would, to be routed or delivered to a specific endpoint.
IPv4 and IPv6 are superfluous in such systems, except in their ability to handle legacy protocols. Well, IPv6 has its uses - it has a lot of features that are hard to reproduce on other networks, and it's relatively lightweight - but IPv4 has no value aside from being able to run stuff built for IPv4 alone.
And that's before you get into "which MySQL are we talking about anyway" debates. There are multiple configurations for how the tables are stored, for example. Then there's MySQL vs. MySQL Max (which is a different product).
Oh, and the data is very important. Not everyone knows how to draw up an entity-relationship diagram, let alone build an optimized database from one, and different databases will lean towards different optimization methods.
The sheer number of permutations of configuring MySQL, of using MySQL, and of using MySQL in conjunction with other products, is so great that a simple list is useless. What would be more useful for people would be a sizable table which lists different types of scenario and different types of usage against different database engines.
Not quite a parallel. The ruling basically says that legal terminology which applies to the ignorant cannot be directly applied to the knowledgeable. With signage, it would be similar - if you can read the "keep off the grass" signs, you are in a different category from those who cannot - but the reverse.
So what makes something "pure"? It's probably easier to say what it isn't, initially. It isn't about locks. You can write MPP applications that have no locks and yet are totally reliable and coherent. It isn't about shared resources - most resources are sequential by nature, sharing them doesn't change that.
Ok, so when is something "purely" parallel? After all, when you break any application down far enough, it becomes serial. A pure parallel program is one in which there is a clean break between what is parallel and what is sequential. The two are not mixed, there is no hybridization, there is no bastardization, it's pure. There is also exactly one break. On one side, code is parallel and only parallel. On the other side, code is sequential and only sequential. Above all else, a purely parallel program cannot be sequentially coherent from a programmatic standpoint, ONLY from an end-user's standpoint.
Now we get to the OS. Can an OS parallelize? Yes. Automatic parallelizing by OS', in which nominally sequential code is parallelized by the OS on the application's behalf, has existed since the 90s. It's not a big deal any more. This isn't merely about splitting up the odd instruction here or syscall there. We're talking genuine parallelization.
Perhaps more common, though, are parallelizing compilers. These take nominally sequential code and - as part of basic optimization - convert the output into a highly parallelized binary. The earliest compilers I know of that did this were research compilers at my old University, back in 1974. Earlier examples probably exist. These days, many people use message passing libraries and/or OpenMP, but those produce generally inferior code. True parallel optimization has no markup in the code and requires no heavy layering of libraries.
But what of parallel programmers? People who actually write parallel code? Name me one major application in Occam. Just one will do. No? Parlog? Parallel C? Hell, does anyone on Slashdot have UPC even installed on their machine, used or not? What about parallel environments - anyone here using OpenMOSIX or Kerrighed? I seem to remember a couple of folks who used Rocks. Out of the hundred thousand Slashdot readership. Impressive percentage.
Does anyone need to go to that level, though, these days? There are plenty of middleware layers that handle all that. Sure there are. But then you're no longer talking a purely parallel environment, as most of the middleware layers are designed to make things easy, not parallel. Many are sequential (violating the strict two-layer model required for pure parallelism) and many are nothing more than complex wrappers that hide the very parallelism they supposedly promote. They are generally heavyweight - RPC has how many layers? And that's one of the lighter systems! - but offer nothing useful that a plain sockets call couldn't have done. Ok, they can convert data types. And how many hybrid 32-bit/64-bit or little-endian/big-endian clusters do you use on a regular basis?
The vertical app writers had better damn well worry about it. If you write sequential code on top of parallel code, you get marginal speedups. If you write parallel code on top of parallel code, you get giant speedups. Any programmer who writes inefficient code will produce inefficient results.
There is no good news in parallelism, there is however considerable despair and despondency as some trivial load-balancer gets sold as a parallel system (which it isn't), and ethernet-based clusters are touted as fast. (Multi-millisecond latencies just don't compare with 2.5-8 microsecond latencies of Myrinet or
Partly due to the lack of really good Fortran compilers for Linux, and also partly due to modern CPUs being designed around many of the concepts of C, there are some areas I would expect to see Fortran but don't. FFTW, ATLAS, OIL and GSL are all based in C with maybe some hand-turned assembly.
You go left-to-right, rotate the page 180', then go right to left, rotate the page 180', and so on. This is the only script I know that does that, but there ARE a number of scripts which go left-to-right and right-to-left on alternate lines. Neither of these would be difficult to support in any system that already supports bidi.
Non-IP networks are dying? Must tell that to makers of Infiniband cards, who are carving out a very nice LAN niche and are set on moving into the WAN market. Also need to tell that to xDSL providers, who invariably use ATM, not IP. And if you consider IP to mean IPv4, then the US Government should be informed forthwith that its migration to IPv6 is "dead". Oh, and for satellite communication, they've only just got IP to even work. Since they weren't using string and tin cans before, I can only assume most in use are controlled via non-IP protocols and that this will be true for a very long time. More down-to-earth, PCI's latest specs allows for multiple hosts and is becoming a LAN protocol. USB, FireWire and Bluetooth are all networks of a sort - Bluetooth has a range of a mile, if you connect the devices via rifle.
C programming. Well, yes, the web is making pure C less useful for some applications, but I somehow don't think pure C developers will be begging in the streets any time soon. Device driver writers are in heavy demand, and you don't get far with those if you're working in Java. There are also an awful lot of patches/additions to Linux (a pure C environment), given this alleged death of C. I'd love to see someone code a hard realtime application (again, something in heavy demand) in AJAX. What about those relational databases mentioned earlier in the story? Those written in DHTML? Or do I C an indication of other languages at work?
Netware - well, given the talk about non-IP dying, this is redundant and just a filler. It's probably right, but it has no business being there with the other claim. One should go.
What should be there? Well, Formal Methods is dying, replaced by Extreme Programming. BSD is dying, but only according to Netcraft. Web programming is dying - people no longer write stuff, they use pre-built components. Pure parallel programming is dying -- it's far more efficient to have the OS divide up the work and rely on multi-CPU, multi-core, hyperthreaded systems to take care of all the tracking than it is to mess with very advanced programming techniques, message-passing libraries and the inevitable deadlock issues. Asynchronous hardware is essentially dead. Object-Oriented Databases seem to be pretty much dead. 3D outside of games seems to be dead. Memory-efficient and CPU-efficient programming methods are certainly dead. I guess that would be my list.
The earlier Commodore IEEE-488 drives were not only larger, but faster and capable of carrying out operations without CPU intervention.
Two meg? You sure? Given the file overheads, it would need to be a very short list.
Education, per se, is no guarantee of being civilized in the modern sense, and an educated person can utilize far more devastating weapons than any uneducated warlord. That has, throughout history, been an important lesson. Education can protect you - from disease, assailants and many other woes. Education can also produce far more efficient, far more effective tyrants than mere brutality. Brutality and savagery aren't very effective, and that's all your local warlord is capable of.
Your post then needs rewriting: He eats until the local warlord comes along and attempts to steal his animals. His counter-offensive wipes out the warlord, his retinue and a chunk of the surrounding landscape. Realizing his superiority, he proceeds to invade all of the other warlord-held territories in the area, developing an ever-larger following. At which point, he invades the neighboring countries and eventually creates a substantial mini-empire.
The review seemed selective, but I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt. (Having said that, I recently worked for a place that paid the Wall Street Journal to run an "article" for them, so I tend to be more skeptical than I used to be.)
First, if the laptop is aimed at overseas users, is the technical support going to be capable of handling that?
Second, also for overseas use, this will be sent to people who have never seen a computer - big or otherwise - and are probably unfamiliar with the notion of GUIs or possibly even typing. In fact, you can't rely on anything we take for granted being known. Some of it probably will, but you can't know which bits for which people. Is the interface culturally-neutral?
Third, two hours doesn't seem like a lot, when the nearest wall socket in Africa might be several week's walk. Is there an alternative power system? Doesn't matter what - solar cells, power crank, whatever. Without power, it's a lump of plastic-coated spare parts.
Fourth, how is the internationalization? IIRC, Hebrew and Chinese are written right to left - does the typing tutor know this? Are the desktop icons themable to something meaningful in each culture? Did you look to see that the SIL packages and fonts for internationalization were there?
Fifth, you mention wireless issues. But this would likely have been in a home with a wireless access point, or near a metro-provided WAP. This would be pretty useless in a school with no WAP, but only laptops. That would also be useless for mobile populations, where connections between groups will be at indeterminate times and places, but will need to be recognized and supported whenever they exist.
Even in England, you have over a hundred thousand "Travellers" who would benefit from dynamic wireless routing, Mobile IP and NEMO support. Is the wireless support for these sorts of things there?
Lastly, there's the durability. Three kids in a suburban, air-conditioned home is one thing. Whether you are talking about English Travellers, Mexican street kids or Tibetan Sherpas, the climates are more extreme, the stresses are infinitely worse, and the availability of replacements is next to zero.
In the real world, you are looking at external temperatures ranging from -40 to +120. Usually not on the same day, but that can happen. You are looking at shocks that could exceed 6G. Water won't be a spilled glass of coca cola, it's more likely to be monsoon season. The case won't be so much scratched by bumping into a wall as it will be stabbed by the occasional 6' mugger's knife.
When you get into the real-world situations, where "ruggedized" is really pushed to the limits, will this machine really stand up to the punishments it will receive? Or is it merely going to be a way for Intel to pocket some cash, with the customer ending up both financially and intellectually the poorer for it?
All I ask of reviewers, OLPC, Intel or any other person involved is to convince me. Why me, in particular? Because I'm demanding but stay within the limits of what is practical, and am knowledgeable enough to set the limits to what is practical. So can many others - I'm nothing special - it's that I'm posting a set of measurable benchmarks and criteria, and that could theoretically be useful.
Fraud? Yes. Tolerated? Well, yes. And therein lies the real problem.
Is trial by combat a valid option in the United States?
If the lawyers win and become sufficiently stinking rich, we might be able to persuade them to all retire and move somewhere else like Barbados or something.
It's not about mimicking someone, but about preferring to stand on the shoulders of giants -- even if said giants are just other people standing on other shoulders. Innovation does involve something new being added. It is also not merely adding something for the sake of adding something - it can't be "Embrace and Extend". What was there before has to have a definite, identifiable, significant limitation or flaw and the new solution has to have a definite, identifiable, significant remedy that is genuinely unique and quite possibly inspired.
There is almost nothing in the world that didn't have a predecessor. Modern writing evolved from early phonetic syllaberies which evolved from symbols representing words/ideas which evolved from pictures representing entire scenes/concepts. Each stage came from something older, but each stage required a truly amazing intellectual leap.
Now, I personally draw a distinction between innovation and invention. To me, "invention" can only really refer to the first step in any such chain. All other steps are innovative, but they are not inventive. To me, an invention can have no true precursor. There may be something that an inventor uses as a source of inspiration, some personal Muse, but the source cannot be a true predecessor. The most it can be is inspiration.
Inventions, by my definition, are extremely rare, and are almost certainly invented by individuals. Innovations, by definition, are the work of not only the innovator(s) but all predecessors as well. As such, they are by definition not the work of individuals.
Also by my definition, inventors are very much a breed apart. The way most people think precludes them from ever inventing anything - they simply cannot imagine something from scratch, they can only imagine in derivative terms. Nothing wrong with that, and for most of life it is infinitely preferable. To think totally outside the box, totally in non-derivative terms, requires a brain that has some combination of higher-functioning autism, schizo-effective disorder and borderline personality disorder, and is yet functional enough in the real world to do anything meaningful.
Inventors are almost never successful, rarely have more than one true invention in their entire life, and historically have either descended further into madness, died young as a result of that illness, and/or died in abject poverty as a result of that illness. These days, you will most likely find true inventors living homeless on the streets, suffering from alcoholism and terrible ill-health. They will not be living in the condos of Silicon Valley, sipping champagne for breakfast. The reason there are more artistic inventors than technological inventors is that the homeless can usually scrounge chalk or paints far more easily than they can chip fabrication plants.
Countries that tend to provide better services for those who can barely function in life are frequently cited for having an extraordinary number of true inventors. This isn't because they really have more, it's because their inventors are more likely to live long enough and have the means to circulate their ideas. Countries known to provide only limited or non-existent help are known for their innovators (who are often world-class) but almost never for true invention. Generally, no country can afford to fund both inventors and innovators, and almost nobody tries.
But I can think of some potential customers if reports of this movie ever reaches the Bible Belt in the US. (For those not wanting to read the article, it's a movie about a guy trying to have sex with God. Try to imagine all the possible ways this could get people offended.)
Even places that do have such services (Portland, Oregon, has a very nice mass-transit system called Trimet) underfund them, over-restrict them and generally miss the entire point of such a system. It's a fiasco. (In the case of Trimet, the light-rail system is restricted to 50 mph in the open, and about 3 mph in towns.)
The British system has many flaws - the wrong type of snow...???!!! - and is regarded as a joke. Nonetheless, Manchester's tram reduced traffic along its route by almost a third, Busy Bee ran a minibus service that operated as much like a taxi as a bus service, and the local trains were fast enough that they needed two or three miles - not feet - to stop. Like I said, this is regarded as somewhat of a joke - not because nobody wants it, but because it's not reliable enough or fast enough.
To bring the American mass-transit system up to this kind of level would take decades of concerted effort just to get people to understand what is possible and/or practical.
Going back to the original issue of metro WiFi -- consider the problem. Many people understand transit, but most are lacking in understanding on mass-transit issues as relate to metro areas in the US. Far, far fewer people understand Mobile IP and mesh network topologies. So what fraction of those are going to have any understanding of Metro WiFi for American cities? WiFi is a complex field. There are many topologies, over 250 routing protocols, 3 forms of anonymity/security which would still allow public access, countless deployment strategies, multitudes of ways to pay for it all, and a near-infinite number of ways to provide the hard bandwidth that's needed to feed the system. You imagine any mayor is going to understand all that? You imagine any net admin the mayor could hope to afford is going to understand all that? You imagine that the State or local council will permit either an adequate budget or the use of advanced enough services to carry out such a vision correctly, even if the vision were to be any good?
(Remember, Government has to go with the lowest bidder, not the most cost-effective one. TCO, ROI and service provided are not factors taken into account. The Government is required by law to pay the least, no matter what the long-term cost. That's why nothing the Government ever does can ever be any good. When it comes to physical hardware, you get what you pay for. I'd prefer a system that did what was truly needed, devil take the price tag, because in my opinion Government is only meaningful for projects that can't be afforded - and if it can't be afforded, what difference does the price make?)
Ok, I can accept that. Whether Microsoft will is another matter... If their lawsuit isn't aimed at customers, I just can't find a single other target that Microsoft would want to attack right now.
I absolutely hate linking to stores, but I can't find a good review of a book that covers this issue well anywhere else. There are probably much better books out there, but this is the best one I know of.
Apparently they didn't read the same history as the ancient Greeks did, either. (Ok, ok, the Sumerians invented politics in general, but the Greeks invented both politics and science as we know them today - and mixed them freely. Usually with martinis. Or mead. One of the two.)