Your insults show a distinct lack of bias. FWIW, many Scandanavian countries have taxes that make the worst US States look like havens, yet are nonetheless rated the best places in the world to live on virtually every known criteria known to man, so I think it reasonable to tell you to stuff your link between abusive government and taxation somewhere biologically inadvisable.
"We don't need people/companies to all be good and exemplary"
Is that so? Then either you have a warped idea of "good and exemplary" (which essentially only means being reasonable - Common Law makes no other claims as to what is "good" or what example a person must set) or you are saying that being unreasonable and abusive is perfectly acceptable. Which is an interesting use of the English language, if nothing else. If being unreasonable is, itself, reasonable then can it still be called unreasonable? Answers on a postcard to...
No, "our" system does not pit disagreeable qualities of anyone against anything. Disagreeable qualities are your choice to do and your choice to tolerate. By defining them as disagreeable, you define them as qualities that you would not do and would not tolerate, otherwise they would not be disagreeable to you. It's your life, you get to choose your values. Just remember that what you do IS what you value. There is no distinction.
No, Diebold cannot claim any easy way out. Taxation may imply representation, but it does not imply a mandatory purchase order. Corruption may well exist in Massachusetts, but since when has it become the job of Diebold to police the Government? They can't even police themselves - numerous security holes, deliberate untruths to customers, possible evidence of deliberate vote tampering in Federal elections... That last one is not trivial. Would you buy a voting machine from a company that could donate victory to your opponent? You'd have to be insane to go for an organization that is even suspected of ballot rigging. (Yes, suspicion is not proof is not conviction, but only a lunatic borrows trouble - and the interest rates are terrible.)
Nor can I say that Diebold sympathizers should get some slack. They are certainly guilty of belligerence and false advertising, they are almost certainly guilty of violation of mandatory Federal standards for devices containing sensitive information, they are very likely guilty of bullying and other anti-competitive behavior and are quite possibly guilty of direct or indirect involvement in ballot rigging. They don't need slack as much as they need to be openly and publicly held to account for what has been shown to be true and investigated in-depth for what has been shown to be well within the balance of probability.
Convict a politician at the ballot box, if you must, but be very very sure of the ballot box you convict with.
That's because geeks have a genetically-implanted dress sense from hyper-intelligent beings from another world. Those who lack the genes necessary give in to their ancestral ape-man desires for suits and ties.
Mix alcohol with a necklace of fireballs. D&D/AD&D can be heavily about roleplaying, provided the DM is more into puzzles than monsters. On those times I've encountered the monster-addicted DM, I prefer to play my 20th level hamster mage. The game can get very interesting when my character starts firing off fourth-level squeeks.
British cult tv would be a better source, but neither the Dr Who movie nor The Avengers were well-planned. They filled the script up with ideas used in the various TV episodes, but totally failed to write anything innovative. Nor did they write anything which exploited the scale of the Big Screen - if you've got amazing sound and a staggering picture, don't write as if the audience is watching a 3" portable telly in a campervan. Sheesh!
The potential, though, is huge. The Tomorrow People, Sapphire and Steel, Blake's 7 - these could make damn good movies. They'd need to be about the same sort of length as the individual LoTR movies, but there's now good reason to believe people will watch a truly good movie that is that long, so there's no excuses there. These series already dug deep into the human condition, but they were heavily limited by tiny budgets. (The Tomorrow People cost about $8,000 an episode - a Hollywood producer probably spends more on sodas for the crew than that show spent for its entire run!) They were also limited by attitudes, with TV execs thinking of sci-fi as a fad for children that was going to die any minute anyway.
They were also constrained by the technology of the time. Colour-Separated Overlay (CSO or "blue-screen") and plastic Airfix models packed with explosives were about the upper limit for special effects. Modern computer graphics, complete with high dynamic range and photorealistic rendering techniques, totally blows away anything these cult TV series could do at the time. And as good as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were, nothing they could produce can rival a modern 11.1-channel 24-bit 88.2 KHz digitally-textured (eg: 3D sound, phase shifting, audio ray-tracing of post-production sounds, etc) environment.
What about American cult TV? Well, there really hasn't been much that was either powerful or memorable. American TV execs were stupider than the English ones and generally discouraged anything that was any good. Most American telefantasy has been soap operas that merely happened to include ideas borrowed from science-fiction, as opposed to being science-fiction that merely happened to borrow the occasional idea from soap operas (multi-threaded asynchronous stories, for example). There have been a few things that got through, but most got canceled once the execs escaped from the dungeon they'd been chained up in.
What about other sources? I'd like to see some of Bill Baggs' productions re-done on the big screen. (The Zero Imperative has definite possibilities, and these days a reworking of The Airzone Solution might well be good too.) Non-British/Non-American sources? Well, that's tougher. There are many excellent writers in many countries, but I can't think of any who have produced something that would work well in a movie format. Riverworld is far too long and complex, for example, to do well outside of a book format. Also, other cultures tend to have an idea of the human condition that is totally alien to the people who would likely be watching such a movie. This makes things difficult. (The fact that The Fifth Element was watched by fewer and bought by fewer than March of the Penguins shows that French science-fiction is out-matched by French science-fact in the eyes of American audiences. That may or may not be fair on French sci-fi writers, but the marketplace has never been known for fairness.)
Ok. Fair enough. I was thinking of Plan 9, as Bell Labs was no group of amateurs, and the two co-inventors of C (and Unix) would presumably qualify as talented OS designers.:) But you are absolutely right - mainstream commercial OS' do not meet the needs or desires of users. Most OS' out there meet some needs well, many OS' meet a number of needs adequately, but no OS yet written caters to more than 50% of what users are wanting their machines for.
I won't produce a huge laundry list here - suffice to say that there are MANY features in ALL major and many minor OS' that could perfectly well exist in all of the others without sacrificing anything that was already there. The lack of features is not an inherent limitation of an OS, although it may be a limitation on the programmers' collective imagination, or maybe a limitation on what the egos of those programmers can take in the way of other people getting there first. Why customers should have to suffer for the defective personalities of project managers and corporate drones, I don't know. I'm not even convinced it makes any kind of economic sense to produce substandard defective goods. Perfection may be unattainable, but we're barely getting above scraping the bottom of the barrel. From underneath.
Now, I agree that 99.9% of business software is indeed written the way you describe, but I would point out that application bugs, poor UIs, interoperability issues, unexpected downtime, security breeches, high learning curves and inefficient implementations are costing corporations billions, if not trillions, on a global basis. And by "cost", I mean exactly that. This is how much less corporations are making than they would do if they used archaic but reliable products that have had many of these issues eliminated over the decades.
Which is why you get power stations using twenty-to-thirty-year-old systems for controlling equipment. I don't believe there are any that still use TRS-80s, but Windows NT 3.x is widely used for mission-critical systems. Why? Because it works, it's a known quantity, and it's much more solid than any later Microsoft product. I've seen hospitals use MS-DOS for medical imaging. Why? It has many defects, but fragility isn't one of them.
What about corporate desktops? Every time a machine blue-screens, it costs the company money. Time is money - and lots of it. Ten minutes of downtime may not sound much, but that's ten minutes of productivity lost. A sales rep or an engineer using nothing more than a pad of paper can earn small fortunes in ten minutes, but the same person in front of a blue screen can do nothing. They become dependent on the technology, so the loss of it means the total loss of activity. Depending on the size of the company, ten minutes could be worth anything from one thousand to a hundred thousand.
Chances are, you'll have more than one application crashing hard on one desktop per year. For most corporate applications, if they can get away with a net loss of one day's loss for every hundred days worked, they're doing well. After a single year, that's 3.65 days (about 525 minutes) that are probably going to be wasted from downtime. At the conservative estimate I gave, that's over half a million per year. For a major corporation, it's probably closer to thirty million. That's every year.
Do you know how many semi-trained programmers you could turn into seasoned, high-grade professionals for thirty million dollars? And you only have to do that once. They don't need retraining the next year. One company's losses for one year, if spent on raising the bar instead of drinking at the bar, could slash corporate losses from downtime across the entire industrialized world. The money saved from improved reliability would more than cover the cost of the work.
On the whole, code monkeys produce products that help earn $1 for every $2 spent. That is not a good return. Businesses may want the software fast, but it hurts them, it hurts the economy, it hurts the shareholders, it hurts the consumers. If you'd earn more money with an abacus and a stack of post-it notes than with the latest copy of Vista and a quad-CPU, quad-core PC, then don't throw good money after bad. If you'd see better profits from a slide-rule and a stencil set than with the latest AutoCAD, then don't upgrade.
I'm in favour of technology and am certainly no Luddite, but the phrase 'no pain, no gain' does NOT mean that if you suffer horribly, you will get something wonderful. If you suffer horribly, the odds are very high that suffering horribly is ALL you will get.
You mean like Plan 9/Inferno? (A damn good OS, but unfortunately with more lines of code than users.) Or BeOS? (Another good OS, but with lousy management.) There are countless other OS' that have appeared over time, either to be ignored or neglected by the users. Foolish in the extreme - diversity is the key to longevity and quality - but an inevitable result of the current technical market. Until the marketplace is safe for the inventor, inventions will be rare and never widely circulated. Nobody likes being crushed, squished and pulverized.
No, the problem is with the word "secure". Think for a moment. Windows users are secure in the knowledge that they have someone to blame, even though it won't make any difference. Windows programmers are secure in the knowledge that there are enough bugs to guarantee their jobs and their children's jobs unto the third generation. System crackers are secure in the knowledge that they own 98% of all data on desktops. DoD contractors are secure in the knowledge that even those times that the Government has banned Windows for FIPS-180 violations, the DoD will nonetheless use the OS even on classified networks. Windows is riddled with all kinds of security.
There really isn't a language called C. It's just a bunch of assembler macros.:)
Seriously, assembly is important for all the reasons you noted, but also for some others. If you know assembly, the chances are:
You know how to design the software, because you got sick of trying to debug in a disassembler
You know how to express the design cleanly - unclean assembly is longer, so takes more effort, and is murder to debug
You know how to add structure to the code, as it's easier to test and fix a small subroutine than a gigantic blob
You know how to avoid unnecessary structure, as exploding stacks is generally not a good idea
You know how to re-use code, as it is pure hell to repeatedly reinvent anything in assembly
All software engineering, computer science and programming courses should start by requiring people to program a non-trivial application on an ARM processor, or something with an equally limited instruction set, in pure assembly. Why? Because then you get people who think, who program with care and forethought, who think of bloat not in terms of adding more RAM, but in terms of opportunities for bugs, glitches and gremlins. Sure, you'll get more dropouts. The computing world doesn't need more code monkeys, so it's no loss if they did. Who needs a society of half-baked, semi-literate coders?
This is not elitism, because I'm not saying that anyone should be excluded from the profession. I don't think they should. What I do think is that society needs to make damn sure that the typical coder isn't the worst coder, which is what you get if people are trained to NOT think but to let the computer do the thinking for them. Windows may act like a HAL-9000 at times, but trust me, it isn't remotely capable of anything resembling thought. A bad design or a poor implementation will not be rectified by some magical intelligence in the machine, because there isn't any.
No. You only have to generate code for another already-existing compiler. For example, this is how people use f2c. You can also write compilers that generate bytecode (some LISP compilers do this, as do many Java compilers).
Now, if you were to ask "isn't knowledge of assembly language for a given microprocessor required to create a compiler capable of directly generating native code?" then the answer would be yes, because all the other possibilities have been excluded. Alternatively, if you asked "isn't quality knowledge of assembly language for a given microprocessor required to create a compiler that can generate code that is compact, efficient on resources and fast?" then the answer would also be yes.
However, as most modern programs are anything but compact, efficient on resources or fast, that is a rather moot point. The best compiler in the world can't turn junk into quality, although a trashy compiler can certainly turn quality into junk.
I'm all for ISPs restricting themselves to wherever they like -- provided they don't obstruct others providing Internet access in those regions they aren't so bothered with. (The number of fights over metropolitan networks - cabled or wireless - is astonishing.) If the ISP wants to limit itself, then it should have zero rights outside of the area it has limited itself to. Pure and simple.
Secondly, ISPs have no business restricting what can be published about what is provided. Actually, it would be good if we could see not only the performance of the network provided but also how the downstream performance compares with the upstream pipes. (Are they at capacity? Are they oversubscribed, and if so, by how much? What do customers really get for their money? What services or benefits do the ISP get that are NOT passed on to consumers?)
This information can't possibly put them at risk. What puts ISPs at risk is incompetency so great that if anyone actually knew the details, the ISP's customers and possibly shareholders would launch an all-out rebellion. Secrecy for an established service - as opposed to one that is new and vulnerable to the unreasonable and unreasoning excesses of the market - exists only to hide the skeletons in the closet and brush the mountains of dirt under the carpet. It has no legitimate basis.
Now, that's very different from publishing internal documents on why certain decisions were made or other internal matters. Those things probably should stay confidential within the corporation. I think it would be a mistake to confuse information that is of genuine value in making a sensible decision with information that is only useful in slamming others for making what they believe to be sensible decisions.
(Having said that, if a newspaper's investigative reporter digs up such information as part of an investigation into fraud, abuse of consumers, or something similar, then that should be entirely fair game. Companies that use reasonable protections in an seriously unreasonable way - concealing anti-competitive actions, price-gouging, illegal wiretaps, unreasonable denial of service, etc. - then the company's interests should be secondary to the needs and rights of consumers and authorities alike.)
You'll notice I specifically mentioned what the ISP gets versus what the customers get - not just bandwidth but any service or benefit. If the ISP is passing on the costs of their upstream line(s) to their consumers, but the sum total of what the customers get is significantly worse than the sum total of what the ISP gets - whether that is protocols, service guarantees, bandwidth, latency, capabilities, fault-tolerance, or whatever - then the customer should have the right to know that what they are getting is substandard. The customer should not have the automatic right to know why - that should be a private matter for the ISP, unless the ISP decides otherwise. But customers cannot compare two options if they have no metrics by which to make such a comparison, which means there is no real market, no real customers - consumers, yes, but not customers, there are only smoke and mirrors.
Look at what typically appears in any RPG: Tables, equations, conflicting optimizations, quotas/capacities, invariants, if/then/else structures, inventive/imaginative solutions, time-slicing between threads, a central processing unit conversing with programs (or players), etc. Do you see anything that might be familiar in any of these?
Now look at some of the RPGs and LRPs which have failed over time. Tunnels and Trolls, for example. Treasure Trap. These are games that have far too simple a system. They lack the structure or the coherence I've outlined as existing in those games that do well.
Some of the themed RPGs - the Dr Who RPG, for example - have not done well because there is too much structure or too great an imbalance. There's no room for optimization or one thread gets all of the useful time.
No, a successful RPG or LRP is one that mimics the tools that every engineer - software or hardware - uses every working day, along with the same tradeoffs, the same architecture and the same flexibility. RISC-architecture games (like D&D) generally produce faster, more exciting games than those that are CISC-architectured (like Rolemaster), but each has devotees. And I'll bet almost anything that the devotee mappings are almost identical for the processor design as they are for the game design.
To say that they are both geeks is missing something much more fundamental. I've shown that RPGs and engineering are essentially identical. What about other devotees - the DIY radio geek mentioned in the parent post, for example? Exactly the same elements are present, in exactly the same form. Instead of balancing which stat to bump up, you're balancing circuit layout vs. noise, sensitivity vs. squelch, or any number of other factors. Imaginative solutions? There are hundreds of ways to make a tuned circuit, depending on how much drift you want to allow or how exact you want the results. Tables? Well, you look up any component spec sheet and tell me what there's plenty of. There's no such thing as a 100 ohm resistor, or rather there are a few thousand, depending on the exact characteristics you are looking for.
Oh, you'll find geeks amongst the wargamers, as well. A good game of "Squad Leader", "Britannia" or "Decline and Fall" has every bit as much mathematical elegance and logic as a finely-honed encryption library or precision-made racing engine. Again, if you look at the wargames that have done badly, you find they are mostly games with too little in them or are so heavy that they are unplayable.
They all have exactly the same common elements and - this is the key part - they all read like a diagnostic manual for so-called Geek Syndrome. In other words, the "geeks", the games, the professions and the hobbies are not logically distinguishable. Different sides, same coin. To say that a geek is attracted to the game has no more meaning than to say that the game is attracted to the geek. It just doesn't make any sense to make that kind of distinction. It simply doesn't exist.
Long division or short division, it's still division. Long division is used because it is easier, not because of anything special about it. So that part, I would ignore entirely for now. That just leaves "polynomial division", ie: the division of one polynomial by another, lower-order polynomial. For all practical intents and purposes, division and fraction mean the same thing. The only special thing here is that these fractions must always be improper fractions, as the numerator is always a higher order than the denominator. Ratios, which are also fractions, are usually expressed as improper fractions with a qualifier (eg: 2:1 for, or 7:1 against). So ratios encompass everything we need to describe here.
Polynomials are tougher, but not impossible. A polynomial cannot be a polynomial fraction, so our simple, layman's explanation only has to not allow recursion to eliminate that case entirely. The exponents cannot be polynomials, fractions or negative, which means that the logarithm of an individual term must always be a natural number - provided you consider 0 to be in the series of natural numbers, ie: you use N, not N+. That might not be too bad - a polynomial is just the sum of some set of these terms. We can now ditch the word "polynomial", as any number of such terms will be an expanded polynomial and all contracted polynomials can be written in an expanded form. (A constant is a constant monomial which is a special case of a polynomial, so even a single such term is fair game for polynomial division.)
Ok, so what does it mean to have a natural number for a logarithm? That's hardly layman's terms. Well, points, lines, squares, cubes, hypercubes, etc, are all shapes. Other than fractals, there are no 2.7-dimensional objects. The sum of any such series can be described simply as a set of numerical shapes. (They're not "real" shapes, they're numbers whose equivalent Nth-dimensional shape is mathematically indistinguishable from the original number raised to the Nth power.) This deals with the recursion, because you can't have the inverse of a physical square. It doesn't mean anything.
So the simplest description that could be understood and would be 100% honest would be: It's the ratio of two sets of numerical shapes.
Ok, so now we get back to the "long division" part. Long division is counting up a series of subtractions. Nothing complicated. Easiest way to do that with sets is to make groups.
This makes our layman's description of polynomial long division: Figuring out the ratio of two sets of numerical sets by collecting them into groups.
Fifteen words. Well under the 300 allowed and the only possible interpretation (either to a mathematician or a layman) is identical to that of polynomial long division. It may sound simplistic, but really the only thing it is is simple. In functional terms, it isn't distinguishable from the formal mathematical description.
I'd build a machine that was a heterogenius cluster of clusters. Each cluster is homogenius, but uses a different architecture from the others. So there'd be one section which was Opteron based, another that used the latest Power chip, a third that used Cell processors, a fourth based on the 68040 (for semi-retro stuff), a fifth based on the Transputer (retro and cool), a sixth based on the DEC Alpha (more retro), a seventh on the UltraSPARC and an eighth based on the MIPS64. Each cluster would be fully populated with the highest-speed RAM on the market, local busses would be whatever was fastest (eg: Opteron would be HyperTransport 3, whereas the 68040 would probably be fastest on the VME/VXI architecture) and inter-nodal connects would be 24-lane InfiniBand.
Now, if money is no object, the above would not be good enough. Flexible, sure, but the segments are too specialized. For the ubercool dream machine, I'd go for:
Wafer-scale system-on-a-chip/processor-in-memory architecture with built-in message-passing (based around MPI-2.1 and Bulk Synchronous Processing) and 32 built-in 10 Gb/s interconnects, where the memory is processor-speed and 16 gigabytes per wafer, where the underlying instruction set is RISC-based and heavily optimized, but also where there is direct hardware support for linear algebra, matrix algebra and FFTs up to 3D (ie: pretty much everything from BLAS, LINPACK, ATLAS and FFTW). The heavy numerical stuff doesn't have to be absolutely maxed-out performance, it just has to be faster than any combination of existing software and existing hardware. As per the Crusoe, there would be translation support from other instruction sets, only this would actually include support for processors that were useful. The cluster would then be a 5D or 6D hypercube topology (no, not really built in six dimensions, just wired as though it were a regular hypercube in that number of dimensions).
(Since money is no object, it doesn't matter that the reject rate would be something like 95%. I'd merely need to make something like 3,276,800 such wafers in order to have enough that worked to build a really good cluster.)
Triply-linked sounds stupid. If you want a variable linking strategy, you'd probably be better off with having an index list which is itself internally doubly-linked and which is doubly-linked to the original list. You can then reorder the index without reordering the list, reorder the list without reordering the index, or reorder the associations between index and list without having to reorder either.
A second option is to use n-ary linkage. Each node has some number of links coming off it, which may vary between nodes, where a link may be single or double, and where each link is marked so as to allow a program to traverse any set of associated links according to the association. You now have every order that you are likely to ever want, simultaneously, with no further processing required. Mathematicians call such a topology a graph.
A triply-linked list, on the other hand, has no obvious value. There is nothing a triply-linked list can do that you can't do with the above two methods faster, better, more reliably and more flexibly. I would argue for the superior solution over a patented inferior solution every time.
Under "ideal" conditions, the nations would contribute those areas they are good at, work in a unified manner, and actually be productive as a cooperative. In order to have a sustainable, viable presence in space, this is the only way it can be achieved.
If international cooperation between Governments is impossible, then the next-best would be international cooperation between the millions of brilliant engineers, scientists and enthusiasts that are out there, preferably with sponsorship from corporations and the uber-rich in much the same way that such groups were the major sponsors behind the Renaissance.
(Enthusiasts? Yes. If you got to run a spaceship@home program for doing CFDs on launch vehicles or other heavy-duty calculations, you could reduce the budget required to carry out a lot of the initial research, reducing the initial funding required. Once a fully-functional working prototype exists and has been launched - however minimally - any such venture is in a much stronger position to get the kind of investment needed. It's the initial work, where you've lots of heavy-lifting but no meaningful budget, that support from volunteers and enthusiasts would be a significant asset.)
Well, yes. There are usually analogies to any computational process that mere terrans (as opposed to us elves from the planet Tharkquark) can understand.
Let's take the database optimization. Databases are merely methods of storing and organizing data. Let's say that you are denormalizing a relational database, splitting it into locally-connected "islands" and running each island on its own load-balancing system. This is no trivial setup - you have changed the structure of the data and are running it on a cluster where each "node" on that cluster is itself a cluster. This is no trivial thing that - computationally - is outside the realms of more than a few database engineers. How many companies do you know that run database hypercubes as a matter of course?
Can this be explained to the layperson? Sure. Denormalizing is duplicating information. If your mother didn't build a deck of cards holding favorite recipes from a bunch of recipe books, she's probably the only one who didn't. Duplicating data to make it easy and quick to look up is something almost everyone does at some time or other. If you're having trouble explaining this, point to the examples around you.
Load-balancing? Virtually everyone is familiar with sharing the workload.
Dividing up into self-contained sets of records and clustering them? That doesn't sound very real-worldish. Well, yes it is. Departments, compartments, apartments - all different ways to describe isolated groups of self-relating entities that nonetheless can interact in defined ways.
There is absolutely no problem in computing that you can describe that does not have a real-world counterpart. This is a direct consequence of Turing's definition of Computable. If the layman doesn't understand, it is not because they can't, it's because nobody took the time.
The reality is that most good computer scientists, inventors, rocket scientists, etc, are inspired by quality science fiction. (Pulp sci-fi just produces brainless zombies. Who then go around eating the brains of everyone else.) What most countries have now in the way of sci-fi is pathetic. Those countries that have never produced good sci-fi have never produced good creators. Good scientists, good technicians, but not inventors or innovators. Strictly minor updates on existing stuff.
Nothing truly new is going to happen before today's school kids graduate. If you want an international population with the minds and drive to actually do REAL stuff, then you want an international population that dreams of space and passionately wants to get there. You won't do that with a press release. If you want a world fired up about space exploration, if you want the next generation of engineers dreaming of new ways to make this possible, then give them a reason to dream.
Political problems are inevitable in this. If you thought the "Not Invented Here" syndrome was bad internally within the US high-tech industry, just wait until you start pitching multi-billion-dollar projects to the international market. Then there will be restrictions on information that can be shared. Inevitably, this will include information vital to the safety of astronauts, as you can't restrict the technology on usage. Either it is not exported at all, or it's exported and will be used wherever applicable. Politicians, however, are more likely to be concerned with votes at home and industries at home (provided donations towards reelection are given), not foreigners. Even foreigners in space.
This is important to consider, because rockets for space exploration are not much different from rockets for ICBMs or rockets used in cruise missiles. The difficult bits are control and guidance, and anything capable of deep space exploration has more than enough of both. Why do you think NASA went for the moon? Bragging rights? To a degree. A much bigger reason was to develop the ability to hit very specific targets at extreme range, which was a major element in Cold War military reasoning - and a gigantic factor in current military thinking from the interceptor missiles to the attempts by poverty-stricken militaristic nations to build long-range systems.
Ok, let's say the politics can be dealt with - as unlikely as that is. Will this work? Probably not. Even America and Europe can't agree on standard units, dooming many a rocket in the past. (At least three Mars missions were lost because of this.) Throw in incompatibilities from the rest of the world, an increase in Ingrish and other mis-translations, the diabolical conditions of many space facilities in the few countries to possess any, etc, and you reach the conclusion that the technical folk will simply not be capable of working together with anything like the level of competency or coherency needed for such demanding technology.
Finally, many of the core technologies are evolving too rapidly right now to guarantee coherency. It would seem much more logical to disseminate some of that core first, and worry about getting the agencies to cooperate meaningfully AFTER everyone has arrived to a common understanding of some of the basics. If we can't agree on when to use maglev, high-altitude launches, or jet-assisted launches, then how can anyone expect to agree on anything else? There is also a serious shortage of newly-graduating quality tech folk (mostly due to a serious shortage of sci-fi to inspire them as they were growing up), which means we don't have the skilled minds capable of sustaining such an effort.
Slashdot Mirror
"We don't need people/companies to all be good and exemplary"
Is that so? Then either you have a warped idea of "good and exemplary" (which essentially only means being reasonable - Common Law makes no other claims as to what is "good" or what example a person must set) or you are saying that being unreasonable and abusive is perfectly acceptable. Which is an interesting use of the English language, if nothing else. If being unreasonable is, itself, reasonable then can it still be called unreasonable? Answers on a postcard to...
No, "our" system does not pit disagreeable qualities of anyone against anything. Disagreeable qualities are your choice to do and your choice to tolerate. By defining them as disagreeable, you define them as qualities that you would not do and would not tolerate, otherwise they would not be disagreeable to you. It's your life, you get to choose your values. Just remember that what you do IS what you value. There is no distinction.
No, Diebold cannot claim any easy way out. Taxation may imply representation, but it does not imply a mandatory purchase order. Corruption may well exist in Massachusetts, but since when has it become the job of Diebold to police the Government? They can't even police themselves - numerous security holes, deliberate untruths to customers, possible evidence of deliberate vote tampering in Federal elections... That last one is not trivial. Would you buy a voting machine from a company that could donate victory to your opponent? You'd have to be insane to go for an organization that is even suspected of ballot rigging. (Yes, suspicion is not proof is not conviction, but only a lunatic borrows trouble - and the interest rates are terrible.)
Nor can I say that Diebold sympathizers should get some slack. They are certainly guilty of belligerence and false advertising, they are almost certainly guilty of violation of mandatory Federal standards for devices containing sensitive information, they are very likely guilty of bullying and other anti-competitive behavior and are quite possibly guilty of direct or indirect involvement in ballot rigging. They don't need slack as much as they need to be openly and publicly held to account for what has been shown to be true and investigated in-depth for what has been shown to be well within the balance of probability.
Convict a politician at the ballot box, if you must, but be very very sure of the ballot box you convict with.
You know what you're talking about, What're you posting on Slashdot for? :)
That's because geeks have a genetically-implanted dress sense from hyper-intelligent beings from another world. Those who lack the genes necessary give in to their ancestral ape-man desires for suits and ties.
Mix alcohol with a necklace of fireballs. D&D/AD&D can be heavily about roleplaying, provided the DM is more into puzzles than monsters. On those times I've encountered the monster-addicted DM, I prefer to play my 20th level hamster mage. The game can get very interesting when my character starts firing off fourth-level squeeks.
The potential, though, is huge. The Tomorrow People, Sapphire and Steel, Blake's 7 - these could make damn good movies. They'd need to be about the same sort of length as the individual LoTR movies, but there's now good reason to believe people will watch a truly good movie that is that long, so there's no excuses there. These series already dug deep into the human condition, but they were heavily limited by tiny budgets. (The Tomorrow People cost about $8,000 an episode - a Hollywood producer probably spends more on sodas for the crew than that show spent for its entire run!) They were also limited by attitudes, with TV execs thinking of sci-fi as a fad for children that was going to die any minute anyway.
They were also constrained by the technology of the time. Colour-Separated Overlay (CSO or "blue-screen") and plastic Airfix models packed with explosives were about the upper limit for special effects. Modern computer graphics, complete with high dynamic range and photorealistic rendering techniques, totally blows away anything these cult TV series could do at the time. And as good as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were, nothing they could produce can rival a modern 11.1-channel 24-bit 88.2 KHz digitally-textured (eg: 3D sound, phase shifting, audio ray-tracing of post-production sounds, etc) environment.
What about American cult TV? Well, there really hasn't been much that was either powerful or memorable. American TV execs were stupider than the English ones and generally discouraged anything that was any good. Most American telefantasy has been soap operas that merely happened to include ideas borrowed from science-fiction, as opposed to being science-fiction that merely happened to borrow the occasional idea from soap operas (multi-threaded asynchronous stories, for example). There have been a few things that got through, but most got canceled once the execs escaped from the dungeon they'd been chained up in.
What about other sources? I'd like to see some of Bill Baggs' productions re-done on the big screen. (The Zero Imperative has definite possibilities, and these days a reworking of The Airzone Solution might well be good too.) Non-British/Non-American sources? Well, that's tougher. There are many excellent writers in many countries, but I can't think of any who have produced something that would work well in a movie format. Riverworld is far too long and complex, for example, to do well outside of a book format. Also, other cultures tend to have an idea of the human condition that is totally alien to the people who would likely be watching such a movie. This makes things difficult. (The fact that The Fifth Element was watched by fewer and bought by fewer than March of the Penguins shows that French science-fiction is out-matched by French science-fact in the eyes of American audiences. That may or may not be fair on French sci-fi writers, but the marketplace has never been known for fairness.)
I won't produce a huge laundry list here - suffice to say that there are MANY features in ALL major and many minor OS' that could perfectly well exist in all of the others without sacrificing anything that was already there. The lack of features is not an inherent limitation of an OS, although it may be a limitation on the programmers' collective imagination, or maybe a limitation on what the egos of those programmers can take in the way of other people getting there first. Why customers should have to suffer for the defective personalities of project managers and corporate drones, I don't know. I'm not even convinced it makes any kind of economic sense to produce substandard defective goods. Perfection may be unattainable, but we're barely getting above scraping the bottom of the barrel. From underneath.
Which is why you get power stations using twenty-to-thirty-year-old systems for controlling equipment. I don't believe there are any that still use TRS-80s, but Windows NT 3.x is widely used for mission-critical systems. Why? Because it works, it's a known quantity, and it's much more solid than any later Microsoft product. I've seen hospitals use MS-DOS for medical imaging. Why? It has many defects, but fragility isn't one of them.
What about corporate desktops? Every time a machine blue-screens, it costs the company money. Time is money - and lots of it. Ten minutes of downtime may not sound much, but that's ten minutes of productivity lost. A sales rep or an engineer using nothing more than a pad of paper can earn small fortunes in ten minutes, but the same person in front of a blue screen can do nothing. They become dependent on the technology, so the loss of it means the total loss of activity. Depending on the size of the company, ten minutes could be worth anything from one thousand to a hundred thousand.
Chances are, you'll have more than one application crashing hard on one desktop per year. For most corporate applications, if they can get away with a net loss of one day's loss for every hundred days worked, they're doing well. After a single year, that's 3.65 days (about 525 minutes) that are probably going to be wasted from downtime. At the conservative estimate I gave, that's over half a million per year. For a major corporation, it's probably closer to thirty million. That's every year.
Do you know how many semi-trained programmers you could turn into seasoned, high-grade professionals for thirty million dollars? And you only have to do that once. They don't need retraining the next year. One company's losses for one year, if spent on raising the bar instead of drinking at the bar, could slash corporate losses from downtime across the entire industrialized world. The money saved from improved reliability would more than cover the cost of the work.
On the whole, code monkeys produce products that help earn $1 for every $2 spent. That is not a good return. Businesses may want the software fast, but it hurts them, it hurts the economy, it hurts the shareholders, it hurts the consumers. If you'd earn more money with an abacus and a stack of post-it notes than with the latest copy of Vista and a quad-CPU, quad-core PC, then don't throw good money after bad. If you'd see better profits from a slide-rule and a stencil set than with the latest AutoCAD, then don't upgrade.
I'm in favour of technology and am certainly no Luddite, but the phrase 'no pain, no gain' does NOT mean that if you suffer horribly, you will get something wonderful. If you suffer horribly, the odds are very high that suffering horribly is ALL you will get.
You mean like Plan 9/Inferno? (A damn good OS, but unfortunately with more lines of code than users.) Or BeOS? (Another good OS, but with lousy management.) There are countless other OS' that have appeared over time, either to be ignored or neglected by the users. Foolish in the extreme - diversity is the key to longevity and quality - but an inevitable result of the current technical market. Until the marketplace is safe for the inventor, inventions will be rare and never widely circulated. Nobody likes being crushed, squished and pulverized.
No, the problem is with the word "secure". Think for a moment. Windows users are secure in the knowledge that they have someone to blame, even though it won't make any difference. Windows programmers are secure in the knowledge that there are enough bugs to guarantee their jobs and their children's jobs unto the third generation. System crackers are secure in the knowledge that they own 98% of all data on desktops. DoD contractors are secure in the knowledge that even those times that the Government has banned Windows for FIPS-180 violations, the DoD will nonetheless use the OS even on classified networks. Windows is riddled with all kinds of security.
Seriously, assembly is important for all the reasons you noted, but also for some others. If you know assembly, the chances are:
All software engineering, computer science and programming courses should start by requiring people to program a non-trivial application on an ARM processor, or something with an equally limited instruction set, in pure assembly. Why? Because then you get people who think, who program with care and forethought, who think of bloat not in terms of adding more RAM, but in terms of opportunities for bugs, glitches and gremlins. Sure, you'll get more dropouts. The computing world doesn't need more code monkeys, so it's no loss if they did. Who needs a society of half-baked, semi-literate coders?
This is not elitism, because I'm not saying that anyone should be excluded from the profession. I don't think they should. What I do think is that society needs to make damn sure that the typical coder isn't the worst coder, which is what you get if people are trained to NOT think but to let the computer do the thinking for them. Windows may act like a HAL-9000 at times, but trust me, it isn't remotely capable of anything resembling thought. A bad design or a poor implementation will not be rectified by some magical intelligence in the machine, because there isn't any.
Now, if you were to ask "isn't knowledge of assembly language for a given microprocessor required to create a compiler capable of directly generating native code?" then the answer would be yes, because all the other possibilities have been excluded. Alternatively, if you asked "isn't quality knowledge of assembly language for a given microprocessor required to create a compiler that can generate code that is compact, efficient on resources and fast?" then the answer would also be yes.
However, as most modern programs are anything but compact, efficient on resources or fast, that is a rather moot point. The best compiler in the world can't turn junk into quality, although a trashy compiler can certainly turn quality into junk.
Would I be correct if I guessed you prefer Perl or Python to C?
Secondly, ISPs have no business restricting what can be published about what is provided. Actually, it would be good if we could see not only the performance of the network provided but also how the downstream performance compares with the upstream pipes. (Are they at capacity? Are they oversubscribed, and if so, by how much? What do customers really get for their money? What services or benefits do the ISP get that are NOT passed on to consumers?)
This information can't possibly put them at risk. What puts ISPs at risk is incompetency so great that if anyone actually knew the details, the ISP's customers and possibly shareholders would launch an all-out rebellion. Secrecy for an established service - as opposed to one that is new and vulnerable to the unreasonable and unreasoning excesses of the market - exists only to hide the skeletons in the closet and brush the mountains of dirt under the carpet. It has no legitimate basis.
Now, that's very different from publishing internal documents on why certain decisions were made or other internal matters. Those things probably should stay confidential within the corporation. I think it would be a mistake to confuse information that is of genuine value in making a sensible decision with information that is only useful in slamming others for making what they believe to be sensible decisions.
(Having said that, if a newspaper's investigative reporter digs up such information as part of an investigation into fraud, abuse of consumers, or something similar, then that should be entirely fair game. Companies that use reasonable protections in an seriously unreasonable way - concealing anti-competitive actions, price-gouging, illegal wiretaps, unreasonable denial of service, etc. - then the company's interests should be secondary to the needs and rights of consumers and authorities alike.)
You'll notice I specifically mentioned what the ISP gets versus what the customers get - not just bandwidth but any service or benefit. If the ISP is passing on the costs of their upstream line(s) to their consumers, but the sum total of what the customers get is significantly worse than the sum total of what the ISP gets - whether that is protocols, service guarantees, bandwidth, latency, capabilities, fault-tolerance, or whatever - then the customer should have the right to know that what they are getting is substandard. The customer should not have the automatic right to know why - that should be a private matter for the ISP, unless the ISP decides otherwise. But customers cannot compare two options if they have no metrics by which to make such a comparison, which means there is no real market, no real customers - consumers, yes, but not customers, there are only smoke and mirrors.
Now look at some of the RPGs and LRPs which have failed over time. Tunnels and Trolls, for example. Treasure Trap. These are games that have far too simple a system. They lack the structure or the coherence I've outlined as existing in those games that do well.
Some of the themed RPGs - the Dr Who RPG, for example - have not done well because there is too much structure or too great an imbalance. There's no room for optimization or one thread gets all of the useful time.
No, a successful RPG or LRP is one that mimics the tools that every engineer - software or hardware - uses every working day, along with the same tradeoffs, the same architecture and the same flexibility. RISC-architecture games (like D&D) generally produce faster, more exciting games than those that are CISC-architectured (like Rolemaster), but each has devotees. And I'll bet almost anything that the devotee mappings are almost identical for the processor design as they are for the game design.
To say that they are both geeks is missing something much more fundamental. I've shown that RPGs and engineering are essentially identical. What about other devotees - the DIY radio geek mentioned in the parent post, for example? Exactly the same elements are present, in exactly the same form. Instead of balancing which stat to bump up, you're balancing circuit layout vs. noise, sensitivity vs. squelch, or any number of other factors. Imaginative solutions? There are hundreds of ways to make a tuned circuit, depending on how much drift you want to allow or how exact you want the results. Tables? Well, you look up any component spec sheet and tell me what there's plenty of. There's no such thing as a 100 ohm resistor, or rather there are a few thousand, depending on the exact characteristics you are looking for.
Oh, you'll find geeks amongst the wargamers, as well. A good game of "Squad Leader", "Britannia" or "Decline and Fall" has every bit as much mathematical elegance and logic as a finely-honed encryption library or precision-made racing engine. Again, if you look at the wargames that have done badly, you find they are mostly games with too little in them or are so heavy that they are unplayable.
They all have exactly the same common elements and - this is the key part - they all read like a diagnostic manual for so-called Geek Syndrome. In other words, the "geeks", the games, the professions and the hobbies are not logically distinguishable. Different sides, same coin. To say that a geek is attracted to the game has no more meaning than to say that the game is attracted to the geek. It just doesn't make any sense to make that kind of distinction. It simply doesn't exist.
Polynomials are tougher, but not impossible. A polynomial cannot be a polynomial fraction, so our simple, layman's explanation only has to not allow recursion to eliminate that case entirely. The exponents cannot be polynomials, fractions or negative, which means that the logarithm of an individual term must always be a natural number - provided you consider 0 to be in the series of natural numbers, ie: you use N, not N+. That might not be too bad - a polynomial is just the sum of some set of these terms. We can now ditch the word "polynomial", as any number of such terms will be an expanded polynomial and all contracted polynomials can be written in an expanded form. (A constant is a constant monomial which is a special case of a polynomial, so even a single such term is fair game for polynomial division.)
Ok, so what does it mean to have a natural number for a logarithm? That's hardly layman's terms. Well, points, lines, squares, cubes, hypercubes, etc, are all shapes. Other than fractals, there are no 2.7-dimensional objects. The sum of any such series can be described simply as a set of numerical shapes. (They're not "real" shapes, they're numbers whose equivalent Nth-dimensional shape is mathematically indistinguishable from the original number raised to the Nth power.) This deals with the recursion, because you can't have the inverse of a physical square. It doesn't mean anything.
So the simplest description that could be understood and would be 100% honest would be: It's the ratio of two sets of numerical shapes.
Ok, so now we get back to the "long division" part. Long division is counting up a series of subtractions. Nothing complicated. Easiest way to do that with sets is to make groups.
This makes our layman's description of polynomial long division: Figuring out the ratio of two sets of numerical sets by collecting them into groups.
Fifteen words. Well under the 300 allowed and the only possible interpretation (either to a mathematician or a layman) is identical to that of polynomial long division. It may sound simplistic, but really the only thing it is is simple. In functional terms, it isn't distinguishable from the formal mathematical description.
...I overlay the map of the Internet on top of the map of science, will I end up with a flow-chart of Windows?
I'd build a machine that was a heterogenius cluster of clusters. Each cluster is homogenius, but uses a different architecture from the others. So there'd be one section which was Opteron based, another that used the latest Power chip, a third that used Cell processors, a fourth based on the 68040 (for semi-retro stuff), a fifth based on the Transputer (retro and cool), a sixth based on the DEC Alpha (more retro), a seventh on the UltraSPARC and an eighth based on the MIPS64. Each cluster would be fully populated with the highest-speed RAM on the market, local busses would be whatever was fastest (eg: Opteron would be HyperTransport 3, whereas the 68040 would probably be fastest on the VME/VXI architecture) and inter-nodal connects would be 24-lane InfiniBand.
Now, if money is no object, the above would not be good enough. Flexible, sure, but the segments are too specialized. For the ubercool dream machine, I'd go for:
Wafer-scale system-on-a-chip/processor-in-memory architecture with built-in message-passing (based around MPI-2.1 and Bulk Synchronous Processing) and 32 built-in 10 Gb/s interconnects, where the memory is processor-speed and 16 gigabytes per wafer, where the underlying instruction set is RISC-based and heavily optimized, but also where there is direct hardware support for linear algebra, matrix algebra and FFTs up to 3D (ie: pretty much everything from BLAS, LINPACK, ATLAS and FFTW). The heavy numerical stuff doesn't have to be absolutely maxed-out performance, it just has to be faster than any combination of existing software and existing hardware. As per the Crusoe, there would be translation support from other instruction sets, only this would actually include support for processors that were useful. The cluster would then be a 5D or 6D hypercube topology (no, not really built in six dimensions, just wired as though it were a regular hypercube in that number of dimensions).
(Since money is no object, it doesn't matter that the reject rate would be something like 95%. I'd merely need to make something like 3,276,800 such wafers in order to have enough that worked to build a really good cluster.)
A second option is to use n-ary linkage. Each node has some number of links coming off it, which may vary between nodes, where a link may be single or double, and where each link is marked so as to allow a program to traverse any set of associated links according to the association. You now have every order that you are likely to ever want, simultaneously, with no further processing required. Mathematicians call such a topology a graph.
A triply-linked list, on the other hand, has no obvious value. There is nothing a triply-linked list can do that you can't do with the above two methods faster, better, more reliably and more flexibly. I would argue for the superior solution over a patented inferior solution every time.
If international cooperation between Governments is impossible, then the next-best would be international cooperation between the millions of brilliant engineers, scientists and enthusiasts that are out there, preferably with sponsorship from corporations and the uber-rich in much the same way that such groups were the major sponsors behind the Renaissance.
(Enthusiasts? Yes. If you got to run a spaceship@home program for doing CFDs on launch vehicles or other heavy-duty calculations, you could reduce the budget required to carry out a lot of the initial research, reducing the initial funding required. Once a fully-functional working prototype exists and has been launched - however minimally - any such venture is in a much stronger position to get the kind of investment needed. It's the initial work, where you've lots of heavy-lifting but no meaningful budget, that support from volunteers and enthusiasts would be a significant asset.)
Let's take the database optimization. Databases are merely methods of storing and organizing data. Let's say that you are denormalizing a relational database, splitting it into locally-connected "islands" and running each island on its own load-balancing system. This is no trivial setup - you have changed the structure of the data and are running it on a cluster where each "node" on that cluster is itself a cluster. This is no trivial thing that - computationally - is outside the realms of more than a few database engineers. How many companies do you know that run database hypercubes as a matter of course?
Can this be explained to the layperson? Sure. Denormalizing is duplicating information. If your mother didn't build a deck of cards holding favorite recipes from a bunch of recipe books, she's probably the only one who didn't. Duplicating data to make it easy and quick to look up is something almost everyone does at some time or other. If you're having trouble explaining this, point to the examples around you.
Load-balancing? Virtually everyone is familiar with sharing the workload.
Dividing up into self-contained sets of records and clustering them? That doesn't sound very real-worldish. Well, yes it is. Departments, compartments, apartments - all different ways to describe isolated groups of self-relating entities that nonetheless can interact in defined ways.
There is absolutely no problem in computing that you can describe that does not have a real-world counterpart. This is a direct consequence of Turing's definition of Computable. If the layman doesn't understand, it is not because they can't, it's because nobody took the time.
Nothing truly new is going to happen before today's school kids graduate. If you want an international population with the minds and drive to actually do REAL stuff, then you want an international population that dreams of space and passionately wants to get there. You won't do that with a press release. If you want a world fired up about space exploration, if you want the next generation of engineers dreaming of new ways to make this possible, then give them a reason to dream.
This is important to consider, because rockets for space exploration are not much different from rockets for ICBMs or rockets used in cruise missiles. The difficult bits are control and guidance, and anything capable of deep space exploration has more than enough of both. Why do you think NASA went for the moon? Bragging rights? To a degree. A much bigger reason was to develop the ability to hit very specific targets at extreme range, which was a major element in Cold War military reasoning - and a gigantic factor in current military thinking from the interceptor missiles to the attempts by poverty-stricken militaristic nations to build long-range systems.
Ok, let's say the politics can be dealt with - as unlikely as that is. Will this work? Probably not. Even America and Europe can't agree on standard units, dooming many a rocket in the past. (At least three Mars missions were lost because of this.) Throw in incompatibilities from the rest of the world, an increase in Ingrish and other mis-translations, the diabolical conditions of many space facilities in the few countries to possess any, etc, and you reach the conclusion that the technical folk will simply not be capable of working together with anything like the level of competency or coherency needed for such demanding technology.
Finally, many of the core technologies are evolving too rapidly right now to guarantee coherency. It would seem much more logical to disseminate some of that core first, and worry about getting the agencies to cooperate meaningfully AFTER everyone has arrived to a common understanding of some of the basics. If we can't agree on when to use maglev, high-altitude launches, or jet-assisted launches, then how can anyone expect to agree on anything else? There is also a serious shortage of newly-graduating quality tech folk (mostly due to a serious shortage of sci-fi to inspire them as they were growing up), which means we don't have the skilled minds capable of sustaining such an effort.
So... that would make an American trillion a billiard?
OneCare 2.0 Care, RedCare, BlueCare.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to live too close to Caldera either.