>[...] if people know that buying this new board from MS/Intel (which has few tangible benefits) will render half of the internet unusable, nobody is going to go for it.
True. It's like the regional protection with DVDs. If given a choice, many consumers will rather buy a crappy "region free" DVD player than a high-end player that doesn't allow japanes/european/us disks. Still, some others do especially when people remain willing to sacrify privacy for security in the light of the 9/11 type events. And they might just have enough momentum to threaten free software.
I agree that the idea behind the GNU project was not to produce a free (as in beer) clone of a crappy OS like Windows.
> I don't think it's a bad idea to be able to emulate windows programs, but we shouldn't make a distribution of linux with the sole purpose of doing it... do ya see what I mean?
Couldn't agree more. We don't need a mutilated Linux that tries to be Windows. We need an application like Wine, packaged to provide access to Windows on top of Linux. Lindows users should feel like: hey, I'm running Linux, but I don't need to get rid of my Windows legacy all at once. They shouldn't feel: damn, I glad I bought a cheap computer but it runs my old apps crappy. Have Linux adjust to Windows and it will end up like OS/2.
And never underestimate the need for applications like Wine. The major part of the networked world is not Free (as in speech). Therefore, to communicate in a Free manner with the rest of the world we ("the Linux community") need to be able read their crappy propriatry formats. I'm sorry to say that: resistance is brave, but in the end futile. Open source conversion tools and cloned applications like StarOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice are one way to read eg. MS Word formatted email (who invented that) or Excel files. Another way is to simply emulate those evil binaries. The same goes for games. Sooner or later you will need to collaborate, face it.
Isn't Linux's main problem with desktops the lack of added value on top of it being free (beer/speech)? Where's the desktop killer app? Where's the apache for the end-user/consumer masses?
Good point. ' Guess that answers the question about the subtle difference between an emulator and a VM. VMs tend to include more high level concepts than emulators.
Still, as much as (software) emulators emulate existing hardware there have also been several attempts to create "virtual" machines in hardware. (For example: P-code interpreters (low-level Pascal) and Sun's attempts to hard wire a Java VM.)
Since climate may relate to any and all events in the past through chaos theory... Isn't the main problem that in order to proof any global climate theory in a (natural) scientific way, we would need to reproduce all events? Ie.: to proof that earth temparature rose over the last century due to human behaviour, we would need to:
1) Recreate all circumstances as thay were in 1902 - which we obviously can't do, 2) Reprocuce all events that happened since 1902 (including two world wars) - which we obviously don't want to do.
Now does that mean that climate research isn't science?
Wow. Why didn't I think of that when it was mentioned even in the original post... (Seriously, I forgot)
...Now with a futuristically fast CDReWriter and a flashing light source, wouldn't it be possible to display moving pictures on a rewritable disk? WOW!
How about Reconfigurable Computers? These are basically FPGAs featuring some ALUs and general gates, but instead of configuring these once at "burn-time" they are reconfigured dynamically on the fly, to transform the complete processor core for a specific task.The technique is somewhat young, but the ides is promising both in reducing die-size (or maximizing resource usage) bringing down power consumption.
How would this combine with asynchronous computing?
Nice summer holidays experiment for my new CDburner.
...A few weeks and a LOT of them shiny disks!...Or at least, I'd guess you won't get away without the mandatory trial & error phase;-)
You're probably right about the CD specs. Things like rotation speed and the varying number of tracks per "cylinder" might be complicated, though. And so is the fact the tracks are in a spiral rather than concentrical. Still, I'm confident that with some endeavour the whole trick could be done hacked into mkisofs to work with regular hardware.
Ooh. This thing is bound to become mainstream shortly!
Sometimes, you might use a CDR for something other than just data storage. Distribution of your own demos, for example.
On any occasion where you have a little space left on your CD (and a little time in your tight agenda;-) you might just want to make it look a bit less dull.
How long 'till this hack, or a similar one will be available for any CD writer? It's an incredible idea - I love it - but it can't be that hard, can it? Just a matter of finding out a where which bit goes and then writing a descent piece of (open source) software, right?!?
In the Netherlands legal problems are often solved by legalizing the crime. This is of course an exaggeration, but think of the infamous drugs and abortion legislation. In that line it is not surprising that although you are not allowed to copy music to (analog) audiotapes for commercial purposes ("fair use") you pay a certain fee for each empty tape (typically $0.25-0.50) as well as any new CD/LP/tape? with contents. (The same fee probably goes for empty CDRs, though I'm not sure)
The money collected does not go back directly into the record industry's pockets, but is distributed by an organisation called Buma/Stemra. (Link is in Dutch only, so use the fish.) Each (Dutch?) artist gets a share, which is statistically determined by Buma/stemra, based on record sales, radio broadcasts and festivals. This "intelectual tax" constitutes only a small amount of money for an individual artist (typically $10-$100 per year, for an amature band that sold 1000-5000 records), but it seems to be a fair start.
Could a system like that work in Australia as well?
Why not donate to Wine?IBM must have some usefull DLLs that miss from Wine, right? Also, IMHO OS2's value was not so much in it's front end - which was rather similar to MS Windows'.
Its superiority over Windows is ratherr in its general design and back end: Compared to Win95, Warp is a real OS, rather than a graphical DOS shell.
I Agree a 40 x 120 pixel b&w screen is useless. Personally, I feel the same about the "high-res" colour screens in i-mode phones - or the preview panels on photo camera's for that matter. Hopefully (in the unforeseeable future) we'll have video beamers small and cheap enough to fit into our phones.
Still, $15 dollars for the camera is a good start for Starwars-like holographic communicators!
My suggestion was primarily intended as a joke, but I understand your concern.
> Imagine a Uhaul truck with no Timothy McViegh, now imagine 100's of them.
Hope you won't think I'm a terrorist when I say thoughts like these have crossed my mind lots of time. Guided trucks, airplanes, Exxon Valdes'... But then, technology to do make that stuff has been available for years to any toy-car, toy-plane or toy-rocket hobbyist. Appearently, it's much to complicated to people that don't understand it's dangerous to kill people.;-)
Maybe I'm too naive, but I think terrorists will typically start using simpler weapons rather than more complicated ones: why invent something complicated while security is so bad there are obvious ways to do it simpler.
While I agree it's always best to keep an eye at the big picture, I think geek applications such as the one I proposed won't endanger anyone - except for the inevitible accidents it will cause on public roads.
1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.
Hmm. Let's just forget about a hands-free kit and mount your phone to your front bumper. That - combined with a way to remotely stear the car with the cell phone at the other end - should give you the ultimate Pole Position experience! And on top of that: it's much safer to crash your car when you're not in it!
I used to work for a +4000 world-wide company that used Citrix for a time registration system, and I must admit that using it was horrific (mostly due to the type of application, though;-). While I don't know about Citrix server side maintainance, IMHO the IT people were happy about not having to install +4000 copies of their homebrew time registration tool every time they fixed a bug.
And even though it's hard to imagine an application where a technology like Citrix (or VNC, or any thin client application for that matter) is really worthwhile (and has acceptible performance using low bandwidth) the technology is interesting. In a sense it's a primitive form of parallel processing, that does not involve actually parallelizing the program: it's virtual to the user as well as the application.
There's no possible way to do that. How much logic is running on Word in between saves? Is your PDA going to run real-time grammar and spelling checks as you type, all locally?
Very good point. Moreover, I'm sure that without the code being adapted to this technology, an application would need more rather than less bandwidth when the application is cut in two in the middle instead of the edge.
Typically, desktop programs spend little time in front nor back end but spend most time "in the middle". Ie. accessing the screen is mostly done by the OS, as is file transfer. CPU time inside the actual application mostly stems from loops that require speedy memory access, and that therefore are best executed at either client or server, not both.
...Elaborating on several hints on this "invention"'s originallity...
[...]The two inventors, who run an 11-person company in Singapore called Intramedia, "stumbled on the code" that lets MXI perform this feat of translation and have spent the last four years perfecting it, said Chandrasekar. MXI is influenced by Unix, and borrows aspects of the kernel at the heart of the software, he said.
I wonder what "aspects" they "borrowed"... Maybe, they stumbled on a complete code base and spent the last four years trying to understand it;-).
Good point. I agree it's much easier to spot congestion through tracking. However, this information never needs to leave the "local tracking device".
Moreover, 10 cars in a traffic jam isn't much of a problem, except for the people in these 10 cars;-) (Of course the same goes for greater numbers.) My point is that a constant number of cars, stuck in a traffic jam is not the main problem, but rather a growing jam causing other jams elsewhere.
Isn't it more typical for the number of cars in a certain area to increase rapidly over a small time period - in case of a jam?
What we need is corporate transparency [...] it's not enough for them to tell us that they're trustworthy.
Wouldn't it be enough if it just were technologically impossible to gather information about individual cell phone users? I acknowledge that solving real-world problems with "new technologies" is generally a bad idea, but it should be possible to measure the number of cell phones at a particular location by tracking the amount of radion signals without knowing anything about the signal's contents.
I agree. Even in case you are actually paying the phone company (Ie in a phone converstion vs. stand-by) and this data is used solely to determine a "degree of congestion", I would not consider this company stealing anything. I don't consider highway patrol eating from the money I payed for my car as I pass a traffic monitoring camera. (...OK forget about those times you pay a speeding fine;-)
...But I guess cell phone data of the type "X is at Y", or "X is making a call at Y" doesn't add a lot to current traffic info. By the time this system has figured out there is congestion at some junction based on cell phone calls, the congestion will allready have spreaded (at approx. 20km/h in opposite direction) and you are likely to be just in the middle. To provide evasive routing and traffic speed control you need much more accurate data at very low latency.
To build a predicitive model, you could use data of individual cell phone routes. For large data sets this could result in a very acurate model of comuting traffic, which could be used to find predictive patterns.
So how about a company tracking your whereabouts through your cellular? Even in case your privacy is "respected", wouldn't that be frighning?
True. Adding more roads does yields more traffic, and the only read solution is to reduce mobility. But meanwhile - visa versa - it seems logical to aim road improvements at regions where congestion is highest. This is more efficient than just building roads and waiting for traffic to come use it. Why use (taxpayer's) money and use up space and natural recources for roads that aren't used.
...And for the problem of finding the bottlenecks, this system might help to some extent. So: wear/use your mobile to vote!
Maybe I am overgenerallizing. But most typically, banks get robbed by (ex) employees. Theft from supermarkets (in cities like Amsterdam, Holland (NL)) is due to employees, not customers in 80-90% of the cases. That is: the people that the institution is intended for (ie.: the employees) are more likely to damage it than its outside customers.
As a software developer, I know that it is generally me who (unintentionally) wrecks the (Windows) machine I'm working on, not my manager nor the IT people taking care of firewalls and virusses. It's not a matter of hardware, software(?) or procedures. It's simply the fact that as a developer I spend much more time using "my" computer and I am therefore much more likely to break it.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. The artical was published by MSMBC...
Makes you wonder about the origin of the acronym's first two letters, doesn't it?
>[...] if people know that buying this new board from MS/Intel (which has few tangible benefits) will render half of the internet unusable, nobody is going to go for it.
True. It's like the regional protection with DVDs. If given a choice, many consumers will rather buy a crappy "region free" DVD player than a high-end player that doesn't allow japanes/european/us disks.
Still, some others do especially when people remain willing to sacrify privacy for security in the light of the 9/11 type events. And they might just have enough momentum to threaten free software.
I agree that the idea behind the GNU project was not to produce a free (as in beer) clone of a crappy OS like Windows.
> I don't think it's a bad idea to be able to emulate windows programs, but we shouldn't make a distribution of linux with the sole purpose of doing it... do ya see what I mean?
Couldn't agree more. We don't need a mutilated Linux that tries to be Windows. We need an application like Wine, packaged to provide access to Windows on top of Linux. Lindows users should feel like: hey, I'm running Linux, but I don't need to get rid of my Windows legacy all at once. They shouldn't feel: damn, I glad I bought a cheap computer but it runs my old apps crappy. Have Linux adjust to Windows and it will end up like OS/2.
And never underestimate the need for applications like Wine. The major part of the networked world is not Free (as in speech). Therefore, to communicate in a Free manner with the rest of the world we ("the Linux community") need to be able read their crappy propriatry formats. I'm sorry to say that: resistance is brave, but in the end futile. Open source conversion tools and cloned applications like StarOffice, AbiWord, Gnumeric and OpenOffice are one way to read eg. MS Word formatted email (who invented that) or Excel files. Another way is to simply emulate those evil binaries. The same goes for games. Sooner or later you will need to collaborate, face it.
Isn't Linux's main problem with desktops the lack of added value on top of it being free (beer/speech)? Where's the desktop killer app? Where's the apache for the end-user/consumer masses?
Probably a stupid suggestion, but I wonder...
If
XBox + UltimateTV = KillerApp
Then
Massive loss + massive loss = big bucks?
How do all these poor Microsoft share holders make a living?
Good point. ' Guess that answers the question about the subtle difference between an emulator and a VM. VMs tend to include more high level concepts than emulators.
Still, as much as (software) emulators emulate existing hardware there have also been several attempts to create "virtual" machines in hardware. (For example: P-code interpreters (low-level Pascal) and Sun's attempts to hard wire a Java VM.)
Since climate may relate to any and all events in the past through chaos theory... Isn't the main problem that in order to proof any global climate theory in a (natural) scientific way, we would need to reproduce all events? Ie.: to proof that earth temparature rose over the last century due to human behaviour, we would need to:
1) Recreate all circumstances as thay were in 1902 - which we obviously can't do,
2) Reprocuce all events that happened since 1902 (including two world wars) - which we obviously don't want to do.
Now does that mean that climate research isn't science?
Wow. Why didn't I think of that when it was mentioned even in the original post... (Seriously, I forgot)
...Now with a futuristically fast CDReWriter and a flashing light source, wouldn't it be possible to display moving pictures on a rewritable disk? WOW!
How about Reconfigurable Computers? These are basically FPGAs featuring some ALUs and general gates, but instead of configuring these once at "burn-time" they are reconfigured dynamically on the fly, to transform the complete processor core for a specific task.The technique is somewhat young, but the ides is promising both in reducing die-size (or maximizing resource usage) bringing down power consumption.
How would this combine with asynchronous computing?
Nice summer holidays experiment for my new CDburner.
...Or at least, I'd guess you won't get away without the mandatory trial & error phase ;-)
...A few weeks and a LOT of them shiny disks!
You're probably right about the CD specs. Things like rotation speed and the varying number of tracks per "cylinder" might be complicated, though. And so is the fact the tracks are in a spiral rather than concentrical. Still, I'm confident that with some endeavour the whole trick could be done hacked into mkisofs to work with regular hardware.
Ooh. This thing is bound to become mainstream shortly!
Sometimes, you might use a CDR for something other than just data storage. Distribution of your own demos, for example.
;-) you might just want to make it look a bit less dull.
On any occasion where you have a little space left on your CD (and a little time in your tight agenda
How long 'till this hack, or a similar one will be available for any CD writer? It's an incredible idea - I love it - but it can't be that hard, can it? Just a matter of finding out a where which bit goes and then writing a descent piece of (open source) software, right?!?
Let's go!
In the Netherlands legal problems are often solved by legalizing the crime. This is of course an exaggeration, but think of the infamous drugs and abortion legislation. In that line it is not surprising that although you are not allowed to copy music to (analog) audiotapes for commercial purposes ("fair use") you pay a certain fee for each empty tape (typically $0.25-0.50) as well as any new CD/LP/tape? with contents. (The same fee probably goes for empty CDRs, though I'm not sure)
The money collected does not go back directly into the record industry's pockets, but is distributed by an organisation called Buma/Stemra. (Link is in Dutch only, so use the fish.) Each (Dutch?) artist gets a share, which is statistically determined by Buma/stemra, based on record sales, radio broadcasts and festivals. This "intelectual tax" constitutes only a small amount of money for an individual artist (typically $10-$100 per year, for an amature band that sold 1000-5000 records), but it seems to be a fair start.
Could a system like that work in Australia as well?
Why not donate to Wine?IBM must have some usefull DLLs that miss from Wine, right? Also, IMHO OS2's value was not so much in it's front end - which was rather similar to MS Windows'.
Its superiority over Windows is ratherr in its general design and back end: Compared to Win95, Warp is a real OS, rather than a graphical DOS shell.
I Agree a 40 x 120 pixel b&w screen is useless. Personally, I feel the same about the "high-res" colour screens in i-mode phones - or the preview panels on photo camera's for that matter. Hopefully (in the unforeseeable future) we'll have video beamers small and cheap enough to fit into our phones.
Still, $15 dollars for the camera is a good start for Starwars-like holographic communicators!
My suggestion was primarily intended as a joke, but I understand your concern.
;-)
> Imagine a Uhaul truck with no Timothy McViegh, now imagine 100's of them.
Hope you won't think I'm a terrorist when I say thoughts like these have crossed my mind lots of time. Guided trucks, airplanes, Exxon Valdes'... But then, technology to do make that stuff has been available for years to any toy-car, toy-plane or toy-rocket hobbyist. Appearently, it's much to complicated to people that don't understand it's dangerous to kill people.
Maybe I'm too naive, but I think terrorists will typically start using simpler weapons rather than more complicated ones: why invent something complicated while security is so bad there are obvious ways to do it simpler.
While I agree it's always best to keep an eye at the big picture, I think geek applications such as the one I proposed won't endanger anyone - except for the inevitible accidents it will cause on public roads.
1.) Cell phones are definitely getting banned in cars now.
Hmm. Let's just forget about a hands-free kit and mount your phone to your front bumper. That - combined with a way to remotely stear the car with the cell phone at the other end - should give you the ultimate Pole Position experience! And on top of that: it's much safer to crash your car when you're not in it!
I used to work for a +4000 world-wide company that used Citrix for a time registration system, and I must admit that using it was horrific (mostly due to the type of application, though ;-). While I don't know about Citrix server side maintainance, IMHO the IT people were happy about not having to install +4000 copies of their homebrew time registration tool every time they fixed a bug.
And even though it's hard to imagine an application where a technology like Citrix (or VNC, or any thin client application for that matter) is really worthwhile (and has acceptible performance using low bandwidth) the technology is interesting. In a sense it's a primitive form of parallel processing, that does not involve actually parallelizing the program: it's virtual to the user as well as the application.
There's no possible way to do that. How much logic is running on Word in between saves? Is your PDA going to run real-time grammar and spelling checks as you type, all locally?
Very good point. Moreover, I'm sure that without the code being adapted to this technology, an application would need more rather than less bandwidth when the application is cut in two in the middle instead of the edge.
Typically, desktop programs spend little time in front nor back end but spend most time "in the middle". Ie. accessing the screen is mostly done by the OS, as is file transfer. CPU time inside the actual application mostly stems from loops that require speedy memory access, and that therefore are best executed at either client or server, not both.
How about Citrix? Other thin client/heavy server applications?
...Elaborating on several hints on this "invention"'s originallity...
;-).
[...]The two inventors, who run an 11-person company in Singapore called Intramedia, "stumbled on the code" that lets MXI perform this feat of translation and have spent the last four years perfecting it, said Chandrasekar. MXI is influenced by Unix, and borrows aspects of the kernel at the heart of the software, he said.
I wonder what "aspects" they "borrowed"... Maybe, they stumbled on a complete code base and spent the last four years trying to understand it
Good point. I agree it's much easier to spot congestion through tracking. However, this information never needs to leave the "local tracking device".
;-) (Of course the same goes for greater numbers.) My point is that a constant number of cars, stuck in a traffic jam is not the main problem, but rather a growing jam causing other jams elsewhere.
Moreover, 10 cars in a traffic jam isn't much of a problem, except for the people in these 10 cars
Isn't it more typical for the number of cars in a certain area to increase rapidly over a small time period - in case of a jam?
What we need is corporate transparency [...] it's not enough for them to tell us that they're trustworthy.
Wouldn't it be enough if it just were technologically impossible to gather information about individual cell phone users? I acknowledge that solving real-world problems with "new technologies" is generally a bad idea, but it should be possible to measure the number of cell phones at a particular location by tracking the amount of radion signals without knowing anything about the signal's contents.
I agree. Even in case you are actually paying the phone company (Ie in a phone converstion vs. stand-by) and this data is used solely to determine a "degree of congestion", I would not consider this company stealing anything. I don't consider highway patrol eating from the money I payed for my car as I pass a traffic monitoring camera. (...OK forget about those times you pay a speeding fine ;-)
...But I guess cell phone data of the type "X is at Y", or "X is making a call at Y" doesn't add a lot to current traffic info. By the time this system has figured out there is congestion at some junction based on cell phone calls, the congestion will allready have spreaded (at approx. 20km/h in opposite direction) and you are likely to be just in the middle. To provide evasive routing and traffic speed control you need much more accurate data at very low latency.
To build a predicitive model, you could use data of individual cell phone routes. For large data sets this could result in a very acurate model of comuting traffic, which could be used to find predictive patterns.
So how about a company tracking your whereabouts through your cellular? Even in case your privacy is "respected", wouldn't that be frighning?
True. Adding more roads does yields more traffic, and the only read solution is to reduce mobility. But meanwhile - visa versa - it seems logical to aim road improvements at regions where congestion is highest. This is more efficient than just building roads and waiting for traffic to come use it. Why use (taxpayer's) money and use up space and natural recources for roads that aren't used.
...And for the problem of finding the bottlenecks, this system might help to some extent. So: wear/use your mobile to vote!
Of course, we're not there yet.
Maybe I am overgenerallizing. But most typically, banks get robbed by (ex) employees. Theft from supermarkets (in cities like Amsterdam, Holland (NL)) is due to employees, not customers in 80-90% of the cases. That is: the people that the institution is intended for (ie.: the employees) are more likely to damage it than its outside customers.
As a software developer, I know that it is generally me who (unintentionally) wrecks the (Windows) machine I'm working on, not my manager nor the IT people taking care of firewalls and virusses. It's not a matter of hardware, software(?) or procedures. It's simply the fact that as a developer I spend much more time using "my" computer and I am therefore much more likely to break it.