Of course, the best places to view this transit of Venus is in the middle east: Iran, Iraq and south-eastern Turkey. This is the real motivation behind the Bush administrations' efforts to destabilize the region and, essentially, prevent anyone (not a member of the right-wing, anti-scientific, anti-democratic cabal) from properly observing the transit.
Proper and accurate observations of the transit could provide crucial evidence that would undermine the doctines of the anti-intelectual, right-wing, pro-coporatist secret society whose members have taken over the U.S., British and Israeli governments. Any weakening of these doctrines would threaten the...
Well, you get the idea. To really fill the theory out we need some mention of the Kennedy assasinations (amoung others), the Knights of the Templar, Free Masons, Yakuza, Tibetan Bhudist warrior-monks, Cabalist mysticism/numerology, international bankers (of whatever persuasion), and a sprinkling of Lovecraftian Elder-Gods.
The sad part is, however, it just couldn't be more frieghtening or depressing than the truth (and not nearly as romantic).
"...inspiration from traditional Malay architecture, which he says possesses a bio-climatic environment and is in harmony with nature."
I tell ya, nothing impresses the ladies like a good bio-climatic environment.
Oh wait, that's just more pretentious crap from eco-freaks. NEXT
Actually, there is quite a science to tropical architechture, or there was before the invention of air-conditioning. I have an uncle who was trained as an architect in Vietnam and he learned all this stuff about how to design buildings to be self-cooling. Now, living in the U.S. where every building of any size has its own air-conditioner, his skills are completely outdated.
I'm not really trying to defend the term "bio-climatic" but there is something to be said for climate-appropriate architecture. It's not even a matter of being an "eco-freak": if you need to get by in a climate that has 100% humiditity and 110 degree temeratures in the shade, you need to put some real thought and effort into your architecture. Folks in tropical climates have understood this for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
I guess you could also say the same thing about the Television or the Radio... there wasn't really a problem to be solved but someone designed a "machine" that... [further ignorant blah-blah-blah snipped]
Of course there was a a real problem that radio was invented to solve: communication with ships and sea! Television had similar, though less specific , motivations (extending the range and vesatility of human communication).
In general, technology for its own sake is pointless. Combine this with the art/philosophy-major jargon ("challenging convetional assumptions...") and we have a completely worthless endeavor.
So someone stuck an Airport base station in thier backpack, big deal! Here, I stuck a desk chair in a dufflebag: ooh, I'm challenging conventional assumptions about deskchairs and suggesting new architectures for office furniture based on blah blah blah... I'm subversive and confrontational! (even though I have nothing of political or social merit to say)
While the method by which the reporter came up with the $1 trillion figure may be suspect, that doesn't mean that the figure is wrong (or, if the figure is wrong, it doesn't mean that the figure is an over-estimate). A bit of back-of-the-napkin fiddling can give you a good idea how much money this should cost:
Consider just the labor costs of a 10 year mission involving a space station, some launch and landing facilities, a moon base and a mars mission:
100 person operations greoup
300 person ground crew
12 person station crew
12 person moon-base crew
12 mars mission crew
180 person engineering staff
400 people for construction
50 person scientific staff
~1000 people total
Rule of thumb for a small tech company is that 5 people cost about $2,000,000 per year. We can de-rate that sum a bit (say down to $1.5 mil/anum) because we will be operating with larger organization with lower overhead costs. So we get about $300,000 per/year per/person or about 300,000,000/year total. Multiply by 10 years and we get about 3 trillion dollars. In order to be under 1 trillion dollars, we either need to be able to do with far fewer personnel (manage a space station, moon base, mars mission and attendant launch and landing facilities with only 300 people) or we need to do it much more cheaply.
I don't think it very likely that the outlined mission could be done with fewer than about a thousand people, but we could certainly cut the costs of employing those people if (I'm sure you saw this coming) we just outsourced everything to Russia, India and China, or we could have everyone employed in the U.S. but making minimum wage. In either case, there wouldn't be any significant benefit to the U.S. economy, either by soaking up unemployed workers (only 1000 people isn't going to make much of a dent in the 3 million lost jobs since Bush took charge) or by pumping money back into the economy at the top (trickle down economics, all over again).
No... on the left. Menu items have the keycode on the right, and the icon on the left. It would be redundant to put the keycode on the left *and* the right.
Yes, it would be redundant, just like putting a meaningless picture next to a prefectly good word or phrase would be redundant (and pointless).
Now, I know that the original Mac OS made allowances for icons to be added to menu items, but I never saw a usefull program that actually did that. I can see why, just for the sake of versatility, you may want to allow such a thing, but I don't think it is a terribly usefull or important feature.
That would be interesting. Remove all verbs from the toolbar, and the result would be nothing left on the toolbar.
We can only hope.
Besides, without an icon for Save, what do you display next to the Save menu item?
The command key equivalent?
Seriously, the proliferation of toolbars in modern programs is obsessive and pathological. A few things can be usefully placed in toolbars, most of which represent important program modes (selection of an editing tool in a painting or drawing program, bold/italic/underline or text jusifitcation modes in a word processor, etc.), but the edict that every task must, somewhere, be represented as a tiny picture is pure, unhelpfull, Microsoft bunk.
Icons in a GUI represent things (nouns), not actions (verbs). Action are represented either by a menu item (such as "Save", "Close" or "Quit") or by actual actions that the user performs ON an icon (moving it from one directory window to another, moving it from it's current location to the trash can, etc.)
The fact the Microsoft thought that representing the save action as an icon of any kind simply underscores their basic mis-understanding of the GUI metaphor.
Re:the Maginot Line of Spam
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Gates on Spam
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There's a fatal flaw to this plan: email wants to be free (as in beer).
Like hell. email doesn't want anything it's just inanimate bits. Some peole may want email to be free, but they may also bet willing to pay some amount to be rid of spam. Somewhere between the two desires there is a balance that is likely worth at least a few dollars (or what-have-you).
Such a global decentralized pay-as-you-go service can only take off if millions of users agree to it. As long as a free alternative exists (and just try stamping out good old-fashioned SMTP) the majority of users will prefer to delete a few spam messages rather than pay for each email they send. And if the people you wish to communicate with are still using the old free service, why pay for the new one?
The system doesn't have to be omnipresent to be effective. If only the major consumer ISPs got on board, that would be enough: In order to send spam to the users of the joiner ISPs, spam houses would need to shell out cash. Even if each email only cost a penny or two, this would be enough of a cost to deter most spammers.
There is no need to "stamp out good old-fashioned SMTP" either, my scheme is an extension of SMTP (an added protocol exchange). Most email exchanges could even continue to be conducted under the free model between trusted peers (the same folks that would, otherwise, need some kind of reciprocity agreement to cover balanced send/receive costs). Selected peers could be required to pay for email transmission based on observed spamminess of the peers email traffic.
Once a few of the big guys got on board with the extended SMTP system, smaller ISPs wishing to exchange email with them would jump on board quite rapidly. The cost to individual users would be nominal and could be marketed as a "spam prevention feature" (we already have premium ISPs marketing fare less effective services). If a user sends approximately as many emails as he receives, the incoming and outgoing costs would balance, making the service appear free to the average user.
Think about it for a moment: how many emails do you send in a month? I only send a couple dozen, myself. I'd be willing to pay an extra dollar or so a month if it eliminated all (or even most) of the spam I receive. The only people who would feel any real monetary pinch would be folks send out a great many more email messages than they receive: spammers.
Now I have no illusions that my sort of spam prevention scheme will be implemented, precisely because it is a distributed system. Any of the big players with the ability to push this sort of thing through are too interested in customer lock-in and monopoly building to back a plan that doesn't make provision for those interests. I just don't think that there are any fundamental technical, economic, social or psychological barriers to implementing such a mechanism.
Re:the Maginot Line of Spam
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Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Charging people postage for letters works because there is one centralized postal service which makes all the deliveries. Charging people for sending email will never work because nobody, not even Microsoft, owns the "email service." Because there isn't one. Just the SMTP protocol, and millions of computers which comply with it.
Maybe in a few decades people will catch on to the fact that the internet is global and decentralized, and that schemes like this are doomed to failure. You can't devise a pay-for-email scheme that doesn't have a dozen ways to get around it-- especially since this plan appears to be destined for the US only. As if every unsolicited email I get can't be traced to Taiwan, Korea, or Russia.
It shouldn't be too hard to devise a global, decentralized pay-for-email system:
Each email server would be allowed to require a payment from any other server sending it email. The receiving server may refuse to accept incoming email from a server if the sending server does not already have a positive balance with the receiving server.
The payment system between servers can be by almost any means: all we need is a protocol between servers so the receiver can indicate to the sender that the receiver thinks that the send has insufficient funds.
A sender that does not pay up is eventaully blocked by most other servers.
A receiver who does not acknowledge legitimate payments from senders will get blacklisted by the senders.
Senders, in order to recoup their costs, must pass on the payment requirement to upstream senders.
An auxiliary protocol might allow balance transfers between servers, but this has authentication difficulties. Still, for pairs of servers that routinely transfer large numbers of messages, the extra cost and difficulty of proper authentication may be worth it.
The scheme is independant of central authorities (the only actors involved are the current sender and receiver, somewhere in the store-and-forward chain) and of any given payment method (the receiver may indicate that only certain payment methods are acceptable, but the sender may decide to use another receiver with other payment options). The scheme allows distributed pruning of misbehaving nodes (senders and receivers).
From the Micro$oft perspective, there is one big problem with my scheme: it does not allow a central means of control that would hand power over to a monopolist. However, some people might consider this a feature rather than a flaw.
It is widely known that few significant development projects, if any, finish successfully, on time, and within budget.
What bothers me about statements like this, is that no one is suggesting that perhaps our estimation and budgeting methods are off.
What if someone scheduled one week and allocate $100 for design and construction of a skyscraper, and when the engineers failed to deliver, who should be blamed? The engineers?!
First, there are lots of folks who have been saying, for a long time, that our estimation and budgeting methods are inadequate: Fred Brooks and Tom DeMarco are just two of the best known advocates of this position. It seems, unfortunately, that it is not a message that many folk like to hear. It is, I guess, easier (and more expedient) to blame the tools or the craftspeople than to figure out what really went wrong.
Second, your example would be more apt if the building materials (steel and concrete) or the blueprints and construction tools were being blamed for cost overruns and schedule slips. No one would suggest that building skyscrapers would be easier and more reliable if the bricks and jackhammers were more intuitive.
What she is saying smacks of silver bullets (see Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month, chapter 16: No Silver Bullets - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (and succeeding chapters in the 20th Anniversary Edition)) and just can't be taken seriously. To summarize Brooks:
There is simply no way to take the programming and software engineering tasks and make them easy: they are difficult by their very essence, not by the accident of what tools we use.
While we may be able to devise languages and environments that make the creation of quality software by talented experts easier, we will never be able to make the creation of quality software easy and certain when undertaken by talentless hacks, amatures and diletants. Unfortunately, the later is what is desired by most by managers, becuase it would mean that the cost of labor could be greatly reduced (by hiring cheaper or fewer warm bodies). It also happens to be the largest market, at least in the past two decades, for new development tools: think of the target markets for VisualBASIC, dBASE IV, Hypercard and most spreadsheets.
Most Physicists believe that God created the laws of physics to be elegant...
Actually, most Physicists don't believe in God.
What's the problem here? As an engineer I see no problem with believing two (or more) contradictory things, so long as the math works out to at least three decimal places.
My personal belief is: If some entity created the laws of physics then that entity is god, but I don't believe in god (which is to say, I don't believe that the laws of physics were created: they just are)
Re:What does 'different mathmetics' mean?
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The Golden Ratio
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On a side note, here is a question that I have never known the answer to. Why do countries that have such dissimilar languages (the US and China or Russia for example) all use the same roman numeral numbers?
First you meant to ask "Why does everyone use arabic numbers even though the languages are different?" Roman numbers are rarely used anymore, and certainly not for anything that matters (not if you want to do any kind of arithmetic with the numbers, at least).
The prevailing use of arabic numerals, however, is a bit complicated. Some of it may be due to western colonialism in modern times (forcing the colonies to use european systems), but that's not all there is to it.
I would point out that somecultures still have their own numeral systems, but if you've read the first wikipedia reference, above, you will see why that would be pointless.
Most importantly: There's nothing about privacy in the first amendment.
Well, that depends on whether you consider fear and intimidation to be an abridgement of your right to freedom of speech. Further, though you are technically correct, the first amendment doesn't specifically address privacy (except as an interpretive issue), the fourth amendment is aprorpos:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It is from this amendment, specifically the part about being secure in their persons, that we get the modern right to privacy.
The two amendments, combined, are pretty good backup for the idea of a right to privacy, addressing both overt (search and seizure) and covert (fear and intimidation) governmental monkey-business.
The iPod is basically 5 parts: HD, PCB, LCD, case and battery. If I had to build the PCB from commodity parts (bought from someplace like Digi-Key) I could probably do it for about $50. The case would cost another $20 (in quantity 1000). An appropriate LCD from EarthLCD can be had for about $30 as well. I don't know what the prismatic LiION cell is wholesale, but I'll throw in another $30 for good measure. If we assume that I could get the HD for the 100,000 count price, the whole thing comes to ~$200.
We can safely assume that Apple can bring some pressure to bear for better pricing on all of the above parts. Given this analysis, I'd guess that the entry price for the mini-iPod will be $149 and Apple knows something we don't about how to keep costs down (or they're willing to take a much lower profit maragin to build market share: not a bad plan if you expect mini-iPod buyers to graduate to higher maragin products in a year or so).
SABRE was launched back in 1964, and is, I think, still in use today. I, personally, upgraded some NAVY software in 1995, that was first written back in the early 70s. The software, called SPAN for Strength PlANing model, was still in active use in 1995, and is probably still kicking.
Other folks have mentioned descendants of OS/360, but I think that there are also companies that actively support one or more of the PDP-11 OSs (either RT-11 or RSX-11), both of which predate the software in question.
Finally, we can have the obligatory SCO bashing comment: if you believe Mr. McBride, then millions of computers, from dozens of different vendors, are running software directly descended from systems first written between 1969 and 1972!
Imagine that you were given the task of designing a machine to lay bricks.... the problem becomes much more difficult if I add the stipulation that the machine be constructed entirely from bricks and mortar.
Now, imagine that the bricks come in several hundred shapes and sizes and the mortar can be formulated to produce a wide range of strength and fexiblity.
Atoms are not bricks and atomic bonds are not mortar. Analogies are only good for very specific and limited tasks: if taken too far (as you have done with your bricks & mortar = atoms & atomic bonds analogy) they breakdown and lead to misleading, if not outright ridiculous, conclusions.
About a year ago, my wife and I faced a similar situation: we wanted to write an online travel journal while on vacation in Viet Nam. We ended up using my slashdot journal, though we had to forego posting photographs (not too big a deal, however, since most of our pictures remained undeveloped until we returned to The States).
If you read further along in the journal, or if you caught the article, you can see that I faced similar problems with portable computing equipment. I got some of the same, unhelpfull, responses to my query as you see here.
I am currently working on a partial solution to the equipment problem. While my target is long battery life, the same solution would work for off-the-grid computing: the total power consumption of my device is low enough that a couple of solar panels could easily power it.
Ok, if we assume that you mean AA NiMH cells, we would be talking about 1800-2000 mAHrs at 4.8V or about 8.6-9.6 WHr. We can assume that the LCD and backlight eat about 1.5W, the CPU is probably no more than 1W and we can throw in another 1W just for good measure, for a grand total of about 3.5W. That should give us about 3 hours of battery life if we run the thing flat out. If we can throttle back the processor or, occasionally dim the screen, we can probably get that up to 4 or 5 hours.
If we use non-rechargable cells, we get a higher voltage and, maybe, greater capacity (the makers of standard non-rechargable batteries are pretty vague about actual capacities). If we assume that standard alkaline cells have a capacity of 2000-2200 mAHrs, we have about 12 WHrs from 4 cells, which gives us 4 hours of battery life, minimum. With aggress power saving, we can expect 5 or 6 hours of run time.
That really doesn't sound so bad, especially since they claim only 2 hours of storage in that proprietary disk. You could watch two disks before you had to recharge or change batteries.
This is the first real-world application of RFID that has made some sense to me (modulo the whole question of getting a friend to carry your tag while you play hookey). Schools have a legitimate interest in track student attendance and movements (at least while on school grounds).
Another application for RFID that would be unpleasant occurred to me recently: quality control and regulatory compliance stickers. Rather than have a bunch of little ugly stickers on the products you buy ("QC#4 passed", or "UL approved") you could write that information into an RFID tag embedded in the product. It would be both prettier and, maybe, a bit harder to forge. Then we would have a legitimate application for consumer RFID tag readers (so you could verify the regulatory compliance of products on store shelves, read the embedded serial number/batch number/date of manufacture, etc.)
When, some years ago, I was in the nappy (diaper in the US) purchasing stage, writing on the packat claimed that using disposables was more environmentally friendly than machine washing and tumble drying re-usables.
If this is really what the package read, then you can see how they got this past the advertising standards people: Tumble drying is highly inefficient, burning lots of energy just to evaporate water. If, instead, you machine washed the cloth diapers and then hung them out to dry, the environmentally friendly advantage of the disposables would disappear. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be doing this, but the disposable diaper company clearly stacked the deck when they made this claim.
The chip will have 64 threads of execution, which means that each thread only needs to deliver about 400 MFLOPS. Since a standard floating point instruction has a latency (from issue to retire) of about 5 or 6 cycles, this is easily achievable in current technology (2-2.5 GHz system clock) without even using pipelining. If the thread units are pipelined, you can expect the clock to be in 400-800 MHz range.
When they have a device that delivers 200 GFLOPS with 64 threads, then I'll be interested.
I had an 11/44, 3 RL02s (10MB removable platter hard disks) and 2 RX02s (8-inch floppies) that ran quite happily off the 110V power from a high-amp outlet for a window air-conditioner. Sure, the lights in the house dimmed a bit when I powered it up, and the room got a bit warm, but there was no real problem.
I also have a Varian 620f that could be run off residential power, but you needed the kind of outlet you have for a washing machine (either 3 prong plug with one prong perpendular to the others, or three prong twist-to-lock). Again, the room gets kind of warm when you run the thing.
All such machines were heavy beasts, so you really shouldn't have them in the upper floors of a residential home (at least, not in the middle of the floor. Near a load-bearing wall might be ok), but the power requirements weren't too bad, so long as you could afford the bill every month. At worst, you would need to hire an electrician to install special, high capacity, breakers, wires and outlets from the breaker box to the room where the computer lives. Just a minor matter of money.
The bigger problem was that some of the peripherals (especially removable platter hard disk drives) had pretty strict environmental constraints: they didn't like to be exposed to airbourne particulates (dust, smoke, pollen, etc.), and weren't too happy about humidity either. Real installations had air filtration in the computer room in order to keep the air particulate-free, as well as mondo air-conditioning systems to keep the equipment cool and dry. Again, you could do such things in a residential home, but it would be expensive.
Finally, most of the bigger systems required quite a bit of regular maintenance. This would add to the already substantial cost of running such a beast. This is the main reason that I retired my 11/44: I couldn't afford the upkeep.
R.M.S clearly didn't have lots of money to burn, so any such finnicky systems were out of his league: Personal computers and workstations, on the other hand, would run quite happily in a regular, humid, dusty, suburbann home.
Slashdot Mirror
Proper and accurate observations of the transit could provide crucial evidence that would undermine the doctines of the anti-intelectual, right-wing, pro-coporatist secret society whose members have taken over the U.S., British and Israeli governments. Any weakening of these doctrines would threaten the ...
Well, you get the idea. To really fill the theory out we need some mention of the Kennedy assasinations (amoung others), the Knights of the Templar, Free Masons, Yakuza, Tibetan Bhudist warrior-monks, Cabalist mysticism/numerology, international bankers (of whatever persuasion), and a sprinkling of Lovecraftian Elder-Gods.
The sad part is, however, it just couldn't be more frieghtening or depressing than the truth (and not nearly as romantic).
Actually, there is quite a science to tropical architechture, or there was before the invention of air-conditioning. I have an uncle who was trained as an architect in Vietnam and he learned all this stuff about how to design buildings to be self-cooling. Now, living in the U.S. where every building of any size has its own air-conditioner, his skills are completely outdated.
I'm not really trying to defend the term "bio-climatic" but there is something to be said for climate-appropriate architecture. It's not even a matter of being an "eco-freak": if you need to get by in a climate that has 100% humiditity and 110 degree temeratures in the shade, you need to put some real thought and effort into your architecture. Folks in tropical climates have understood this for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
No, seriously, I forgot what your point was. Could you repeat the question?
Of course there was a a real problem that radio was invented to solve: communication with ships and sea! Television had similar, though less specific , motivations (extending the range and vesatility of human communication).
In general, technology for its own sake is pointless. Combine this with the art/philosophy-major jargon ("challenging convetional assumptions...") and we have a completely worthless endeavor.
So someone stuck an Airport base station in thier backpack, big deal! Here, I stuck a desk chair in a dufflebag: ooh, I'm challenging conventional assumptions about deskchairs and suggesting new architectures for office furniture based on blah blah blah ... I'm subversive and confrontational! (even though I have nothing of political or social merit to say)
While the method by which the reporter came up with the $1 trillion figure
may be suspect, that doesn't mean that the figure is wrong (or, if the figure
is wrong, it doesn't mean that the figure is an over-estimate). A bit of
back-of-the-napkin fiddling can give you a good idea how much money this
should cost:
Consider just the labor costs of a 10 year mission involving a space station,
some launch and landing facilities, a moon base and a mars mission:
Rule of thumb for a small tech company is that 5 people cost about $2,000,000
per year. We can de-rate that sum a bit (say down to $1.5 mil/anum) because
we will be operating with larger organization with lower overhead costs. So
we get about $300,000 per/year per/person or about 300,000,000/year total.
Multiply by 10 years and we get about 3 trillion dollars. In order to be under
1 trillion dollars, we either need to be able to do with far fewer personnel
(manage a space station, moon base, mars mission and attendant launch and
landing facilities with only 300 people) or we need to do it much more cheaply.
I don't think it very likely that the outlined mission could be done with
fewer than about a thousand people, but we could certainly cut the costs of
employing those people if (I'm sure you saw this coming) we just outsourced
everything to Russia, India and China, or we could have everyone employed
in the U.S. but making minimum wage. In either case, there wouldn't be any
significant benefit to the U.S. economy, either by soaking up unemployed
workers (only 1000 people isn't going to make much of a dent in the 3 million
lost jobs since Bush took charge) or by pumping money back into the
economy at the top (trickle down economics, all over again).
Yes, it would be redundant, just like putting a meaningless picture next to a prefectly good word or phrase would be redundant (and pointless).
Now, I know that the original Mac OS made allowances for icons to be added to menu items, but I never saw a usefull program that actually did that. I can see why, just for the sake of versatility, you may want to allow such a thing, but I don't think it is a terribly usefull or important feature.
We can only hope.
The command key equivalent?
Seriously, the proliferation of toolbars in modern programs is obsessive and pathological. A few things can be usefully placed in toolbars, most of which represent important program modes (selection of an editing tool in a painting or drawing program, bold/italic/underline or text jusifitcation modes in a word processor, etc.), but the edict that every task must, somewhere, be represented as a tiny picture is pure, unhelpfull, Microsoft bunk.
The fact the Microsoft thought that representing the save action as an icon of any kind simply underscores their basic mis-understanding of the GUI metaphor.
Like hell. email doesn't want anything it's just inanimate bits. Some peole may want email to be free, but they may also bet willing to pay some amount to be rid of spam. Somewhere between the two desires there is a balance that is likely worth at least a few dollars (or what-have-you).
The system doesn't have to be omnipresent to be effective. If only the major consumer ISPs got on board, that would be enough: In order to send spam to the users of the joiner ISPs, spam houses would need to shell out cash. Even if each email only cost a penny or two, this would be enough of a cost to deter most spammers.
There is no need to "stamp out good old-fashioned SMTP" either, my scheme is an extension of SMTP (an added protocol exchange). Most email exchanges could even continue to be conducted under the free model between trusted peers (the same folks that would, otherwise, need some kind of reciprocity agreement to cover balanced send/receive costs). Selected peers could be required to pay for email transmission based on observed spamminess of the peers email traffic.
Once a few of the big guys got on board with the extended SMTP system, smaller ISPs wishing to exchange email with them would jump on board quite rapidly. The cost to individual users would be nominal and could be marketed as a "spam prevention feature" (we already have premium ISPs marketing fare less effective services). If a user sends approximately as many emails as he receives, the incoming and outgoing costs would balance, making the service appear free to the average user.
Think about it for a moment: how many emails do you send in a month? I only send a couple dozen, myself. I'd be willing to pay an extra dollar or so a month if it eliminated all (or even most) of the spam I receive. The only people who would feel any real monetary pinch would be folks send out a great many more email messages than they receive: spammers.
Now I have no illusions that my sort of spam prevention scheme will be implemented, precisely because it is a distributed system. Any of the big players with the ability to push this sort of thing through are too interested in customer lock-in and monopoly building to back a plan that doesn't make provision for those interests. I just don't think that there are any fundamental technical, economic, social or psychological barriers to implementing such a mechanism.
It shouldn't be too hard to devise a global, decentralized pay-for-email system:
The scheme is independant of central authorities (the only actors involved are the current sender and receiver, somewhere in the store-and-forward chain) and of any given payment method (the receiver may indicate that only certain payment methods are acceptable, but the sender may decide to use another receiver with other payment options). The scheme allows distributed pruning of misbehaving nodes (senders and receivers).
From the Micro$oft perspective, there is one big problem with my scheme: it does not allow a central means of control that would hand power over to a monopolist. However, some people might consider this a feature rather than a flaw.
First, there are lots of folks who have been saying, for a long time, that our estimation and budgeting methods are inadequate: Fred Brooks and Tom DeMarco are just two of the best known advocates of this position. It seems, unfortunately, that it is not a message that many folk like to hear. It is, I guess, easier (and more expedient) to blame the tools or the craftspeople than to figure out what really went wrong.
Second, your example would be more apt if the building materials (steel and concrete) or the blueprints and construction tools were being blamed for cost overruns and schedule slips. No one would suggest that building skyscrapers would be easier and more reliable if the bricks and jackhammers were more intuitive.
What she is saying smacks of silver bullets (see Fred Brooks Mythical Man-Month, chapter 16: No Silver Bullets - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering (and succeeding chapters in the 20th Anniversary Edition)) and just can't be taken seriously. To summarize Brooks:
While we may be able to devise languages and environments that make the creation of quality software by talented experts easier, we will never be able to make the creation of quality software easy and certain when undertaken by talentless hacks, amatures and diletants. Unfortunately, the later is what is desired by most by managers, becuase it would mean that the cost of labor could be greatly reduced (by hiring cheaper or fewer warm bodies). It also happens to be the largest market, at least in the past two decades, for new development tools: think of the target markets for VisualBASIC, dBASE IV, Hypercard and most spreadsheets.
What's the problem here? As an engineer I see no problem with believing two (or more) contradictory things, so long as the math works out to at least three decimal places.
My personal belief is: If some entity created the laws of physics then that entity is god, but I don't believe in god (which is to say, I don't believe that the laws of physics were created: they just are)
I would point out that some cultures still have their own numeral systems, but if you've read the first wikipedia reference, above, you will see why that would be pointless.
Well, that depends on whether you consider fear and intimidation to be an abridgement of your right to freedom of speech. Further, though you are technically correct, the first amendment doesn't specifically address privacy (except as an interpretive issue), the fourth amendment is aprorpos:
It is from this amendment, specifically the part about being secure in their persons, that we get the modern right to privacy.
The two amendments, combined, are pretty good backup for the idea of a right to privacy, addressing both overt (search and seizure) and covert (fear and intimidation) governmental monkey-business.
We can safely assume that Apple can bring some pressure to bear for better pricing on all of the above parts. Given this analysis, I'd guess that the entry price for the mini-iPod will be $149 and Apple knows something we don't about how to keep costs down (or they're willing to take a much lower profit maragin to build market share: not a bad plan if you expect mini-iPod buyers to graduate to higher maragin products in a year or so).
Other folks have mentioned descendants of OS/360, but I think that there are also companies that actively support one or more of the PDP-11 OSs (either RT-11 or RSX-11), both of which predate the software in question.
Finally, we can have the obligatory SCO bashing comment: if you believe Mr. McBride, then millions of computers, from dozens of different vendors, are running software directly descended from systems first written between 1969 and 1972!
kibo says.
Now, imagine that the bricks come in several hundred shapes and sizes and the mortar can be formulated to produce a wide range of strength and fexiblity.
Atoms are not bricks and atomic bonds are not mortar. Analogies are only good for very specific and limited tasks: if taken too far (as you have done with your bricks & mortar = atoms & atomic bonds analogy) they breakdown and lead to misleading, if not outright ridiculous, conclusions.
If you read further along in the journal, or if you caught the article, you can see that I faced similar problems with portable computing equipment. I got some of the same, unhelpfull, responses to my query as you see here.
I am currently working on a partial solution to the equipment problem. While my target is long battery life, the same solution would work for off-the-grid computing: the total power consumption of my device is low enough that a couple of solar panels could easily power it.
If we use non-rechargable cells, we get a higher voltage and, maybe, greater capacity (the makers of standard non-rechargable batteries are pretty vague about actual capacities). If we assume that standard alkaline cells have a capacity of 2000-2200 mAHrs, we have about 12 WHrs from 4 cells, which gives us 4 hours of battery life, minimum. With aggress power saving, we can expect 5 or 6 hours of run time.
That really doesn't sound so bad, especially since they claim only 2 hours of storage in that proprietary disk. You could watch two disks before you had to recharge or change batteries.
Another application for RFID that would be unpleasant occurred to me recently: quality control and regulatory compliance stickers. Rather than have a bunch of little ugly stickers on the products you buy ("QC#4 passed", or "UL approved") you could write that information into an RFID tag embedded in the product. It would be both prettier and, maybe, a bit harder to forge. Then we would have a legitimate application for consumer RFID tag readers (so you could verify the regulatory compliance of products on store shelves, read the embedded serial number/batch number/date of manufacture, etc.)
If this is really what the package read, then you can see how they got this past the advertising standards people: Tumble drying is highly inefficient, burning lots of energy just to evaporate water. If, instead, you machine washed the cloth diapers and then hung them out to dry, the environmentally friendly advantage of the disposables would disappear. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be doing this, but the disposable diaper company clearly stacked the deck when they made this claim.
When they have a device that delivers 200 GFLOPS with 64 threads, then I'll be interested.
oops, my bad, that's an S-Video port.
I also have a Varian 620f that could be run off residential power, but you needed the kind of outlet you have for a washing machine (either 3 prong plug with one prong perpendular to the others, or three prong twist-to-lock). Again, the room gets kind of warm when you run the thing.
All such machines were heavy beasts, so you really shouldn't have them in the upper floors of a residential home (at least, not in the middle of the floor. Near a load-bearing wall might be ok), but the power requirements weren't too bad, so long as you could afford the bill every month. At worst, you would need to hire an electrician to install special, high capacity, breakers, wires and outlets from the breaker box to the room where the computer lives. Just a minor matter of money.
The bigger problem was that some of the peripherals (especially removable platter hard disk drives) had pretty strict environmental constraints: they didn't like to be exposed to airbourne particulates (dust, smoke, pollen, etc.), and weren't too happy about humidity either. Real installations had air filtration in the computer room in order to keep the air particulate-free, as well as mondo air-conditioning systems to keep the equipment cool and dry. Again, you could do such things in a residential home, but it would be expensive.
Finally, most of the bigger systems required quite a bit of regular maintenance. This would add to the already substantial cost of running such a beast. This is the main reason that I retired my 11/44: I couldn't afford the upkeep.
R.M.S clearly didn't have lots of money to burn, so any such finnicky systems were out of his league: Personal computers and workstations, on the other hand, would run quite happily in a regular, humid, dusty, suburbann home.