even if we have lots of unused processor time (which I'm sure we do), pumping the data in to and out of a remote procedure call can consume a lot of bandwidth and result in a huge lag time. Many problems don't distribute well, even when you have relatively high bandwidth connections to send the data over (like multi-GB memory busses), so the problem only gets worse when you use a measley network pipe or modem line. (processor memory bus bandwidth tends to be in the 5-10 Giga-bit range, even the best home internet access is only 10-100 Mega-bits)
the steady state of a hard drive is full. There just isn't going to be enough spare, on-line, storage space on folks' desktops to give any appreciable amount out to share. If you have to deal with the bloat of a self healing encoding, the problem only gets worse.
Consider the case of N users, each with one hard drive of size X. They share out half of their hard drive space, but a file takes three times as much space to store on the distributed system than it does purely locally (for the self-healing encoding). The total hard drive space available to the group is now N*X/2 + 1/3*N*X/2 = N*X*4/6, or just over half the actual total space on the network. The average space available to any single user is the total available space on the network divided by the number of users, or just over half the actual space on the individual user's local hard drive.
That doesn't sound like too good a deal to me. Admittedly, I will be getting some extra reliability, but given how many home user's back-up their data on a regular basis, I don't think reliability is worth much (at least to home users).
At first blush, it sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think the economics are going to support it. It will always be easier and cheaper for the folk that actually need more storage or processing power to just go out and buy it, especially while Moore's law is in effect. For anyone else, it just doesn't matter.
Other folk have mentioned the MPEG motion compensation algorithm (though I think they got it a bit wrong). The algorithm chops up the current frame into 8x8 pixel block on even block sized boundries (first block at (0,0):(7,7), second block at (0,8):(7,15), and so on). These blocks are then compared against all possible 8x8 pixel blocks, local to the original block, in the adjacent frame (we compare against the blocks shifted by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 pixels in both the x and y directions). Essentially, each block is compared against every possible sub block of a 12x12 pixel block centered on the original block's position. The comparisson succeeds if the difference between the two blocks in small enough (this is a threshold that you set).
Once you have done this for every block in the original frame, you have a set of motion vectors from which you can construct an intermediate frame.
My biggest problem with the micro-ATX motherboards is that they still dictate the geometry of the I/O ports. If I want an iMac-esque PC, I usually want the I/O ports moved around to more sensible locations, especially if I have several different roles in mind for the machines. If all the I/O ports were combined into a single standard internal header (much like the ATX power header) then the case designers would have much more freedom on case shape and port placement.
I'm not certain what to do about expansion slots, but for most of these ultra-small PCs, I guess it doesn't matter very much, since you won't have a wealth of slots to deal with anyhow. I do, however, have a problem with all-in-one PC motherboards, having been burned a couple times with crappy integrated audio and video components (and all the integrated ethernet interfaces I have seen have been based on the abominable Realtek chipset). At least the iMacs use half-reasonable components for the integrated stuff.
So long as the micro-ATX boards use crappy components and require the end result to be a simple box, I'm not too interested.
Unless the e-mail is encrypted during transmission there is little point in worrying about storing it on your local machine in an encrypted format. Since the transmission format is wide open you have to assume that it has already been captured and read by anyone interested in snooping around your life. If they already have copies of some of the clear text that resides in the encrypted archive, it will be child's play to find your encryption keys and decrypt the entire archive.
If you are planning on doing stuff you would rather not have extra evidence of later, don't talk about it over e-mail! If you are conspiring with other folk stupid enough to send incriminating information over e-mail, you have bigger problems to worry about. If you are already sending all your e-mail in an encrypted form, you simply need to keep the encrypted e-mails in the archive as well.
As others have already pointed out, Itanium does fairly badly on SpecINT and moderatly well (though not spectacularly) on SpecFP, but there are other benchmarks to consider: Stream and TPC are the two that leap to mind, but I am sure that there are some others that measure more than just raw CPU performance. (you won't be running any of your code on a bare CPU anyway, so you should consider some measures of full system performance) I don't see any numbers for Itanium on the Stream or TPC web sites, but maybe I missed something.
Graphics professionals don't buy Macs out of brand loyalty, they buy them because they are the best tool for the job. It is really that simple. No matter what advances have been made by Windows or Linux in the past decade, both are still lacking many of the vital features required by folk working in the print industry or in visual arts.
Unless you can get software on an academic discount (are you or your friend enrolled in a university?) you will be hard pressed to assemble an adequate system for only $1000. Even if you buy a used system (used iMacs can be had for $600-$700) you will find it hard to obtain the required application software with the remaining funds (Photoshop and Illustrator are expensive). If you can get academic discounts, however, it shouldn't be hard at all (you can get a new iMac plus a full suite of software for something near $1000. Apple offers reasonable discounts and bundles to academic buyers) to get a full package within budget.
In an extreme situation, you can get perfectly good used Macs (pre-G3, PCI PowerMacs: [789][56]00 series machines) at very reasonable prices (I recently bought two 8500s for $150 each) and slap in a G3 upgrade (~$150) and a bunch of RAM (~$40/128MB, comparatively expensive, but not monstrous), a new hard drive (18GB ~$160) and a nice monitor (any PC monitor will work, but you will need an adapter: $30 at the local computer shop) for well under the proposed $1000 limit. You still have the problem of software, however.
In the interests of full disclosure: I am a long time Mac user (since 1984) and own stock in Apple. I have also worked in the design graphics industry (as a typesetter and graphic artist) so I know something of what I speak. In recent years, I have migrated much of my computing off of Macs onto Linux, but only for web-surfing and programming (I changed careers in the early ninties. I'm now a software engineer). However, if I have something to do that involves looking good in print or on screen, I still use a Mac.
If you can find a copy of it, C+C++: Programming with Objects in C and C++ by Allen Holub. The book gives a solid overview of object orientation, as well as examples of how to implement object oriented programming in ostensibly non-object oriented languages (in this case, standard C). Once it has introduced the basic OO concepts, and how you might implement them in a non-OO language, it goes on to show you how C++ delivers the same language features with much less hassle. As with other books by Allen Holub, this one is written with clarity and humor: it is both informative and enjoyable to read.
You may be remembering what your science teachers have told you, but you are wrong about the actual practice of science. There are only two 'stages' and you never reach any kind of end.
In the first stage you have some phenomena that you want to try to 'explain' (in scientific parlance 'explain' actually means 'predict through use of appropriate mathematical formulae). The scientists will come up with hypotheses that yield testable formulae for predicting the phenomena in question.
In the second stage you gather lots of empirical data and see if the predictions of your hypotheses agree with the data you have gathered. You may gather data specifically chosen to prove your hypotheses false (since it should be easy to predict what measurements are most likely to disagree with your hypotheses) or you may just use whatever data comes easily to hand (there may be a large mass of existing data, as with Tyco Brahe's astronomical measurements used by Kepler to derive the shapes of the planets' orbits).
Once you have gathered enough data you can see where your hypotheses disagree with the measured data and adjust the hypotheses accordingly. Eventually your hypotheses agree to the measured data to within the current error bounds, at which time you have an official theory.
Importantly, you never actually have access to truth. Nothing is ever proven (though many things may be disproven) and everything is open to some level of doubt. It's just a matter of how much doubt you find acceptable for any give application. For common, everyday tasks, the precision required of most measurements is very low:
speed of light = faster than anything else
speed of sound = not as fast as light but faster than most other things
age of the universe = age of the earth = older than we care to think about
mass of a subatomic particle = as close to zero as makes no odds.
For specific applications you will require greater precision, but still not perfect precision:
how well calibrated should the resistors in the power supply of my desktop computer be? = 10% - 15% of specified value
how well calibrated should the resistors in my pacemaker be? = 2% - 5% of specified value.
The real problem with your use of the terms 'truth' and 'proof' is that they don't mean the same thing to a scientist as they mean in common english. In common english Truth is absolute and Proof is irrefutable. To a scientist, however, truth simply means that the formulae yield answers close enough to measured values that we can't tell the difference (modulo the accuracy of our measuring devices), and proof simply means that no data has been found that clearly contradicts a specific set of formulae (aka, an hypothesis).
Just because science isn't accessing some cosmic Truth doesn't mean that sceintific theories are really just opinions. An opinion is a though in someone's head that has no concrete basis in fact. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is a set of formulae that serve to predict objective, measurable values for physical phenomena to within some specified error range. It may not be too similar to what most people think of as Truth, but it is pretty far from the common definition of option as well. It is certainly a damn sight more reliable that the assorted forms of propaganda, superstition, and outright ignorance that have passed themselves off as Truth for most of history.
Through all the talk of adding government backdoors to crypto-systems, I haven't seen any coverage of how the backdoors would work from a technical standpoint. I've heard all the hand-waving about delivery of sealed documents to the supreme court that would only be opened upon presentation of a warrant, but I want to know the mathematics behind it all.
Are the proposed backdoors simply blanket weaknesses in the allowed crypto standards, or does this have something to do with how the final encrypted message is constructed? I can see some ways that the users decryption key could be incorporated into the resulting message (as an encrypted sub-message using the government's key) so that the government could recover the user's private key from any message. I'm much less certain of how you would construct an encryption algorithm that would ensure that all messages could be decrypted by both the user's private key and the government's private key.
Is there some description of how these backdoors are supposed to work?
There are a number of good things about the P4's new instruction set and architecture like 128 integer and 128 floating point registers, not to mention making use of predication and data speculation at the hardware level.
um, have there been some really big changes is the IA32 or is this guy getting P4 confused with the IA64?
No. The registesr file and ALU make up a relatively small part of a modern CPU. Quite a bit of room is taken up by on-chip caches and assorted bits of scheduling/dependancy logic. I'd bet that the lion share of the extra trasistors goes first to extra on-chip cache, then to logic supporting the extra pipeline stages.
No matter how high resolution your monitor, or how fast the refresh rate, any region of illuminated (i.e. non-black) pixels will show up as discrete spots of light. On older, lower resolution, displays this is because you can distinguish between separate raster scans. On newer displays you have the shadow mask to contend with. In either case, the only way to make the text characters appear as actual continuous regions is to display them as non-illuminated pixels (i.e. black text on a non-black background).
There have been studies done (do a google search on "contrast" and "readability") that show that black text on a pale background may be better than black text on a pure white background. The studies don't seem to agree on what the best background colors are (they range from cream to pale green to light grey to pink). here is a page that is a good introduction to the topic (WARNING: the page has a mildly anoying web gizmo).
You might also consider that there could be something wrong with your monitor. I have some old monitors that ripple and pulse for a few minutes after you power them up or when the line power sags (I don't keep the monitors on the UPS in order to maximize battery life). It may be time to get a new monitor.
Finally, as others have said, maybe your eyes are just tired. Take a break. Go look out a window at some distant objects. Get out into the Big Blue Room.
is not whether or not worms can be written for one system or another, but whether or not the system explicitly defines primitives that directly enable the functioning of said worms.
In the case of the internet mail worm, the function of the worm was based on unanticipated behaviors of both the worm code (the author had intended the worm to limit its speed of propagation) and the internet mail system (the author was exploiting a bug in the mail transfer agent). Clearly, this sort of situation, while a threat to security, is easily remedied once the exploit is known. The remedy can even be implemented with little or no effect on daily operations, since the erroneous behavior of the program will not have been used as part of any applications.
In the case of the various Outlook worms, however, the situation is reversed. The worms rely on explicit features of the Outlook suite for their functioning. These same features have been incorporated into all sorts of applications built upon the Outlook suite, which means that in order to disable the worm, many production applications must be modified or discarded.
This is a design issue, at its heart. There are some cultural effects involved (e.g. the MS assumption of a monoclonal computing environment leads to the expectation, and exploitation, of features that would not be reliably present in a heterogeneous enviornment.) but the central problem is the explicit decision by Outlook program managers to include features that were inherently insecure. (Consider that, while Sun may have a similar monoclonal outlook to Microsoft, Java was designed for both security and provision of a wide and reliable feature set)
The question is not "can worms be written for systems other than Microsoft's?" -- to which the answer must always be 'yes', even if only because we can't rule out the possibility entirely -- but, rather, "is it easier or harder to write worms for Microsoft systems than for other systems?" The answer is, pretty clearly, that Microsoft's design decisions make worms far easier to implement on MS platforms than on other platforms.
The first 3D, first person, multi-player games that I recall were both on the Mac, back in the 1989-1991 time frame.
There was a simple maze/combat game, whose name I don't quite recall (I'm thinking it was MazeWars) which offered a first-person perspective mode. Web searches turn up references to games of similar description on Sun workstations and Xerox Altos, which suggests an eaven earlier date than 1989.
Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.
While DOOM may have popularized the FPS genre, it was nowhere near originating it.
I will say, however, the DOOM, and Wolfenstein before it, were the first games to produce anything like a sense of real motion on non-workstation class hardware (I'd seen nausea inducing games on SGI workstations back in 1991, but most PCs and Macs couldn't render quickly, or smoothly, enough to fool the eye). I'm still impressed with what DOOM could do on a lowly 40MHz 386.
Re:I want to know about Artist's Concepts.
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Primordial Helium
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There is an entire field of artistic endeavor known as either scientific illustration or technical illustration. I don't actually know much about what you study to get such a degree, but I know a few technical illustrators, and would easily trust them with far-more-than-remotely scientific things.
As for NASA having artists on the payroll, you can see some examples of just this sort of thing when the NASA Art Train comes to a town near you. You might even recognize a few of the artists in the exhibition (scroll down past the sponsors' names).
The TRS-80 web-server isn't quite as much of a joke as the authors' indended:
First, there is a Zilog Z80 variant that is marketed as a web server on a chip. Of course, the ez80190 runs at 50MHz and can address up to 16MB of memory, a far cry from the old Z80-A or 8080. (the chip itself only appears to have 8KB of SRAM, however, which is pretty similar to a TRS-80 or yore)
Second, the storage capacity of audio cassette tapes should not be underestimated. We can reasonably espect that the maximum storage density of an audio cassette is similar to the maximum bandwidth of vioce telephone lines (audio cassettes probably have a higher storage density, in fact, because the vioce telephone line bandwith is artificially limited in order to filter out varous kinds of noise). If we could record at 32Kbaud we would be able to store 10MB (that's Mega BYTES) on one side of a 90 minute tape.
Looked at another way, a cassette tape can store about the same amount of information as your average CD (they store about the same amount of music, and cassette tapes are actually better fidelity that audio CDs, they just degrade faster and don't reproduce well on consumer grade equipment), which means that we could actually expect to get something more like 600MB-800MB if we had really good recording and playback equipment. Not too shaby.
Of course, with a normal tape player we would have an average seek time of over 20 minutes, but you have to make some compromises for this level of geekiness. I can think of a few ways to decrease the seek time, but we are still talking about something on the order of minutes rather than a reasonable value in the range of seconds.
Stepping on or dropping a paper book doesn't destroy it (paper doesn't shatter when stepped on, unlike LCDs). Even immersion in water doesn't completely destroy a paper book, but I'd be suprised if an eBook would survive that.
Otherwise, you hit all the most important points. I've been saying this for years, every time someone brings up the whole eBook canard: There may be a very few instances in which eBooks make sense for the consumer, but, in general, paper is a much better technology. It doesn't have much to do with rights, but with ergonomic and economic concerns.
Until I can buy an ebook reader for $5, which will survive a fall from 6 meters onto cement (or being struck, repeatedly, with a sledge hammer, for that matter) and subsequent dunking in salt water, can be folded in half or rolled into a tube, doesn't need batteries or a power cord, and can be as easily read in bright sunlight as in a dimly lit room, I just don't see that paper has any competition.
<GRIPE>
A company I worked for called itself a 'matrixed organization', which is a term I had never run into before. All of the job postings mentioned the term (as in "The successful applicant must work well in a matrixed work environment") but the term itself was never defined. I assumed that the term was some MBA jargon, but was never able to find a precise definition in a reliable source.
As far as I could tell, the term covered both 'multitasking' for the individual employee (technical folk often worked on several projects simultaneously), as well as some amount of ambiguity as to the precise chain of command in the organization (the employee was responsible to several managers, but if you didn't appease the right manager, you got your head bitten off, or worse). To top it off, there was damn little guidance from management as to task priorities, until a task was severely behind schedule, at which point you got lots of 'guidance' (in the form of pestering and reprimands).
Anyone who has suffered through this kind of work environment knows that 'multitasking', in manager-speak, is just another word for 'work harder you miserable peons', often with a healthy dose of 'make sure these tasks get done in the right order, even though I don't know what that order is.' </GRIPE>
I read through this entire thread at mod level one, and sure enough, there is not a single comment about his stories or his characters, because those barely exist.
The reason that noone is commenting on Vinge's characters or stories is because they are not relevant to the topic at hand! The issue at hand is whether or not Vinge is a blithering nut-job for going on about this singularity crap that seems to be so popular with a number of science fiction writers cum technology commentators. I am heartened to see that there is a fair amount of skepticism in the comments concerning the idea of the singularity and Vinge's general nuttiness (and, even, self-contradiction) on the subject. It's good to know that the CS and IT trenches are fill, for the most part, with sane, level-headed folk, unlike the ranks of supposed luminaries like Joy, Kurzweil, and Vinge.
There may well be folks in this forum who think that Vinge is a great writer: they're wrong, but more power to 'em anyway. I've read both A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky and found them moderately enjoyable, but nothing to rave about. I wouldn't say that Vinge is in the ranks of the worst science ficiton I've ever read, but he's not far removed from the median (I won't say if he's above or below).
<OFFTOPIC> If you are looking for good literature in SF, you should have a look at Gene Wolfe (the New Sun and Long Sun series), Kim Stanley Robinson (Red/Green/Blue Mars and Ice Henge), Octavia Butler, Richard Grant (Rumors of Spring, Views from the Oldest House and Through the Heart. More recently, Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, In the Land of Winter and Kaspian Lost), or, maybe, Stephen R. Donaldson. I used to be quite fond of C. J. Cherryh, but have found her recent stuff too formulaeic. There is good SF out there, but, as with almost anything else, the ratio of good-to-crap follows Sturgeon's law. <OFFTOPIC>
Actually, there is another (semi-)recent event that more closely resembles Vinge's singularity, where our own artifacts have overtaken us by one means or another: the rise of corporations.
Corporations are an artifact of our legal systems and have steadily grown in power and efficacy since they were first concieved several hundred years ago. At this point they are self-sustaining and self-reproducing, even persuing their own agendas that have only a tangential relationship to individual human agendas.
I think it is interesting to note, however, that corporations are not, by almost any measure, smarter than individual humans, quite the oposite (consider well known sayings about the I.Q. of a mob or design by committee). The issue isn't whether our creations become more intelligent than us, but whether they become more potent than us.
Corporations have become more potent than individual humans because 1) they can amass far larger fortunes (in terms of manpower, money, land, or almost any other measure) than an individual, and 2) they are, essentially, immortal (and, to a large extent, unkillable. While the laws may, technically, be empowered to disband a coroporation, in practice this is nearly impossible). Corporations are essentially god-like: omnipotent (if not omnicient) and immortal, invulnerable to almost any harm, complete with their own mysterious motives and goals.
So, if we accept that the singularity has already occurred, we might ask why we aren't more aware of it's after effects. The answer, of course, is that the corporations don't want us to be aware, and are doing everything in their considerable power to obscure the effects of the singularity. Life goes on as normal, as far as lowly humans are concerned, because it would be terribly inconvenient for the corporations if it didn't (modulo polution, environmental destruction and a moderate amount of human suffering and expoitation).
I'll second this nomination. I discovered this book (Computer Power and Human Reason) in my library while finding books for my own list. I haven't any idea where or when I bought it, but I'm reading it now, and it is really good. I'd put it under the non-technical/historical/philosophical category. A good companion piece to Freedom's Edge and Kurzweils recent load of hooey (The Age of Spiritual Machines not to be confused with his earlier book, The Age of Intelligent Machines which is actually quite good).
I also thought of a few more books that deserve to be mentioned: A number of books by Edward Yourdon (Structured Analysis and DesignThe Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and The Rise and Resurection of the American Programmer should pretty well cover Yourdon) are good to have, even if his theses are no longer much in vogue. Similarly, the OO books by Grady and Booch are worth having, along with some UML, Use Cases and Patterns related texts.
Finally, there was a little hippy-trippy book I ran into back in college in the early nineties, but was never able to find again later. The title was Digital Memory and was some kind of treatise on Peace, Love, and Interactive Computing. It actually had a few interesting things to say, even if the tone was a bit on the too-much-THC-in-my-bloodstream side.
My list is geared toward providing a good research base for technical people and folks that want to become technical people. Here are the hard-core technical books:
The Art of Computer Programming, volumes I-III - Donald Knuth
The Mythical Man-Month - Fred Brooks
Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald M. Weinberg
Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools - Aho, Sethi, and Ullman
Compiler Design in C or Compiler Design in Java - Allen Hollub
C+C++ Programming With Objects in C and C++ - Allen Hollub
Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach - Cox & Novobilski
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - Hennesy & Patterson
The C Programming Language - Kernighan & Ritchie
The UNIX Programming Environment - Kernighan & Pike
Information Theory - Claude E. Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers - Sloane and Wyner
Cybernetics - Norbert Wiener
Numerical Recipes in C - Press, Vetterling, Teukolsky, & Flannery
Operating System Design: The XINU Approach - Douglass Comer
Operating System Concepts - Silberschatz & Galvin
Mobile Robotics: Inspiration to Implementation - Jones & Flynn
Tog on Software Design - Bruce Tognazzini
And, for the non-technical end of things, more history oriented:
The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer - Freiberger & Swaine
IBM's Early Computers - Bashe, Johnson, Palmer & Pugh
The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond (I'm not a karma whore, I'm more of a self-promoter: I'm in the acknowledgements)
The Age of Intelligent Machines - Raymond Kurzweil (not to be confused with his more recent book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which is likely a load of tripe, but may be worth including anyhow)
Freedom's Edge: The Computer Threat to Society - Milton R. Wessel (a much saner analysis of the effect of computers on our culture than Kurzweil's recent book)
Otherwise, I'd get some stuff on relational database theory and design (the book by C. J. Date is widely used, though nearly unreadable), a few books about other languages (both common and rare, you should at least have books on Java, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran and BASIC, but it shouldn't be too hard to construct a set covering far more), as well as some books about assorted kinds of hardware (a couple of microprocessor books -- 6502, Z80, 68000, 8086/8088 -- as well as some of the older minis and mainframes -- CDC 6600, PDP-11, DEC VAX, IBM 360 -- along with a few books on specific models of personal computers -- Apple II, Macintosh, IBM-PC -- should satisfy most people's curiosity). You might top it off with some non-computer books about electronics and methematics, but I don't know what to suggest there.
You should be able to find some very nice deals on a number of these books at used bookstores. Some of the books are out of print, so this may be your only real option. Amazon has links to used bookstores, and many of them have their own websites if you are still mad at Amazon over the one-click patent stuff. I'd suggest Powell's Books in Portland, they've got a better selection than I've seen almost anywhere else, and they deliver.
Pundits have been running at the mouth about information appliances and digital convergence and the death of the PC since the 80's and it just isn't happening. I can't think of a single dumb idea that's been "the next big thing" for nearly as long.
so, if I add some RAM, and swap out my NIC and video card PRESTO!, according of MS, I have an entirely new computer! (Let's not even consider my semi-annual hard-drive/CD-ROM upgrade)
I guess I'm lucky not to be cursed with any MS habits, but it's a real bummer to live in world where this kind of crap isn't considered a crime punnishable by death. At least this gives me one less reason to waste may money on MSCrack!
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even if we have lots of unused processor time (which I'm sure we do), pumping the data in to and out of a remote procedure call can consume a lot of bandwidth and result in a huge lag time. Many problems don't distribute well, even when you have relatively high bandwidth connections to send the data over (like multi-GB memory busses), so the problem only gets worse when you use a measley network pipe or modem line. (processor memory bus bandwidth tends to be in the 5-10 Giga-bit range, even the best home internet access is only 10-100 Mega-bits)
the steady state of a hard drive is full. There just isn't going to be enough spare, on-line, storage space on folks' desktops to give any appreciable amount out to share. If you have to deal with the bloat of a self healing encoding, the problem only gets worse.
Consider the case of N users, each with one hard drive of size X. They share out half of their hard drive space, but a file takes three times as much space to store on the distributed system than it does purely locally (for the self-healing encoding). The total hard drive space available to the group is now N*X/2 + 1/3*N*X/2 = N*X*4/6, or just over half the actual total space on the network. The average space available to any single user is the total available space on the network divided by the number of users, or just over half the actual space on the individual user's local hard drive.
That doesn't sound like too good a deal to me. Admittedly, I will be getting some extra reliability, but given how many home user's back-up their data on a regular basis, I don't think reliability is worth much (at least to home users).
At first blush, it sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think the economics are going to support it. It will always be easier and cheaper for the folk that actually need more storage or processing power to just go out and buy it, especially while Moore's law is in effect. For anyone else, it just doesn't matter.
Once you have done this for every block in the original frame, you have a set of motion vectors from which you can construct an intermediate frame.
I'm not certain what to do about expansion slots, but for most of these ultra-small PCs, I guess it doesn't matter very much, since you won't have a wealth of slots to deal with anyhow. I do, however, have a problem with all-in-one PC motherboards, having been burned a couple times with crappy integrated audio and video components (and all the integrated ethernet interfaces I have seen have been based on the abominable Realtek chipset). At least the iMacs use half-reasonable components for the integrated stuff.
So long as the micro-ATX boards use crappy components and require the end result to be a simple box, I'm not too interested.
If you are planning on doing stuff you would rather not have extra evidence of later, don't talk about it over e-mail! If you are conspiring with other folk stupid enough to send incriminating information over e-mail, you have bigger problems to worry about. If you are already sending all your e-mail in an encrypted form, you simply need to keep the encrypted e-mails in the archive as well.
As others have already pointed out, Itanium does fairly badly on SpecINT and moderatly well (though not spectacularly) on SpecFP, but there are other benchmarks to consider: Stream and TPC are the two that leap to mind, but I am sure that there are some others that measure more than just raw CPU performance. (you won't be running any of your code on a bare CPU anyway, so you should consider some measures of full system performance) I don't see any numbers for Itanium on the Stream or TPC web sites, but maybe I missed something.
Graphics professionals don't buy Macs out of brand loyalty, they buy them because they are the best tool for the job. It is really that simple. No matter what advances have been made by Windows or Linux in the past decade, both are still lacking many of the vital features required by folk working in the print industry or in visual arts.
Unless you can get software on an academic discount (are you or your friend enrolled in a university?) you will be hard pressed to assemble an adequate system for only $1000. Even if you buy a used system (used iMacs can be had for $600-$700) you will find it hard to obtain the required application software with the remaining funds (Photoshop and Illustrator are expensive). If you can get academic discounts, however, it shouldn't be hard at all (you can get a new iMac plus a full suite of software for something near $1000. Apple offers reasonable discounts and bundles to academic buyers) to get a full package within budget.
In an extreme situation, you can get perfectly good used Macs (pre-G3, PCI PowerMacs: [789][56]00 series machines) at very reasonable prices (I recently bought two 8500s for $150 each) and slap in a G3 upgrade (~$150) and a bunch of RAM (~$40/128MB, comparatively expensive, but not monstrous), a new hard drive (18GB ~$160) and a nice monitor (any PC monitor will work, but you will need an adapter: $30 at the local computer shop) for well under the proposed $1000 limit. You still have the problem of software, however.
In the interests of full disclosure: I am a long time Mac user (since 1984) and own stock in Apple. I have also worked in the design graphics industry (as a typesetter and graphic artist) so I know something of what I speak. In recent years, I have migrated much of my computing off of Macs onto Linux, but only for web-surfing and programming (I changed careers in the early ninties. I'm now a software engineer). However, if I have something to do that involves looking good in print or on screen, I still use a Mac.
If you can find a copy of it, C+C++: Programming with Objects in C and C++ by Allen Holub. The book gives a solid overview of object orientation, as well as examples of how to implement object oriented programming in ostensibly non-object oriented languages (in this case, standard C). Once it has introduced the basic OO concepts, and how you might implement them in a non-OO language, it goes on to show you how C++ delivers the same language features with much less hassle. As with other books by Allen Holub, this one is written with clarity and humor: it is both informative and enjoyable to read.
In the first stage you have some phenomena that you want to try to 'explain' (in scientific parlance 'explain' actually means 'predict through use of appropriate mathematical formulae). The scientists will come up with hypotheses that yield testable formulae for predicting the phenomena in question.
In the second stage you gather lots of empirical data and see if the predictions of your hypotheses agree with the data you have gathered. You may gather data specifically chosen to prove your hypotheses false (since it should be easy to predict what measurements are most likely to disagree with your hypotheses) or you may just use whatever data comes easily to hand (there may be a large mass of existing data, as with Tyco Brahe's astronomical measurements used by Kepler to derive the shapes of the planets' orbits).
Once you have gathered enough data you can see where your hypotheses disagree with the measured data and adjust the hypotheses accordingly. Eventually your hypotheses agree to the measured data to within the current error bounds, at which time you have an official theory.
Importantly, you never actually have access to truth. Nothing is ever proven (though many things may be disproven) and everything is open to some level of doubt. It's just a matter of how much doubt you find acceptable for any give application. For common, everyday tasks, the precision required of most measurements is very low:
- speed of light = faster than anything else
- speed of sound = not as fast as light but faster than most other things
- age of the universe = age of the earth = older than we care to think about
- mass of a subatomic particle = as close to zero as makes no odds.
For specific applications you will require greater precision, but still not perfect precision:The real problem with your use of the terms 'truth' and 'proof' is that they don't mean the same thing to a scientist as they mean in common english. In common english Truth is absolute and Proof is irrefutable. To a scientist, however, truth simply means that the formulae yield answers close enough to measured values that we can't tell the difference (modulo the accuracy of our measuring devices), and proof simply means that no data has been found that clearly contradicts a specific set of formulae (aka, an hypothesis).
Just because science isn't accessing some cosmic Truth doesn't mean that sceintific theories are really just opinions. An opinion is a though in someone's head that has no concrete basis in fact. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is a set of formulae that serve to predict objective, measurable values for physical phenomena to within some specified error range. It may not be too similar to what most people think of as Truth, but it is pretty far from the common definition of option as well. It is certainly a damn sight more reliable that the assorted forms of propaganda, superstition, and outright ignorance that have passed themselves off as Truth for most of history.
Are the proposed backdoors simply blanket weaknesses in the allowed crypto standards, or does this have something to do with how the final encrypted message is constructed? I can see some ways that the users decryption key could be incorporated into the resulting message (as an encrypted sub-message using the government's key) so that the government could recover the user's private key from any message. I'm much less certain of how you would construct an encryption algorithm that would ensure that all messages could be decrypted by both the user's private key and the government's private key.
Is there some description of how these backdoors are supposed to work?
um, have there been some really big changes is the IA32 or is this guy getting P4 confused with the IA64?
No. The registesr file and ALU make up a relatively small part of a modern CPU. Quite a bit of room is taken up by on-chip caches and assorted bits of scheduling/dependancy logic. I'd bet that the lion share of the extra trasistors goes first to extra on-chip cache, then to logic supporting the extra pipeline stages.
In the case of the internet mail worm, the function of the worm was based on unanticipated behaviors of both the worm code (the author had intended the worm to limit its speed of propagation) and the internet mail system (the author was exploiting a bug in the mail transfer agent). Clearly, this sort of situation, while a threat to security, is easily remedied once the exploit is known. The remedy can even be implemented with little or no effect on daily operations, since the erroneous behavior of the program will not have been used as part of any applications.
In the case of the various Outlook worms, however, the situation is reversed. The worms rely on explicit features of the Outlook suite for their functioning. These same features have been incorporated into all sorts of applications built upon the Outlook suite, which means that in order to disable the worm, many production applications must be modified or discarded.
This is a design issue, at its heart. There are some cultural effects involved (e.g. the MS assumption of a monoclonal computing environment leads to the expectation, and exploitation, of features that would not be reliably present in a heterogeneous enviornment.) but the central problem is the explicit decision by Outlook program managers to include features that were inherently insecure. (Consider that, while Sun may have a similar monoclonal outlook to Microsoft, Java was designed for both security and provision of a wide and reliable feature set)
The question is not "can worms be written for systems other than Microsoft's?" -- to which the answer must always be 'yes', even if only because we can't rule out the possibility entirely -- but, rather, "is it easier or harder to write worms for Microsoft systems than for other systems?" The answer is, pretty clearly, that Microsoft's design decisions make worms far easier to implement on MS platforms than on other platforms.
- There was a simple maze/combat game, whose name I don't quite recall (I'm thinking it was MazeWars) which offered a first-person perspective mode. Web searches turn up references to games of similar description on Sun workstations and Xerox Altos, which suggests an eaven earlier date than 1989.
- Spectre, which was released a few years later for the PC under the name Spectre VR, was a wire-frame tank simulation, but you played it from the first-person perspective: as if you were sitting in the tank itself. The Mac version was released in late 1991 or early 1992.
While DOOM may have popularized the FPS genre, it was nowhere near originating it.I will say, however, the DOOM, and Wolfenstein before it, were the first games to produce anything like a sense of real motion on non-workstation class hardware (I'd seen nausea inducing games on SGI workstations back in 1991, but most PCs and Macs couldn't render quickly, or smoothly, enough to fool the eye). I'm still impressed with what DOOM could do on a lowly 40MHz 386.
As for NASA having artists on the payroll, you can see some examples of just this sort of thing when the NASA Art Train comes to a town near you. You might even recognize a few of the artists in the exhibition (scroll down past the sponsors' names).
First, there is a Zilog Z80 variant that is marketed as a web server on a chip. Of course, the ez80190 runs at 50MHz and can address up to 16MB of memory, a far cry from the old Z80-A or 8080. (the chip itself only appears to have 8KB of SRAM, however, which is pretty similar to a TRS-80 or yore)
Second, the storage capacity of audio cassette tapes should not be underestimated. We can reasonably espect that the maximum storage density of an audio cassette is similar to the maximum bandwidth of vioce telephone lines (audio cassettes probably have a higher storage density, in fact, because the vioce telephone line bandwith is artificially limited in order to filter out varous kinds of noise). If we could record at 32Kbaud we would be able to store 10MB (that's Mega BYTES) on one side of a 90 minute tape.
Looked at another way, a cassette tape can store about the same amount of information as your average CD (they store about the same amount of music, and cassette tapes are actually better fidelity that audio CDs, they just degrade faster and don't reproduce well on consumer grade equipment), which means that we could actually expect to get something more like 600MB-800MB if we had really good recording and playback equipment. Not too shaby.
Of course, with a normal tape player we would have an average seek time of over 20 minutes, but you have to make some compromises for this level of geekiness. I can think of a few ways to decrease the seek time, but we are still talking about something on the order of minutes rather than a reasonable value in the range of seconds.
- Stepping on or dropping a paper book doesn't destroy it (paper doesn't shatter when stepped on, unlike LCDs). Even immersion in water doesn't completely destroy a paper book, but I'd be suprised if an eBook would survive that.
Otherwise, you hit all the most important points. I've been saying this for years, every time someone brings up the whole eBook canard: There may be a very few instances in which eBooks make sense for the consumer, but, in general, paper is a much better technology. It doesn't have much to do with rights, but with ergonomic and economic concerns.Until I can buy an ebook reader for $5, which will survive a fall from 6 meters onto cement (or being struck, repeatedly, with a sledge hammer, for that matter) and subsequent dunking in salt water, can be folded in half or rolled into a tube, doesn't need batteries or a power cord, and can be as easily read in bright sunlight as in a dimly lit room, I just don't see that paper has any competition.
A company I worked for called itself a 'matrixed organization', which is a term I had never run into before. All of the job postings mentioned the term (as in "The successful applicant must work well in a matrixed work environment") but the term itself was never defined. I assumed that the term was some MBA jargon, but was never able to find a precise definition in a reliable source.
As far as I could tell, the term covered both 'multitasking' for the individual employee (technical folk often worked on several projects simultaneously), as well as some amount of ambiguity as to the precise chain of command in the organization (the employee was responsible to several managers, but if you didn't appease the right manager, you got your head bitten off, or worse). To top it off, there was damn little guidance from management as to task priorities, until a task was severely behind schedule, at which point you got lots of 'guidance' (in the form of pestering and reprimands).
Anyone who has suffered through this kind of work environment knows that 'multitasking', in manager-speak, is just another word for 'work harder you miserable peons', often with a healthy dose of 'make sure these tasks get done in the right order, even though I don't know what that order is.'
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The reason that noone is commenting on Vinge's characters or stories is because they are not relevant to the topic at hand! The issue at hand is whether or not Vinge is a blithering nut-job for going on about this singularity crap that seems to be so popular with a number of science fiction writers cum technology commentators. I am heartened to see that there is a fair amount of skepticism in the comments concerning the idea of the singularity and Vinge's general nuttiness (and, even, self-contradiction) on the subject. It's good to know that the CS and IT trenches are fill, for the most part, with sane, level-headed folk, unlike the ranks of supposed luminaries like Joy, Kurzweil, and Vinge.
There may well be folks in this forum who think that Vinge is a great writer: they're wrong, but more power to 'em anyway. I've read both A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky and found them moderately enjoyable, but nothing to rave about. I wouldn't say that Vinge is in the ranks of the worst science ficiton I've ever read, but he's not far removed from the median (I won't say if he's above or below).
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If you are looking for good literature in SF, you should have a look at Gene Wolfe (the New Sun and Long Sun series), Kim Stanley Robinson (Red/Green/Blue Mars and Ice Henge), Octavia Butler, Richard Grant (Rumors of Spring, Views from the Oldest House and Through the Heart. More recently, Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, In the Land of Winter and Kaspian Lost), or, maybe, Stephen R. Donaldson. I used to be quite fond of C. J. Cherryh, but have found her recent stuff too formulaeic. There is good SF out there, but, as with almost anything else, the ratio of good-to-crap follows Sturgeon's law.
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Corporations are an artifact of our legal systems and have steadily grown in power and efficacy since they were first concieved several hundred years ago. At this point they are self-sustaining and self-reproducing, even persuing their own agendas that have only a tangential relationship to individual human agendas.
I think it is interesting to note, however, that corporations are not, by almost any measure, smarter than individual humans, quite the oposite (consider well known sayings about the I.Q. of a mob or design by committee). The issue isn't whether our creations become more intelligent than us, but whether they become more potent than us.
Corporations have become more potent than individual humans because 1) they can amass far larger fortunes (in terms of manpower, money, land, or almost any other measure) than an individual, and 2) they are, essentially, immortal (and, to a large extent, unkillable. While the laws may, technically, be empowered to disband a coroporation, in practice this is nearly impossible). Corporations are essentially god-like: omnipotent (if not omnicient) and immortal, invulnerable to almost any harm, complete with their own mysterious motives and goals.
So, if we accept that the singularity has already occurred, we might ask why we aren't more aware of it's after effects. The answer, of course, is that the corporations don't want us to be aware, and are doing everything in their considerable power to obscure the effects of the singularity. Life goes on as normal, as far as lowly humans are concerned, because it would be terribly inconvenient for the corporations if it didn't (modulo polution, environmental destruction and a moderate amount of human suffering and expoitation).
I also thought of a few more books that deserve to be mentioned: A number of books by Edward Yourdon (Structured Analysis and Design The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer and The Rise and Resurection of the American Programmer should pretty well cover Yourdon) are good to have, even if his theses are no longer much in vogue. Similarly, the OO books by Grady and Booch are worth having, along with some UML, Use Cases and Patterns related texts.
Finally, there was a little hippy-trippy book I ran into back in college in the early nineties, but was never able to find again later. The title was Digital Memory and was some kind of treatise on Peace, Love, and Interactive Computing. It actually had a few interesting things to say, even if the tone was a bit on the too-much-THC-in-my-bloodstream side.
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The Art of Computer Programming, volumes I-III - Donald Knuth
- The Mythical Man-Month - Fred Brooks
- Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister
- The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald M. Weinberg
- Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools - Aho, Sethi, and Ullman
- Compiler Design in C or Compiler Design in Java - Allen Hollub
- C+C++ Programming With Objects in C and C++ - Allen Hollub
- Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach - Cox & Novobilski
- Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - Hennesy & Patterson
- The C Programming Language - Kernighan & Ritchie
- The UNIX Programming Environment - Kernighan & Pike
- Information Theory - Claude E. Shannon
- Claude Elwood Shannon: Collected Papers - Sloane and Wyner
- Cybernetics - Norbert Wiener
- Numerical Recipes in C - Press, Vetterling, Teukolsky, & Flannery
- Operating System Design: The XINU Approach - Douglass Comer
- Operating System Concepts - Silberschatz & Galvin
- Mobile Robotics: Inspiration to Implementation - Jones & Flynn
- Tog on Software Design - Bruce Tognazzini
And, for the non-technical end of things, more history oriented:- The Soul of a New Machine - Tracy Kidder
- Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer - Freiberger & Swaine
- IBM's Early Computers - Bashe, Johnson, Palmer & Pugh
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond (I'm not a karma whore, I'm more of a self-promoter: I'm in the acknowledgements)
- The Age of Intelligent Machines - Raymond Kurzweil (not to be confused with his more recent book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which is likely a load of tripe, but may be worth including anyhow)
- Freedom's Edge: The Computer Threat to Society - Milton R. Wessel (a much saner analysis of the effect of computers on our culture than Kurzweil's recent book)
Otherwise, I'd get some stuff on relational database theory and design (the book by C. J. Date is widely used, though nearly unreadable), a few books about other languages (both common and rare, you should at least have books on Java, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran and BASIC, but it shouldn't be too hard to construct a set covering far more), as well as some books about assorted kinds of hardware (a couple of microprocessor books -- 6502, Z80, 68000, 8086/8088 -- as well as some of the older minis and mainframes -- CDC 6600, PDP-11, DEC VAX, IBM 360 -- along with a few books on specific models of personal computers -- Apple II, Macintosh, IBM-PC -- should satisfy most people's curiosity). You might top it off with some non-computer books about electronics and methematics, but I don't know what to suggest there.You should be able to find some very nice deals on a number of these books at used bookstores. Some of the books are out of print, so this may be your only real option. Amazon has links to used bookstores, and many of them have their own websites if you are still mad at Amazon over the one-click patent stuff. I'd suggest Powell's Books in Portland, they've got a better selection than I've seen almost anywhere else, and they deliver.
Interactive Television
I guess I'm lucky not to be cursed with any MS habits, but it's a real bummer to live in world where this kind of crap isn't considered a crime punnishable by death. At least this gives me one less reason to waste may money on MSCrack!