90s Apple Intel Port : The Star Trek Project
on
Cringely: OS X on Intel
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It always amazes me how forgetful geeks are of their geek "history". Even events that happened scarcely a decade ago fade into the background, much less thirty or more years ago.
It's time for a short lesson in Ancient Apple History, kiddies.
It turns out Apple had seriously considered porting the MacOS to Intel hardware in a joint venture with Novell beginning in 1992, as part of the secret, so-called "Star Trek" project (although Intel's Andy Grove knew of and supported it.) It's all covered in detail in Jim Carleton's book "Apple" (yes, sometimes you have to actually read real books, people!), on pg. 166-180, and elsewhere.
The goal was to put the Mac's "finder," which provides the distinctive look and fell of the Macintosh on the screen, onto an Intel-based computer...(Gifford) Calenda designated a former System 7 manager, Chris DeRossi, to head up Apple's side of the project. In a meeting with their colleagues from Novell, someone suggested the endeavor be called "Star Trek". "The idea beaing 'Boldly go where no Macintosh has gone before,' Rolander recalls.
Note that this is all well before the release of Windows 95. One can only wonder what the outcome of a full-out battle of the Mac OS with Windows 95 on Intel boxes would have been, because the project was killed in 1993, shortly after a working prototype was developed. The ostensible reason given by Carleton was that the cost of development was too high : Apple had finite resources, and didn't commit a large enough software budget to handle both the release of MacOS for Power PC hardware and Intel simultaneously.
Carleton goes on to criticize Apple for its short-mindedness in squandering a prime chance to compete for market share. However, the larger debate within Apple has always been whether to pursue the "high-right" strategy of selling small numbers of highly profitable boxes and hardware, or the "low-left" strategy of selling larger numbers of low profit boxes and hardware. The same debate occurred when Apple licensed its hardware in the late 1990s. The discussion ultimately comes down to this basic point.
While I won't go into the merits of both sides of the argument (Carleton does in some detail), I will note that people don't run computers for the operating system : they run it for the applications. For the largest fraction of consumers, the single largest software application is Microsoft's Office. Microsoft now develops and sells Office for MacOS because it is a nice niche market, and doesn't directly compete with it's bread-and-butter Wintel market.
However, would Microsoft develop Office for an Intel-based MacOS directly in competition with Windows? I would bet not. Think about what that means for an Intel-based MacOS.
It just occurred to me that one can also avoid the problem of asteroids and zodiacal dust (dust in the plane of the solar system) almost entirely by sending interstellar mission out of the plane of the solar system.
The chance of a collision with asteroids is very minute. There are actually very few significantly sized asteroids, and they are spread over an enormous volume of space, generally concentrated between Mars and Jupiter. If you don't believe me, just consider that any number of space missions have made it to the outer solar system by now. JPL has launched Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Galileo, Ulysses (on a gravity assist to get to the sun), and Cassini (now halfway between Jupiter and Saturn), and none were taken out of commission by an asteroid (though Galileo had unrelated problems).
Dust and micrometeorites are a much bigger problem, especially since they are distributed throughout space, and the further your mission travels, the more material you will inevitably sweep up. There is an interesting solution here, though. Although the article refers to laser-pulsed sails (in the visible range), it is also possible to use masers (in the microwave range). Since a "good" reflector need only be smooth to within a wavelength of light, a maser sail would only have to be smooth to within a few mm or cm. Not only would this enable you to save greatly on the mass of the sail by using a conducting "spiderweb" sail, which would be mostly empty space, but the sail would also be greatly resiliant to many small dust impacts.
Whether such a design is actually feasible for an actual mission is not immediately clear. However, the distribution of dust sizes in interstellar space is well-known to astronomers, so it would be very straightforwards to study the "damage" done to a sail, as a function of the speed of the vessel. (I'm sure someone has done this...)
It would appear that this poster didn't even take the time to read the article. In fact, the term "solar sail" is somewhat misleading, because the scientists quoted proposed using directed pulses of light from lasers to propel the interstellar craft. The 1/r^2 law is only true for isotropic radiation -- not for a directed laser beam, which can remain well-collimated over great distances.
This idea is not at all new -- I recall reading essentially the same notion as a high school student in the mid-1980s in a book on solar sails. Some futuristic plans included building a massive bank of lasers on the far side of the moon. While we are still very far from realizing such dreams (as we will need the infrastructure in place to support such a lunar base first), I always thought that such ideas were intringuing, and provided a physically viable mode of transporting large payloads, to say, Mars, and the outer solar system.
Lastly, I should also point out that it appears that this author doesn't even understand the basic physics of conventional solar sails. Solar sails use light pressure from the sun, not the solar wind itself. The pressure from the hot plasma streaming from the solar wind is orders of magnitude smaller than the light pressure. Light pressure is also tiny, but since your net velocity is proportional to the time exposed to the source of light, you can build up significant velocities over weeks or months. A great number of people extend the "sail" analogy a bit too far.
Bob
Kurzweil and Thinking Machines
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This is an excellent point.
The same idea occurred to me recently when reading through Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines" book. There are a few orders of magnitude to toss around in these calculations : Kurzweil determined that a desktop computer will be comparable to a human by around 2020. It was evident to me that Kurzweil's timescales (and hence the premises which he used to infer them) are quite far off, because current massive parallelization of commodity CPUs puts one a factor of about 4,000 up from a desktop machine, or about 13 years of Moore's Law evolution. In addition, as the number of CPUs per supercomputer is increased, we have effectively grown faster than Moore's law, due to both the chip and parallelization advances.
Since the supercomputers of today effectively place us where a desktop will be in 2015, it should be apparent (by Kurzweil's logic) that an "intelligent" machine should be nearly imminent.
It is quite evident that something is awry in the logic leading to Kurzweil's conclusion. The simplest explanation is one which is quite familiar to scientists and programmers using state-of-the-art software tecnhinques : having the hardware resources is only a bare minimum requirement to solve a problem. For instance, one can have a supercomputer capable of simulating the Earth's climate for centuries, but that won't get you any closer to the results if you don't also possess a great deal of knowledge about atmospheric physics and numerical methods. The same is true for studies of "Thinking Machines" : one can have a machine possibly capable of thinking, but without the knowledge of how to go about doing it, you are no closer to the solution than where you began.
The topic of singularity formation in GR was a hot topic in the 1960s, since a true singularity would indicate a breakdown in the self-consistency in GR, and hence its incompleteness as a fundamental theory. Lifschitz and colleagues claimed that singularities were an artifact of initial conditions; if you perturbed the starting state away from perfect symmetry, you would form a non-singular final state. Penrose, Hawking, Geroch, and others, on the other hand, worked out from very general considerations that anytime a certain kind of "trapped sphere" (singularity theorem reference)existed, in which any light ray sent out had to go in, HAD to lead to the formation of a singularity. Eventually Lifshitz withdrew his work, and Penrose et al's work has been the accepted one.
Significantly, the singularity theorems demonstrate that GR is not a self-consistent theory, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The natural question which remained was : does stellar collapse of massive stars produce such trapped spheres, and hence black holes? Or is there a "proper graveyard" of stable, dead stars once a star ends its lifetime as a supernova?
The answer astrophysicists have provided is : no, there is no stellar graveyard, above a certain mass. The only possible outcome is a neutron star. Why? Because during collapse, electrons and protons
fuse together to form neutrons (and neutrinos), leaving behind only neutrons. Neutrons are fermions and dislike sitting together. They exert a pressure amongst themselves, which allows a certain class of stable stellar remnants known as neutron stars to exist. However, as Chandrasekhar first demonstrated for white dwarfs, fermionic matter has a natural maximum mass -- for neutron stars, this limit is certainly no more than a few times the mass of the sun, regardless of how much the nuclear matter resists gravity.
Now, along come Mazur and Motolla (whose paper, incidentally, has been submitted, though not accepted, by Physical Review Letters) who claim that that just prior to the formation of a black hole, the matter forms a stable kind of Bose-Einstein condensate, and that something weird happens at the surface which sends the accreting matter around in a "u-turn". This all sounds extremely far-fetched to me, though I haven't read their paper in detail. However, I can make two comments :
1) They have yet to show how actual stellar collapse proceeds to their proposed gravitar, and not instead to neutron star or black hole. ("Robert Wald of Chicago University adds that Mottola and Mazur have put forward no arguments about how gravastars could form in the devastating collapse of a massive star.")
2) If indeed there is no horizon, and accreting matter gets turned around in a "u-turn", that should manifest itself as extremely powerful outflows. We already know of such jets and winds from black hole/accretion disk models, and from observation, so it should be possible to formulate a comparison between the gravitar prediction and black hole models. It seems quite likely that firm constraints on the gravitar model could be placed by examining the known observations.
Does this competition allow for human players? Is there any way for a human to "cheat" and pretend he is a computer, from the standpoint of the competition?
I think it would be interesting to see the results of a surprise "black knight" human player thrown into the mix. (Or perhaps even more interestingly, a human/computer team.) We're at a unique point in computational history -- the best human players can still normally beat out the best computer algorithms, though just _barely_. A decent chess player could probably still take home the prize. In 20 years, however, even the best humans will no longer stand a chance against any reasonably serious chess program.
While I agree that this is strictly true, the hardware used does not vary dramatically -- most every one is a 1 GHz - 2 GHz machine. Considering that the branching in the tree of game possibilities is a combinatoral explosion, the differences in hardware alone will not allow researchers to explore to a significantly greater depth.
The main problem in computational chess playing is not so much in the brute force with which you can explore the tree, but in how one prunes a branch when the option starts looking unpromising. That is really an algorithmic question, and I would be willing to bet that the best algorithm will in fact win in a competition of this sort. It is a bit analogous to taking two comparable, but unequal hardware machines, and running bubble sort on one, and quick sort on the other. Quick sort will always win, hands down, because it is the far superior algorithm.
What did surprise me was that there were no parallel machines on the list -- not even an SMP. I do think that with enough processors and a reasonably sophisticated algorithm, an amateur team could in fact stand to beat a more sophisticated algorithm. But that isn't the case here.
Perhaps I am missing something here, but from the short description, it sounds as if the concept is to put millions of "free floating" tiny robots into the ocean, where they would communicate amongst each other and thence to the outside world. Each robot would have negligably little computational power, but in combination, the robots could have a great impact.
However, it is easy to see that if the robots are indeed freely floating, and are allowed to drift around for long periods of time, they will become separated. Indeed, given enough time, the equilibrium density of robots reached will simply be the number of robots over the entire oceanic volume! The robots will have become so far removed from their neighbors that they will have become useless. Unless the robots are physically tethered together, it is difficult for me to see how they will remain close to one another for any significant duration. And if they are physically tethered, in esseence to form a larger body, why bother with all of the nanoscale complexity? Why not just monitor using conventional silicon technology attached to floating buoys?
It seems like the grant will be pushing nanoscale technology further, which is great for everyone, but I have serious reservations as to their chosen application. It would seem to me that an application where the probes would be fixed in location (in human tissue, for instance) would be a better application
I would also say, however, that I think the days of NASA are numbered and I wouldn't mind the complete dismantling of the entire agency. They are too stuck in the past (reliving the glory days of Apollo), and are actually doing more harm than good now for giving me or my children the opportunity to work and live in space.
First, you seem to have the misconception that NASA is entirely devoted to the manned exploration of space, and that moreover, they haven't done anything new since Apollo.
You are simply misinformed. You're just plain wrong.
Take a look at some of the projects that NASA has been up to recently, and then see if you can still claim they are "living in the past" :
As you can see, NASA is not just about flying shuttle missions. They are actively sponsoring research in the space sciences and astrophysics across the board... from the study of our own planet, to the solar system, other stars and galaxies, and the cosmos as a whole. Their missions support the development of new technologies (which, unlike the previous poster seems to believe, are not limited to propulsion technologies, but include a wide array of telescopes and detectors across the entire spectrum). And NASA also actively supports scientists at all levels -- from graduate students through postdocs and faculty.
I think we live in a unique time where we as a species are really beginning to understand what makes up the universe, and how it works. I'm quite
confident that when the history of science of the 20th and 21st centuries is written, NASA will have played an enormously significant role in that process of discovery.
This article seemed to be missing the most critical element in its analysis of the fall of Ion Storm. We all know that Daikatana would have been praised as a smash success had it included nude pictures of John Romero's girlfiend.
Note that just because the awards were given away in 2001, doesn't mean that the WORK they were awarded for had to be completed in the same year. Often the impact of an award is not apparent for a number of years after the award is given -- if you wish to give out awards based on long-term consequences of a work, and not just "flash-in-the-pan" results, you have to sit back and see how history unfolds. Just look at the list of Nobel Prizes and you will see this is quite true -- only rarely, when an obviously stunning piece of research comes out (ie, high T_C superconductors) is a prize awarded in the short-term.
Also, since this prize has not been around for that long, it still has to contend with "queued" up winners, just as the Nobel did in its early days. Is it really fair to hand out the award for hardware to an individual of lesser importance when someone like Gordon Moore is sitting in the wings without a prize?
It is true that in some games -- a combat flight simulator, for instance -- one design goal would be to achieve the most realistic physics possible. The average kid popping quarters into an arcade game isn't looking for realism, but some folks certainly will.
However, I think the importance of _self-consistent_ physics is quite critical. You can invent your own set of "physical laws", which may be similar to those we are familiar with (ie, with moon gravity instead of Earth gravity) or completely and utterly different (ie, with Matrix-like time and space distortions or a Tolkien-like world replete with magic). However, the world you put forth should appear at once both plausible and self-consistent. Indeed, knowing real physics and the numerical methods to treat it would certainly help game programmers in their own constructions, if only by serving as an intricately balanced example which can serve as a launching point for their work.
Bob
Re:Not exactly a new idea...
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 1
I never had the chance to play Neuromancer : it came out past the prime of my game-playing prime (circa 8th grade), so I'll have to take your word on that one.:-)
I think a broader point to be made is that games coming out today are a lot less diverse than the "old-school" games of the 80s. Most of the games in those days were programmed line-by-line, from the ground up (often in assembly!). As a result, very few games were made in the same mold, even though the computational constraints were severe.
In contrast, even though machines today have vastly greater computational and storage capabilities, most games fall into one of a small number of categories (first-person shooter, simulation, real-time strategy, role-playing, driving, flying, or sports), with very little actually distinguishing them. All of that additional computational ability has proven to be a double-edged sword : the additional complexity in programming a game engine means that many engines get re-used over and over again, in either sequels (Quake, Diablo, Unreal, NFL2K, etc.) or licensed games (both the QIIIA and UT engines are licensed in many other games). Re-using engines, however, forces game designers and programmers into thinking "in the box", and re-inforces the trend. And games STILL take years in their development cycle.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is : so long as people are satisfied with the same-old stuff churned out time and time again, and are willing to shell out their cash for it, companies will continue to satisfy them. Only once people decide that they're fed up with Quake57, will designers sit down and rethink...
Bob
Not exactly a new idea...
on
Uplink
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's curious just how frequently "new" ideas appear in the computing world. It usually turns out that someone had the same idea (and often a better implementation) long before. The new implementation
often has better looking graphics, and runs on speedier machines, but the idea is basically the same. There's a joke that everything in the computing world was invented in 1962. The only thing funnier than the joke is to see younger folks
"invent" the same thing over and over again.
Uplink sounds basically the same as an early 1980s Activision game called Hacker which appeared on the Commodore 64 and other personal computer of that era. At that time (to the best of my knowledge), Hacker was a kind of revolutionary game. It offered no explanation, either on-screen or in the game documentation, as to what was going on. You were simly presented with a text login prompt when the game started, and had to take it from there.
I've heard Cooley & Tukey's original 1965 paper "An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series" on the FFT algorithm cited as such a vast improvement. (Indeed, it has been called "the most valuable numerical algorithm in our lifetime" by the applied mathematician Gilbert Strang.) When you consider it is an N log N algorithm, as opposed to previous N^2 methods (amounting to a factor of ~ 100 in computational efficiency for N ~ 1000, and even bigger gains for larger N), and just how often Fourier methods are used in all branches of computational science, you begin to appreciate how significant their achievement was.
One should realize that the most fundamental numerical algorithms do not change very rapidly. The most common numerical algorithms (sorting, linear algebra, differential equations, etc., both in serial and parallel) have been the subject of intense research by an army of applied mathematicians over the last half-century. All you have to do to take advantage of that work is to call your friendly local numerical library.
Of course, sophisticated 3D graphics methods are still the subject of intense research.
So in sum, I would argue that as far as "serious" numerical methods go, excellent solutions usually exist. (These methods are "open source", indeed open source before the term existed! They are usually published in the scientific literature. The main gains that remain are in "entertainment" applications.
Bob
How curious. Just today I got a forwarded e-mail from a friend who hadn't set up her PayPal account to receive a payment I sent her. The e-mail read :
Dear [recepient's e-mail address suppressed],
On 09/03/00 you received $10.00 from [my e-mail address suppressed].
Our policy is to cancel unclaimed payments after 30 days, so
unless you sign up for a PayPal account these funds will be
returned to the sender. Don't let your money get away!
Note that this warning was sent some 14 MONTHS (!!) after the payment was sent. This is in gross violation of the stated policy of returning funds after 30 days. Moreover, as a sender, you don't have any clue in many cases whether the funds were actually credited or not.
In my case, it was only $10 at stake, but if many other payments were similarly misused, the interest racked up could have been quite substantial.
You want to find the part of the e-mail that mutates the least from spam to spam.
In almost all cases, it is easiest to filter from the recipient's domain name. Their username and hostname is easily changed, but the domain name is somewhat less variable, in my experience. Any respectable company would simply not allow enormous volumes of bulk spam to be sent out under its auspices for very long.
Once you hit "msfrfa", edit the "From Pattern" to be the domain name of the spammer. Then, under "Filter Action" hit "delete". Hit "E"xit, then agree to changes. The whole process takes only about 10 seconds.
So my filtering list includes...
gamblehog.com
postmastergeneral.com
realspecialoffers.com
optinrealbig.com
...
and so on.
The good news is that once you include the most aggregious offenders, your spam influx goes WAY down. With less than a 100 spam sites on my list, I get less than one spam a day in an e-mail account that used to receive one to two orders of magnitude more. You're then in a position where a few seconds of daily maintenance (to add to your existing list) is enough to keep you virtually spam free. Most of the spam I reveive now originates from yahoo.com, aol.com, or msn.com e-mail accounts. I'm not willing to filter out those domains, however, as a few people I know actually have accounts there. However, you rarely get repeat e-mails from those offenders -- the company takes care of them internally, it seems.
I imagine someone out there has already done this, and has released a comprehensives Pine filter list. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Incidentally, this concept is nothing new. David Brin's Earth novel, written more than a decade ago, foresaw a future in which wireless networking was ubiqitous, and civilians routinely archived all of their waking moments with inexpensive video and audio recorders. A natural consequence of this voyeuristic society, as Brin envisioned it, was the virtual elimination of most violent crime.
One interesting and ongoing theme connecting science fiction and science fact is the exploration of Mars.
There is a direct and long tradition of back-and-forth feedback between Martian science fiction and fact : Mars has long held the popular imagination, since Schiaprelli's phrase "canali" was mistranslated as "channels" and led to the classic H.G. Wells novel (and later radio broadcast) War of the Worlds.
The science fiction tradition continued from
Edgar Rice Borroughs' pulp science fiction Martian novels to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars novels.
This continuous thread of Martian fiction, which feeds upon the most recent science information, and in turn inspires future generations of scientists to pick up the investigation. For instance, Carl Sagan noted his fascination with the Borroughs novels as a youth with the Borroughs novels. Later he became a project scientist at JPL working on the Viking missions, whose data were used extensively in Robinson's novels.
With the recent discoveries suggesting the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface in the past, as well as the possibility of life on Mars, this theme is more relevant today than ever. Robinson's novels will likely fuel the
imagination of the next generation of astronomers and astronauts...
Actually, Sega stopped the manufacture of their "broadband adaptors" (BBAs) after just a few months on sale, and even then you had to purchase it directly from Sega.
This limited supply, coupled with a high demand from gamers who want one for netplay (QIIIA, UT, and a precious few other games support the BBA), means the average going price for a BBA is far more than the DC box itself. A quick scan of eBay shows only one currently available, at a starting bid of $120 (!).
So the cost of two of these puppies, and one DC box, would set you back far more than an Ethersys router, which is an all-around better option in any case.
In addition, the DC has only one modem/BBA port; getting two to work with it would be nontrivial.
While the author makes some good points, there are some very serious conceptual errors he makes.
The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
While there is indeed a problem with the distribution of AIDS vaccines and treatments, one cannot neglect the fact that it takes an enormous amount of resources to develop them in the first place. One cannot simply "give away" intellectual property, without undermining the incentive for people to develop future breakthroughs in all fields of science and medicine.
This point cannot be emphasized enough : everything from the central processing unit on the machine you are now using at this very moment, to the car that you drove to work, to the medicinal treatments that may one day save your life, have all been developed under a thoroughly evolved economic system which goes back centuries. It took that length of time to develop the laws and the economic institutions to create and foster the incentive to create. One cannot simply say "to hell with intellectual property rights" without destroying many of the benefits which we all garner from them.
There is a key distinction between most GPL'ed works and those which remain proprietary, as was highlighted in the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". It only makes sense for a company to GPL something when the technology involved is already commonplace. For instance, when Quake was first released, the technology was breakthrough, and ID was certainly not going to make their work GPL at that time. You will not find very many instances of research-grade work which has been released by any company.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that intellectual property rights are not in need of modification in light of current circumstances. That almost goes as a given. But to simply believe that one can do without intellectual property rights is a highly naive, and foolish position to adhere to.
A lot of the scaling of companies was fed by the desire to obtain venture capital funds, and hence, on the way that venture capitalists operate. A large VC firm might receive say, $500M in funds to partition off to individual investors. They simply cannot manage 5,000 different investments of $100,000 apiece -- once you add up their overheads, and the typical failure rate of a startup, there is no way they could be profitable on such a small scale. So they typically fund a few tens of companies from anywhere from a few million to tens of millions of dollars apiece. The bigger, the better.
Of course, a lot of this had to do with the notion that one had to rush to market to get the most market share, which is an idea that has come to be closely scrutinized today.
freeing humans for higher pursuits sounds good, but is probably only likely in a utopia.
Welcome to utopia.
Recall that once upon a time, electronic computers were unwieldy contraptions that required the user to reprogram them in hardware for every new application. von Neumann overcame that obstacle, just as later scientists overcame additional barriers to complexity by building operating systems, high-level language compilers, text terminals, GUIs, and so on.
The point is that the entire venture of computing has been one of bootstrapping additional levels of complexity, since its very inception. As Dykstra has put it, there is only one fundamental problem in computer science, and that is that computers are too hard to use. We have slowly eroded that barrier over time, but a lot more needs to be done to allow humans to think at even higher levels, similar to how they would work with an intelligent colleague rather than an idiot savant. This notion of "autonomous" computing is simply one more step in that direction
Slashdot Mirror
It always amazes me how forgetful geeks are of their geek "history". Even events that happened scarcely a decade ago fade into the background, much less thirty or more years ago.
It's time for a short lesson in Ancient Apple History, kiddies.
It turns out Apple had seriously considered porting the MacOS to Intel hardware in a joint venture with Novell beginning in 1992, as part of the secret, so-called "Star Trek" project (although Intel's Andy Grove knew of and supported it.) It's all covered in detail in Jim Carleton's book "Apple" (yes, sometimes you have to actually read real books, people!), on pg. 166-180, and elsewhere.
The goal was to put the Mac's "finder," which provides the distinctive look and fell of the Macintosh on the screen, onto an Intel-based computer...(Gifford) Calenda designated a former System 7 manager, Chris DeRossi, to head up Apple's side of the project. In a meeting with their colleagues from Novell, someone suggested the endeavor be called "Star Trek". "The idea beaing 'Boldly go where no Macintosh has gone before,' Rolander recalls.
Note that this is all well before the release of Windows 95. One can only wonder what the outcome of a full-out battle of the Mac OS with Windows 95 on Intel boxes would have been, because the project was killed in 1993, shortly after a working prototype was developed. The ostensible reason given by Carleton was that the cost of development was too high : Apple had finite resources, and didn't commit a large enough software budget to handle both the release of MacOS for Power PC hardware and Intel simultaneously.
Carleton goes on to criticize Apple for its short-mindedness in squandering a prime chance to compete for market share. However, the larger debate within Apple has always been whether to pursue the "high-right" strategy of selling small numbers of highly profitable boxes and hardware, or the "low-left" strategy of selling larger numbers of low profit boxes and hardware. The same debate occurred when Apple licensed its hardware in the late 1990s. The discussion ultimately comes down to this basic point.
While I won't go into the merits of both sides of the argument (Carleton does in some detail), I will note that people don't run computers for the operating system : they run it for the applications. For the largest fraction of consumers, the single largest software application is Microsoft's Office. Microsoft now develops and sells Office for MacOS because it is a nice niche market, and doesn't directly compete with it's bread-and-butter Wintel market.
However, would Microsoft develop Office for an Intel-based MacOS directly in competition with Windows? I would bet not. Think about what that means for an Intel-based MacOS.
Best,
Bob
It just occurred to me that one can also avoid the problem of asteroids and zodiacal dust (dust in the plane of the solar system) almost entirely by sending interstellar mission out of the plane of the solar system.
Bob
The chance of a collision with asteroids is very minute. There are actually very few significantly sized asteroids, and they are spread over an enormous volume of space, generally concentrated between Mars and Jupiter. If you don't believe me, just consider that any number of space missions have made it to the outer solar system by now. JPL has launched Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Galileo, Ulysses (on a gravity assist to get to the sun), and Cassini (now halfway between Jupiter and Saturn), and none were taken out of commission by an asteroid (though Galileo had unrelated problems).
Dust and micrometeorites are a much bigger problem, especially since they are distributed throughout space, and the further your mission travels, the more material you will inevitably sweep up. There is an interesting solution here, though. Although the article refers to laser-pulsed sails (in the visible range), it is also possible to use masers (in the microwave range). Since a "good" reflector need only be smooth to within a wavelength of light, a maser sail would only have to be smooth to within a few mm or cm. Not only would this enable you to save greatly on the mass of the sail by using a conducting "spiderweb" sail, which would be mostly empty space, but the sail would also be greatly resiliant to many small dust impacts.
Whether such a design is actually feasible for an actual mission is not immediately clear. However, the distribution of dust sizes in interstellar space is well-known to astronomers, so it would be very straightforwards to study the "damage" done to a sail, as a function of the speed of the vessel. (I'm sure someone has done this...)
Bob
It would appear that this poster didn't even take the time to read the article. In fact, the term "solar sail" is somewhat misleading, because the scientists quoted proposed using directed pulses of light from lasers to propel the interstellar craft. The 1/r^2 law is only true for isotropic radiation -- not for a directed laser beam, which can remain well-collimated over great distances.
This idea is not at all new -- I recall reading essentially the same notion as a high school student in the mid-1980s in a book on solar sails. Some futuristic plans included building a massive bank of lasers on the far side of the moon. While we are still very far from realizing such dreams (as we will need the infrastructure in place to support such a lunar base first), I always thought that such ideas were intringuing, and provided a physically viable mode of transporting large payloads, to say, Mars, and the outer solar system.
Lastly, I should also point out that it appears that this author doesn't even understand the basic physics of conventional solar sails. Solar sails use light pressure from the sun, not the solar wind itself. The pressure from the hot plasma streaming from the solar wind is orders of magnitude smaller than the light pressure. Light pressure is also tiny, but since your net velocity is proportional to the time exposed to the source of light, you can build up significant velocities over weeks or months. A great number of people extend the "sail" analogy a bit too far.
Bob
This is an excellent point.
The same idea occurred to me recently when reading through Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines" book. There are a few orders of magnitude to toss around in these calculations : Kurzweil determined that a desktop computer will be comparable to a human by around 2020. It was evident to me that Kurzweil's timescales (and hence the premises which he used to infer them) are quite far off, because current massive parallelization of commodity CPUs puts one a factor of about 4,000 up from a desktop machine, or about 13 years of Moore's Law evolution. In addition, as the number of CPUs per supercomputer is increased, we have effectively grown faster than Moore's law, due to both the chip and parallelization advances.
Since the supercomputers of today effectively place us where a desktop will be in 2015, it should be apparent (by Kurzweil's logic) that an "intelligent" machine should be nearly imminent.
It is quite evident that something is awry in the logic leading to Kurzweil's conclusion. The simplest explanation is one which is quite familiar to scientists and programmers using state-of-the-art software tecnhinques : having the hardware resources is only a bare minimum requirement to solve a problem. For instance, one can have a supercomputer capable of simulating the Earth's climate for centuries, but that won't get you any closer to the results if you don't also possess a great deal of knowledge about atmospheric physics and numerical methods. The same is true for studies of "Thinking Machines" : one can have a machine possibly capable of thinking, but without the knowledge of how to go about doing it, you are no closer to the solution than where you began.
Bob
Significantly, the singularity theorems demonstrate that GR is not a self-consistent theory, and contains the seeds of its own destruction.
The natural question which remained was : does stellar collapse of massive stars produce such trapped spheres, and hence black holes? Or is there a "proper graveyard" of stable, dead stars once a star ends its lifetime as a supernova?
The answer astrophysicists have provided is : no, there is no stellar graveyard, above a certain mass. The only possible outcome is a neutron star. Why? Because during collapse, electrons and protons fuse together to form neutrons (and neutrinos), leaving behind only neutrons. Neutrons are fermions and dislike sitting together. They exert a pressure amongst themselves, which allows a certain class of stable stellar remnants known as neutron stars to exist. However, as Chandrasekhar first demonstrated for white dwarfs, fermionic matter has a natural maximum mass -- for neutron stars, this limit is certainly no more than a few times the mass of the sun, regardless of how much the nuclear matter resists gravity.
Now, along come Mazur and Motolla (whose paper, incidentally, has been submitted, though not accepted, by Physical Review Letters) who claim that that just prior to the formation of a black hole, the matter forms a stable kind of Bose-Einstein condensate, and that something weird happens at the surface which sends the accreting matter around in a "u-turn". This all sounds extremely far-fetched to me, though I haven't read their paper in detail. However, I can make two comments :
1) They have yet to show how actual stellar collapse proceeds to their proposed gravitar, and not instead to neutron star or black hole. ("Robert Wald of Chicago University adds that Mottola and Mazur have put forward no arguments about how gravastars could form in the devastating collapse of a massive star.")
2) If indeed there is no horizon, and accreting matter gets turned around in a "u-turn", that should manifest itself as extremely powerful outflows. We already know of such jets and winds from black hole/accretion disk models, and from observation, so it should be possible to formulate a comparison between the gravitar prediction and black hole models. It seems quite likely that firm constraints on the gravitar model could be placed by examining the known observations.
Bob
Does this competition allow for human players? Is there any way for a human to "cheat" and pretend he is a computer, from the standpoint of the competition?
I think it would be interesting to see the results of a surprise "black knight" human player thrown into the mix. (Or perhaps even more interestingly, a human/computer team.) We're at a unique point in computational history -- the best human players can still normally beat out the best computer algorithms, though just _barely_. A decent chess player could probably still take home the prize. In 20 years, however, even the best humans will no longer stand a chance against any reasonably serious chess program.
Bob
While I agree that this is strictly true, the hardware used does not vary dramatically -- most every one is a 1 GHz - 2 GHz machine. Considering that the branching in the tree of game possibilities is a combinatoral explosion, the differences in hardware alone will not allow researchers to explore to a significantly greater depth.
The main problem in computational chess playing is not so much in the brute force with which you can explore the tree, but in how one prunes a branch when the option starts looking unpromising. That is really an algorithmic question, and I would be willing to bet that the best algorithm will in fact win in a competition of this sort. It is a bit analogous to taking two comparable, but unequal hardware machines, and running bubble sort on one, and quick sort on the other. Quick sort will always win, hands down, because it is the far superior algorithm.
What did surprise me was that there were no parallel machines on the list -- not even an SMP. I do think that with enough processors and a reasonably sophisticated algorithm, an amateur team could in fact stand to beat a more sophisticated algorithm. But that isn't the case here.
Bob
Perhaps I am missing something here, but from the short description, it sounds as if the concept is to put millions of "free floating" tiny robots into the ocean, where they would communicate amongst each other and thence to the outside world. Each robot would have negligably little computational power, but in combination, the robots could have a great impact.
However, it is easy to see that if the robots are indeed freely floating, and are allowed to drift around for long periods of time, they will become separated. Indeed, given enough time, the equilibrium density of robots reached will simply be the number of robots over the entire oceanic volume! The robots will have become so far removed from their neighbors that they will have become useless. Unless the robots are physically tethered together, it is difficult for me to see how they will remain close to one another for any significant duration. And if they are physically tethered, in esseence to form a larger body, why bother with all of the nanoscale complexity? Why not just monitor using conventional silicon technology attached to floating buoys?
It seems like the grant will be pushing nanoscale technology further, which is great for everyone, but I have serious reservations as to their chosen application. It would seem to me that an application where the probes would be fixed in location (in human tissue, for instance) would be a better application
Bob
First, you seem to have the misconception that NASA is entirely devoted to the manned exploration of space, and that moreover, they haven't done anything new since Apollo.
You are simply misinformed. You're just plain wrong.
Take a look at some of the projects that NASA has been up to recently, and then see if you can still claim they are "living in the past" :
Space Observatories
Chandra X-Ray Observatory
Hubble Space Telescope
Earth Observatories
Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer"
Solar System Missions
Mars Rovers
Astrophysics Research
Origins Program
And a sampling of the slate for future missions :
The Terrestrial Planet Finder
Deep Impact Comet Mission
Dawn Asteroid Flyby"
As you can see, NASA is not just about flying shuttle missions. They are actively sponsoring research in the space sciences and astrophysics across the board... from the study of our own planet, to the solar system, other stars and galaxies, and the cosmos as a whole. Their missions support the development of new technologies (which, unlike the previous poster seems to believe, are not limited to propulsion technologies, but include a wide array of telescopes and detectors across the entire spectrum). And NASA also actively supports scientists at all levels -- from graduate students through postdocs and faculty.
I think we live in a unique time where we as a species are really beginning to understand what makes up the universe, and how it works. I'm quite
confident that when the history of science of the 20th and 21st centuries is written, NASA will have played an enormously significant role in that process of discovery.
Bob
Bob
Note that just because the awards were given away in 2001, doesn't mean that the WORK they were awarded for had to be completed in the same year. Often the impact of an award is not apparent for a number of years after the award is given -- if you wish to give out awards based on long-term consequences of a work, and not just "flash-in-the-pan" results, you have to sit back and see how history unfolds. Just look at the list of Nobel Prizes and you will see this is quite true -- only rarely, when an obviously stunning piece of research comes out (ie, high T_C superconductors) is a prize awarded in the short-term.
Also, since this prize has not been around for that long, it still has to contend with "queued" up winners, just as the Nobel did in its early days. Is it really fair to hand out the award for hardware to an individual of lesser importance when someone like Gordon Moore is sitting in the wings without a prize?
Bob
This is a good point, and a valid one.
It is true that in some games -- a combat flight simulator, for instance -- one design goal would be to achieve the most realistic physics possible. The average kid popping quarters into an arcade game isn't looking for realism, but some folks certainly will.
However, I think the importance of _self-consistent_ physics is quite critical. You can invent your own set of "physical laws", which may be similar to those we are familiar with (ie, with moon gravity instead of Earth gravity) or completely and utterly different (ie, with Matrix-like time and space distortions or a Tolkien-like world replete with magic). However, the world you put forth should appear at once both plausible and self-consistent. Indeed, knowing real physics and the numerical methods to treat it would certainly help game programmers in their own constructions, if only by serving as an intricately balanced example which can serve as a launching point for their work.
Bob
I never had the chance to play Neuromancer : it came out past the prime of my game-playing prime (circa 8th grade), so I'll have to take your word on that one. :-)
...
I think a broader point to be made is that games coming out today are a lot less diverse than the "old-school" games of the 80s. Most of the games in those days were programmed line-by-line, from the ground up (often in assembly!). As a result, very few games were made in the same mold, even though the computational constraints were severe.
In contrast, even though machines today have vastly greater computational and storage capabilities, most games fall into one of a small number of categories (first-person shooter, simulation, real-time strategy, role-playing, driving, flying, or sports), with very little actually distinguishing them. All of that additional computational ability has proven to be a double-edged sword : the additional complexity in programming a game engine means that many engines get re-used over and over again, in either sequels (Quake, Diablo, Unreal, NFL2K, etc.) or licensed games (both the QIIIA and UT engines are licensed in many other games). Re-using engines, however, forces game designers and programmers into thinking "in the box", and re-inforces the trend. And games STILL take years in their development cycle.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is : so long as people are satisfied with the same-old stuff churned out time and time again, and are willing to shell out their cash for it, companies will continue to satisfy them. Only once people decide that they're fed up with Quake57, will designers sit down and rethink
Bob
often has better looking graphics, and runs on speedier machines, but the idea is basically the same. There's a joke that everything in the computing world was invented in 1962. The only thing funnier than the joke is to see younger folks
"invent" the same thing over and over again.
Uplink sounds basically the same as an early 1980s Activision game called Hacker
which appeared on the Commodore 64 and other personal computer of that era. At that time (to the best of my knowledge), Hacker was a kind of revolutionary game. It offered no explanation, either on-screen or in the game documentation, as to what was going on. You were simly presented with a text login prompt when the game started, and had to take it from there.
Bob
One should realize that the most fundamental numerical algorithms do not change very rapidly. The most common numerical algorithms (sorting, linear algebra, differential equations, etc., both in serial and parallel) have been the subject of intense research by an army of applied mathematicians over the last half-century. All you have to do to take advantage of that work is to call your friendly local numerical library.
Of course, sophisticated 3D graphics methods are still the subject of intense research.
So in sum, I would argue that as far as "serious" numerical methods go, excellent solutions usually exist. (These methods are "open source", indeed open source before the term existed! They are usually published in the scientific literature. The main gains that remain are in "entertainment" applications. Bob
How curious. Just today I got a forwarded e-mail from a friend who hadn't set up her PayPal account to receive a payment I sent her. The e-mail read :
Dear [recepient's e-mail address suppressed],
On 09/03/00 you received $10.00 from [my e-mail address suppressed].
Our policy is to cancel unclaimed payments after 30 days, so
unless you sign up for a PayPal account these funds will be
returned to the sender. Don't let your money get away!
Note that this warning was sent some 14 MONTHS (!!) after the payment was sent. This is in gross violation of the stated policy of returning funds after 30 days. Moreover, as a sender, you don't have any clue in many cases whether the funds were actually credited or not.
In my case, it was only $10 at stake, but if many other payments were similarly misused, the interest racked up could have been quite substantial.
Bob
You want to find the part of the e-mail that mutates the least from spam to spam.
In almost all cases, it is easiest to filter from the recipient's domain name. Their username and hostname is easily changed, but the domain name is somewhat less variable, in my experience. Any respectable company would simply not allow enormous volumes of bulk spam to be sent out under its auspices for very long.
Once you hit "msfrfa", edit the "From Pattern" to be the domain name of the spammer. Then, under "Filter Action" hit "delete". Hit "E"xit, then agree to changes. The whole process takes only about 10 seconds.
So my filtering list includes...
gamblehog.com
postmastergeneral.com
realspecialoffers.com
optinrealbig.com
...
and so on.
The good news is that once you include the most aggregious offenders, your spam influx goes WAY down. With less than a 100 spam sites on my list, I get less than one spam a day in an e-mail account that used to receive one to two orders of magnitude more. You're then in a position where a few seconds of daily maintenance (to add to your existing list) is enough to keep you virtually spam free. Most of the spam I reveive now originates from yahoo.com, aol.com, or msn.com e-mail accounts. I'm not willing to filter out those domains, however, as a few people I know actually have accounts there. However, you rarely get repeat e-mails from those offenders -- the company takes care of them internally, it seems.
I imagine someone out there has already done this, and has released a comprehensives Pine filter list. Does anyone know if this is the case?
Bob
Bob
There is a direct and long tradition of back-and-forth feedback between Martian science fiction and fact : Mars has long held the popular imagination, since Schiaprelli's phrase "canali" was mistranslated as "channels" and led to the classic H.G. Wells novel (and later radio broadcast) War of the Worlds.
The science fiction tradition continued from Edgar Rice Borroughs' pulp science fiction Martian novels to Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Blue Mars, Green Mars novels. This continuous thread of Martian fiction, which feeds upon the most recent science information, and in turn inspires future generations of scientists to pick up the investigation. For instance, Carl Sagan noted his fascination with the Borroughs novels as a youth with the Borroughs novels. Later he became a project scientist at JPL working on the Viking missions, whose data were used extensively in Robinson's novels.
With the recent discoveries suggesting the presence of liquid water on the Martian surface in the past, as well as the possibility of life on Mars, this theme is more relevant today than ever. Robinson's novels will likely fuel the imagination of the next generation of astronomers and astronauts...
Bob
Actually, Sega stopped the manufacture of their "broadband adaptors" (BBAs) after just a few months on sale, and even then you had to purchase it directly from Sega.
This limited supply, coupled with a high demand from gamers who want one for netplay (QIIIA, UT, and a precious few other games support the BBA), means the average going price for a BBA is far more than the DC box itself. A quick scan of eBay shows only one currently available, at a starting bid of $120 (!).
So the cost of two of these puppies, and one DC box, would set you back far more than an Ethersys router, which is an all-around better option in any case.
In addition, the DC has only one modem/BBA port; getting two to work with it would be nontrivial.
Bob
The pharma companies are all doing their damndest to keep from from having their AIDS drugs, or at least the intellectual property rights to those drugs, taken away, nationalized, so that those drugs can be made more freely and be used to treat individuals.
While there is indeed a problem with the distribution of AIDS vaccines and treatments, one cannot neglect the fact that it takes an enormous amount of resources to develop them in the first place. One cannot simply "give away" intellectual property, without undermining the incentive for people to develop future breakthroughs in all fields of science and medicine.
This point cannot be emphasized enough : everything from the central processing unit on the machine you are now using at this very moment, to the car that you drove to work, to the medicinal treatments that may one day save your life, have all been developed under a thoroughly evolved economic system which goes back centuries. It took that length of time to develop the laws and the economic institutions to create and foster the incentive to create. One cannot simply say "to hell with intellectual property rights" without destroying many of the benefits which we all garner from them.
There is a key distinction between most GPL'ed works and those which remain proprietary, as was highlighted in the "Cathedral and the Bazaar". It only makes sense for a company to GPL something when the technology involved is already commonplace. For instance, when Quake was first released, the technology was breakthrough, and ID was certainly not going to make their work GPL at that time. You will not find very many instances of research-grade work which has been released by any company.
To be clear, I am not suggesting that intellectual property rights are not in need of modification in light of current circumstances. That almost goes as a given. But to simply believe that one can do without intellectual property rights is a highly naive, and foolish position to adhere to.
Bob
A lot of the scaling of companies was fed by the desire to obtain venture capital funds, and hence, on the way that venture capitalists operate. A large VC firm might receive say, $500M in funds to partition off to individual investors. They simply cannot manage 5,000 different investments of $100,000 apiece -- once you add up their overheads, and the typical failure rate of a startup, there is no way they could be profitable on such a small scale. So they typically fund a few tens of companies from anywhere from a few million to tens of millions of dollars apiece. The bigger, the better.
Of course, a lot of this had to do with the notion that one had to rush to market to get the most market share, which is an idea that has come to be closely scrutinized today.
Bob
Welcome to utopia.
Recall that once upon a time, electronic computers were unwieldy contraptions that required the user to reprogram them in hardware for every new application. von Neumann overcame that obstacle, just as later scientists overcame additional barriers to complexity by building operating systems, high-level language compilers, text terminals, GUIs, and so on.
The point is that the entire venture of computing has been one of bootstrapping additional levels of complexity, since its very inception. As Dykstra has put it, there is only one fundamental problem in computer science, and that is that computers are too hard to use. We have slowly eroded that barrier over time, but a lot more needs to be done to allow humans to think at even higher levels, similar to how they would work with an intelligent colleague rather than an idiot savant. This notion of "autonomous" computing is simply one more step in that direction
Bob
Bob