I don't know about all those high-falutin' "science" guys, but any Fallout players worthy of the title were already familiar with the interesting medical properties of radioactive scorpion venom way back in the 90s. Yet another case of Slashdot being late with the news...
Re:I'm a "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" user
on
Driving Plan 9
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's really easy to make operating systems elegant if you aren't constrained by the terrible task of supporting a large base of (often old) software and hardware (particularly software).
Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.
However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).
The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.
Of course, this is all fine and dandy until these permanently immature people have kids themselves. Then it's a big interesting competition to see who can be the child. For that matter, to see whether one or other parent can manage to stick around long enough to raise the actual children, or whether someone is going to go rocketing out the door once the next 'teenage crush' (oops, I mean, 'true love with a life partner who really understands me') turns up.
I was fortunate enough to be raised by actual adults, and am married to one. But I saw too many of my friends growing up with the consequences of being raised by the first generation of PermaChildren, and there doesn't seem to be a huge difference with many of my generation.
A lot of that stuff about "innocent 6-year-olds" is very disingenuous. 6-year-olds can be innocent largely because there are adults out there shouldering the burdens of adulthood. A side point: unlike the mawkish chain letter thing posted on this thread implies, you need to do this (shoulder adult burdens) without doing too much whining about it. Moaning about how tough it is to wake up in the morning and go to work and deal with irritating stuff in your e-mail is usually a fine warning sign of someone who's about to flip right back into PermaChild status again. Suck it up.
Right, because we hear frank talk from people who have been at _any_ tech company for 18 years all the time, this is obviously a non-event (this means that this guy was cutting code when a good proportion of Slashdotters were still crapping in diapers or watching Saturday morning cartoons). Face it, 18 years of actual activity (not just a few good years followed by 15 years of pontification or management or both) is a long time in this business and perhaps you should shut the hell up and at least listen, before shooting off your mouth. Even if the guy is from (shock, horror) Microsoft, and even if only you think that this guy is only useful as an insight into the enemies' camp.
You're awfully free with your criticism of a talk that you haven't actually listened to. I too prefer transcripts for the same reason, but generally don't feel the need to critique content that I haven't actually heard. I think that it's interesting - but not entirely surprising - that you can get modded "Insightful" on Slashdot now for commentary on a talk that you didn't hear.
It's time to stop pretending that there are wonderful abstract principles at stake when people try programs like this: it's a bit like passionate cries of 'racist!' every time anyone attempts to do anything to rectify the grossly asymmetrical situation of many U.S. born blacks. Computing has been a quite sexist discipline for many years, even if the situation has changed for the better recently. As a result, there's a pretty steep shortage of senior women in most CS faculties that I've ever seen.
As a undergraduate, in 1990-1993, in addition to hearing tales of acts of substantial sexual harassment that went largely unpunished, I also got to see first hand a lot of horny nerds 'helping' the women in their classes by basically attempting to do all their work for them, as well as a few tutors spending an inordinate amount of time trying to score with students rather than teach them. While the situation has improved, the environment of 10 years ago influences the current supply of women with (for example) 12 years of experience.
So can the 'sexist' talk. Go read Stanley Fish's 'The Trouble With Principle' and see if you can still keep a straight face while pushing your abstract principles...
Personally, I suspect that the absence of women from projects like GNOME represents good sense, more than anything else. I have met many incredibly intelligent, hardworking and successful women in serious academic 'systems' research (there seem to be a number in compiler research, for some reason), but far fewer in the sort of hobbyist open source sphere. Perhaps they prefer to be formally recognized and paid properly - if you felt that there was the prospect of lingering sexism in a field, one might prefer a area where there's a solid audit trail for success (e.g. 'why did you hire a man with half the number of first-rate publications as me?') as opposed to the rather nebulous world of success in the open source world (e.g. 'I wonder why other developers didn't flock to my project?').
Back in 1993, I had an officemate (Bernard Gardner, working for the late Allan Bromley) who worked on doing a 3D reconstruction of this mechanism using the tomography images that had recently been done. From what I recall, they made a bit of progress, discovering that two gears that were previously thought to be joined were merely next to each other and on independent axles; the previous assumption would have resulted in a mechanism that couldn't operate (locked together). But they still really didn't know what it did, and sadly, Allan Bromley (who was one of the main people interested in this device) died in 2002.
Overall, it's a fascinating find - I never cease to be amazed at the complexity of many pre-industrial artifacts. I'm curious as to what sort of mechanical insights - not just inscription reading - the new analysis technique can provide.
No, you're not putting Dvorak in perspective. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like 'skinheads marching'? Come on, that's clearly understating the case. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like the Nuremberg rallies. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like those radio stations stirring up the Hutus to go massacre the Tutsis.
You are correct. I am perenially amazed by the sheer lack of informed responses when there is a marginally technical, serious article on here.
We got:
1. "stuff is too complex already, what we need is better UI design". This is a non sequiteur - better UI design and clarity of function is an orthogonal issue to what this article talks about. It's as if the technology was going to be used to do nothing but assemble every last portable gadget into one poorly-designed mega-unit.
2. "this is all about integrating such and so a microcontroller, SOC and flash memory": it's too hard to read the article and realize that we're talking about something a little more general, so let's just drop a couple vaguely-informed sounding buzzwords in there to sound superior. Read the damn articles, guys: Capacitors. Waveguides. Antennas. Crystals. Not just some gates.
3. Some home-spun wisdom about how putting more functions in things makes them more unreliable. Yes, that's right, even since the 4004 computer chips have just been crashing more and more often. That's because there's no such discipline as computer engineering or electrical engineering. No-one has ever thought about these issues before today, on Slashdot. Perhaps one day a discipline might spring up around how to assemble digital and analog logic in a way that somehow encapsulates the properties of individual components.
4. A couple random breathless quotes about Vinge and Kurzweill; with the usual level of irrelevance. Hey, at least these guys aren't sneering.
I was faintly hoping for someone who knows more about this sort of stuff to analyze the very PR-ish seeming nature of the article - what's hype, what's reality. Instead, it's the usual undergraduate-level bluffing and gibberish.
Just for once, I'd like to see someone who has decided to use the stick of 'terrible things happening in the third world somewhere' or 'world poverty' or whatever to beat on Free Software activists ('haha, your puny GPL isn't freeing child slaves in Africa, now, is it?') to explain to us what exactly they're accomplishing in this area.
Ok, so sometimes the cyber-activists are a bit blinkered in their rhetoric, raving on about 'greatest threats to freedom' in a way that suggests that they're not always putting things in a Proper Global Perspective. But it seems like an awfully frequent strategy to take cheap shots at these guys for not solving the problem of world hunger, dictatorships in Third World countries and man's exploitation of man in general.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to castigate our local historic buildings preservation society members for failing to work on eliminating parasitic diseases in Africa.
Right, another libertarian ranting about what the state should do from 'first principles' (never mind the fact that this is an absurd minority opinion and that most of us are quite happy with the idea of democracy and a slightly-to-very activist state, depending on our non-crack-smoking ideologies). And modded up, too, as if repeating libertarian cant at every opportunity is somehow 'insightful'. Once again, one fondly daydreams of the quite small island that would be required to house all of the world libertarians who actually want to live their dream, having so utterly failed to persuade more than about 1% of the population of any first world country.
I suppose it's just about as on-topic as the 'boo-ya, we've got wonderful health care and we're from CANADA!' guy who just had to get that off his chest.
This one's been around for a couple years, but might be new on Slashdot.
It's a pretty cool system subject to some limitations. People that I know that used it reported that bumping into each other confused the system (although the ability to form human chains and have multiple people in contact using the system together in various weird ways was the subject of a recent CHI paper). The inability to get up and move around makes it less appealing.
It's not really clear to me that having to sit in particular places and not move around is a worthwhile trade for the joys of 'identification', either, but I suppose that would depend on your application.
Amusingly, I was just reading an article about a university sticking 6 PCI and 1 AGP graphics cards into a PC to do exactly what you're talking about - at least, in a very specialized domain. But the point is well taken - GPGPU (general purpose GPU) is a pretty specialized domain.
I suspect that you're spot on - that the Cell's potential will be extraordinarily difficult to take advantage of in real life. All of these claims about TFLOPS are marketing hooey. On the other hand, one should thank them for making life interesting for computer scientists.
After so many years, the fact that the microkernel guys can't seem to get around to delivering a (non-embedded) system that:
(A) has decent performance - beyond microbenchmark measurements and the usual ridiculous "we stuck a monolithic kernel on top of it and only took a n% performance hit paper" that every microkernel group trots out every few years. Well, duh. That's because you've stuck most of the complexity into a single address space and are only calling your wondrous microkernel API every now and then. This predicts nothing about what would happen if all the services in the system were split up into lots of user-space services, nothing at all.
(B) supports (natively) _any_ API that anyone cares about, so real measurements could get taken (see (A), above),
(C) actually demonstrates a practical system that can keep working despite user-space failures, deadlocks, resource starvation, etc. That is, you need to show us a system that can allow people to continue to do real work with actual applications when important drivers fall over. A system that can restart its graphics, storage, input device or network drivers is one thing - a system that allows you to keep working despite these failures is quite another.
I see fragments of all of the above here and there, but the failure of microkernels to deliver on their hype suggests to me that their advantages aren't enough to overcome the entrenched advantage of monolithic kernels. Maybe microkernels are better - I suspect they might be - but overall, the advantage just can't be that much. It's been a couple decades, and the chief output of microkernel research groups is still position papers about how great microkernels are and the odd microbenchmark.
I've trained with Ninjutsu guys and with Mixed Martial Artists and Brazillian Juijutsu practioners. I have to agree with the grandparent poster - if a tiny guy half your size is throwing you around, you aren't much of a fighter.
I think the stories about Hatsumi aren't complete rubbish. But there is a bit of a difference between some exceptionally skilled tiny guy surprising a 250lb Marine (who may have very little experience with any kind of serious standup grappling) and the same guy getting onto a mat or ring with a Judoka, BJJ or MMA fighter, collegiate wrestler, and so on - even a more reasonably-sized one. What's more to the point is that the exceptional skill level of someone like Hatsumi or the founder of Aikido (O-Sensei - I couldn't spell his name to save my life) might be rather moot as compared to the skill levels in the people that they can _teach_ in a reasonable amount of time.
That is, most people I've met who had pure Ninjutsu or Aikido or any of the 'tricky' arts just really couldn't carry off their techniques against a half-decent, remotely resisting opponent. They could carry out their techniques well in the dojo against each other, but were obviously very well programmed to avoid doing the 'wrong thing' as an attacker. I think, ultimately, after 10 or 20 years these guys might be able to execute perfectly timed throws and joint-locks against attackers that aren't carrying out well-telegraphed, linear, predictable attacks, but I'm being generous here, as I've never met a practioner from those arts who could handle themselves well in this situation who didn't have extensive cross-training in some other art.
On the other hand, I've never run into anyone who had studied Judo, BJJ, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, etc. for any length of time, who couldn't carry out the techniques that they knew very well against an opponent who really wasn't 'letting them hit/throw/tap them'. Obviously, many of these people have weaknesses (the boxers don't get a miraculous defense against getting taken down), and some of the techniques might be sloppy. But a wrestler who misses the double leg takedown has plenty of alternatives (and is used to using them), and the boxer who misses with the jab is pretty used to that and has another one on the way in about a quarter second, but the aikido or ninjutsu person who misses the 'graceful, deadly throw or strike' ususually winds up pretty flummoxed.
If you're depending on brilliantly misdirecting the energy of a cloddish 250lb puncher into a graceful throw, but find that instead the cloddish 250lb puncher managed to fake a one-two or whip a foot inside your ankle during the procedure, the science tends to break down. Now you're suddenly brawling with someone twice your size - a moment in which many of these reedy little guys start to wish that they'd spent a little more time in the weight room.
By the way, beating most traditional Karate guys is not exactly rocket science, as they tend to be very fast and strong, but exceptionally predictable, linear and quite vulnerable to grappling.
I don't buy the whole 'UFC = reality' argument, but it's a lot more real than most of the proofs that traditionalists presented before the UFC. It's interesting to note that the traditionalists tended to make arguments that they'd totally destroy their opponents in any UFC-type fight right up to the point that they had the chance to prove it, and decided later that their art was all about
(a) not fighting on thin mats, (b) deadly eye pokes and throat strikes, (c) surprise and/or fighting in street clothes, or (d) spiritual stuff after all.
Napster can't find a way to make money off of users' downloads. Film at 11.
Seriously, who thinks that Napster (the big flash in the pan from several years ago) has such brand name recognition that a largely unconnected - and undistinguished - music business deserves to make money off the brand name years later?
1. Facilitate massive copyright violation and get really popular 2. Stop facilitating massive copyright violation 3. ??? 4. Profit!!!
It's a tough call - do developments like this merely improve life for already isolated old people, or do they make it easier (particularly on the conscience) to dump old people in isolated apartments with less and less social contact?
I'm torn between these two arguments. It's not like everyone treated old people warmly and integrated them into normal social life and then technology came along and messed it all up.
Finally, I'm dubious about how 'eco' all of these clean redesigns are. Visiting California, I'm always amused to hear about people with their new 'eco-mega-mansions' - big houses built really far from anywhere, at great expense, with lots of 'energy saving' features. They may save energy in the steady state - but the massive expenditure of energy and capital required to build them is significant. In a part of the world that isn't really experiencing much population growth, gadget-packed new developments (almost guaranteed to be obsolete and difficult in 10 or 20 years) probably aren't a very eco-friendly way to go (even if their theoretical characteristics in the 'steady state' look good).
A major point that seems to be missing from the discussion here is that many Open Source projects grow organically. Early precursors to successful Free and Open Source (FOSS from now on) projects often look like utter rubbish at version 0.1, just like all of their legions of unsuccessful competitors.
In other words, if you were the equivalent of starting a project like GIMP or xine or whatever, you'll be competing for "obvious names" (PhotoEdit, MediaPlayer,...) with a hundred other projects that are equally compelling at that stage. Worse still, each project stakes out a little area around it (if there's a halfway-used "PhotoEdit", you probably don't want ("PhotoEditor", "FotoEdit", etc). By the time you're the front-runner, it's much harder to change.
That's not even mentioning the large numbers of marginal payware, freeware and shareware projects out there also chewing up namespace like there's no tomorrow. And some of these guys have lawyers...
This reminds me somewhat of Stanley Fish's ideas about free speech: that is, the only truly 'free' speech is speech that no-one takes seriously - for example, the rantings of some lunatic on a soapbox.
It's not an entirely unpersuasive argument, incidentally. The idea is that many of the arguments in favor of 'free speech' assume that the speech is not taken seriously: that is, if someone says "hey, lets go out and kill all the niggers/Jews/Arabs/surfers/..." from a position where someone might take them seriously, most people might assume that there's some sort of moral culpability. Of course, there are always people who feel that the responsibility is entirely with the listerners, and that's a consistent and not nonsensical point of view, too.
For those who saw the rather dated (now) but still compelling British mini-series "Edge of Darkness", does this sound a bit familiar? Anyone know whether the location is the same - at the very least, certain scenes in Edge of Darkness seemed inspired by the existence of this bunker, right down to some of the details.
Aside from being a blatant ad (as many other posters have pointed out), the thing I really love about this sort of article lead-in is the use of phrases like 'word on the street' to describe things of interest to cubicle- and parents'-basement-dwellers everywhere. Like hoi polloi are hanging out in back alleys swapping vital info on monitor refresh times...
I suppose it sounds a lot better than 'some nerd said so in the Inquirer forum'.
You should at least look at the papers and documentation on the Plan 9 file system, if you haven't already.
This will be no direct help for you, as you're talking about doing something that sounds fairly user-level. Still, I think you'd probably find the design of the system thought-provoking.
The Plan 9 WORM-based file system was doing something like what you describe (on a daily basis - for pretty much the entire filesystem, large files and all) back in the early 90s. This was implemented on top of a WORM jukebox (with hard drives serving as a cache) and done on a separate file server. The capacity of the systems and cache in question are, in todays terms, not spectacularly huge, but the technology is still very impressive. And remember, this is from the days where a 9Gb hard drive was a pretty l33t thing to have...
I think - and it's hard to remember back to a summer scholarship about 11 years ago - that an extra '1' got prepended to the namespace at some point. So what you remember as Center 127 was 1127 by the time I was there (in 1995), and Dept 1271 was 11271.
So, I think Salus should have written Center 1127, not Department 1127, but the gist of the article is correct.
So I'm going to be a hypocrite on this one. I spent a lot of time writing my thesis on a laptop in a coffee house. But over time, I've started to really find the idea that you should turn up to a place that's (to some extent) meant to be a "third place" - that is, an escape from both home and work - and annex it as yet another place to do work. It's particularly annoying when people decide that not only are they going to camp out for 8 hours with their laptops, they're going to use the place as a mobile office, too. That is: make and receive lots of cell phone calls), give loud business presentations, have loud and uninteresting bull sessions.
I'm not an extremist on this. Obviously people are going to homework, write papers and do work stuff while out. But there's definitely a class of people out there who need to Get an Office! If that's you, do us all a favor and stop pretending that your work is so damn interesting that we all want to hear about it, ok?
Can't We All Get Along? (probably not)
on
McVoy Strikes Back
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· Score: 1
To my way of thinking, anyone who insists that there's one dominant source (among OSS, academic research, private research, commercial products) of Good Ideas And Innovation in all of computing has to be examining the evidence very selectively.
I can think of great new ideas - and first practical implementations of not-so-new ideas - from a whole range of sources. Note that it's probably almost as important (if not more important) to have someone actually build a workable system as it is for someone to have a brainstorm and say "I know, dude, let's build a system with a mouse and stuff".
The range of sources includes:
- Straight commercial software releases from established big or medium-sized companies
- Startups that were 'made' by their new software idea
- Random guys in a garage / dorm room giving things away for free
- Academics, operating either in conjunction with industry, government, the miltary or just under their own wacky steam
- Well-established OSS guys doing similiarly
- Corporate research people (Bell Labs, Xerox,...)
I think it's riduculous for anyone to try to fold these disparate sources together and pretend that any one side has been a dominant source of good ideas or implementations. For a start, many of the OSS zealots on this thread have had a tendency to fold all academic research into OSS regardless of whether it ever actually was released under an truly 'Open' license. On the other hand, a anti-OSS zealot is really stretching their case to claim that the original Unix somehow belongs firmly in the camp of commercial software; as if Ken Thompson and friends were just a bunch of salarymen building another commercial product for AT&T.
You can always build a lawyer-ly case for or against your side (OSS, free software, commerical software, academic research) by simply deciding to trace the chain of influence for all other innovations until you can identify the 'truly' original project that fits your prejudice. We'll forever have to live with pissing contents such as "did the Apple guys really add anything original to Xerox PARCs research" (my take: yes).
Diversity is good. All of these disparate groups that I listed above are well suited to make contributions that might be much harder to make in at least some of the other groups. Almost none of them are nearly as original - or, shall we say, "independent of influence" as their boosters would like to make out. Even research academics (who occasionally find themselves chasing after the field that they'd like to imagine themselves leading).:-)
The lead-in carelessly claims that the opinions in the ACM Queue article are those of the ACM. This is almost certainly not true; the ACM merely operates an on-line journal where authors can express their own opinions in this case.
Once again, Slashdot manages to bollocks up a lead-in with careless, inaccurate, flip or overly opinionated lead-ins that might have taken about 2 minutes to clean up.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about all those high-falutin' "science" guys, but any Fallout players worthy of the title were already familiar with the interesting medical properties of radioactive scorpion venom way back in the 90s. Yet another case of Slashdot being late with the news...
It's really easy to make operating systems elegant if you aren't constrained by the terrible task of supporting a large base of (often old) software and hardware (particularly software).
Nothing epitomizes, to me, the Plan 9 attitude like your remark later in the thread about how not having shared libraries is something to celebrate (it's a feature, not a bug!). I'm aware that you didn't just make this up; it's a pretty common thing for Plan 9 implementers and fans to say. Yes, shared libraries are awkward to implement and do some nasty things to the semantics of your run time.
However, out there in the real world, programmers are frequently required to use complicated, feature-rich libraries that do things undreamt-of on Plan 9 (e.g. create a user interface that looks and works even vaguely like the user interface from any other recent system, for example). The fact that Rob Pike's taste for minimalism in user interfaces conveniently scales down the size of the UI library to almost nothing is neither here nor there. acme is a neat idea, but if you wanted to make the argument that shared libraries are bogus, then you need to show that you can deliver something that's as substantial as the functionality of existing libraries through other means (e.g a user-level file server).
The tendency of Plan 9 boosters to write off anything that they don't need to do as 'obviously inelegant and not worth doing' is fine, but it's hard to see how one can draw system design lessons from it.
Of course, this is all fine and dandy until these permanently immature people have kids themselves. Then it's a big interesting competition to see who can be the child. For that matter, to see whether one or other parent can manage to stick around long enough to raise the actual children, or whether someone is going to go rocketing out the door once the next 'teenage crush' (oops, I mean, 'true love with a life partner who really understands me') turns up.
I was fortunate enough to be raised by actual adults, and am married to one. But I saw too many of my friends growing up with the consequences of being raised by the first generation of PermaChildren, and there doesn't seem to be a huge difference with many of my generation.
A lot of that stuff about "innocent 6-year-olds" is very disingenuous. 6-year-olds can be innocent largely because there are adults out there shouldering the burdens of adulthood. A side point: unlike the mawkish chain letter thing posted on this thread implies, you need to do this (shoulder adult burdens) without doing too much whining about it. Moaning about how tough it is to wake up in the morning and go to work and deal with irritating stuff in your e-mail is usually a fine warning sign of someone who's about to flip right back into PermaChild status again. Suck it up.
Right, because we hear frank talk from people who have been at _any_ tech company for 18 years all the time, this is obviously a non-event (this means that this guy was cutting code when a good proportion of Slashdotters were still crapping in diapers or watching Saturday morning cartoons). Face it, 18 years of actual activity (not just a few good years followed by 15 years of pontification or management or both) is a long time in this business and perhaps you should shut the hell up and at least listen, before shooting off your mouth. Even if the guy is from (shock, horror) Microsoft, and even if only you think that this guy is only useful as an insight into the enemies' camp.
You're awfully free with your criticism of a talk that you haven't actually listened to. I too prefer transcripts for the same reason, but generally don't feel the need to critique content that I haven't actually heard. I think that it's interesting - but not entirely surprising - that you can get modded "Insightful" on Slashdot now for commentary on a talk that you didn't hear.
It's time to stop pretending that there are wonderful abstract principles at stake when people try programs like this: it's a bit like passionate cries of 'racist!' every time anyone attempts to do anything to rectify the grossly asymmetrical situation of many U.S. born blacks. Computing has been a quite sexist discipline for many years, even if the situation has changed for the better recently. As a result, there's a pretty steep shortage of senior women in most CS faculties that I've ever seen.
As a undergraduate, in 1990-1993, in addition to hearing tales of acts of substantial sexual harassment that went largely unpunished, I also got to see first hand a lot of horny nerds 'helping' the women in their classes by basically attempting to do all their work for them, as well as a few tutors spending an inordinate amount of time trying to score with students rather than teach them. While the situation has improved, the environment of 10 years ago influences the current supply of women with (for example) 12 years of experience.
So can the 'sexist' talk. Go read Stanley Fish's 'The Trouble With Principle' and see if you can still keep a straight face while pushing your abstract principles...
Personally, I suspect that the absence of women from projects like GNOME represents good sense, more than anything else. I have met many incredibly intelligent, hardworking and successful women in serious academic 'systems' research (there seem to be a number in compiler research, for some reason), but far fewer in the sort of hobbyist open source sphere. Perhaps they prefer to be formally recognized and paid properly - if you felt that there was the prospect of lingering sexism in a field, one might prefer a area where there's a solid audit trail for success (e.g. 'why did you hire a man with half the number of first-rate publications as me?') as opposed to the rather nebulous world of success in the open source world (e.g. 'I wonder why other developers didn't flock to my project?').
Back in 1993, I had an officemate (Bernard Gardner, working for the late Allan Bromley) who worked on doing a 3D reconstruction of this mechanism using the tomography images that had recently been done. From what I recall, they made a bit of progress, discovering that two gears that were previously thought to be joined were merely next to each other and on independent axles; the previous assumption would have resulted in a mechanism that couldn't operate (locked together). But they still really didn't know what it did, and sadly, Allan Bromley (who was one of the main people interested in this device) died in 2002.
Overall, it's a fascinating find - I never cease to be amazed at the complexity of many pre-industrial artifacts.
I'm curious as to what sort of mechanical insights - not just inscription reading - the new analysis technique can provide.
No, you're not putting Dvorak in perspective. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like 'skinheads marching'? Come on, that's clearly understating the case. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like the Nuremberg rallies. Dvorak voicing his opinion is like those radio stations stirring up the Hutus to go massacre the Tutsis.
There you go. Hope this helps.
You are correct. I am perenially amazed by the sheer lack of informed responses when there is a marginally technical, serious article on here.
We got:
1. "stuff is too complex already, what we need is better UI design". This is a non sequiteur - better UI design and clarity of function is an orthogonal issue to what this article talks about. It's as if the technology was going to be used to do nothing but assemble every last portable gadget into one poorly-designed mega-unit.
2. "this is all about integrating such and so a microcontroller, SOC and flash memory": it's too hard to read the article and realize that we're talking about something a little more general, so let's just drop a couple vaguely-informed sounding buzzwords in there to sound superior. Read the damn articles, guys: Capacitors. Waveguides. Antennas. Crystals. Not just some gates.
3. Some home-spun wisdom about how putting more functions in things makes them more unreliable. Yes, that's right, even since the 4004 computer chips have just been crashing more and more often. That's because there's no such discipline as computer engineering or electrical engineering. No-one has ever thought about these issues before today, on Slashdot. Perhaps one day a discipline might spring up around how to assemble digital and analog logic in a way that somehow encapsulates the properties of individual components.
4. A couple random breathless quotes about Vinge and Kurzweill; with the usual level of irrelevance. Hey, at least these guys aren't sneering.
I was faintly hoping for someone who knows more about this sort of stuff to analyze the very PR-ish seeming nature of the article - what's hype, what's reality. Instead, it's the usual undergraduate-level bluffing and gibberish.
Just for once, I'd like to see someone who has decided to use the stick of 'terrible things happening in the third world somewhere' or 'world poverty' or whatever to beat on Free Software activists ('haha, your puny GPL isn't freeing child slaves in Africa, now, is it?') to explain to us what exactly they're accomplishing in this area.
Ok, so sometimes the cyber-activists are a bit blinkered in their rhetoric, raving on about 'greatest threats to freedom' in a way that suggests that they're not always putting things in a Proper Global Perspective. But it seems like an awfully frequent strategy to take cheap shots at these guys for not solving the problem of world hunger, dictatorships in Third World countries and man's exploitation of man in general.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to castigate our local historic buildings preservation society members for failing to work on eliminating parasitic diseases in Africa.
Right, another libertarian ranting about what the state should do from 'first principles' (never mind the fact that this is an absurd minority opinion and that most of us are quite happy with the idea of democracy and a slightly-to-very activist state, depending on our non-crack-smoking ideologies). And modded up, too, as if repeating libertarian cant at every opportunity is somehow 'insightful'. Once again, one fondly daydreams of the quite small island that would be required to house all of the world libertarians who actually want to live their dream, having so utterly failed to persuade more than about 1% of the population of any first world country.
I suppose it's just about as on-topic as the 'boo-ya, we've got wonderful health care and we're from CANADA!' guy who just had to get that off his chest.
This one's been around for a couple years, but might be new on Slashdot.
It's a pretty cool system subject to some limitations. People that I know that used it reported that bumping into each other confused the system (although the ability to form human chains and have multiple people in contact using the system together in various weird ways was the subject of a recent CHI paper). The inability to get up and move around makes it less appealing.
It's not really clear to me that having to sit in particular places and not move around is a worthwhile trade for the joys of 'identification', either, but I suppose that would depend on your application.
Amusingly, I was just reading an article about a university sticking 6 PCI and 1 AGP graphics cards into a PC to do exactly what you're talking about - at least, in a very specialized domain. But the point is well taken - GPGPU (general purpose GPU) is a pretty specialized domain.
I suspect that you're spot on - that the Cell's potential will be extraordinarily difficult to take advantage of in real life. All of these claims about TFLOPS are marketing hooey. On the other hand, one should thank them for making life interesting for computer scientists.
Meh.
After so many years, the fact that the microkernel guys can't seem to get around to delivering a (non-embedded) system that:
(A) has decent performance - beyond microbenchmark measurements and the usual ridiculous "we stuck a monolithic kernel on top of it and only took a n% performance hit paper" that every microkernel group trots out every few years. Well, duh. That's because you've stuck most of the complexity into a single address space and are only calling your wondrous microkernel API every now and then. This predicts nothing about what would happen if all the services in the system were split up into lots of user-space services, nothing at all.
(B) supports (natively) _any_ API that anyone cares about, so real measurements could get taken (see (A), above),
(C) actually demonstrates a practical system that can keep working despite user-space failures, deadlocks, resource starvation, etc. That is, you need to show us a system that can allow people to continue to do real work with actual applications when important drivers fall over. A system that can restart its graphics, storage, input device or network drivers is one thing - a system that allows you to keep working despite these failures is quite another.
I see fragments of all of the above here and there, but the failure of microkernels to deliver on their hype suggests to me that their advantages aren't enough to overcome the entrenched advantage of monolithic kernels. Maybe microkernels are better - I suspect they might be - but overall, the advantage just can't be that much. It's been a couple decades, and the chief output of microkernel research groups is still position papers about how great microkernels are and the odd microbenchmark.
I've trained with Ninjutsu guys and with Mixed Martial Artists and Brazillian Juijutsu practioners. I have to agree with the grandparent poster - if a tiny guy half your size is throwing you around, you aren't much of a fighter.
I think the stories about Hatsumi aren't complete rubbish. But there is a bit of a difference between some exceptionally skilled tiny guy surprising a 250lb Marine (who may have very little experience with any kind of serious standup grappling) and the same guy getting onto a mat or ring with a Judoka, BJJ or MMA fighter, collegiate wrestler, and so on - even a more reasonably-sized one. What's more to the point is that the exceptional skill level of someone like Hatsumi or the founder of Aikido (O-Sensei - I couldn't spell his name to save my life) might be rather moot as compared to the skill levels in the people that they can _teach_ in a reasonable amount of time.
That is, most people I've met who had pure Ninjutsu or Aikido or any of the 'tricky' arts just really couldn't carry off their techniques against a half-decent, remotely resisting opponent. They could carry out their techniques well in the dojo against each other, but were obviously very well programmed to avoid doing the 'wrong thing' as an attacker. I think, ultimately, after 10 or 20 years these guys might be able to execute perfectly timed throws and joint-locks against attackers that aren't carrying out well-telegraphed, linear, predictable attacks, but I'm being generous here, as I've never met a practioner from those arts who could handle themselves well in this situation who didn't have extensive cross-training in some other art.
On the other hand, I've never run into anyone who had studied Judo, BJJ, boxing, wrestling, Muay Thai, etc. for any length of time, who couldn't carry out the techniques that they knew very well against an opponent who really wasn't 'letting them hit/throw/tap them'. Obviously, many of these people have weaknesses (the boxers don't get a miraculous defense against getting taken down), and some of the techniques might be sloppy. But a wrestler who misses the double leg takedown has plenty of alternatives (and is used to using them), and the boxer who misses with the jab is pretty used to that and has another one on the way in about a quarter second, but the aikido or ninjutsu person who misses the 'graceful, deadly throw or strike' ususually winds up pretty flummoxed.
If you're depending on brilliantly misdirecting the energy of a cloddish 250lb puncher into a graceful throw, but find that instead the cloddish 250lb puncher managed to fake a one-two or whip a foot inside your ankle during the procedure, the science tends to break down. Now you're suddenly brawling with someone twice your size - a moment in which many of these reedy little guys start to wish that they'd spent a little more time in the weight room.
By the way, beating most traditional Karate guys is not exactly rocket science, as they tend to be very fast and strong, but exceptionally predictable, linear and quite vulnerable to grappling.
I don't buy the whole 'UFC = reality' argument, but it's a lot more real than most of the proofs that traditionalists presented before the UFC. It's interesting to note that the traditionalists tended to make arguments that they'd totally destroy their opponents in any UFC-type fight right up to the point that they had the chance to prove it, and decided later that their art was all about
(a) not fighting on thin mats,
(b) deadly eye pokes and throat strikes,
(c) surprise and/or fighting in street clothes, or
(d) spiritual stuff after all.
Napster can't find a way to make money off of users' downloads. Film at 11.
Seriously, who thinks that Napster (the big flash in the pan from several years ago) has such brand name recognition that a largely unconnected - and undistinguished - music business deserves to make money off the brand name years later?
1. Facilitate massive copyright violation and get really popular
2. Stop facilitating massive copyright violation
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
It's a tough call - do developments like this merely improve life for already isolated old people, or do they make it easier (particularly on the conscience) to dump old people in isolated apartments with less and less social contact?
I'm torn between these two arguments. It's not like everyone treated old people warmly and integrated them into normal social life and then technology came along and messed it all up.
Finally, I'm dubious about how 'eco' all of these clean redesigns are. Visiting California, I'm always amused to hear about people with their new 'eco-mega-mansions' - big houses built really far from anywhere, at great expense, with lots of 'energy saving' features. They may save energy in the steady state - but the massive expenditure of energy and capital required to build them is significant. In a part of the world that isn't really experiencing much population growth, gadget-packed new developments (almost guaranteed to be obsolete and difficult in 10 or 20 years) probably aren't a very eco-friendly way to go (even if their theoretical characteristics in the 'steady state' look good).
A major point that seems to be missing from the discussion here is that many Open Source projects grow organically. Early precursors to successful Free and Open Source (FOSS from now on) projects often look like utter rubbish at version 0.1, just like all of their legions of unsuccessful competitors.
...) with a hundred other projects that are equally compelling at that stage. Worse still, each project stakes out a little area around it (if there's a halfway-used "PhotoEdit", you probably don't want ("PhotoEditor", "FotoEdit", etc). By the time you're the front-runner, it's much harder to change.
In other words, if you were the equivalent of starting a project like GIMP or xine or whatever, you'll be competing for "obvious names" (PhotoEdit, MediaPlayer,
That's not even mentioning the large numbers of marginal payware, freeware and shareware projects out there also chewing up namespace like there's no tomorrow. And some of these guys have lawyers...
This reminds me somewhat of Stanley Fish's ideas about free speech: that is, the only truly 'free' speech is speech that no-one takes seriously - for example, the rantings of some lunatic on a soapbox.
It's not an entirely unpersuasive argument, incidentally. The idea is that many of the arguments in favor of 'free speech' assume that the speech is not taken seriously: that is, if someone says "hey, lets go out and kill all the niggers/Jews/Arabs/surfers/..." from a position where someone might take them seriously, most people might assume that there's some sort of moral culpability. Of course, there are always people who feel that the responsibility is entirely with the listerners, and that's a consistent and not nonsensical point of view, too.
For those who saw the rather dated (now) but still compelling British mini-series "Edge of Darkness", does this sound a bit familiar? Anyone know whether the location is the same - at the very least, certain scenes in Edge of Darkness seemed inspired by the existence of this bunker, right down to some of the details.
Yo, yo, word.
Aside from being a blatant ad (as many other posters have pointed out), the thing I really love about this sort of article lead-in is the use of phrases like 'word on the street' to describe things of interest to cubicle- and parents'-basement-dwellers everywhere. Like hoi polloi are hanging out in back alleys swapping vital info on monitor refresh times...
I suppose it sounds a lot better than 'some nerd said so in the Inquirer forum'.
You should at least look at the papers and documentation on the Plan 9 file system, if you haven't already.
This will be no direct help for you, as you're talking about doing something that sounds fairly user-level. Still, I think you'd probably find the design of the system thought-provoking.
The Plan 9 WORM-based file system was doing something like what you describe (on a daily basis - for pretty much the entire filesystem, large files and all) back in the early 90s. This was implemented on top of a WORM jukebox (with hard drives serving as a cache) and done on a separate file server. The capacity of the systems and cache in question are, in todays terms, not spectacularly huge, but the technology is still very impressive. And remember, this is from the days where a 9Gb hard drive was a pretty l33t thing to have...
I think - and it's hard to remember back to a summer scholarship about 11 years ago - that an extra '1' got prepended to the namespace at some point. So what you remember as Center 127 was 1127 by the time I was there (in 1995), and Dept 1271 was 11271.
So, I think Salus should have written Center 1127, not Department 1127, but the gist of the article is correct.
So I'm going to be a hypocrite on this one. I spent a lot of time writing my thesis on a laptop in a coffee house. But over time, I've started to really find the idea that you should turn up to a place that's (to some extent) meant to be a "third place" - that is, an escape from both home and work - and annex it as yet another place to do work. It's particularly annoying when people decide that not only are they going to camp out for 8 hours with their laptops, they're going to use the place as a mobile office, too. That is: make and receive lots of cell phone calls), give loud business presentations, have loud and uninteresting bull sessions.
I'm not an extremist on this. Obviously people are going to homework, write papers and do work stuff while out. But there's definitely a class of people out there who need to Get an Office!
If that's you, do us all a favor and stop pretending that your work is so damn interesting that we all want to hear about it, ok?
To my way of thinking, anyone who insists that there's one dominant source (among OSS, academic research, private research, commercial products) of Good Ideas And Innovation in all of computing has to be examining the evidence very selectively.
...)
:-)
I can think of great new ideas - and first practical implementations of not-so-new ideas - from a whole range of sources. Note that it's probably almost as important (if not more important) to have someone actually build a workable system as it is for someone to have a brainstorm and say "I know, dude, let's build a system with a mouse and stuff".
The range of sources includes:
- Straight commercial software releases from established big or medium-sized companies
- Startups that were 'made' by their new software idea
- Random guys in a garage / dorm room giving things away for free
- Academics, operating either in conjunction with industry, government, the miltary or just under their own wacky steam
- Well-established OSS guys doing similiarly
- Corporate research people (Bell Labs, Xerox,
I think it's riduculous for anyone to try to fold these disparate sources together and pretend that any one side has been a dominant source of good ideas or implementations. For a start, many of the OSS zealots on this thread have had a tendency to fold all academic research into OSS regardless of whether it ever actually was released under an truly 'Open' license. On the other hand, a anti-OSS zealot is really stretching their case to claim that the original Unix somehow belongs firmly in the camp of commercial software; as if Ken Thompson and friends were just a bunch of salarymen building another commercial product for AT&T.
You can always build a lawyer-ly case for or against your side (OSS, free software, commerical software, academic research) by simply deciding to trace the chain of influence for all other innovations until you can identify the 'truly' original project that fits your prejudice. We'll forever have to live with pissing contents such as "did the Apple guys really add anything original to Xerox PARCs research" (my take: yes).
Diversity is good. All of these disparate groups that I listed above are well suited to make contributions that might be much harder to make in at least some of the other groups. Almost none of them are nearly as original - or, shall we say, "independent of influence" as their boosters would like to make out. Even research academics (who occasionally find themselves chasing after the field that they'd like to imagine themselves leading).
The lead-in carelessly claims that the opinions in the ACM Queue article are those of the ACM. This is almost certainly not true; the ACM merely operates an on-line journal where authors can express their own opinions in this case.
Once again, Slashdot manages to bollocks up a lead-in with careless, inaccurate, flip or overly opinionated lead-ins that might have taken about 2 minutes to clean up.