Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers.
In reality, they have oversold their service. They may sell 10Mb service to ten customers, that doesn't mean that they have 100Mb to give. They may only have (say) 50Mb, and nobody would notice unless more than half of their customers saturated their connections. I don't know how much overselling is typical, but I wouldn't be surprised to find some ISPs selling ten times as much as they actually have. This happens all the way up the chain.
Big, fat, huge undersea network cables that transmit lots and lots of data and can really only be maintained by submarines.
Submarine cables are actually surprisingly small. At most they are a few inches thick, which I don't think really counts as "huge". They might seem larger if you ever see them where they come ashore, but that's because in the shallows near the coast they are encased in armoring. Also surprising is that only fairly shallow cables are maintained by submersibles. Deeper cables are actually pulled to the surface by dragging a hook along the seabed until it snags.
Look at the topology of the Internet. The tier 1 ISPs (Sprint, MCI, etc.) will upgrade their backbone pipes, and the same will happen in a trickle-down effect, as it always has.
Part of the fear is that bandwidth usage is or will-be growing faster than more bandwidth can physically (or economically) be added.
I haven't seen a single starving bum on the street.
He may have been a bum, but he damn sure wasn't starving. He may have been hungry, but he wasn't starving. He may not have eaten in days, but he wasn't starving. If you saw him on a street in the US, he wasn't starving.
I really want one. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it...
Don't worry. As soon as they drop, thousands of them will be up for grabs online. When unscrupulous persons discover that the "free" computers are worth $200-$300 USD or more to Americans geeks, they will find a way to cash in. Given the exchange rates in some of the OLPC countries (e.g. 1 US Dollar = 133.236 Nigerian Naira), there is no question. It's sad, but inevitable.
I'm not admonishing people that want one, or OLPC for "not doing anything" (what could they do?), but I would like to wag a finger in advance to all of the people involved (buying or selling) in the future XO black market.
Basically, is purpose is to eliminate format-shifting altogether
If that's so, then why is it that most DRM systems allow format-shifting to DRM-free formats?
Since their business model historically has derived a lot of revenue from the repurchasing of music in new formats (45s, 8-tracks, LPs, cassette tape, CD), they want to stop this
Such shifts are too rare to be protected at great expense. The music industry does not live and die based on whether people purchase the same music every few decades -- it lives on lots of people buying different music every year. Consider that the largest group of music consumers today have probably never owned anything but CDs.
In my area at least, Charter rolled out this bullshit on the same day they announced a rate hike. They want you to pay more for this "service".
The most damning part is that "opting-out" just forwards you to "Windows Live" instead, which is obviously an attempt to pretend that they aren't doing what they're doing by doing what Internet Explorer would do anyway. Fuck you, Charter.
There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 1,638,336 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage. A useful exercise is to critically read ten random articles. It is very likely that most or even all will contain poor writing and unsourced material.
How many of those 1,638,336 articles have ever beenreviewed? There may be well-written articles that nobody has bothered to go through the effort of nominating it for FA. Furthermore, how many of those articles are on topics that anyone could possibly satisfy the FA requirements for? Not every article covers a deep subject. A large number of them are about cricketers and 90's pop albums.
What the hell difference does the number of articles make anyway? What matters is the articles that people actually read, and that undoubtedly does not include all of them. Is this English article on a Korean-language film eroding the quality of Wikipedia by virtue of being one sentence long?
I agree with a lot of criticism of Wikipedia, but not when it's based on the idea that simply counting the number of articles is a good way to measure quality.
(By the way, does anyone have statistics on the ratio of article text to bickering talk pages and administrative bullshit? If anything is killing Wikipedia, I think it's the fact that the people with the most time and energy invested in it tend to spend it all arguing and applying the stub tag.)
Your first comment in reply to mine contained the assertion that depending on Xgrid was an "abysmal design in comparison" to the "far superiour way" of limiting yourself to portable C. I have twice given you reasons why this is not always the case, and all you have done is repeat how "obvious" and "self-evident" your assertion is instead of making any attempt to address those reasons. Just let it go if that's all you're going to do.
what do you think open grid is? it is just a gui wrapper around Xgrid.
Um, no it isn't. OpenMacGrid is just an Xgrid controller. There is no GUI. You enter the address into the built-in Mac OS X Sharing Preferences pane, check a box, and you're done.
it hasn't taken off, but then again neither has xgrid
I'm not sure what your criteria are for "taking off", but Xgrid has been pretty successful. I think it doesn't get much press because the majority of grids are not public.
My point was that if you write portable code you can run it on many platforms without modification
Wow, that's a whopper. No wonder I missed it. Portable code is portable. Dang. You should get an award.
and that this is a far superiour way of doing things than restricting yourself to one single minority platform.
It is not superior in all cases. In fact, it is quite inferior for the target audience who (as I have already stated) may be part of an all-Mac lab already, may be using the Accelerate framework, may be using 64-bit, may already be using Xgrid jobs on private grids, etc. There are any number of reasons why people would choose to "restrict" themselves to the platform. Writing for portability means losing every advantage that the platform has in favor of a potentially larger and less efficient grid, which you will then have to find some cross-platform way to distribute jobs to and return results from. Not everyone is into that kind of masochism -- some scientists actually prefer to do science.
without exception the actual number-crunching code is an console application, plain C - not even any #ifs, and the only thing that is platform specific is a tiny wrapper script.
Without exception? Are you sure nobody ever does any vectorization outside of what the compiler does? Ever? Nobody ever links to platform-specific frameworks for any reason? Ever? Nobody ever writes code to run on a homogenous cluster? Ever?
Being tied to XGrid is an truly abysmal design in comparison.
In your case perhaps it would be. That doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people for whom it is more ideal than your setup. Those people include scientists that already run Mac OS X, and perhaps link the Accelerate framework, and perhaps already have Xgrid-ready jobs that can run on OpenMacGrid without modification. Or maybe they just don't want to concern themselves with the details of distributing jobs and returning results with a Perl script or something.
Maybe, instead of everybody making their own little grid system...
I don't think you fully understand what you're talking about.
For starters, BOINC is not a separate grid. It's a framework and client for many grids. BOINC users can (and do) contribute to many different projects including your "established projects" like Folding@Home and SETI@Home, and including many of the other grids you've listed. Many of the others you listed do exactly the kind of jobs you're calling for, like disease research.
Also, you seem to think that all grid computing projects are interchangeable, and that just isn't so. They may work with different data, or using different methods; they may not have the same requirements for job submission; they may operate on vastly different scales. Basically, they're suited for different research needs. A nice thing about OpenMacGrid, for example, is that researchers can take the same Xgrid job they've been using on their tiny network and send it to a public grid without much, if any modification.
How useful can it be to be locked into one OS? How hard is it to make a commandline program and then a Cocoa interface, that way you can get everyone and still have a pretty window and widget for OS X users.
OpenMacGrid uses Xgrid, which is Mac-only. It isn't something new they've made: it's built-in to Mac OS X. You ask "how hard is it...", and the answer is "A lot harder than just using what's already available."
Also, the Xgrid agent doesn't have a pretty window. It's a background daemon.
So, Xgrid-experts, what kind of permissions does an application like this have? Is it sandboxed somehow?
Xgrid jobs run as user 'nobody', which is decently safe, with process limits so it can't forkbomb you to death. A rogue job could fill up/tmp or ~/Public/Drop Box or whatever with garbage until you run out of disk, or some other annoying things. I won't say "nothing major", because that depends on what you've got that's readable or writable by others. I'm also not wearing my expert hat, so it's entirely possible that I'm unaware of some way that Xgrid jobs could 0wnz0r you.
You still need to trust OpenMacGrid to keep these bad jobs off the grid.
He has special alternate versions of his videos so that Firefox and Apple users can access them
I take it you didn't actually click that link. It isn't an alternate version, it just opens up Windows Media Player instead of trying to play in-browser. And no, it isn't just my system, the link is an.asx stream.
It's a little bit strange that when the head of a company with the most successful DRM platform says "No DRM is better than interoperable DRM", people seem to be getting more supportive of interoperable DRM.
It's also a little bit strange that "the father of MPEG" is how Leonardo Chiariglione is described, rather than the more relevant "father of SDMI".
The "evidence" provided in TFA for this idea is pretty pathetic. I'll summarize (all quotes from the article):
Since AT&T nee Cingular is the only carrier of the iPhone, this will be "forcing everybody to figure out how to dump their current wireless plan and switch over". This is obviously some novel use of the word "forcing".
Apple has sold a lot of iPod and a lot of music. The author doesn't actually make a point with this.
Even while linking to Jobs' "Thoughts on Music", the author implies that it doesn't say anything about the fact that Apple's store uses DRM. Even if it didn't explicitly mention it (which it does), how on earth could anyone interested in reading it not be aware of the context?
iTunes' Vista incompatibilities, which are limited, and for which Apple has provided a fix, caused "Microsoft engineers hurriedly worked to try to solve the problem and make their system compatible. ", while Apple apparently did nothing.
Apple's suspected deal with Apple Corps is a sign of the apocalypse. Or something. The author doesn't really make a point with this, either.
Nettwerk has already come out and said that they asked Apple to remove the DRM from their artists music, and Apple refused.
Did you even read my comment? DRM is part of the deal, just like "128kbps AAC" and "$0.99 per track" are. If Nettwerk doesn't like it, they can take their business elsewhere. Apparently, they aren't too upset by it, as they continue to sell music through Apple's store. Let me say this again: Nettwerk and the artists they represent continue to make money selling DRMed music through Apple's store. Nobody is forcing them to do so. In fact, they sell the same music in their own store, for the same price, without DRM.
An Apple lawyer has stated that even if the labels did give the OK, "they would see no reason to remove DRM"
Bullshit. I have heard this "quote" bandied about a thousand times, and it always comes back to the source being "an anonymous Apple lawyer" supposedly quoted by the EFF. I challenge you to find any evidence that distinguishes that quote's validity from that of, say, the tooth fairy.
not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed for three years
Given the length of the mission, it's quite likely that hydroponic gardens would be used to provide food. Conveniently, quite a few potheads are also experts in hydroponics.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, they go and buy more bandwidth from their upstream providers.
In reality, they have oversold their service. They may sell 10Mb service to ten customers, that doesn't mean that they have 100Mb to give. They may only have (say) 50Mb, and nobody would notice unless more than half of their customers saturated their connections. I don't know how much overselling is typical, but I wouldn't be surprised to find some ISPs selling ten times as much as they actually have. This happens all the way up the chain.
Big, fat, huge undersea network cables that transmit lots and lots of data and can really only be maintained by submarines.
Submarine cables are actually surprisingly small. At most they are a few inches thick, which I don't think really counts as "huge". They might seem larger if you ever see them where they come ashore, but that's because in the shallows near the coast they are encased in armoring. Also surprising is that only fairly shallow cables are maintained by submersibles. Deeper cables are actually pulled to the surface by dragging a hook along the seabed until it snags.
Look at the topology of the Internet. The tier 1 ISPs (Sprint, MCI, etc.) will upgrade their backbone pipes, and the same will happen in a trickle-down effect, as it always has.
Part of the fear is that bandwidth usage is or will-be growing faster than more bandwidth can physically (or economically) be added.
2. Once every child has a laptop... maybe someone will think of the "OPSPC" project (one power socket per child)
The XO is powered by either a hand-crank or a pull cord. It doesn't need a power socket.
I haven't seen a single starving bum on the street.
He may have been a bum, but he damn sure wasn't starving. He may have been hungry, but he wasn't starving. He may not have eaten in days, but he wasn't starving. If you saw him on a street in the US, he wasn't starving.
I really want one. I want it I want it I want it I want it I want it...
Don't worry. As soon as they drop, thousands of them will be up for grabs online. When unscrupulous persons discover that the "free" computers are worth $200-$300 USD or more to Americans geeks, they will find a way to cash in. Given the exchange rates in some of the OLPC countries (e.g. 1 US Dollar = 133.236 Nigerian Naira), there is no question. It's sad, but inevitable.
I'm not admonishing people that want one, or OLPC for "not doing anything" (what could they do?), but I would like to wag a finger in advance to all of the people involved (buying or selling) in the future XO black market.
Basically, is purpose is to eliminate format-shifting altogether
If that's so, then why is it that most DRM systems allow format-shifting to DRM-free formats?
Since their business model historically has derived a lot of revenue from the repurchasing of music in new formats (45s, 8-tracks, LPs, cassette tape, CD), they want to stop this
Such shifts are too rare to be protected at great expense. The music industry does not live and die based on whether people purchase the same music every few decades -- it lives on lots of people buying different music every year. Consider that the largest group of music consumers today have probably never owned anything but CDs.
In my area at least, Charter rolled out this bullshit on the same day they announced a rate hike. They want you to pay more for this "service".
The most damning part is that "opting-out" just forwards you to "Windows Live" instead, which is obviously an attempt to pretend that they aren't doing what they're doing by doing what Internet Explorer would do anyway. Fuck you, Charter.
There are about 1,300 featured articles. There are also about 1,700 good articles. However, there are currently 1,638,336 articles on Wikipedia. This means that slightly more than 99.8% of all the articles on Wikipedia are not considered well written, verifiable or broad or comprehensive in their coverage. A useful exercise is to critically read ten random articles. It is very likely that most or even all will contain poor writing and unsourced material.
How many of those 1,638,336 articles have ever been reviewed? There may be well-written articles that nobody has bothered to go through the effort of nominating it for FA. Furthermore, how many of those articles are on topics that anyone could possibly satisfy the FA requirements for? Not every article covers a deep subject. A large number of them are about cricketers and 90's pop albums.
What the hell difference does the number of articles make anyway? What matters is the articles that people actually read, and that undoubtedly does not include all of them. Is this English article on a Korean-language film eroding the quality of Wikipedia by virtue of being one sentence long?
I agree with a lot of criticism of Wikipedia, but not when it's based on the idea that simply counting the number of articles is a good way to measure quality.
(By the way, does anyone have statistics on the ratio of article text to bickering talk pages and administrative bullshit? If anything is killing Wikipedia, I think it's the fact that the people with the most time and energy invested in it tend to spend it all arguing and applying the stub tag.)
Your first comment in reply to mine contained the assertion that depending on Xgrid was an "abysmal design in comparison" to the "far superiour way" of limiting yourself to portable C. I have twice given you reasons why this is not always the case, and all you have done is repeat how "obvious" and "self-evident" your assertion is instead of making any attempt to address those reasons. Just let it go if that's all you're going to do.
what do you think open grid is? it is just a gui wrapper around Xgrid.
Um, no it isn't. OpenMacGrid is just an Xgrid controller. There is no GUI. You enter the address into the built-in Mac OS X Sharing Preferences pane, check a box, and you're done.
it hasn't taken off, but then again neither has xgrid
I'm not sure what your criteria are for "taking off", but Xgrid has been pretty successful. I think it doesn't get much press because the majority of grids are not public.
My point was that if you write portable code you can run it on many platforms without modification
Wow, that's a whopper. No wonder I missed it. Portable code is portable. Dang. You should get an award.
and that this is a far superiour way of doing things than restricting yourself to one single minority platform.
It is not superior in all cases. In fact, it is quite inferior for the target audience who (as I have already stated) may be part of an all-Mac lab already, may be using the Accelerate framework, may be using 64-bit, may already be using Xgrid jobs on private grids, etc. There are any number of reasons why people would choose to "restrict" themselves to the platform. Writing for portability means losing every advantage that the platform has in favor of a potentially larger and less efficient grid, which you will then have to find some cross-platform way to distribute jobs to and return results from. Not everyone is into that kind of masochism -- some scientists actually prefer to do science.
What I wrote was...
If you weren't trying to generalize about distributed projects, then what the hell was your point?
without exception the actual number-crunching code is an console application, plain C - not even any #ifs, and the only thing that is platform specific is a tiny wrapper script.
Without exception? Are you sure nobody ever does any vectorization outside of what the compiler does? Ever? Nobody ever links to platform-specific frameworks for any reason? Ever? Nobody ever writes code to run on a homogenous cluster? Ever?
Being tied to XGrid is an truly abysmal design in comparison.
In your case perhaps it would be. That doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of other people for whom it is more ideal than your setup. Those people include scientists that already run Mac OS X, and perhaps link the Accelerate framework, and perhaps already have Xgrid-ready jobs that can run on OpenMacGrid without modification. Or maybe they just don't want to concern themselves with the details of distributing jobs and returning results with a Perl script or something.
Maybe, instead of everybody making their own little grid system...
I don't think you fully understand what you're talking about.
For starters, BOINC is not a separate grid. It's a framework and client for many grids. BOINC users can (and do) contribute to many different projects including your "established projects" like Folding@Home and SETI@Home, and including many of the other grids you've listed. Many of the others you listed do exactly the kind of jobs you're calling for, like disease research.
Also, you seem to think that all grid computing projects are interchangeable, and that just isn't so. They may work with different data, or using different methods; they may not have the same requirements for job submission; they may operate on vastly different scales. Basically, they're suited for different research needs. A nice thing about OpenMacGrid, for example, is that researchers can take the same Xgrid job they've been using on their tiny network and send it to a public grid without much, if any modification.
How useful can it be to be locked into one OS? How hard is it to make a commandline program and then a Cocoa interface, that way you can get everyone and still have a pretty window and widget for OS X users.
OpenMacGrid uses Xgrid, which is Mac-only. It isn't something new they've made: it's built-in to Mac OS X. You ask "how hard is it...", and the answer is "A lot harder than just using what's already available."
Also, the Xgrid agent doesn't have a pretty window. It's a background daemon.
So, Xgrid-experts, what kind of permissions does an application like this have? Is it sandboxed somehow?
/tmp or ~/Public/Drop Box or whatever with garbage until you run out of disk, or some other annoying things. I won't say "nothing major", because that depends on what you've got that's readable or writable by others. I'm also not wearing my expert hat, so it's entirely possible that I'm unaware of some way that Xgrid jobs could 0wnz0r you.
Xgrid jobs run as user 'nobody', which is decently safe, with process limits so it can't forkbomb you to death. A rogue job could fill up
You still need to trust OpenMacGrid to keep these bad jobs off the grid.
He has special alternate versions of his videos so that Firefox and Apple users can access them
.asx stream.
I take it you didn't actually click that link. It isn't an alternate version, it just opens up Windows Media Player instead of trying to play in-browser. And no, it isn't just my system, the link is an
It's a little bit strange that when the head of a company with the most successful DRM platform says "No DRM is better than interoperable DRM", people seem to be getting more supportive of interoperable DRM.
It's also a little bit strange that "the father of MPEG" is how Leonardo Chiariglione is described, rather than the more relevant "father of SDMI".
Ha! Welcome to...oh. Shit.
Generally, satire is funny.
Now make the battery user accessible, and make it play mp3/aac/ogg/flac off directories and not itunes databases and we're all set.
In other words: change everything about it.
Nettwerk has already come out and said that they asked Apple to remove the DRM from their artists music, and Apple refused.
Did you even read my comment? DRM is part of the deal, just like "128kbps AAC" and "$0.99 per track" are. If Nettwerk doesn't like it, they can take their business elsewhere. Apparently, they aren't too upset by it, as they continue to sell music through Apple's store. Let me say this again: Nettwerk and the artists they represent continue to make money selling DRMed music through Apple's store. Nobody is forcing them to do so. In fact, they sell the same music in their own store, for the same price, without DRM.
An Apple lawyer has stated that even if the labels did give the OK, "they would see no reason to remove DRM"
Bullshit. I have heard this "quote" bandied about a thousand times, and it always comes back to the source being "an anonymous Apple lawyer" supposedly quoted by the EFF. I challenge you to find any evidence that distinguishes that quote's validity from that of, say, the tooth fairy.
not likely to be inclined to get into a tin can with no weed for three years
Given the length of the mission, it's quite likely that hydroponic gardens would be used to provide food. Conveniently, quite a few potheads are also experts in hydroponics.