So, Jordan, you provide a nice demonstration of a flaw. It is considered polite in many circles, that when destroying someone's hard-work, that you make a peace offering in the form of some assistance.
Can we expect therefore to see an equally interesting and thorough discussion of how Napster/Gnutella can grow, evolve and perhaps merge, to provide the "ideal compromise" where we will not need 100Gb networks, but where:
a) The destruction of any significant %age of the network is transparrently ignored or healed.
b) The network will not segment as GnutellaNet can.
c) Bandwith requirements are low[er]
d) Anonymity of participants is maintained where required.
e) The law can't shut it down so easily.
f) Data can be secured, encrypted and/or signed (etc.) for specific users
And MY personal wish:
g) The end result is so globally accepted for file exchange and storage, that FTP dies a death, and we all live without buffer-overflow exploits for the rest of out lives:-)
Note that Napster and Gnutella were very one-sided in their freedom with files. There was no facility available to ensure that the law wasn't honoured where desired.
Sadly, some people seem to be under the impression that shiny gadgets can replace age old methods of human communication
They can. More generally they simply up-the-ante rather than being a replacement, but remember that the book replaced word-of-mouth once upon-a-time. What level of resistance do you think that received?
Would the Bible be the same had it been written on a microchip instead of parchment. Would the works of such great literary minds as Shakespere or Mark Twain have had the same impact on our society if they had been strings of ones and zeros on magnetic media
Your questions imply that you believe that the form of the words, and their storage is more important that the meaning of the words themselves. I would argue that if the bible was on a microchip for the last 2000 years, that the message therein would have had no less impact, and the spread of the message may even have been more insidious without the burden of manual copying, and the inherrent errors caused by that manual copying.
Technology can do wonderful things, but it will never replace genuine human communication
So IMHO here's the flaw in your argument. It isn't trying to REPLACE human communication, it is trying to ENHANCE it. Perhaps it will fail on this attempt, perhaps in 1000 years time, when books lose all physical form, and the content is inserted straight into your memory, slashdotters the universe over will have this same discussion again???...
I'm looking forward to giving this baby a whirl. --
Hmmm.. Another means of representing the same old programs. I suppose its target was to make the programmers life easier, and the code easier to understand. Both of which are great targets.
On the other hand, I suspect that what we really NEED is a language that can be REALLY well optimized. In the "good old days" when PCs had 1Mhz processors, 10Mb HDD and 64Kb RAM, programmers had to struggle to make their code fast, tight and clean. These days, with 1GHz CPU, 30Gb HDD and 1Gb RAM, that ain't so. Programmers can just add a "-O6" flag, and hope for the best.
Can you imagine a programming paradigm that meant code could be written as readily as it is today, but which compiled to that old-fast 'n' tight code.
We wouldn't be needing to upgrade our hardware every 5 minutes just to cater for the latest greatest office suite, desktop, or version of 'X', which now take 4 full CDROMs to install because the code is so lazy, and re-use is still just a pipe-dream! --
While I completely agree that good things came from this, and valuable lessons were learned, I found the bahaviour of the US government, and of NASA, immediately after the incident, to be completely inappropriate.
They put back the operation of these missions by what? 10 years? Even today, it is an undeniable fact that you are placing a number of human beings atop a rather large bomb, and exploding it in a controlled manner. This involves risk... You are then spinning them around the globe in an inhospitable environment. This too involves risk...
Why then, when one of the many risks is realised as the (unfortunate) death of 7 astronauts, should anything change in our attitude to the launches?
Sure, learn from mistakes, but stop moving forwards? Sheer madness...
(-: Just because windows crashes, we don't stop using it... We continue valiantly until we find Linux, *BSD or some other safer alternative:-)
Yes, a review would be good, and anybody who finds a source for this book in the US or UK, let us all know...
In a similar vein, "Slant" by Greg Bear, is a weighty tome, but includes some excellent AI storylines, and to keep the true Slashdotter happy, there's a whole heap of nano-technology thrown in with some excellent medical-nano and war-machine-nano to keep you happy, with an underlying plot about the mental development of two entirely different and both quite incerdible AIs.
I get the same impressions and have the same questions about EVAS, but my take on it is "Fair enough..."
These days, XFree is providing an OpenGL interface, and as long as this interface is hardware independent (I believe that XFree 4.x can software render OpenGL if you don't use accelerated hardware), and if some WM designer wants to try using OpenGL calls directly to draw on his "canvas" and obtains a speedup, then go-on, push that envelope. After all, generally speaking, the WM owns the desktop - How it draws on it is not for the user to worry about.
On the other hand, if what's being done really is that "simple", then I wouldn't call it a product, just a feature. If it subsequently is released as an API/library that other WMs can use to gain the same benefits, THEN it's an application.
A couple of years ago I experienced US wireless technology first hand and I asked a friend of mine from SSF why he thought it was so poor. His relpy was I believe most insightful:
"The US invents loads of stuff. That means we get version 1.0 of loads of stuff. Everyone else gets version 2.0 and we're stuck with an old infrastructure" or words to that effect.
WAP, or WAP1 as I've seen it referred to here, could well be an example of the same problem, happening in Europe. i-mode will have to compete with an existing established infrastructure as well as the up-coming WAP2.
IMHO WAP's biggest problem is it's per-minute charges. I can spend 3 minutes using WAP to find the weather in NYC, or I can call a friend in NYC, get the answer in 10 seconds, and spend the rest of my phone bill on catching up with a mate! (Yes international calls from a UK mobile are really cheap sometimes:-) ) --
Walking FTL! Care to explain ?
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
So for all of the Sci-Fi authors out there, we finally have FTL Travel - We don't need to bend space, create wormholes or anything requiring any massive energy... Just open the front door and walk !!!;-)
So would some kind soul care to explain how 'c' is a constant that is used throughout physics, but we can still slow/stop light? My physics isn't what it should be these days:-(
Greg Bear's "slant" is IMHO an excellent Sci-Fi treatment of the problems of medical nano - And of various other forms of nano (eg. Military and Manufacturing). This is only one of the threads of the tale of Intelligent computers, and various levels of social intercourse
Of course, you have to be able to read Greg Bear - He's an acquired taste.
Slashdot Mirror
So, Jordan, you provide a nice demonstration of a flaw. It is considered polite in many circles, that when destroying someone's hard-work, that you make a peace offering in the form of some assistance.
:-)
Can we expect therefore to see an equally interesting and thorough discussion of how Napster/Gnutella can grow, evolve and perhaps merge, to provide the "ideal compromise" where we will not need 100Gb networks, but where:
a) The destruction of any significant %age of the network is transparrently ignored or healed.
b) The network will not segment as GnutellaNet can.
c) Bandwith requirements are low[er]
d) Anonymity of participants is maintained where required.
e) The law can't shut it down so easily.
f) Data can be secured, encrypted and/or signed (etc.) for specific users
And MY personal wish:
g) The end result is so globally accepted for file exchange and storage, that FTP dies a death, and we all live without buffer-overflow exploits for the rest of out lives
Note that Napster and Gnutella were very one-sided in their freedom with files. There was no facility available to ensure that the law wasn't honoured where desired.
--
Sadly, some people seem to be under the impression that shiny gadgets can replace age old methods of human communication
They can. More generally they simply up-the-ante rather than being a replacement, but remember that the book replaced word-of-mouth once upon-a-time. What level of resistance do you think that received?
Would the Bible be the same had it been written on a microchip instead of parchment. Would the works of such great literary minds as Shakespere or Mark Twain have had the same impact on our society if they had been strings of ones and zeros on magnetic media
Your questions imply that you believe that the form of the words, and their storage is more important that the meaning of the words themselves. I would argue that if the bible was on a microchip for the last 2000 years, that the message therein would have had no less impact, and the spread of the message may even have been more insidious without the burden of manual copying, and the inherrent errors caused by that manual copying.
Technology can do wonderful things, but it will never replace genuine human communication
So IMHO here's the flaw in your argument. It isn't trying to REPLACE human communication, it is trying to ENHANCE it. Perhaps it will fail on this attempt, perhaps in 1000 years time, when books lose all physical form, and the content is inserted straight into your memory, slashdotters the universe over will have this same discussion again???...
I'm looking forward to giving this baby a whirl.
--
Hmmm.. Another means of representing the same old programs. I suppose its target was to make the programmers life easier, and the code easier to understand. Both of which are great targets.
On the other hand, I suspect that what we really NEED is a language that can be REALLY well optimized. In the "good old days" when PCs had 1Mhz processors, 10Mb HDD and 64Kb RAM, programmers had to struggle to make their code fast, tight and clean. These days, with 1GHz CPU, 30Gb HDD and 1Gb RAM, that ain't so. Programmers can just add a "-O6" flag, and hope for the best.
Can you imagine a programming paradigm that meant code could be written as readily as it is today, but which compiled to that old-fast 'n' tight code.
We wouldn't be needing to upgrade our hardware every 5 minutes just to cater for the latest greatest office suite, desktop, or version of 'X', which now take 4 full CDROMs to install because the code is so lazy, and re-use is still just a pipe-dream!
--
This is not true. OpenBSD have of course merged the required fixes already, and they can be found at:
OpenBSD 2.8 http://www.openbsd.org/errata.html
OpenBSD 2.7 http://www.openbsd.org/errata27.html
The rebuild and install is trivial.
--
While I completely agree that good things came from this, and valuable lessons were learned, I found the bahaviour of the US government, and of NASA, immediately after the incident, to be completely inappropriate.
:-)
They put back the operation of these missions by what? 10 years? Even today, it is an undeniable fact that you are placing a number of human beings atop a rather large bomb, and exploding it in a controlled manner. This involves risk... You are then spinning them around the globe in an inhospitable environment. This too involves risk...
Why then, when one of the many risks is realised as the (unfortunate) death of 7 astronauts, should anything change in our attitude to the launches?
Sure, learn from mistakes, but stop moving forwards? Sheer madness...
(-: Just because windows crashes, we don't stop using it... We continue valiantly until we find Linux, *BSD or some other safer alternative
--
Yes, a review would be good, and anybody who finds a source for this book in the US or UK, let us all know...
In a similar vein, "Slant" by Greg Bear, is a weighty tome, but includes some excellent AI storylines, and to keep the true Slashdotter happy, there's a whole heap of nano-technology thrown in with some excellent medical-nano and war-machine-nano to keep you happy, with an underlying plot about the mental development of two entirely different and both quite incerdible AIs.
--
I get the same impressions and have the same questions about EVAS, but my take on it is "Fair enough..."
These days, XFree is providing an OpenGL interface, and as long as this interface is hardware independent (I believe that XFree 4.x can software render OpenGL if you don't use accelerated hardware), and if some WM designer wants to try using OpenGL calls directly to draw on his "canvas" and obtains a speedup, then go-on, push that envelope. After all, generally speaking, the WM owns the desktop - How it draws on it is not for the user to worry about.
On the other hand, if what's being done really is that "simple", then I wouldn't call it a product, just a feature. If it subsequently is released as an API/library that other WMs can use to gain the same benefits, THEN it's an application.
--
A couple of years ago I experienced US wireless technology first hand and I asked a friend of mine from SSF why he thought it was so poor. His relpy was I believe most insightful:
:-) )
"The US invents loads of stuff. That means we get version 1.0 of loads of stuff. Everyone else gets version 2.0 and we're stuck with an old infrastructure" or words to that effect.
WAP, or WAP1 as I've seen it referred to here, could well be an example of the same problem, happening in Europe. i-mode will have to compete with an existing established infrastructure as well as the up-coming WAP2.
IMHO WAP's biggest problem is it's per-minute charges. I can spend 3 minutes using WAP to find the weather in NYC, or I can call a friend in NYC, get the answer in 10 seconds, and spend the rest of my phone bill on catching up with a mate! (Yes international calls from a UK mobile are really cheap sometimes
--
So for all of the Sci-Fi authors out there, we finally have FTL Travel - We don't need to bend space, create wormholes or anything requiring any massive energy... Just open the front door and walk !!! ;-)
:-(
So would some kind soul care to explain how 'c' is a constant that is used throughout physics, but we can still slow/stop light? My physics isn't what it should be these days
Layman's terms appreciated, but not mandatory.
--
Of course, you have to be able to read Greg Bear - He's an acquired taste.
Here's a non-associate Amazon.com link