The bottom line is that TCPA and Palladium are two different projects. The TCPA hardware provides only a subset of the full Palladium functionality, which includes significant additional hardware and software elements. Only TCPA already has a freely downloadable detailed specification, and a tested port of all driver and library level software to Linux.
Don't get completely up in arms about this is what is trying to say. Then he has an even better quote later:
My personal opinion (not speaking for IBM) is that DRM is stupid, because it can never be effective[6,7], and it takes away existing rights of the consumer. But this is not the place for that debate. To condemn TCPA for the ability to run a bad application is absurd. This argument is exactly like the arguments of governments in their attempts to ban encryption, under the rationale that encryption can be used by terrorists to hide their messages.
You might be interested to read Lessig's take on this. Basically I guess if Lessig posted it, he's okay with this statement:
...donate money to your favorite open source project or website. Give money to the EFF or ACLU (or both!). Buy a t-shirt from an online comic strip or musician.
It seems like this attempt to market something as "gridMathematica" is really a little deceiving. In reality it is more distributed Mathematica. Grids involve virtual organizations, authentication, etc. For more information see Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke's paper The Anatomy of the Grid.
There are other packages which do very similar things and have a for a long time, such as NetSolve and Ninf which allow you to do cool stuff with most any application that needs computational power.
There is also a Commodity Grid Kit (standard interface to Globus services) for Matlab that should be out soon, more info can be found here.
So for now, I'll just consider this more someone wanting to capitalize on the hype around Grids at SC2002 than anything else. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
that I got out of the papers so far, is that if I want to rip copy protected audio CDs, I'll get a plextor drive and use CD Paranoia (see this paper for more information).
Oh you mean something like this. As they'll tell you, it's not as easy as you think. Most commercial projects don't color balance with each other all that well because well, they don't need to. Plus there is need to do some funky stuff with fading around the edges. ANL also has a MicroMural and MicroMural2. The MicroMural2 is pretty impressive to see a full screen hi-res video running on. They've done a good job of making the projecters blend together.
The other issue is the noise and heat that LCD projectors make. Which is pretty significant.
One component of the forthcoming TeraGrid is a cluster of computers with NVidia GeForce cards at Argonne National Lab for visualization. So there is one...
Actually, all domains were originally free to have. I think NSF used to reimburse NSI for the cost of each one. I remember back in the good ol days of domain squatting (when it cost nothing to squat because no one knew about it), the guy who had knotsberryfarm.com traded it to them for a couple of jars of jelly. Which really makes more sense then sending out rabid droves of lawyers. I mean if I had a domain that someone wanted they could be like "here, we'll give you a brand spanking new dual g4 if you give up the domain". It saves money on both sides. Of course, that's only if they had a legitimate claim on the domain. I'm not that much of a whore.
Can anyone else picture themselves wandering about aimlessly singing this age old tune whenever they can't find a network connection?
Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side? Rainbows are visions, but only illusions, And rainbows have nothing to hide. So we've been told and some choose to believe it I know they're wrong, wait and see. Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection, The lovers, the dreamers and me.
According to some whois queries that I just ran you can register such high quality domain names as fuckicann.[com/net/org], fuckwipo.[com/net/org] and fucknsi.[net/org].
As a side, several years ago when NSI was pounding the company that I worked for in the butt hard core because they had a problem in their root servers, I proceeded to register fucknsi.org while on hold with them. Their tech support didn't believe that I could have a domain when I said my email contact was everyone.should@fucknsi.org.
There has been a fair number of posts about whether or not Java is really an "Open-Standard". The first thing to remember is where this article originates, Business 2.0.
Taking that into account, Java is an open standard. Are there other compilers for Java? Yes. Are there multiple interpreters for Java? Yes. Is the standard published on how it works? Yes (Addison-Wesely publishes several books on it). So, for the average intended reader of business 2.0, Java is an open standard.
First of all, be sure to check out the links at the end of the article to some of the projects that are going on right now. Some of the ones that I find more interesting are the Particle Physics Data Grid and the Access Grid (no link in article).
One of the great benefits of Grid computing over distributed computing is the access to resources, such as storage. This is what PPDG seeks to do, provide access to physicists, in near real time, to the results of experiments. The problem is that the experiments may be performed at CERN and the researcher may be at CalTech. While normally for a telnet or what not, this isn't a problem, it is a problem when an experiment can produce Petabytes of data. For more information on that see http://www.ppdg.org. There is another project called NEESGrid that will provide access to earthquake simulation equipment remotely. Truly cool.
I also encourage you to check out Globus. Using a system like the Globus Toolkit along with MDS, I can locate a machine and execute my program on it transparently. This transparency is taken care through a network of resource managers, proxys and gatekeepers. It's pretty cool and is pretty easy to install on your favorite Linux box.
Programming Grid enabled applications is pretty easy. There are software libraries called CoG Kits that provide simple APIs for Java, Python and a few other languages. In just a few lines of code you can have a program that looks up a server to run your executable on, connects, executes and returns the data to you.
The current push right now is towards OGSA which is Open Grid Services Architecture. This will form the basis for Globus 3.0. OGSA will take ideas from web services, like WSDL, service advertisement, etc, and implement them to create Grid services. This will be the next thing with services easily able to advertise themselves and clients easily able to find services.
1.4 "IPR Impairing License" shall mean the GNU General Public License, the GNU Lesser/Library General Public License, and any license that requires in any instance that other software distributed with software subject to such license (a) be disclosed and distributed in source code form; (b) be licensed for purposes of making derivative works; or (c) be redistributable at no charge.
So under C are all free licenses disqualified? I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
Some of us might remember when KPMG had the big hullaballo about people linking to them, apparently TrapWare (the guys that make the anti-spyware) have a similar thing on their website:
As stated in the Terms and Conditions for Use of Trapware's web site, to obtain permission to link to this web site or any other web site owned and operated by Trapware, please contact the Legal Department of Trapware. No trademark or logo of Trapware may be used as a "hot" link to any Trapware or other web site without the prior written approval of Trapware. The following guidelines are given to assist you and expedite your request for linking to Trapware. Please do not link to Trapware's web site until you have received written authorization to do so.
If he really wanted to prevent linking, he'd set it up in apache so it only accepts incoming connections for legally authorised URLs, but judging by their website, they're quite oblivious to the nature of the Internet.
I encourage everyone to post links to their website in the blogs, just like what happened to KPMG a few months ago.
This is a little surprising that it got posted and all because it's not all that earth shatterning news, but I'll provides some additional information about grids in General.
There are a wide variety of systems like this that are either currently available or are being developed. Among them are Particle Physics Data Grid, NEESGrid and various European and Asian counterparts.
The basic premise is to allow access to various resources you don't have at your desktop. This is not to be confused to with putting all these computers together an forking a process a billion times and having it run it run all over the globe. It's more like saying I have a process that requires 128 processors and 4GB of ram, go find it an run it for me.
Most of the systems use Globus which is pretty much the defacto standard. There are other systems out there such as Legion and Condor which serve slightly different purposes.
I've also seen some issues about security raised, so I'll mention them quickly. Globus is built upon an API called GSS (Generic Security System), I believe it will soon (if not already) have an RFC published. This is a layer on top of various other security systems that may be local to the server running it. It can use Kerberos or PKI to do encryption across the network (don't flame me if it's wrong, I'm not security expert).
When I wish to start using the grid, I start up my proxy that takes care of all authentication for me. Then my proxy connects to the gatekeeper on the remote machine which authenticates me based on my private key and then authorizes me via a mapping (usually just a text file). The task is then executed by the gatekeeper via the mapping on the remote machine. Input and output can be redirected over a secure layer if you so desire.
My certificate is issued by an authority. In this case the Globus CA. The nice thing if that if you want to set up a grid of your own computers, you can get a cert from them too. Install Globus and it will tell you how.
Certificates also allow you to get access to data. This allows me as a user A to run program B at site C providing results to user D at site E for a period of time F.
It's all terribly neat and remarkably easy to install on your favorite Linux or Solaris box. It's also fairly easy to write programs to utilize the Grid thanks to the various CogKits for Python, Java and Perl.
Anyone who has tried to understand the various "standards" for web services and their associated train wreck (I think I'm being gracious here) would realize that most of them are bolted on to a protocol that was never meant to serve them in such a way. HTTP is meant for quick requests, not monoloithic requests that take a long time.
Before you rush to say Mickeysoft is destroying the web, please realize that he's referring to web services, not your personal home page (although I'd imagine they'd like to make that proprietary too).
Once again this is the whole licensing crap. If I paid for my copy of Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft and WarCraft II then I should be able to play them online, but sometimes there are problems with firewalls and what not that render a battle.net server unaccessible. This is neither my fault nor their fault, but they have esentially turned my CD's into coasters.
As for the stuff about CD keys, I think we all know that's just skirting the issue some. The real issue is about control. Blizzard is after complete control just like every other closed software company is. The fact they make kick ass games shouldn't change your view in this case.
``The draw on the batteries was estimated at more than 4.5 kilowatts. With any existing technology the batteries would have been drained flat in one and a half minutes,'' the inventor said
And yet the machine only "powered" three 100 watt light bulbs. Now, IAAEE (I am an electrical engineer) and that doesn't add up to more than 300 watts. Maybe they got watts and watt-hours mixed up I thought...but then they would have to run for 15 hours, a lot more than the 2 or so stated.
Well, it's a nice humorous read for a wednesday evening.
Such a project is not that difficult, in fact, we had to develop a program for my senior software engineering class, with a GUI and all. It was based on Halsted's metrics which is based on lines of code, variable names, function calls etc.
The problem with such a method is in introduction CS classes (or even OO classes) there are very few ways to do things. Furthermore if the professor gives information related to it, it's highly likely such information will appear verbatim in the solutions.
My university uses such a program, and often it seems to flag people who didn't cheat. We might hear about how many people get "caught" but it never shows how many people actually DIDN'T cheat (ie the rate of false positives). Of the three people who I know well that were flagged, none of them cheated and all were exonerated. Fortunately, I attend a small enough school that a few well placed connections can correct this, but I feel bad for people at larger institutions.
As a TA for a senior level class, I still frequently come across copied homework and lab assignments. Unfortunately, all I can do is give the people 0's on the assignment (no harm if they never did it in the first place). I'm wondering what the punishment at other institutions is.
I'm not sure if it was on leech zmodem or not (I never really used it) but I did have a hacked version of HSLink that took advantage of the fact that the protocol required an ACK to say the whole file had been received, it would ignore this and you would have the file, the BBS would think you didn't and voila...no more ratio problems.:-)
Actually, it's not a case where they individually modelled, but rather individually simulated. They all probably used one of a handful (or a large handful of models) depending on the length, color,etc. But then software (Fizt) was able to apply the physics so it worked on all the hairs.
The most impressive scene that shows this is where Sully and Mike are banished to Nepal with the Abominable Snowman. Seeing how the snowcone's parts flew into Sully's hair was quite impressive. As was seeing the snow on Sully when he crashed the sled.
I find this area of research particularly interesting because of my own research and the high amounts of computing power that it requires.
But to answer some of the previous posts about the sharing of resources, one of the larger problems is to figure out and method of saying this:
Run program X at site Y under policy P providing access to Z under policy Q.
So, it's not like you'll just be able to tap in, there will be policies for program execution and data access. But it's coming faster than you think.
One of the coolest concepts is that of process migration which will probably be integrated into a ubiquitous computing grid. Whereby a process running on Processor A, Architecture X can migrate to Processor B, Architecture Y and preserve state. I've seen this work with some DEC's and Sparcs swapping processes and it's most impressive, but still needs some work.
Maybe not to that extreme...But I've done pretty much the same a little over a year ago with a PowerBook G3 running at 233Mhz. The Windows was on a different system in the shot, but it was through VMWare. MythII was running locally as was MacOnLinux. Now if only someone hadn't stolen that laptop I could still be having fun like that, but that beg's the question, why so much? I actually had a legitimate use for most of that stuff for various work projects, but rarely did I actually need them all at once.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't get completely up in arms about this is what is trying to say. Then he has an even better quote later:
Ahh...it's great to take stuff outta context.
Ralph Wiggum once said the immortal lines "What's a battle?". Seeing stuff like this makes me say "What's a banner ad?".
So yes, exploding dog does count.
It seems like this attempt to market something as "gridMathematica" is really a little deceiving. In reality it is more distributed Mathematica. Grids involve virtual organizations, authentication, etc. For more information see Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, and Steve Tuecke's paper The Anatomy of the Grid.
There are other packages which do very similar things and have a for a long time, such as NetSolve and Ninf which allow you to do cool stuff with most any application that needs computational power.
There is also a Commodity Grid Kit (standard interface to Globus services) for Matlab that should be out soon, more info can be found here.
So for now, I'll just consider this more someone wanting to capitalize on the hype around Grids at SC2002 than anything else. Unless I'm missing something obvious.
that I got out of the papers so far, is that if I want to rip copy protected audio CDs, I'll get a plextor drive and use CD Paranoia (see this paper for more information).
Oh you mean something like this. As they'll tell you, it's not as easy as you think. Most commercial projects don't color balance with each other all that well because well, they don't need to. Plus there is need to do some funky stuff with fading around the edges. ANL also has a MicroMural and MicroMural2. The MicroMural2 is pretty impressive to see a full screen hi-res video running on. They've done a good job of making the projecters blend together.
The other issue is the noise and heat that LCD projectors make. Which is pretty significant.
One component of the forthcoming TeraGrid is a cluster of computers with NVidia GeForce cards at Argonne National Lab for visualization. So there is one...
Actually, all domains were originally free to have. I think NSF used to reimburse NSI for the cost of each one. I remember back in the good ol days of domain squatting (when it cost nothing to squat because no one knew about it), the guy who had knotsberryfarm.com traded it to them for a couple of jars of jelly. Which really makes more sense then sending out rabid droves of lawyers. I mean if I had a domain that someone wanted they could be like "here, we'll give you a brand spanking new dual g4 if you give up the domain". It saves money on both sides. Of course, that's only if they had a legitimate claim on the domain. I'm not that much of a whore.
According to some whois queries that I just ran you can register such high quality domain names as fuckicann.[com/net/org], fuckwipo.[com/net/org] and fucknsi.[net/org].
As a side, several years ago when NSI was pounding the company that I worked for in the butt hard core because they had a problem in their root servers, I proceeded to register fucknsi.org while on hold with them. Their tech support didn't believe that I could have a domain when I said my email contact was everyone.should@fucknsi.org.
Of course, you're probably just wasting your $10.
With regards to CIFS it's controlled by SNIA. You can find the spec at http://www.snia.org/English/Work_Groups/NAS/CIFS/i ndex.html.
It's Microsoft's extensions that make it a problem. Someone more knowledgeable might want to clear this up a little better than I can.
There has been a fair number of posts about whether or not Java is really an "Open-Standard". The first thing to remember is where this article originates, Business 2.0.
Taking that into account, Java is an open standard. Are there other compilers for Java? Yes. Are there multiple interpreters for Java? Yes. Is the standard published on how it works? Yes (Addison-Wesely publishes several books on it). So, for the average intended reader of business 2.0, Java is an open standard.
I'm probably going to get flamed for this, but something doesn't have to be controlled by an international standards organization to be open.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go prepare for flames as I've posted something that people are going to have problems with.
First of all, be sure to check out the links at the end of the article to some of the projects that are going on right now. Some of the ones that I find more interesting are the Particle Physics Data Grid and the Access Grid (no link in article).
One of the great benefits of Grid computing over distributed computing is the access to resources, such as storage. This is what PPDG seeks to do, provide access to physicists, in near real time, to the results of experiments. The problem is that the experiments may be performed at CERN and the researcher may be at CalTech. While normally for a telnet or what not, this isn't a problem, it is a problem when an experiment can produce Petabytes of data. For more information on that see http://www.ppdg.org. There is another project called NEESGrid that will provide access to earthquake simulation equipment remotely. Truly cool.
I also encourage you to check out Globus. Using a system like the Globus Toolkit along with MDS, I can locate a machine and execute my program on it transparently. This transparency is taken care through a network of resource managers, proxys and gatekeepers. It's pretty cool and is pretty easy to install on your favorite Linux box.
Programming Grid enabled applications is pretty easy. There are software libraries called CoG Kits that provide simple APIs for Java, Python and a few other languages. In just a few lines of code you can have a program that looks up a server to run your executable on, connects, executes and returns the data to you.
The current push right now is towards OGSA which is Open Grid Services Architecture. This will form the basis for Globus 3.0. OGSA will take ideas from web services, like WSDL, service advertisement, etc, and implement them to create Grid services. This will be the next thing with services easily able to advertise themselves and clients easily able to find services.
So under C are all free licenses disqualified? I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
This is from http://www.trapware.com/companyLinking.html (terms and condition violation here).
Yeah right...So here's another TrapWare terms and conditions violation! YAY!
If he really wanted to prevent linking, he'd set it up in apache so it only accepts incoming connections for legally authorised URLs, but judging by their website, they're quite oblivious to the nature of the Internet.
I encourage everyone to post links to their website in the blogs, just like what happened to KPMG a few months ago.
SpectorSoft makes a product called Spector and SpectorPro, from what I can tell, it takes a bunch of screenshots.
WinWhatWhere Investigator is a different program and should have had the URL as http://www.winwhatwhere.com. Although it seems to do generally the same thing.
This is a little surprising that it got posted and all because it's not all that earth shatterning news, but I'll provides some additional information about grids in General.
There are a wide variety of systems like this that are either currently available or are being developed. Among them are Particle Physics Data Grid, NEESGrid and various European and Asian counterparts.
The basic premise is to allow access to various resources you don't have at your desktop. This is not to be confused to with putting all these computers together an forking a process a billion times and having it run it run all over the globe. It's more like saying I have a process that requires 128 processors and 4GB of ram, go find it an run it for me.
Most of the systems use Globus which is pretty much the defacto standard. There are other systems out there such as Legion and Condor which serve slightly different purposes.
I've also seen some issues about security raised, so I'll mention them quickly. Globus is built upon an API called GSS (Generic Security System), I believe it will soon (if not already) have an RFC published. This is a layer on top of various other security systems that may be local to the server running it. It can use Kerberos or PKI to do encryption across the network (don't flame me if it's wrong, I'm not security expert).
When I wish to start using the grid, I start up my proxy that takes care of all authentication for me. Then my proxy connects to the gatekeeper on the remote machine which authenticates me based on my private key and then authorizes me via a mapping (usually just a text file). The task is then executed by the gatekeeper via the mapping on the remote machine. Input and output can be redirected over a secure layer if you so desire.
My certificate is issued by an authority. In this case the Globus CA. The nice thing if that if you want to set up a grid of your own computers, you can get a cert from them too. Install Globus and it will tell you how.
Certificates also allow you to get access to data. This allows me as a user A to run program B at site C providing results to user D at site E for a period of time F.
It's all terribly neat and remarkably easy to install on your favorite Linux or Solaris box. It's also fairly easy to write programs to utilize the Grid thanks to the various CogKits for Python, Java and Perl.
Anyone who has tried to understand the various "standards" for web services and their associated train wreck (I think I'm being gracious here) would realize that most of them are bolted on to a protocol that was never meant to serve them in such a way. HTTP is meant for quick requests, not monoloithic requests that take a long time.
Before you rush to say Mickeysoft is destroying the web, please realize that he's referring to web services, not your personal home page (although I'd imagine they'd like to make that proprietary too).
Once again this is the whole licensing crap. If I paid for my copy of Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft and WarCraft II then I should be able to play them online, but sometimes there are problems with firewalls and what not that render a battle.net server unaccessible. This is neither my fault nor their fault, but they have esentially turned my CD's into coasters.
As for the stuff about CD keys, I think we all know that's just skirting the issue some. The real issue is about control. Blizzard is after complete control just like every other closed software company is. The fact they make kick ass games shouldn't change your view in this case.
Such a project is not that difficult, in fact, we had to develop a program for my senior software engineering class, with a GUI and all. It was based on Halsted's metrics which is based on lines of code, variable names, function calls etc.
The problem with such a method is in introduction CS classes (or even OO classes) there are very few ways to do things. Furthermore if the professor gives information related to it, it's highly likely such information will appear verbatim in the solutions.
My university uses such a program, and often it seems to flag people who didn't cheat. We might hear about how many people get "caught" but it never shows how many people actually DIDN'T cheat (ie the rate of false positives). Of the three people who I know well that were flagged, none of them cheated and all were exonerated. Fortunately, I attend a small enough school that a few well placed connections can correct this, but I feel bad for people at larger institutions.
As a TA for a senior level class, I still frequently come across copied homework and lab assignments. Unfortunately, all I can do is give the people 0's on the assignment (no harm if they never did it in the first place). I'm wondering what the punishment at other institutions is.
I'm not sure if it was on leech zmodem or not (I never really used it) but I did have a hacked version of HSLink that took advantage of the fact that the protocol required an ACK to say the whole file had been received, it would ignore this and you would have the file, the BBS would think you didn't and voila...no more ratio problems. :-)
Actually, it's not a case where they individually modelled, but rather individually simulated. They all probably used one of a handful (or a large handful of models) depending on the length, color,etc. But then software (Fizt) was able to apply the physics so it worked on all the hairs.
The most impressive scene that shows this is where Sully and Mike are banished to Nepal with the Abominable Snowman. Seeing how the snowcone's parts flew into Sully's hair was quite impressive. As was seeing the snow on Sully when he crashed the sled.
They're lemon...
I find this area of research particularly interesting because of my own research and the high amounts of computing power that it requires.
But to answer some of the previous posts about the sharing of resources, one of the larger problems is to figure out and method of saying this:
Run program X at site Y under policy P providing access to Z under policy Q.
So, it's not like you'll just be able to tap in, there will be policies for program execution and data access. But it's coming faster than you think.
One of the coolest concepts is that of process migration which will probably be integrated into a ubiquitous computing grid. Whereby a process running on Processor A, Architecture X can migrate to Processor B, Architecture Y and preserve state. I've seen this work with some DEC's and Sparcs swapping processes and it's most impressive, but still needs some work.
I would suggest reading The Grid: Blueprint For a New Computing Infrastructure if you'd like to get more about the general idea of the grid. It's light on technical details, but a good high point view.
Maybe not to that extreme...But I've done pretty much the same a little over a year ago with a PowerBook G3 running at 233Mhz. The Windows was on a different system in the shot, but it was through VMWare. MythII was running locally as was MacOnLinux. Now if only someone hadn't stolen that laptop I could still be having fun like that, but that beg's the question, why so much? I actually had a legitimate use for most of that stuff for various work projects, but rarely did I actually need them all at once.
here you see it
It's odd that there's a map in Myth II with the same name as a church I go.