In general you might think that the cost per gig you pay and the cost per gig that Amazon pays is similar. And you would be right. But to obtain high reliability you will pay more.
Amazon, or anybody who tries to build a large distributed storage service, can spread out the probability of disk errors over a larger set of users than you are able to do. The marginal cost to replace a disk that has failed, on a per user basis, is therefore lower for Amazon.
Moreover, the overhead to manage many disks does not increase linearly to the number of disks. Put another way, their per user cost to manage the disks is lower than you.
The cost equation is less about purchasing the storage than maintaining it through the inevitable failures over time. This makes the gigabyte-based usage cost very fair, since it is proportional to the rate of error. The access cost manages their bandwidth expense.
What I would like from a service like this is a pricing guarantee -- if they maintain the same pricing two years from now, it will be a ripoff given the diminishing cost of storage and bandwidth. It would be nice to have it pegged to some kind of disk/bandwidth industry index.
The effect is largey attributed to Pendry. It was very contentious in the physics community until last year, when it was generally accepted that the eminescent wave was the process by which the light travelled (otherwise you have supraluminal propagation.)
The ramifications of this technology are very large, not just for the optical realm, but for other frequencies also.
...I'll put on the asbestos underwear for this post...
In 1990 at Microsoft there were several requirements that drove the registry. The number of third party applications and application writers was growing very fast. Making this worse, a new object system was on the horizon which could dramatically increase the number of independently-authored "components" that needed to be registered. There was a need to store state in a segregated manner so that apps wouldn't stomp on other app's information. Also there was a "new" notion of remote manageability for the objects, so the access method should be easily remotable early in the boot process. Also the OS needed a place to store lots of very small data items.
It would have been best to use the file system, but the file system at that time was FAT which could not store small data items efficiently. The registry was the first API common between Windows 3 and OS/2 (and also NT), which was a goal at the time. Of course it quickly went out of control, since there was no rational security or ownership model. The registry was kept very very simple in order to maximize the likelihood that the next file system (either the object file system or NTFS) would be able to implement it, including in the NT kernel (which had a very simple API model). It was also the first API from Microsoft that had unused parameters for future features, such as context ids for security, query features, and other stuff. Unfortunately much of that didn't work as planned since very few applications paid attention to the requirement to set them to 0L!
I didn't expect it to be so massively overused, nor for it to survive beyond Windows 3.x. It was supposed to be superceded by an object file system (that was designed and implemented several times, but never released.)
There's a good story behind the registry, though: I designed the registry while on a bachelor party for a friend, mostly on a car ride between San Diego and Las Vegas, and faxed in the design from Las Vegas the morning after the party to the responsible program manager. Which might explain much about the design...;-)
I run my computer to a 12' diagonal rear projection screen, using a Digital Projections DLP projector. For computer work it is readable with all lights on, and uses my far focus eyesight rather than near focus, which helps with eyestrain.
I used to run a noisy PC in the equipment room, but I then I found:
1) You can build a fanless PC (I used Signum Data components and modified them with more heat pipes... next step is to use the Zalman monster case.)
2) It is easier to run a long (with repeater) DVI cable for the projector than it was to run a long run Firewire for the DVD. In both cases you run USB2 repeater -- either for peripherals or the sound box.
It is amazing for videogames and DVDs, although the DVD quality is slightly lower than a dedicated high end system (Meridian DVD + Snell & Wilcox interpolator). But the HTPC is LESS expensive and more versatile.
Microsoft could probably do this if they wanted to. But there are many reasons why they are unlikely to do so. First there is IBM, Linux almost certainly infringes some Microsoft patent, Windows almost certainly infringes some IBM patent. It is a zero sum game.
Yes, it is zero sum. That's why most of the large companies cross license. Microsoft and IBM are cross licensed to ALL of each other's patents. So if Linux infringed, IBM would have freedom of action, but Red Hat would not. And arguably if IBM does not own at least 51% (or whatever the cross license specifies) of Linux, they might not even be licensed. Since that's a legal grey area (who owns Linux?), I don't know how that would shake out.
The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license.
Yes, it can be an antitrust issue. IBM covered this a while ago, as has the MPEG Licensing Authority (which has most of the MPEG-related patents), QUALCOMM (which has most of the CDMA patents), and many others. The only thing you have to do to avoid antitrust is to license to everybody "fairly", i.e. without discrimination.
So, for example, Microsoft could offer to license the relevant patents to Red Hat in return for 5% of their revenue (revenue, not profit). And if Red Hat declined to pay, they could sue Red Hat to stop them from distributing Linux.
Now the interesting thing for the "tin hat" crowd: Microsoft has just started ramping up a licensing group, using the guy who started that business for IBM, Marshall Phelps.
Actually Mach was developed at CMU under Rick Rashid. Tevanian was a graduate student of his. Most of the Mach team is at Microsoft Research, including Rashid (who heads up Microsoft Research). They tried to convince Tevanian to come there, but he decided instead to go to NeXT Computer, which also was based on the Mach microkernel. When Apple acquired NeXT, it took most of their OS and development philosophy also.
It's a complex topic, but here is one way to look at the variety of different expert systems:
One is plain old code. Very hard to maintain.
Two is a forward chaining production system. These systems move forward from facts to a set of conclusions. Examples of this include CLIPS and iLOG. CLIPS is public domain source from NASA. Jess is a Java version of CLIPS. Commercial versions include ART, Haley, and a host of others. If you have many rules, you will want a RETE based system, since that scales Olog(n) to number of rules; there are more advanced algorithms than RETE also.
Three is a backward chaining production system. These systems move backwards from a goal statement to a compatible set of facts. Most common example is Prolog. Amzi has an inexpensive prolog. Prolog also particularly good at writing parsers.
Four are a set of case based reasoning system (CBR). These take cases and learn inferences over them. Particularly useful for help and diagnostic systems. Inference Corp, Brightware and others have such systems, usually in hybrid engines that also do rules and objects.
Five are a set of formal statistical reasoning systems, for example based on Bayes Theorem, such as influence diagrams. These can also be generalizations of Markov models, commonly used in speech recognition.
Sixth are "informal" statistical reasoning systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANN) and fuzzy logics. Although they have precise mathematical models, the learning algorithms are usually not precisely statistically matched to the training sets. You can find several ANN and fuzzy logic algorithms in various recipe books or the faq at comp.* newsgroup.
I have seriously butchered expert systems in this oversimplified note, but this gives you a sense of the space. I echo other posters in recommending that you obtain a general purpose expert system tool, learn it, and try multiple approaches. Most production systems really show that 1) knowledge of the expert domain is most important, and 2) using what works is more important than picking a single "pure" approach.
Archer claims you don't open up the engines until you get past Jupiter. So presumably you aren't going warp 4.5 the entire way.
Cochrane claims the new "warp 5 engine" will allow speeds 100 times faster than before. The generally accepted definition of warp (from Gene Roddenberry) is warp cubed is the light speed factor. So warp 2 is 8x light speed, and warp 4.5 would be 91x light speed, which roughly corresponds to 100x Cochrane's warp 1 drive.
Still, 4 days at 100x lightspeed is still only about 1 lightyear...
I will confess up front: I have a media room designed by the people at Skywalker Ranch and Bose with input from Bran Ferren the founder of Imagineering and Danny Hillis the founder of Thinking Machines. It was computer modelled by Lucas and Bose, and ear tuned by Bob Stuart of Meridian. From time to time I talk with Bill Gates about home control issues we have.
The bottom line is that wired homes suck.
Why? Because they are basically custom jobs, and therefore need to be reprogrammed every time you change the system. Take a simple example: the unified control system. When you move from a dual stack CRT projector to a DMD projector, or from an analog high end 5 channel audio system to a fully 8 channel digital audio system, you have to revise the control system. What order things turn on and off. The power systems. The layout of the UI of all control panels. Possibly the interfaces to the stack of media changers. The media selection systems (of which Escient is a major provider) are also proprietary and closed.
Each change is a major software job, and that job takes LONGER than the next revision of products, so you start to fall behind the innovation curve.
There is no dynamic plug and play control system that works end to end all the way to the UI. This is the major impediment to consumer control systems. It is the tyranny of static systems.
And you'd be surprised at how many systems that should work together but do not. And the stupidity of A/V architectures (like the lack of high quality end to end digital solutions in the video chain.)
Then there are the little things nobody thinks about ahead of time: like a stack of projectors may all (analog) drift differently, so although any single projector drifts imperceptably, the fact that they all drift in different directions make it very obvious.
I truly am a beta test site, and my systems is in perpetual beta. I have had the CEO of Runco thank me for being able to test configurations that his company can't test. I'm not complaining: the positive side of this is that I get the latest and greatest, even if they don't work quite perfectly. And I'm a geek, so that's OK!
So if you go for a wired home, be prepared for one of the following three situations:
1. You will almost never change anything, or if you do, you'll change almost everything together. OR
2. You will upgrade from time to time, but not everything will work at any given time. You'll have techs tramping through your house constantly, especially every time you have a party where you want to impress people. OR
3. You will take charge and program the systems yourself. You'll need an open-minded installer, because they hate it when you mess up the cables after they've neatened them, and A LOT OF TIME...
I assume the Slashdot community would fall into category three...;-)
No river going through his house. It's in several "modules", which allows him to have an impressive entranceway to his yard for parties separated from the family compound (private), more formal sit-down kinds of parties (e.g. the annual CEO summit), and the less-formal entertainment areas.
It is VERY wired, also with a lot of security and cameras. Almost everything can be controlled remotely. He has surfaces that can display digital art and rotate it. Visitors and residents can have badges that customize the photos, environment, etc. according to their preferences.
Custom company that Bill started put together most of it, and a part of that company was acquired by Microsoft and worked on Microsoft home and consumer electronics prototyping. They used a variant of DCOM to have distributed control systems in the house. He has a multiple projector screen wall. He has had a host of unforeseen problems, some of which we've shared (see my other post in this section.)
It's actually less palatial than several estates owned by famous celebrities... Michael Jackson's comes to mind.
There has been a mixture of facts and distortions in these threads.
Hotmail has several different kinds of machines. For purposes of this article, there are three kinds:
1) Solaris boxes used for storing the email, basically huge local file servers
2) A mix of NT and FreeBSD Intel boxes used as "front doors", i.e. the things that render the pages.
3) FreeBSD Intel boxes for the rest (the plumbing of the email application, ad server, incoming email, etc.)
The article, I assume, is talking about the front doors. This is not the bulk of Hotmail, although they are the ones that handle the connections (after the load balancer, of course).
Hotmail represents a lot of practical learning about how to maintain and build scale. They add clusters in units of groups of the three types of machines noted above. This simplifies management and expenses, as well as technical issues.
Microsoft is, of course, interested in moving the front doors to Windows 2000 as a scalability and management test. They have run Windows NT 4 on them in the past and learned from that. I doubt the interior machines of Hotmail will use Windows 2000 without a significant and extremely costly redesign -- unlike the front doors, there is significant non-portable code involved.
My information comes from having done an analysis of Hotmail at Microsoft, where I was chief architect until 1999.
Yes, Avie Tevanian was part of the Mach team. The head/professor of the Mach project was Rick Rashid, the VP of Microsoft Research. Other significant contributors to Mach followed Rashid to Microsoft (Rich Draves and Mike Jones being good examples).
Everybody overlooks Apple's major contribution to GUI over PARC: not menus, single button mouse, etc. It was the programming model.
PARC said "use Smalltalk and get GUI". Smalltalk supported a form of closure for their blocks, which is how you attached things like buttons or menu items to code behavior. Unfortunately, the number of people willing to develop applications in Smalltalk was limited, esp. for commercial use.
Apple's major contribution was the window, grafport, and event loop based programming model. There was related research work elsewhere, but exposing the GUI programming model the way they did was commercially novel. Most importantly, it enabled a commercial third-party application market using languages like assembler, Pascal and C.
Tying an OS programming model to an interpreted managed memory language has historically been the kiss of death for a system (Smalltalk, Lisp, Telescript, Dylan). I believe this is because those interpreted languages were designed without sufficient attention to commercial application issues. In addition, memory and CPU were more expensive, and applications were simple enough that the overhead of managed memory was deemed excessive (you could conceivably track all of your objects without excessive effort).
Consequently, Java is the first interpreted system that can succeed. Better attention to these issues, and better timing...
I have a lot of respect for jwz and what he has done for Open Source and Netscape. But Open Source is under a lot of scrutiny. It is very damaging to have people like Stallman and Jamie act with such personal self-interest. Yet it is important the the movement has visible leadership.
And here is the great challenge of the Open Source, pointed to by the Cathedral and Baazar manifesto: Open Source is driven by many egos. Can it ever be different? The power of the Baazar comes from the many egos. On the other paw, the corporate management structure that creates the Cathedral also creates an atmosphere of responsibility that allows the corporation to be a publically-scrutinized organization. It has clear responsibilities and roles for people. When a person from Sun talks, their role in the organization tells you a lot about how to interpret their statements. The Baazar does not have this structure. Under scrutiny, outsiders do not know how to interpret the statements of any individual in the Baazar. Do they represent Open Source? Do they dictate its goals? Are they random? Are they a "part of" it or not? Without a formal organization, many of these questions are senseless. But outsiders demand accountability even for philosophies.
I don't know if Open Source will end up like "Zen", a philosophy, or "Catholicism", an organized religion. The movement itself doesn't seem to know, but scrutiny, visible leadership, commercial success, and aggression (e.g. anti-MSFT) tend to push things in the latter direction.
Correction: the GUID does not identify the creator of the document. The GUID can be linked to the network card on the machine where the document was created, OR the registry on the machine where the document was created (for machines without network cards).
[Straight after the discovery of the ID's Microsoft promised us that they'd erase the databases immediately. If they're able to use these id's it means that they haven't erased the bases. They lied AGAIN....]
Take a valium and stick to watching the X-Files. They did not track this with the Microsoft registration database -- it was done more simply by comparing the GUIDs in documents.
I find it interesting that so many people assume that GUIDs were invented by Microsoft with evil intent, when in fact Microsoft was reusing an "open standard" for generating unique 128-bit identification numbers from RPC for DCE (Unix) -- with minor mods to handle the larger fraction of PCs w/o network cards. This decision was made over seven years ago for OLE2. This is also used by CORBA.
The reason a GUID is in a Word document is because Microsoft treats documents as objects (generally considered a good thing), and objects carry identifiers with are GUIDs. Most other distributed object systems do the same thing.
The main issue is that Microsoft distributed GUIDs more pervasively than most, since their software is so popular.
How do I know this? I made this design decision for using GUIDs.
Are the GNOME guys thinking about this? Don't they use CORBA? Sometimes it's easy to take your infrastructure for granted -- like I imagine the Word guys did when they used COM/OLE, and ended up with this GUID/privacy problem.
There are several posts claiming this is some ploy to make it harder for the DOJ to break up the company. People theorize that aligning on customer boundaries rather than product boundaries makes it harder to break up Microsoft.
Poppycock.
If anything, reorganizing around customer boundaries makes it EASIER to break up the company. It means Microsoft drew the dotted lines that say "cut here".
All the "Baby Bill" proposals involve splitting up Windows among several companies, to spread it around. This reorganization implicitly allows at least 3 versions of Windows, each focused at a different customer segment.
The problem with the break up proposals, usually inspired by the Standard Oil breakup, is that they usually just result in a larger number of vertical monopolies.
> require an actor to be filmed in front of > totally white background to enable easier > special effects.
They can use whatever color is most convenient and not on the actors. Usually you would not use white because it is a complex color. Traditionally the background is green. In older times, they would use blue (the original "blue screen" term before Windows co-opted it to mean a different kind of "special effect").
Lighting is key. Essentially they have as uniform a background as possible so they can digitally composite scenes onto a particular background color.
Light: REX Pro + credit card + drivers license + work card key all fit into the Rex case in one pocket.
Medium: hook the Beacon pager to my belt.
If I can carry extra weight, I add a Nokia cell phone and Toshiba subnotebook.
I used to use a Palm. Now I use the NEC Beacon pager. It is a FLEX pager, address book, and calendar, and synchronizes with the PC. So it is functionally a REX + pager. UI sucks, though. I'm waiting until one of those wristwatch pagers have sufficient capacity to match the Beacon.
PCG-C1 is available now. You can buy one from Sony Direct. It's cool -- a really small PC with a built-in CCD camera. But has some weird limitations. See http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/jump/c1x/.
A company called JPD imports the latest coolest notebooks from Japan. Usually the Japanese notebooks are released in the US about 6 months later, so often you can get a preview of what's coming. See http://www.jpd.com. You'll see that Panasonic has a similar computer to the Sony PCG-C1, with a higher-resolution camera.
One of the 4 is in Seattle, the old Cinerama. Paul Allen (co-founder of MSFT, now big-time investor of misc. random stuff and sports teams) bought it and converted it to digital. Did he buy it just to be first to see The Phantom Menace? Talking about overpaying for a ticket!
The big plus on the digital system is no film damage over time. The big minus is lower apparent resolution than a good projector. They are using TI DLP and Hughes-JVC lightvalve technologies. I don't know which one will be used for TPM.
Slashdot Mirror
In general you might think that the cost per gig you pay and the cost per gig that Amazon pays is similar. And you would be right. But to obtain high reliability you will pay more.
Amazon, or anybody who tries to build a large distributed storage service, can spread out the probability of disk errors over a larger set of users than you are able to do. The marginal cost to replace a disk that has failed, on a per user basis, is therefore lower for Amazon.
Moreover, the overhead to manage many disks does not increase linearly to the number of disks. Put another way, their per user cost to manage the disks is lower than you.
The cost equation is less about purchasing the storage than maintaining it through the inevitable failures over time. This makes the gigabyte-based usage cost very fair, since it is proportional to the rate of error. The access cost manages their bandwidth expense.
What I would like from a service like this is a pricing guarantee -- if they maintain the same pricing two years from now, it will be a ripoff given the diminishing cost of storage and bandwidth. It would be nice to have it pegged to some kind of disk/bandwidth industry index.
The effect is largey attributed to Pendry. It was very contentious in the physics community until last year, when it was generally accepted that the eminescent wave was the process by which the light travelled (otherwise you have supraluminal propagation.)
The ramifications of this technology are very large, not just for the optical realm, but for other frequencies also.
...I'll put on the asbestos underwear for this post...
;-)
In 1990 at Microsoft there were several requirements that drove the registry. The number of third party applications and application writers was growing very fast. Making this worse, a new object system was on the horizon which could dramatically increase the number of independently-authored "components" that needed to be registered. There was a need to store state in a segregated manner so that apps wouldn't stomp on other app's information. Also there was a "new" notion of remote manageability for the objects, so the access method should be easily remotable early in the boot process. Also the OS needed a place to store lots of very small data items.
It would have been best to use the file system, but the file system at that time was FAT which could not store small data items efficiently. The registry was the first API common between Windows 3 and OS/2 (and also NT), which was a goal at the time. Of course it quickly went out of control, since there was no rational security or ownership model. The registry was kept very very simple in order to maximize the likelihood that the next file system (either the object file system or NTFS) would be able to implement it, including in the NT kernel (which had a very simple API model). It was also the first API from Microsoft that had unused parameters for future features, such as context ids for security, query features, and other stuff. Unfortunately much of that didn't work as planned since very few applications paid attention to the requirement to set them to 0L!
I didn't expect it to be so massively overused, nor for it to survive beyond Windows 3.x. It was supposed to be superceded by an object file system (that was designed and implemented several times, but never released.)
There's a good story behind the registry, though: I designed the registry while on a bachelor party for a friend, mostly on a car ride between San Diego and Las Vegas, and faxed in the design from Las Vegas the morning after the party to the responsible program manager. Which might explain much about the design...
I run my computer to a 12' diagonal rear projection screen, using a Digital Projections DLP projector. For computer work it is readable with all lights on, and uses my far focus eyesight rather than near focus, which helps with eyestrain.
I used to run a noisy PC in the equipment room, but I then I found:
1) You can build a fanless PC (I used Signum Data components and modified them with more heat pipes... next step is to use the Zalman monster case.)
2) It is easier to run a long (with repeater) DVI cable for the projector than it was to run a long run Firewire for the DVD. In both cases you run USB2 repeater -- either for peripherals or the sound box.
It is amazing for videogames and DVDs, although the DVD quality is slightly lower than a dedicated high end system (Meridian DVD + Snell & Wilcox interpolator). But the HTPC is LESS expensive and more versatile.
Microsoft could probably do this if they wanted to. But there are many reasons why they are unlikely to do so. First there is IBM, Linux almost certainly infringes some Microsoft patent, Windows almost certainly infringes some IBM patent. It is a zero sum game.
Yes, it is zero sum. That's why most of the large companies cross license. Microsoft and IBM are cross licensed to ALL of each other's patents. So if Linux infringed, IBM would have freedom of action, but Red Hat would not. And arguably if IBM does not own at least 51% (or whatever the cross license specifies) of Linux, they might not even be licensed. Since that's a legal grey area (who owns Linux?), I don't know how that would shake out.
The other reason is anti-trust. If Microsoft tried that type of thing they would probably be ordered to license.
Yes, it can be an antitrust issue. IBM covered this a while ago, as has the MPEG Licensing Authority (which has most of the MPEG-related patents), QUALCOMM (which has most of the CDMA patents), and many others. The only thing you have to do to avoid antitrust is to license to everybody "fairly", i.e. without discrimination.
So, for example, Microsoft could offer to license the relevant patents to Red Hat in return for 5% of their revenue (revenue, not profit). And if Red Hat declined to pay, they could sue Red Hat to stop them from distributing Linux.
Now the interesting thing for the "tin hat" crowd: Microsoft has just started ramping up a licensing group, using the guy who started that business for IBM, Marshall Phelps.
Industry Leader to Join Microsoft's Legal Team as Head of Intellectual Property Group
Microsoft Plays Intellectual Property Licensing Catch-Up
Actually Mach was developed at CMU under Rick Rashid. Tevanian was a graduate student of his. Most of the Mach team is at Microsoft Research, including Rashid (who heads up Microsoft Research). They tried to convince Tevanian to come there, but he decided instead to go to NeXT Computer, which also was based on the Mach microkernel. When Apple acquired NeXT, it took most of their OS and development philosophy also.
Nope. In the PC card format, the largest Toshiba is still 5 GB. That's even on the website link you had.
It's a complex topic, but here is one way to look at the variety of different expert systems:
One is plain old code. Very hard to maintain.
Two is a forward chaining production system. These systems move forward from facts to a set of conclusions. Examples of this include CLIPS and iLOG. CLIPS is public domain source from NASA. Jess is a Java version of CLIPS. Commercial versions include ART, Haley, and a host of others. If you have many rules, you will want a RETE based system, since that scales Olog(n) to number of rules; there are more advanced algorithms than RETE also.
Three is a backward chaining production system. These systems move backwards from a goal statement to a compatible set of facts. Most common example is Prolog. Amzi has an inexpensive prolog. Prolog also particularly good at writing parsers.
Four are a set of case based reasoning system (CBR). These take cases and learn inferences over them. Particularly useful for help and diagnostic systems. Inference Corp, Brightware and others have such systems, usually in hybrid engines that also do rules and objects.
Five are a set of formal statistical reasoning systems, for example based on Bayes Theorem, such as influence diagrams. These can also be generalizations of Markov models, commonly used in speech recognition.
Sixth are "informal" statistical reasoning systems, such as artificial neural networks (ANN) and fuzzy logics. Although they have precise mathematical models, the learning algorithms are usually not precisely statistically matched to the training sets. You can find several ANN and fuzzy logic algorithms in various recipe books or the faq at comp.* newsgroup.
I have seriously butchered expert systems in this oversimplified note, but this gives you a sense of the space. I echo other posters in recommending that you obtain a general purpose expert system tool, learn it, and try multiple approaches. Most production systems really show that 1) knowledge of the expert domain is most important, and 2) using what works is more important than picking a single "pure" approach.
Well, to really nitpick:
Archer claims you don't open up the engines until you get past Jupiter. So presumably you aren't going warp 4.5 the entire way.
Cochrane claims the new "warp 5 engine" will allow speeds 100 times faster than before. The generally accepted definition of warp (from Gene Roddenberry) is warp cubed is the light speed factor. So warp 2 is 8x light speed, and warp 4.5 would be 91x light speed, which roughly corresponds to 100x Cochrane's warp 1 drive.
Still, 4 days at 100x lightspeed is still only about 1 lightyear...
The bottom line is that wired homes suck.
Why? Because they are basically custom jobs, and therefore need to be reprogrammed every time you change the system. Take a simple example: the unified control system. When you move from a dual stack CRT projector to a DMD projector, or from an analog high end 5 channel audio system to a fully 8 channel digital audio system, you have to revise the control system. What order things turn on and off. The power systems. The layout of the UI of all control panels. Possibly the interfaces to the stack of media changers. The media selection systems (of which Escient is a major provider) are also proprietary and closed.
Each change is a major software job, and that job takes LONGER than the next revision of products, so you start to fall behind the innovation curve.
There is no dynamic plug and play control system that works end to end all the way to the UI. This is the major impediment to consumer control systems. It is the tyranny of static systems.
And you'd be surprised at how many systems that should work together but do not. And the stupidity of A/V architectures (like the lack of high quality end to end digital solutions in the video chain.)
Then there are the little things nobody thinks about ahead of time: like a stack of projectors may all (analog) drift differently, so although any single projector drifts imperceptably, the fact that they all drift in different directions make it very obvious.
I truly am a beta test site, and my systems is in perpetual beta. I have had the CEO of Runco thank me for being able to test configurations that his company can't test. I'm not complaining: the positive side of this is that I get the latest and greatest, even if they don't work quite perfectly. And I'm a geek, so that's OK!
So if you go for a wired home, be prepared for one of the following three situations:
1. You will almost never change anything, or if you do, you'll change almost everything together. OR
2. You will upgrade from time to time, but not everything will work at any given time. You'll have techs tramping through your house constantly, especially every time you have a party where you want to impress people. OR
3. You will take charge and program the systems yourself. You'll need an open-minded installer, because they hate it when you mess up the cables after they've neatened them, and A LOT OF TIME...
I assume the Slashdot community would fall into category three... ;-)
No river going through his house. It's in several "modules", which allows him to have an impressive entranceway to his yard for parties separated from the family compound (private), more formal sit-down kinds of parties (e.g. the annual CEO summit), and the less-formal entertainment areas. It is VERY wired, also with a lot of security and cameras. Almost everything can be controlled remotely. He has surfaces that can display digital art and rotate it. Visitors and residents can have badges that customize the photos, environment, etc. according to their preferences. Custom company that Bill started put together most of it, and a part of that company was acquired by Microsoft and worked on Microsoft home and consumer electronics prototyping. They used a variant of DCOM to have distributed control systems in the house. He has a multiple projector screen wall. He has had a host of unforeseen problems, some of which we've shared (see my other post in this section.) It's actually less palatial than several estates owned by famous celebrities... Michael Jackson's comes to mind.
There has been a mixture of facts and distortions in these threads.
Hotmail has several different kinds of machines. For purposes of this article, there are three kinds:
1) Solaris boxes used for storing the email, basically huge local file servers
2) A mix of NT and FreeBSD Intel boxes used as "front doors", i.e. the things that render the pages.
3) FreeBSD Intel boxes for the rest (the plumbing of the email application, ad server, incoming email, etc.)
The article, I assume, is talking about the front doors. This is not the bulk of Hotmail, although they are the ones that handle the connections (after the load balancer, of course).
Hotmail represents a lot of practical learning about how to maintain and build scale. They add clusters in units of groups of the three types of machines noted above. This simplifies management and expenses, as well as technical issues.
Microsoft is, of course, interested in moving the front doors to Windows 2000 as a scalability and management test. They have run Windows NT 4 on them in the past and learned from that. I doubt the interior machines of Hotmail will use Windows 2000 without a significant and extremely costly redesign -- unlike the front doors, there is significant non-portable code involved.
My information comes from having done an analysis of Hotmail at Microsoft, where I was chief architect until 1999.
Yes, Avie Tevanian was part of the Mach team. The head/professor of the Mach project was Rick Rashid, the VP of Microsoft Research. Other significant contributors to Mach followed Rashid to Microsoft (Rich Draves and Mike Jones being good examples).
PARC said "use Smalltalk and get GUI". Smalltalk supported a form of closure for their blocks, which is how you attached things like buttons or menu items to code behavior. Unfortunately, the number of people willing to develop applications in Smalltalk was limited, esp. for commercial use.
Apple's major contribution was the window, grafport, and event loop based programming model. There was related research work elsewhere, but exposing the GUI programming model the way they did was commercially novel. Most importantly, it enabled a commercial third-party application market using languages like assembler, Pascal and C.
Tying an OS programming model to an interpreted managed memory language has historically been the kiss of death for a system (Smalltalk, Lisp, Telescript, Dylan). I believe this is because those interpreted languages were designed without sufficient attention to commercial application issues. In addition, memory and CPU were more expensive, and applications were simple enough that the overhead of managed memory was deemed excessive (you could conceivably track all of your objects without excessive effort).
Consequently, Java is the first interpreted system that can succeed. Better attention to these issues, and better timing...
I have a lot of respect for jwz and what he has done for Open Source and Netscape. But Open Source is under a lot of scrutiny. It is very damaging to have people like Stallman and Jamie act with such personal self-interest. Yet it is important the the movement has visible leadership.
And here is the great challenge of the Open Source, pointed to by the Cathedral and Baazar manifesto: Open Source is driven by many egos. Can it ever be different? The power of the Baazar comes from the many egos. On the other paw, the corporate management structure that creates the Cathedral also creates an atmosphere of responsibility that allows the corporation to be a publically-scrutinized organization. It has clear responsibilities and roles for people. When a person from Sun talks, their role in the organization tells you a lot about how to interpret their statements. The Baazar does not have this structure. Under scrutiny, outsiders do not know how to interpret the statements of any individual in the Baazar. Do they represent Open Source? Do they dictate its goals? Are they random? Are they a "part of" it or not? Without a formal organization, many of these questions are senseless. But outsiders demand accountability even for philosophies.
I don't know if Open Source will end up like "Zen", a philosophy, or "Catholicism", an organized religion. The movement itself doesn't seem to know, but scrutiny, visible leadership, commercial success, and aggression (e.g. anti-MSFT) tend to push things in the latter direction.
Correction: the GUID does not identify the creator of the document. The GUID can be linked to the network card on the machine where the document was created, OR the registry on the machine where the document was created (for machines without network cards).
Good book but should have covered distributed GC. These days one of the "big things" for objects is using them to build distributed systems.
A good paper on distributed GC came from one of the INRIA project OS's called COOL, but there have been several research papers on the topic.
[Straight after the discovery of the ID's Microsoft promised us that they'd erase the databases immediately. If they're able to use these id's it means that they haven't erased the bases. They lied AGAIN....]
Take a valium and stick to watching the X-Files. They did not track this with the Microsoft registration database -- it was done more simply by comparing the GUIDs in documents.
Geez.
I find it interesting that so many people assume that GUIDs were invented by Microsoft with evil intent, when in fact Microsoft was reusing an "open standard" for generating unique 128-bit identification numbers from RPC for DCE (Unix) -- with minor mods to handle the larger fraction of PCs w/o network cards. This decision was made over seven years ago for OLE2. This is also used by CORBA.
The reason a GUID is in a Word document is because Microsoft treats documents as objects (generally considered a good thing), and objects carry identifiers with are GUIDs. Most other distributed object systems do the same thing.
The main issue is that Microsoft distributed GUIDs more pervasively than most, since their software is so popular.
How do I know this? I made this design decision for using GUIDs.
Are the GNOME guys thinking about this? Don't they use CORBA? Sometimes it's easy to take your infrastructure for granted -- like I imagine the Word guys did when they used COM/OLE, and ended up with this GUID/privacy problem.
There are several posts claiming this is some ploy to make it harder for the DOJ to break up the company. People theorize that aligning on customer boundaries rather than product boundaries makes it harder to break up Microsoft.
Poppycock.
If anything, reorganizing around customer boundaries makes it EASIER to break up the company. It means Microsoft drew the dotted lines that say "cut here".
All the "Baby Bill" proposals involve splitting up Windows among several companies, to spread it around. This reorganization implicitly allows at least 3 versions of Windows, each focused at a different customer segment.
The problem with the break up proposals, usually inspired by the Standard Oil breakup, is that they usually just result in a larger number of vertical monopolies.
> require an actor to be filmed in front of
> totally white background to enable easier
> special effects.
They can use whatever color is most convenient and not on the actors. Usually you would not use white because it is a complex color. Traditionally the background is green. In older times, they would use blue (the original "blue screen" term before Windows co-opted it to mean a different kind of "special effect").
Lighting is key. Essentially they have as uniform a background as possible so they can digitally composite scenes onto a particular background color.
I have modes.
Light: REX Pro + credit card + drivers license + work card key all fit into the Rex case in one pocket.
Medium: hook the Beacon pager to my belt.
If I can carry extra weight, I add a Nokia cell phone and Toshiba subnotebook.
I used to use a Palm. Now I use the NEC Beacon pager. It is a FLEX pager, address book, and calendar, and synchronizes with the PC. So it is functionally a REX + pager. UI sucks, though. I'm waiting until one of those wristwatch pagers have sufficient capacity to match the Beacon.
PCG-C1 is available now. You can buy one from Sony Direct. It's cool -- a really small PC with a built-in CCD camera. But has some weird limitations. See http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/jump/c1x/.
A company called JPD imports the latest coolest notebooks from Japan. Usually the Japanese notebooks are released in the US about 6 months later, so often you can get a preview of what's coming. See http://www.jpd.com. You'll see that Panasonic has a similar computer to the Sony PCG-C1, with a higher-resolution camera.
One of the 4 is in Seattle, the old Cinerama. Paul Allen (co-founder of MSFT, now big-time investor of misc. random stuff and sports teams) bought it and converted it to digital. Did he buy it just to be first to see The Phantom Menace? Talking about overpaying for a ticket!
The big plus on the digital system is no film damage over time. The big minus is lower apparent resolution than a good projector. They are using TI DLP and Hughes-JVC lightvalve technologies. I don't know which one will be used for TPM.