Right now, if you want to do something on the web, you need a web server. Sure, you can rent a virtual one etc., but still.
The model in a peer-to-peer content distribution network is more like if you need to put something up, you just do it by connecting your computer to the rest of the world. The network distributes the content according to demand. If your machine goes down, the content doesn't disappear.
Of course, someone still needs to run a computer somewhere, but the fact is that there's a gazillion of computers out there idling. If you can tap into them... The current way of organising computers with DNS is really fairly static and thus inefficient, even with virtual servers.
So it's about lower cost and seamless handling of failures and scaling.
Of course, this kind of thing is not going to happen overnight, and it might not even be feasible (not yet, at least). But that's why it's research. And yes, these ideas have been simmering for some time, I was in the field when I wrote my Masters three years ago, and at that time I certainly read a couple papers about it. Given what we know today, how could we redesign IP or DNS or the web to avoid some of their flaws? It's interesting stuff.
Why not just make the interpreter a bit smarter? I think Firefox's array implementation will use a continuous array unless you try to use it in an associative fashion.
Also when you're talking about pixels, you need to know the type of each element so you can put the elements themselves (and not pointers to them) next to each other in the array to get anywhere near compiled C code speed. How can you do that without either a smarter interpreter or some kind of type system where you specify it explicit? If you're going to make the interpreter smarter, you might as well try to reuse the existing array syntax.:)
By the way, strictly speaking the built-in array is actually O(1) amortized as far as I know and a continuous array is also only O(1) amortized if you want to be able to add elements dynamically. But sure, hash lookup is slower than indexing.
You got that backwards. What they should do is deleting the remark about Windows. Anyone succumbing to the (tm) crap should have their head examined. Every time somebody writes "registered trademark", god kills a kitten. It's true. Between us, we just killed two. No, I'm not going to write it again.
Now someone is going to say legal blahblah necessary blahblah. But there is something wrong if fear of a big corporation is making you write that kind of kitten-lethal nonsense every time you mention a product made by that corporation.
If you haven't already, watch the video. It's actually pretty cool.
No rectum images, although they do illustrate a bad-ass looking device currently used for rectum investigations. Hint: it's like a big fat snake with lights in the end, and boy, can it wiggle.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. Other than Switzerland, which has been free since 1291, could you point out a Democratic Republic that has been around longer the US?
Yet somehow Bush managed to get into the office twice and disturb the world order to the extent that the next American president can get a Nobel prize within a year, just for undoing the damage done.
Don't be so smug about the good things that you can't see the bad. "Better than everything else." Pffff.
The fact that a Chinese university is doing cutting-edge research is a good thing for you Americans. That means they're getting richer, thus a growing market for the pop culture products and Hollywood entertainment you're so good at exporting. Maybe 80% of the entertainment in the telly here in Denmark (in Europe) is from the US.
Now you just need to teach them to abide your copyrights. Maybe they can teach you how to eat vegetables in return. Fix an obesity problem or two, eh?
Nice try, but actually Norway is not part of the European Union (EU). In case you are wondering, Opera is situated in Oslo which is the capital of Norway. It's also not a really a big business (compared to many other companies here), I really sincerely doubt anyone would give a damn (except their users) if it weren't for the foul play.
Energy is extracted from the area that the blades cover. Twice as long blades means four times the area (pi * r ^ 2), which in turn means four times the energy. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, you can't just make double the blade length for twice the cost (must be stronger, etc.) but still.
I looked into it at some time ago for a web site that had product sizes in cm. I had to implement an exception for visitors from just one country. If you're from the US, I've officially hated you since that day.
Look at Games Workshop as an example. They borderline brainwash staff to love their job, and then they pay them so little that they generally have to share accomodation with fellow staff. And yet the staff turnover is surprisingly low for such a relatively crappy and intensive job. Well, yeah, it does take a couple of years before you die of it.
You could also have used a kit for event-based programming and you wouldn't have to deal with multiprogramming at all. It can help a lot. If, of course, the things you were interfacing with wouldn't make it too difficult.
Your link is to TDPs. Which are not representative for normal power usage, and hence pretty useless. You need to look at figures at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ or a similar place. Last I looked, the desktop Core 2 Duo is more efficient under load with Athlon 64 X2 being more efficient in idle (apparently because Intel's EIST is not really working).
The difference is that when you installed that Fedora, you got a whole slew of applications with it; applications that have no counterpart in a fresh Windows installation. Uninstall them and you can have a better comparison.
Comparing sizes is silly in general, though. It matters for the OLPC, but it doesn't really matter for mainstream computers in the western world.
"And in today's world the real value of a computer is it being networked," says Zachary. "Finding a network in the poor areas is either impossible or very expensive."
What about connectivity? Aren't telecommunications services expensive in the developing world?
When these machines pop out of the box, they will make a mesh network of their own, peer-to-peer. This is something initially developed at MIT and the Media Lab. We are also exploring ways to connect them to the backbone of the Internet at very low cost.
Perhaps it would have been better to interview someone who's actually put some effort into understanding what the OLPC is doing. But then again, the article itself is obviously just a rant so why bother.
I was just thinking, why doesn't this make sense for a rich country in Europe, like Denmark? Or any other developed nation. We currently don't seem to have the will to equip each child in the public schools with a computer, but if the price is right...
I've recently finished my CS studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. The education here is mostly based on doing projects in small groups, one project per semester. So I've been through this 10 times. The master's thesis is just another project.
I've worked on grid software, BDDs for finding optimal task graphs, a decentralised distributed file system, a neural network for recognizing handwritten letters on a PDA, etc. Great fun. Learned a lot too. Especially about designing and developing software with other people.
If the startup sound gets annoying over time, which sounds probable, why not simply change it over time? Count experience points and award people with a different experience. It works for World of Warcraft. Or so I've heard.
You'd think so, but it's simply not relevant right now. Really. There's so much traditionally generated power to cut down on that it is not a problem.
So it remains a problem for the future, but why worry about that? Perhaps the fact that night and day is reversed on different parts of the planet will fix the problem. Or some new tech will appear. With the current political climate the problem is still decades away. I think this is why you don't see solutions appearing, there's currently no need for them.
Guardia (http://www.guardia.com/) is a Danish company that has been working on this for several years. They were featured in a show about startups last year. I think they use two cameras and infrared scanning to make the system more reliable, although I'm not sure how well it works yet.
Their floor model looks pretty neat. It was featured in the show. The cameras are mounted on two pillars and can move up and down by themselves. You get the feeling of a creepy intelligent robot, not far from Minority Report.
Anyway, they are working on it. If it can be done and they don't run out of money, I'm sure they will succed. The entrepreneur (the CEO) is really dedicated to the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, if you want to do something on the web, you need a web server. Sure, you can rent a virtual one etc., but still.
The model in a peer-to-peer content distribution network is more like if you need to put something up, you just do it by connecting your computer to the rest of the world. The network distributes the content according to demand. If your machine goes down, the content doesn't disappear.
Of course, someone still needs to run a computer somewhere, but the fact is that there's a gazillion of computers out there idling. If you can tap into them... The current way of organising computers with DNS is really fairly static and thus inefficient, even with virtual servers.
So it's about lower cost and seamless handling of failures and scaling.
Of course, this kind of thing is not going to happen overnight, and it might not even be feasible (not yet, at least). But that's why it's research. And yes, these ideas have been simmering for some time, I was in the field when I wrote my Masters three years ago, and at that time I certainly read a couple papers about it. Given what we know today, how could we redesign IP or DNS or the web to avoid some of their flaws? It's interesting stuff.
Why not just make the interpreter a bit smarter? I think Firefox's array implementation will use a continuous array unless you try to use it in an associative fashion.
Also when you're talking about pixels, you need to know the type of each element so you can put the elements themselves (and not pointers to them) next to each other in the array to get anywhere near compiled C code speed. How can you do that without either a smarter interpreter or some kind of type system where you specify it explicit? If you're going to make the interpreter smarter, you might as well try to reuse the existing array syntax. :)
By the way, strictly speaking the built-in array is actually O(1) amortized as far as I know and a continuous array is also only O(1) amortized if you want to be able to add elements dynamically. But sure, hash lookup is slower than indexing.
You got that backwards. What they should do is deleting the remark about Windows. Anyone succumbing to the (tm) crap should have their head examined. Every time somebody writes "registered trademark", god kills a kitten. It's true. Between us, we just killed two. No, I'm not going to write it again.
Now someone is going to say legal blahblah necessary blahblah. But there is something wrong if fear of a big corporation is making you write that kind of kitten-lethal nonsense every time you mention a product made by that corporation.
... where having spent countless of hours fragging others in Descent will get you hired. Scary.
If you haven't already, watch the video. It's actually pretty cool.
No rectum images, although they do illustrate a bad-ass looking device currently used for rectum investigations. Hint: it's like a big fat snake with lights in the end, and boy, can it wiggle.
What an incredibly stupid thing to say. Other than Switzerland, which has been free since 1291, could you point out a Democratic Republic that has been around longer the US?
Yet somehow Bush managed to get into the office twice and disturb the world order to the extent that the next American president can get a Nobel prize within a year, just for undoing the damage done.
Don't be so smug about the good things that you can't see the bad. "Better than everything else." Pffff.
The fact that a Chinese university is doing cutting-edge research is a good thing for you Americans. That means they're getting richer, thus a growing market for the pop culture products and Hollywood entertainment you're so good at exporting. Maybe 80% of the entertainment in the telly here in Denmark (in Europe) is from the US.
Now you just need to teach them to abide your copyrights. Maybe they can teach you how to eat vegetables in return. Fix an obesity problem or two, eh?
Nice try, but actually Norway is not part of the European Union (EU). In case you are wondering, Opera is situated in Oslo which is the capital of Norway. It's also not a really a big business (compared to many other companies here), I really sincerely doubt anyone would give a damn (except their users) if it weren't for the foul play.
Energy is extracted from the area that the blades cover. Twice as long blades means four times the area (pi * r ^ 2), which in turn means four times the energy. Of course, it's much more complicated than that, you can't just make double the blade length for twice the cost (must be stronger, etc.) but still.
Here's some info:
http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/wtrb/size.htm
Even more so; The US uses Imperial while most of the world uses Metric, not just another country.
Actually, it's not just "most of the world". The US appears to be just about the only country not transitioning away from imperial units (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units).
I looked into it at some time ago for a web site that had product sizes in cm. I had to implement an exception for visitors from just one country. If you're from the US, I've officially hated you since that day.
You could also have used a kit for event-based programming and you wouldn't have to deal with multiprogramming at all. It can help a lot. If, of course, the things you were interfacing with wouldn't make it too difficult.
Your link is to TDPs. Which are not representative for normal power usage, and hence pretty useless. You need to look at figures at http://www.silentpcreview.com/ or a similar place. Last I looked, the desktop Core 2 Duo is more efficient under load with Athlon 64 X2 being more efficient in idle (apparently because Intel's EIST is not really working).
Yeah, true. Except mine.
Try a recent Ubuntu. Things have moved on.
The difference is that when you installed that Fedora, you got a whole slew of applications with it; applications that have no counterpart in a fresh Windows installation. Uninstall them and you can have a better comparison.
Comparing sizes is silly in general, though. It matters for the OLPC, but it doesn't really matter for mainstream computers in the western world.
... a well-dressed Slashdotter is coming to a place near YOU!
A wardrobe that can tell you what to wear. Ingenious!
Now we just need an invention to get people here to leave their basem^Whomes. For other purposes than real-world RPGs.
From the FAQ on laptop.org:
Perhaps it would have been better to interview someone who's actually put some effort into understanding what the OLPC is doing. But then again, the article itself is obviously just a rant so why bother.
I was just thinking, why doesn't this make sense for a rich country in Europe, like Denmark? Or any other developed nation. We currently don't seem to have the will to equip each child in the public schools with a computer, but if the price is right...
I've recently finished my CS studies at Aalborg University in Denmark. The education here is mostly based on doing projects in small groups, one project per semester. So I've been through this 10 times. The master's thesis is just another project.
I've worked on grid software, BDDs for finding optimal task graphs, a decentralised distributed file system, a neural network for recognizing handwritten letters on a PDA, etc. Great fun. Learned a lot too. Especially about designing and developing software with other people.
I'd say go for it.
If the startup sound gets annoying over time, which sounds probable, why not simply change it over time? Count experience points and award people with a different experience. It works for World of Warcraft. Or so I've heard.
You'd think so, but it's simply not relevant right now. Really. There's so much traditionally generated power to cut down on that it is not a problem.
So it remains a problem for the future, but why worry about that? Perhaps the fact that night and day is reversed on different parts of the planet will fix the problem. Or some new tech will appear. With the current political climate the problem is still decades away. I think this is why you don't see solutions appearing, there's currently no need for them.
Guardia (http://www.guardia.com/) is a Danish company that has been working on this for several years. They were featured in a show about startups last year. I think they use two cameras and infrared scanning to make the system more reliable, although I'm not sure how well it works yet.
Their floor model looks pretty neat. It was featured in the show. The cameras are mounted on two pillars and can move up and down by themselves. You get the feeling of a creepy intelligent robot, not far from Minority Report.
Anyway, they are working on it. If it can be done and they don't run out of money, I'm sure they will succed. The entrepreneur (the CEO) is really dedicated to the idea.
There's a difference between viewing articles (as in seeing that there's lots of text and looking at the pictures) and reading articles. :-)
Ubuntu has changed the rules.