AdvFS: One feature I'd really like see implemented would be the old Veritas Advanced Filesystem either as a commercial product ported over or as a free reimplementation. The ability to clone a filesystem volume and then append changes as deltas to the original is quite a nifty feature. Adding total versioning of all filesystem objects would be even better. A good logical volume manager would be nice too. It's coming along though.
Display Postscript: Whatever happened to L. Peter Deutsch's old Display Ghostscript X Server extension? It seems like the last update to that was about three years or so back. Now that's a feature we would all love. DPS handles displaying fonts and complex shapes properly. We all know X isn't going to die any time soon, so a good Display Ghostscript server extension would be a Godsend. For that matter, with all the funding being dumped into KDE and Gnome, why did we all forget about GNUStep? But I digress.
devfs: Please, when are we going to finally transition away from static device nodes to devfs? Solaris had it right, dynamically name the device on detection after its physical properties. This is really important and hasn't been implemented for anything more than testing.
In kernel Framebuffer/DRM device drivers: The old GGI folks had it right. Physical devices like video cards should be initialized and managed in kernel space. Let the console and applications like an X Server talk to the device through a device node and/or ioctl calls and be done with it. No more video crashes when changing display modes, and real user space video security. Yes, there's framebuffer support in 2.4, but not for any decent, modern, cards. DRM hooks within XFree-4.x have come along nicely for GLX support though.
NFS: is STILL a mess! Christ, five years after everyone in Linux land finally accepted that Linux needs a major NFS rewrite and we still have to run BSD or a commercial UNIX for a decent NFS server. What a clusterfuck.
AFS support: OpenAFS is good, real good. But its licensing terms are unacceptable for inclusion into the main kernel tree. AFS is critical for enterprise quality network filesystem support. Notwithstanding, I still thank IBM for their initial code release and the OpenAFS team for the quality work they've done in porting the old IBM/Transarc codebase over to Linux.
Journaled filesystems: are here, but they're still a bit shaky for heavy use. They're getting pretty damn good feature wise though. A year or two more of long uptimes in the real world and they'll be rock solid for the enterprise. Way to go!
Raw I/O support: Primarily due to pushing from Oracle and IBM this has come a long way. But it still needs to be banged on for a couple years yet before enterprise folks will trust Linux for large scale database deployments. We also need a ubiquitous 64 bit platform to deploy upon. Alphas and Suns don't count because not enough folks run Linux on those systems to shake out enough bugs such that one would prefer Linux over DU or Solaris. I've seen Linux on an ES40 and it's not pretty. Which leads me to...
Mainstream 64bit hardware: This is not a Linux fault, but the fault of Intel. When are they going to finally release a decent 64 bit platform suitable for the commodity market? Un-fucking-believable that over ten years after the release of the DEC Alpha we still don't have ubiquitous 64bit computing. And these days RAM is so cheap we're actually running up against the physical memory bus limit, never mind the virtual memory advantages to 64bit memory management. This is just stupid. Hope AMD eats Intel's lunch, they deserve it.
I'm sure there's more... and JMO for what little that's worth.
Well, so does IBM. They're at the forefront of materials science and solid-state physics, to name just two. A fab is possibly the most complex and expensive artifact on the planet, except maybe for a nuclear aircraft carrier, and IBM is a leader in this field.
This is a bad analogy, and in fact makes my point. The initial costs for a new chip fab is on the same order as a large skyscraper, a new bridge, or the Boston Big Dig. Yes, a fab represents a huge upfront capital investment for IBM (or Intel for that matter), but an expected ROI time schedule is planned upfront. The technology involved represents incremental advancements (new lithography techniques, increasing wafer sizes, etc) not entirely new technologies. And there's already a market for chip technology. The only market for space currently is putting up communications satellites, yet we know there are many worthwhile uses for space technology: preventing catastrophe from an asteroid/comet collision; asteroid mining; scientific advances both from creating the technology to get out there and the discoveries as a result. If we limited spending on space to only those items which would generate an ROI within a five or ten year time horizon none of those goals could be met in the near term. You're comparing an already mature market with an embryonic potential market.
Certainly there are many situations whereby the commercial market does a better job at allocating resources than government. But those situations are limited to ones where a financial ROI is evident and recoupable within a short time horizon. Recouping space investment may well take one to two hundred years, well beyond the time horizon of any private enterprise. The real question is: do we (as a society) wish to invest long term without knowing the quantifiable ROI, since any return would be so far into the future it's completely unpredictable. I think that, yes, the obvious long term gains from space research make this spending worth our while. But I also don't have a bias against spending on certain government programs. Transparent government spending which benefit the entire population (education, infrastructure, health care), with a public and open budget, tend to be good investments IMO. Secret spending, without public oversight, tends to be a predictable nightmare. See the Bradley infantry transport vehicle for an example of classified financial mismanagement of a government program.
In short, I'm not ideologically opposed to taxation for public spending, nor do I think that all government spending must be inefficient by design. I think government financial mismanagement is better understood on a case by case basis. And I think that's the core of where we ideologically diverge.
Umm, NASA having vast budgets and no accountability is the problem. How will removing oversight on how the taxpayer's money is spent help?
The problem is not unaccountable management unable to properly track funds (or outright embezzlement). The problem is congress setting specific goals for NASA to achieve while drastically underfunding those objectives. Look at the original Space Station Freedom goals set during the Reagan administration. Compare that to the funding provided. So NASA spent huge sums of money designing a space station that never got off the ground because the goals set by Reagan and congress couldn't possibly be met with the funding allocated. Congress later responded by killing the project and blaming NASA for budgetary mismanagement after Reagan left office. One might claim that NASA should have told congress upfront that they couldn't possibly build Freedom for the money provided, but they wouldn't have even begun the project had they played the game straight like this. The original shuttle design of the late sixties and early seventies follows the same pattern. NASA knew what they wanted and how to build it. They went to Nixon and congress asking for $20 Billion to get it done properly. Nixon and Congress balk and say, 'No, but we'll give you $10 Billion'. Instead of NASA balking with the responsible answer, 'No, we can't meet your objectives with that level of funding', they agreed, knowing that once on board they'll get more down the road from cost overruns, and so followed through on a sub-par design from the start. See Boston's Big Dig for another example of this kind of budgetary madness in action. You see the same kind of insanity in the commercial sector from unreasonable attention paid to per-quarter results at the expense of long term business objectives. I don't blame the bean counters, they just provide reports to upper management. It's the top level decision makers - those who set policy - who are at fault.
I agree that NASA (and every other commercial and government agency) needs aggressive budgetary oversight by a qualified third party auditor. But I don't think that making certain money was spent in each appropriate line item without fraud will actually solve this problem, until policy makers get realistic about how much legitimate engineering costs. A great example of this is the design and construction of the shuttle main engines, which were designed and built top down with no component safety tests ostensibly in order to save money. Sure, it reduced the budget for a short time, which helped sell the shuttle to congress. But long term this cost the shuttle program dearly as once the engines were built they had to be tested as a complete unit, with any component failure requiring a complete disassembly of the engine (never mind design flaws requiring a whole redesign and reconstruction of the engine). Every engineer on the program knew this was a safety nightmare, but the purse strings are controlled by congress and so the engineers had no say in the matter. If Nixon and congress had followed through on the original $20 Billion request, and NASA had followed through on their original design goals, we likely would have a significantly safer shuttle, and one which would have more closely met the original per-launch cost reductions from a reusable vehicle. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Based on this I argue that further congressional oversight is not the solution. Congress should set a strict and consistent yearly budget, provide goals for NASA to meet, and let NASA engineers decide on the timetable.
What NASA needs is to be forced to commercially justify every project and every member of staff. Until then, the culture of waste, inefficiency and mismanagement will continue unabated.
I disagree. Do not forget that unlike large scale commercial engineering, such as building a bridge or a skyscraper, NASA pushes the envelope of current science and technology in ways which makes following concrete budgets and timetables at times impossible. Thus only a non-commercial organization like a government has the necessary resources to pave the way for commerce by funding infrastructure for future commercial space enterprise. Space exploration will never be commercially viable until the infrastructure is in place for business to exploit whatever resources are available. If we had relied on only commercial enterprise to fund our roads and bridges we would never have built the interstate highway system. That expenditure was peanuts compared to the economic benefit we've all realized as a result of that government spending. Space is the same. We'll need government to invest upfront to build infrastructure and set standards so that someday business can exploit the abundant resources available. JMO.
I wonder what kind of volume would be necessary to hold eighteen exabytes of RAM? Of course, this question doesn't even consider interconnects and a bus to the outside world... --M
Solar cells (cost) - once again, solar cells are an energy transport mechanism. Because the energy investment in lifecycle support (mining, production, distribution, maintenance, recycling) is greater than the lifetime energy output. Efficiencies would have to be far higher to offset this. Don't forget that you have to produce all the energy that we currently consume + all of the energy consumed to produce the energy.
Can you back that assertion up? According to this energy payback from total manufacturing costs in materials, processing, and energy for single crystalline silicon (SC-Si) cells is about 3.5 years; assuming a conservative 4.7 solar hours per day. Copper indium diselenide (CIS) payback is 1.7 years, though it's much less efficient at converting solar energy per square meter, that loss in efficiency is more than made up in reduced manufacturing costs.
You make many other assertions, and toss off known cost effective energy producers such as wind with "[...]noisy, ugly blight on the landscape[...]" and "Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here[...]". I hope British Petroleum and Texaco aren't making a dire mistake with their wind investments. Or it might be that your rant is more political than factual?
Linux users aren't switching to OS X left and right.
...just switched to OS X. Been running primarily Linux on my home desktop since 1994. And I can tell you that in my lab, where I'm in charge of supporting over two hundred Linux desktops, servers, and compute nodes, we're seeing a dramatic transition from Linux to OS X among professors. They just bought me a 1Ghz 17" flat panel iMac in order to integrate OS X into our Kerberos realm and AFS cell, as well as get a chunk of internally supported software running on OS X. In addition I just bought a used 400Mhz G4 desktop for home and am awaiting a 17" Powerbook on order. At home I run what I'm tasked to support at work. That doesn't mean we're planning a wholesale migration from Linux to OS X - there are plenty of grad students and postdocs who prefer an x86 box running Linux for development purposes. And God knows I'd never recommend those Mac blade servers for compute considering the price/performance. We're pretty cost conscious and the PC still wins for compute and as a cheap desktop. So, on the high end I expect we'll be supporting 30-40 Macs for the profs, with another hundred+ or so Linux desktops for the postdocs and grad students over the next year or two. I am very impressed by OS X. I would have never have considered buying a Mac back in the old System 7,8,9 days. MacOS might have been good for Pantone color support, but not for much else. OS X, OTOH, beats NeXTStep - an environment I used to love. Apple's done right by me so they get my money. Simple as that.
But still, there are vast numbers of traditional 'NIX programs which compile properly under OS X. And plenty of pre-compiled packages easily installed with fink, too. Sure, one can claim that packages which rely on Linux kernel hooks won't run properly, but so what. Your example of CD burning software doesn't make any sense, because who in their right mind would want to install X CD-Roast (or whatever) when OS X ships with iTunes? Same for DVD burning tools. Find me one tool under Linux for which I can't find something comparable under OS X (I'll answer my own question: a native emacs port:) ). Still, you are factually correct. Thanks for the reply.
I've been running Linux and BSD on my home machines since '94. Finally got sick of maintaining those installs instead of doing work with the computer (and happen to need MS Office to exchange xls spreadsheets with my CPA)... what did I buy? I Macintosh. Why? Because OS X has all the 'NIX software I could possibly want, very easy system management (meaning I'm not wasting my time dicking around with the computer), and the readability of the fonts are simply better than anything out there. Claiming there's no "linux" software, when just about everything includes source and will compile properly under OS X, really misses the point. Also, the battery life of a powerbook is excellent. 5 hours/charge for the 15", 4.5 hours/charge for the 17". I absolutely love this computer. Apple finally did it right. Of course, I used to love the NeXT Station on my desk many years back, so call me biased. --M
Yup, you're right. Thanks! Looks like Drew Gallatin and Ken Merry have put together a zero copy solution along with a Tiger TG3 Gb driver for FreeBSD. They have an interesting FAQ on the project and development status here. Most cool...
The Linux IP stack is a complete rewrite and doesn't derive from the traditional BSD sockets code at all. In particular IP packet formation between Linux and BSD is completely different. The header and tail portion of an IP packet is handled in a single pass through called an "sk_buff". In BSD header and tail formation of the packet is handled in two passes, one for the header the next for the tail, in an "nbuf". The BSD protocol implementation is traditional and the one described in TCP/IP Illustrated, while the Linux implementation is completely new. I believe that one positive feature of the Linux implementation is that it has allowed for zero copy networking, though that's a limited benefit which is only of use to a very small subset of servers connected to very fast network links. A big positive of the BSD stack is that it's old, rigorously tested, and very well documented. Note that the System V Streams implementation is completely different as well, so Solaris and other SysV derived kernels follow their own method for packet formation. I make no claims that any of these protocol implementations are better than the others, only that the code base and history are completely different.
I've attended a few USENIX kernel internals courses but that's the extent of my competence (have poked through the source out of curiosity though). Please feel free to post additional information or correct any mistakes I may have made.
While it's true that under the Bush I administration the DOJ followed through with a consent decree over anti-competitive practices at Microsoft, that action was over contracts between MS and all large PC vendors which bundled Windows with all PCs manufactured regardles of what OS they shipped with. Microsoft signed the consent decree and immediately found a loophole and continued their old practices into the Clinton administratoin. The Clinton DOJ action against MS was primarily over bundling Internet Explorer within Windows 98 in order to kill Netscape. In the previous instance we see MS leveraging their monopoly to kill off distribution of other OSs with any and all PCs. In the latter case we see them leveraging their monopoly to kill a secondary application and development environmet which threatened to commoditize Windows through open standards and platform compatability.
Without a doubt, once Bush took office and Ashcroft took the DOJ we had a new policy of dropping the case at all costs. The DOJ settled with defendant that had previously convicted. When have you ever seen that by a prosecutor? Extremely strange, and obviously political. This is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing, it's a Bush II policy issue, the effects of which are in the public record.
It was a combination of a kernel driver for the video card and a set graphics libraries, which working together would provide a common hardware abstraction layer for all applications which might need to paint to a display. This way all applications could use the same functions to paint the display no matter what the underlying hardware. They then created a GGI X Server as a proof of concept that X could work over GGI. The real intention was to replace SVGAlib and get X drivers out of userspace - for both performance and security reasons. Pretty much what we have today with frame buffer and DRI support in the kernel, but far advanced for its time. There was some kind of falling out between Linus and the project so it never got added to the baseline kernel, the politics of which I can't remember. This is going back to 1996 or so. Too bad, it was a good idea which didn't survive.
You might be thinking of the Berlin Project, which I see has moved over to something called Fresco. Haven't followed up on that in some time so I can't speak to its current development activity.
The reason that the DOJ hasn't had a similar effect on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, of course, is that Microsoft chose to ignore its consent decree and force the DOJ to make it stick in court, which has been so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the US government has pretty much lost the will to press the charges home.
Not to mention a change of administration in the executive branch leading to a kinder, gentler, nation for our formerly oppressed corporate underclass. Thank God for campaign contributions or we wouldn't have PC software at all! *cough* --M
Had to buy a PS/2 to USB converter so I could keep using my Kinesis keyboard. Bunches of people I work with swear by the Mac pro keyboards but they drive me nuts. I absolutely love my Kinesis I made it a requirement for employment when I started at my current job. My boss thought it was weird but didn't have a problem laying out the $300 or so for the keyboard to get me onboard.
Frankly, this is a career. I fuck my fingers/wrists up and I don't have a job. And I swear, that keyboard has saved my wrists. I had all sorts of problems after years of using a normal keyboard, but after taking the time to get used to the Kinesis I found my tendonitis receeding and the pain going away. I still have to take breaks while doing long keyboarding sessions, but that keyboard saved my career. I like it so much I bought one for home. I can't recommend it enough for the serious typist.
I would liken the keyboard to keys shaped along the inside of a bra... and that always helps when I'm typing away.:)
So, the plan is to make the hundreds of millions (if not +1 billion) individuals who properly use email for individual communication in order to stop or slow down the few tens or hundreds of professional SPAMers from the expense of mass emailings. Why do I think this benefits the toll colector more than me? Why can't international and nationa legislation solve this problem?
I would argue that the real solution to SPAM is to fix SMTP such that it authenticates users and servers at the protocol level while mail is passed from the originating server to the final destination. But of course, there's no need to charge a per-email fee in such a circumstance. And while I'm not surprised to see Microsoft devoting R&D dollars toward such a scheme, given todays 'charge for it and make it fit into an economic model or it doesn't exist' guilded age we should expect MS is only one of many to try and find a way to extract more money for the things we take for granted as free today. Would anyone like to buy some of my bottled air?
Thanks for a great read! Do you think you could speak to the relationship between tolemeres and cell apoptosis, along with popular speculation on how that might relate to aging?
Just wait 'till you try using the Letter 'U' and the Numeral '2' together in a song! Like feathers blown out a chicken coop, watch those RIAA suits jump at the chance to sue your ass! Ahhh, isn't democracy and freedom wonderful? --M
Sun got its energy from a large cloud of hydrogen; formation of matter; blah blah blah - Agree. So what? The sun generates energy through a fusion reaction which is not related to our current energy crisis and dependency on oil. Bringing up the creation of our sun doesn't in any way shed light on the formation of oil, why our oil supply is finite, or how it relates to the collection of ambient solar energy as an alternative supply source.
Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism - Agreed. For our use we would be converting energy from electricity to hydrogen through electrolysis or some (hopefully) more efficient mechanism.
My primary point is that we're currently using stored solar in the form of squished plants and dinosaurs. We're running out of that stored sunlight buried in the ground in the form of petrofuels stuff, and had better find a way to collect and store this energy on our own. Whether it's solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, or nuclear we'd better get off our asses soon, or we're fucked as a civilization.
do you think oil got its energy from? We're burning comnpressed plant and animal matter, all of which stored energy from the sun before being crushed into oil. Solar -> hydrogen just normalizes our energy demand with currently available resources, since in the status quo we're burning fuels stored over millions of years. --M
Heh. Yeah, I bought an open box RCA F38310 38" 16:9 tube for $1300 last month. It's a bitch to lift, but everyone comments on how amazing HDTV really is to view. Also, viewing anamorphic DVDs in 480p makes a huge difference in viewing quality. Sure, it's not 1080i - the stuff on HBO-HD and SHO-HD blows a 480p DVD out of the water. But it's such an amazing step up from viewing 480i that spending $1300 for that feature alone would have been worth it. Just hope that because this set only supports component input, never mind HDCP compliant DVI, that I'm not screwed with a worthless set a few years down the road.
Are you suggesting there's enough farmable landmass to support six billion people eating cow today? Note that according to this article the technology to grow large slabs of edible muscle ala "steak" doesn't yet exist. --M
City Liberal from Boston right here. You know, the place where the Revolutionary War started. Socially progressive and pro-American are two values which AREN'T mutually exclusive. Get off your conservative high horse. --M
"the plural of anecdote is not data"
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Yeah, you're right. But I swear it had "definition". But that I mean that it didn't just look like an eye "floater" smear (cruft floating in one's eyeball), it actually looked like an object that reflected sunlight with a shadow underneath (the object, not the ground - I couldn't see that). Beats the fuck out of me what I saw. But you're right about the interpretation part. It's a one off event (non-repeatable) that's so strange it doesn't fit into any "normal" recognizable phenomena, which makes interpretation meaningless.
Like the other guy, thanks for writing seriously without a knee-jerk response. I don't know what I saw, but I'm pretty sure I know what I didn't see. That pretty much sums it up.:)
Best, --Maynard
Lots of interesting patterns to find...
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the problem is correcting for differences from anecdote to anecdote in your source data. And unlike a controlled experiment, increasing your data set of eye witness accounts only increases the noise throughout your dataset. I'm pretty convinced that what I saw was a physical object, but I wouldn't base any formal conclusions on it, or any other number of accounts. So, from a personal standpoint, yes I think I saw a real thing. But from a factual standpoint I think it's worthless with which to form a factual conclusion.
We pretty much agree though. And thank you for not writing a stupid knee jerk response.
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AdvFS: One feature I'd really like see implemented would be the old Veritas Advanced Filesystem either as a commercial product ported over or as a free reimplementation. The ability to clone a filesystem volume and then append changes as deltas to the original is quite a nifty feature. Adding total versioning of all filesystem objects would be even better. A good logical volume manager would be nice too. It's coming along though.
Display Postscript: Whatever happened to L. Peter Deutsch's old Display Ghostscript X Server extension? It seems like the last update to that was about three years or so back. Now that's a feature we would all love. DPS handles displaying fonts and complex shapes properly. We all know X isn't going to die any time soon, so a good Display Ghostscript server extension would be a Godsend. For that matter, with all the funding being dumped into KDE and Gnome, why did we all forget about GNUStep? But I digress.
devfs: Please, when are we going to finally transition away from static device nodes to devfs? Solaris had it right, dynamically name the device on detection after its physical properties. This is really important and hasn't been implemented for anything more than testing.
In kernel Framebuffer/DRM device drivers: The old GGI folks had it right. Physical devices like video cards should be initialized and managed in kernel space. Let the console and applications like an X Server talk to the device through a device node and/or ioctl calls and be done with it. No more video crashes when changing display modes, and real user space video security. Yes, there's framebuffer support in 2.4, but not for any decent, modern, cards. DRM hooks within XFree-4.x have come along nicely for GLX support though.
NFS: is STILL a mess! Christ, five years after everyone in Linux land finally accepted that Linux needs a major NFS rewrite and we still have to run BSD or a commercial UNIX for a decent NFS server. What a clusterfuck.
AFS support: OpenAFS is good, real good. But its licensing terms are unacceptable for inclusion into the main kernel tree. AFS is critical for enterprise quality network filesystem support. Notwithstanding, I still thank IBM for their initial code release and the OpenAFS team for the quality work they've done in porting the old IBM/Transarc codebase over to Linux.
Journaled filesystems: are here, but they're still a bit shaky for heavy use. They're getting pretty damn good feature wise though. A year or two more of long uptimes in the real world and they'll be rock solid for the enterprise. Way to go!
Raw I/O support: Primarily due to pushing from Oracle and IBM this has come a long way. But it still needs to be banged on for a couple years yet before enterprise folks will trust Linux for large scale database deployments. We also need a ubiquitous 64 bit platform to deploy upon. Alphas and Suns don't count because not enough folks run Linux on those systems to shake out enough bugs such that one would prefer Linux over DU or Solaris. I've seen Linux on an ES40 and it's not pretty. Which leads me to...
Mainstream 64bit hardware: This is not a Linux fault, but the fault of Intel. When are they going to finally release a decent 64 bit platform suitable for the commodity market? Un-fucking-believable that over ten years after the release of the DEC Alpha we still don't have ubiquitous 64bit computing. And these days RAM is so cheap we're actually running up against the physical memory bus limit, never mind the virtual memory advantages to 64bit memory management. This is just stupid. Hope AMD eats Intel's lunch, they deserve it.
I'm sure there's more... and JMO for what little that's worth.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Well, so does IBM. They're at the forefront of materials science and solid-state physics, to name just two. A fab is possibly the most complex and expensive artifact on the planet, except maybe for a nuclear aircraft carrier, and IBM is a leader in this field.
:)
This is a bad analogy, and in fact makes my point. The initial costs for a new chip fab is on the same order as a large skyscraper, a new bridge, or the Boston Big Dig. Yes, a fab represents a huge upfront capital investment for IBM (or Intel for that matter), but an expected ROI time schedule is planned upfront. The technology involved represents incremental advancements (new lithography techniques, increasing wafer sizes, etc) not entirely new technologies. And there's already a market for chip technology. The only market for space currently is putting up communications satellites, yet we know there are many worthwhile uses for space technology: preventing catastrophe from an asteroid/comet collision; asteroid mining; scientific advances both from creating the technology to get out there and the discoveries as a result. If we limited spending on space to only those items which would generate an ROI within a five or ten year time horizon none of those goals could be met in the near term. You're comparing an already mature market with an embryonic potential market.
Certainly there are many situations whereby the commercial market does a better job at allocating resources than government. But those situations are limited to ones where a financial ROI is evident and recoupable within a short time horizon. Recouping space investment may well take one to two hundred years, well beyond the time horizon of any private enterprise. The real question is: do we (as a society) wish to invest long term without knowing the quantifiable ROI, since any return would be so far into the future it's completely unpredictable. I think that, yes, the obvious long term gains from space research make this spending worth our while. But I also don't have a bias against spending on certain government programs. Transparent government spending which benefit the entire population (education, infrastructure, health care), with a public and open budget, tend to be good investments IMO. Secret spending, without public oversight, tends to be a predictable nightmare. See the Bradley infantry transport vehicle for an example of classified financial mismanagement of a government program.
In short, I'm not ideologically opposed to taxation for public spending, nor do I think that all government spending must be inefficient by design. I think government financial mismanagement is better understood on a case by case basis. And I think that's the core of where we ideologically diverge.
Gotta go, lunchtime! (betcha we do both eat
Cheers,
--Maynard
Umm, NASA having vast budgets and no accountability is the problem. How will removing oversight on how the taxpayer's money is spent help?
The problem is not unaccountable management unable to properly track funds (or outright embezzlement). The problem is congress setting specific goals for NASA to achieve while drastically underfunding those objectives. Look at the original Space Station Freedom goals set during the Reagan administration. Compare that to the funding provided. So NASA spent huge sums of money designing a space station that never got off the ground because the goals set by Reagan and congress couldn't possibly be met with the funding allocated. Congress later responded by killing the project and blaming NASA for budgetary mismanagement after Reagan left office. One might claim that NASA should have told congress upfront that they couldn't possibly build Freedom for the money provided, but they wouldn't have even begun the project had they played the game straight like this. The original shuttle design of the late sixties and early seventies follows the same pattern. NASA knew what they wanted and how to build it. They went to Nixon and congress asking for $20 Billion to get it done properly. Nixon and Congress balk and say, 'No, but we'll give you $10 Billion'. Instead of NASA balking with the responsible answer, 'No, we can't meet your objectives with that level of funding', they agreed, knowing that once on board they'll get more down the road from cost overruns, and so followed through on a sub-par design from the start. See Boston's Big Dig for another example of this kind of budgetary madness in action. You see the same kind of insanity in the commercial sector from unreasonable attention paid to per-quarter results at the expense of long term business objectives. I don't blame the bean counters, they just provide reports to upper management. It's the top level decision makers - those who set policy - who are at fault.
I agree that NASA (and every other commercial and government agency) needs aggressive budgetary oversight by a qualified third party auditor. But I don't think that making certain money was spent in each appropriate line item without fraud will actually solve this problem, until policy makers get realistic about how much legitimate engineering costs. A great example of this is the design and construction of the shuttle main engines, which were designed and built top down with no component safety tests ostensibly in order to save money. Sure, it reduced the budget for a short time, which helped sell the shuttle to congress. But long term this cost the shuttle program dearly as once the engines were built they had to be tested as a complete unit, with any component failure requiring a complete disassembly of the engine (never mind design flaws requiring a whole redesign and reconstruction of the engine). Every engineer on the program knew this was a safety nightmare, but the purse strings are controlled by congress and so the engineers had no say in the matter. If Nixon and congress had followed through on the original $20 Billion request, and NASA had followed through on their original design goals, we likely would have a significantly safer shuttle, and one which would have more closely met the original per-launch cost reductions from a reusable vehicle. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Based on this I argue that further congressional oversight is not the solution. Congress should set a strict and consistent yearly budget, provide goals for NASA to meet, and let NASA engineers decide on the timetable.
What NASA needs is to be forced to commercially justify every project and every member of staff. Until then, the culture of waste, inefficiency and mismanagement will continue unabated.
I disagree. Do not forget that unlike large scale commercial engineering, such as building a bridge or a skyscraper, NASA pushes the envelope of current science and technology in ways which makes following concrete budgets and timetables at times impossible. Thus only a non-commercial organization like a government has the necessary resources to pave the way for commerce by funding infrastructure for future commercial space enterprise. Space exploration will never be commercially viable until the infrastructure is in place for business to exploit whatever resources are available. If we had relied on only commercial enterprise to fund our roads and bridges we would never have built the interstate highway system. That expenditure was peanuts compared to the economic benefit we've all realized as a result of that government spending. Space is the same. We'll need government to invest upfront to build infrastructure and set standards so that someday business can exploit the abundant resources available. JMO.
Cheers,
--Maynard
I wonder what kind of volume would be necessary to hold eighteen exabytes of RAM? Of course, this question doesn't even consider interconnects and a bus to the outside world... --M
You make many other assertions, and toss off known cost effective energy producers such as wind with "[...]noisy, ugly blight on the landscape[...]" and "Someone is making big bucks selling the Brooklyn Bridge here[...]". I hope British Petroleum and Texaco aren't making a dire mistake with their wind investments. Or it might be that your rant is more political than factual?
Cheers,
--Maynard
Cheers,
--Maynard
But still, there are vast numbers of traditional 'NIX programs which compile properly under OS X. And plenty of pre-compiled packages easily installed with fink, too. Sure, one can claim that packages which rely on Linux kernel hooks won't run properly, but so what. Your example of CD burning software doesn't make any sense, because who in their right mind would want to install X CD-Roast (or whatever) when OS X ships with iTunes? Same for DVD burning tools. Find me one tool under Linux for which I can't find something comparable under OS X (I'll answer my own question: a native emacs port :) ). Still, you are factually correct. Thanks for the reply.
Best,
--Maynard
You can't run Linux apps on an iBook.
$ make clean; make; make install
Or for that matter, just install fink.
I've been running Linux and BSD on my home machines since '94. Finally got sick of maintaining those installs instead of doing work with the computer (and happen to need MS Office to exchange xls spreadsheets with my CPA)... what did I buy? I Macintosh. Why? Because OS X has all the 'NIX software I could possibly want, very easy system management (meaning I'm not wasting my time dicking around with the computer), and the readability of the fonts are simply better than anything out there. Claiming there's no "linux" software, when just about everything includes source and will compile properly under OS X, really misses the point. Also, the battery life of a powerbook is excellent. 5 hours/charge for the 15", 4.5 hours/charge for the 17". I absolutely love this computer. Apple finally did it right. Of course, I used to love the NeXT Station on my desk many years back, so call me biased. --M
Yup, you're right. Thanks! Looks like Drew Gallatin and Ken Merry have put together a zero copy solution along with a Tiger TG3 Gb driver for FreeBSD. They have an interesting FAQ on the project and development status here. Most cool...
--Maynard
The Linux IP stack is a complete rewrite and doesn't derive from the traditional BSD sockets code at all. In particular IP packet formation between Linux and BSD is completely different. The header and tail portion of an IP packet is handled in a single pass through called an "sk_buff". In BSD header and tail formation of the packet is handled in two passes, one for the header the next for the tail, in an "nbuf". The BSD protocol implementation is traditional and the one described in TCP/IP Illustrated, while the Linux implementation is completely new. I believe that one positive feature of the Linux implementation is that it has allowed for zero copy networking, though that's a limited benefit which is only of use to a very small subset of servers connected to very fast network links. A big positive of the BSD stack is that it's old, rigorously tested, and very well documented. Note that the System V Streams implementation is completely different as well, so Solaris and other SysV derived kernels follow their own method for packet formation. I make no claims that any of these protocol implementations are better than the others, only that the code base and history are completely different.
I've attended a few USENIX kernel internals courses but that's the extent of my competence (have poked through the source out of curiosity though). Please feel free to post additional information or correct any mistakes I may have made.
Cheers,
--Maynard
While it's true that under the Bush I administration the DOJ followed through with a consent decree over anti-competitive practices at Microsoft, that action was over contracts between MS and all large PC vendors which bundled Windows with all PCs manufactured regardles of what OS they shipped with. Microsoft signed the consent decree and immediately found a loophole and continued their old practices into the Clinton administratoin. The Clinton DOJ action against MS was primarily over bundling Internet Explorer within Windows 98 in order to kill Netscape. In the previous instance we see MS leveraging their monopoly to kill off distribution of other OSs with any and all PCs. In the latter case we see them leveraging their monopoly to kill a secondary application and development environmet which threatened to commoditize Windows through open standards and platform compatability.
Without a doubt, once Bush took office and Ashcroft took the DOJ we had a new policy of dropping the case at all costs. The DOJ settled with defendant that had previously convicted. When have you ever seen that by a prosecutor? Extremely strange, and obviously political. This is not a Democrat vs. Republican thing, it's a Bush II policy issue, the effects of which are in the public record.
Cheers,
--Maynard
It was a combination of a kernel driver for the video card and a set graphics libraries, which working together would provide a common hardware abstraction layer for all applications which might need to paint to a display. This way all applications could use the same functions to paint the display no matter what the underlying hardware. They then created a GGI X Server as a proof of concept that X could work over GGI. The real intention was to replace SVGAlib and get X drivers out of userspace - for both performance and security reasons. Pretty much what we have today with frame buffer and DRI support in the kernel, but far advanced for its time. There was some kind of falling out between Linus and the project so it never got added to the baseline kernel, the politics of which I can't remember. This is going back to 1996 or so. Too bad, it was a good idea which didn't survive.
You might be thinking of the Berlin Project, which I see has moved over to something called Fresco. Haven't followed up on that in some time so I can't speak to its current development activity.
Cheers,
--Maynard
The reason that the DOJ hasn't had a similar effect on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, of course, is that Microsoft chose to ignore its consent decree and force the DOJ to make it stick in court, which has been so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the US government has pretty much lost the will to press the charges home.
Not to mention a change of administration in the executive branch leading to a kinder, gentler, nation for our formerly oppressed corporate underclass. Thank God for campaign contributions or we wouldn't have PC software at all! *cough* --M
Had to buy a PS/2 to USB converter so I could keep using my Kinesis keyboard. Bunches of people I work with swear by the Mac pro keyboards but they drive me nuts. I absolutely love my Kinesis I made it a requirement for employment when I started at my current job. My boss thought it was weird but didn't have a problem laying out the $300 or so for the keyboard to get me onboard.
:)
Frankly, this is a career. I fuck my fingers/wrists up and I don't have a job. And I swear, that keyboard has saved my wrists. I had all sorts of problems after years of using a normal keyboard, but after taking the time to get used to the Kinesis I found my tendonitis receeding and the pain going away. I still have to take breaks while doing long keyboarding sessions, but that keyboard saved my career. I like it so much I bought one for home. I can't recommend it enough for the serious typist.
I would liken the keyboard to keys shaped along the inside of a bra... and that always helps when I'm typing away.
Cheers,
--Maynard
So, the plan is to make the hundreds of millions (if not +1 billion) individuals who properly use email for individual communication in order to stop or slow down the few tens or hundreds of professional SPAMers from the expense of mass emailings. Why do I think this benefits the toll colector more than me? Why can't international and nationa legislation solve this problem?
I would argue that the real solution to SPAM is to fix SMTP such that it authenticates users and servers at the protocol level while mail is passed from the originating server to the final destination. But of course, there's no need to charge a per-email fee in such a circumstance. And while I'm not surprised to see Microsoft devoting R&D dollars toward such a scheme, given todays 'charge for it and make it fit into an economic model or it doesn't exist' guilded age we should expect MS is only one of many to try and find a way to extract more money for the things we take for granted as free today. Would anyone like to buy some of my bottled air?
--Maynard
Thanks for a great read! Do you think you could speak to the relationship between tolemeres and cell apoptosis, along with popular speculation on how that might relate to aging?
Just wait 'till you try using the Letter 'U' and the Numeral '2' together in a song! Like feathers blown out a chicken coop, watch those RIAA suits jump at the chance to sue your ass! Ahhh, isn't democracy and freedom wonderful? --M
- 'my being a dumbass' - disagree. Dumbass.
- Sun got its energy from a large cloud of hydrogen; formation of matter; blah blah blah - Agree. So what? The sun generates energy through a fusion reaction which is not related to our current energy crisis and dependency on oil. Bringing up the creation of our sun doesn't in any way shed light on the formation of oil, why our oil supply is finite, or how it relates to the collection of ambient solar energy as an alternative supply source.
- Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism - Agreed. For our use we would be converting energy from electricity to hydrogen through electrolysis or some (hopefully) more efficient mechanism.
My primary point is that we're currently using stored solar in the form of squished plants and dinosaurs. We're running out of that stored sunlight buried in the ground in the form of petrofuels stuff, and had better find a way to collect and store this energy on our own. Whether it's solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, or nuclear we'd better get off our asses soon, or we're fucked as a civilization.JMO,
--Maynard
do you think oil got its energy from? We're burning comnpressed plant and animal matter, all of which stored energy from the sun before being crushed into oil. Solar -> hydrogen just normalizes our energy demand with currently available resources, since in the status quo we're burning fuels stored over millions of years. --M
Heh. Yeah, I bought an open box RCA F38310 38" 16:9 tube for $1300 last month. It's a bitch to lift, but everyone comments on how amazing HDTV really is to view. Also, viewing anamorphic DVDs in 480p makes a huge difference in viewing quality. Sure, it's not 1080i - the stuff on HBO-HD and SHO-HD blows a 480p DVD out of the water. But it's such an amazing step up from viewing 480i that spending $1300 for that feature alone would have been worth it. Just hope that because this set only supports component input, never mind HDCP compliant DVI, that I'm not screwed with a worthless set a few years down the road.
Cheers,
--Maynard
Are you suggesting there's enough farmable landmass to support six billion people eating cow today? Note that according to this article the technology to grow large slabs of edible muscle ala "steak" doesn't yet exist. --M
City Liberal from Boston right here. You know, the place where the Revolutionary War started. Socially progressive and pro-American are two values which AREN'T mutually exclusive. Get off your conservative high horse. --M
I completely agree with that statement. --M
Yeah, you're right. But I swear it had "definition". But that I mean that it didn't just look like an eye "floater" smear (cruft floating in one's eyeball), it actually looked like an object that reflected sunlight with a shadow underneath (the object, not the ground - I couldn't see that). Beats the fuck out of me what I saw. But you're right about the interpretation part. It's a one off event (non-repeatable) that's so strange it doesn't fit into any "normal" recognizable phenomena, which makes interpretation meaningless.
:)
Like the other guy, thanks for writing seriously without a knee-jerk response. I don't know what I saw, but I'm pretty sure I know what I didn't see. That pretty much sums it up.
Best,
--Maynard
the problem is correcting for differences from anecdote to anecdote in your source data. And unlike a controlled experiment, increasing your data set of eye witness accounts only increases the noise throughout your dataset. I'm pretty convinced that what I saw was a physical object, but I wouldn't base any formal conclusions on it, or any other number of accounts. So, from a personal standpoint, yes I think I saw a real thing. But from a factual standpoint I think it's worthless with which to form a factual conclusion.
We pretty much agree though. And thank you for not writing a stupid knee jerk response.
Cheers,
--Maynard