Although I'm posting this late enough no one will probably see it...
This isn't really evolution, since there is no determination of fitness. With normal GAs you (somehow) evaluate the "fitness" of the creature, which is typically used to drive how often, and with whom, the creature reproduces.
In the stuff I've done, general lifespan is driven by genes, as are reproduction behaviors, movement and eating habits. Available "energy" i.e. food eaten, put additional limits on lifespan and mating. Thus, there are some "natural" fitness measurements, if a creature dies off before it mates, it wasn't fit enough... If it doesn't have enough energy to share with it's offspring, that allows them both to survive, it wasn't fit enough.
One of the more interesting genes I've been using lately is a "mutation rate". If I start out with some base creatures, that I know are likely to survive, but aren't great, they will frequently evolve to the point where they are co-existing with the environment pretty well, and once that point has been reached, their mutation rate drops to nearly zero.
A large topic of the original article though is that the market is saturated, that MS is having a hard time continueing to convince people to purchase their products (primarily OS & Office), which is their core. They are actively looking for new oportunities, and that is where the relevence of a "theory of business" comes into play, and quite possibly why they aren't able to see large scale success with anything that isn't directly related to Windows (e.g. XBox).
Regarding IBM, I'm still not convinced that the anti-trust angle you quoted contradicts (or perhaps contraindicates?) what I described regarding their new products vs. existing products/markets...
Do you have any references for the IBM issues you refer to?
From the way you describe it, it doesn't make much sense to me. From the bits I've read on it, it sounded like there were two divisions, with the mainframe division continuing on as they did, and the PC division being told not to sell into places where they might be able to sell a mainframe, or similarly, don't develop solutions that would compete with the mainframe offerings.
It seems that your description doesn't jive with mine, so I'm a little confused... (Also, but unrelated to my confusion, is that IBM isn't an isolated example of what I was describing, Drucker has described a number of companies like that. I believe that a similar issue appears in "The Innovator's Dilemma", regarding disruptive technologies, which it seems we are kinda talking about.
WRT MS, I'm claiming (or Drucker might claim) that it doesn't really matter if MS buys it's way into other areas if they aren't making the same magnitudes of money, since their core area that they are protecting is eroding, and they can't escape their current theory of business to truely migrate into a new area.
The company must protect these core products. "The prime directive at Microsoft is to protect Windows and get customers to buy Windows and upgrades to Windows," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based newsletter.
If this is really the mindset at MS, it is one of the continuing problems with a lot of big businesses, which is based on their "theory of business". The problem that Peter Drucker lays out is that a company continues to use a theory of business that may have been VERY successful at one time in their earlier years, but because the environment changes, it is no longer successful. But the company isn't able to review their theory of business and create a new one that takes advantage of their current environment.
A typical symptom that Drucker points out is sacrificing new business oportunities for old ones. This was a problem IBM had when creating the PC market, it frequently sacrificed PC sales to it's mainframe line, and stunted itself for some time.
One aspect that seems to particularly apply here is Drucker's story about GM. GM apparently was very good at improving the performance of existing businesses (I don't recall exactly how it did this though). Over a period of years, it bought a number of other well established businesses (in a variety of fields and for seemingly too much money) and dramatically improved their performance. The idea is that GM had a great theory of business, which no longer applied to it's own field, but still worked in other areas.
It seems like MS is trying to do this, expanding into MSN, the Xbox and other areas, but that still there is something in it's theory of business that is holding it back from dominating those areas. Perhaps they haven't gone far enough afield from their core business... (or perhaps their ToB is too Windows centric)...
It was called the "Wild West" for a reason. There were periods of time where it was difficult and/or dangerous and time-consuming to get from the East coast to the West coast. This isn't talking about 10 years ago...
The idea is that other languages embody higher-order logics that we haven't yet discovered in western cultures. Consequently, when a language is lost, we've lost another opportunity to learn those logics and apply them to programming.
Now, personally, I find the idea silly. The paper that is linked from the article is pretty deep, and talking about Sanskrit particularly, which has a long history, and a lot of deep algorithmic aspects. Most of the languages that are disappearing are tiny languages, which may be interesting in their own right, but probably wouldn't revolutionize programming...
Also personally, it's too bad that these languages are disappearing, if in fact they are. However, I'm all in favor of languages becoming unused. Culling the herd and all that... but each language is a piece of our culture, and I'd personally like them to be archived, so that in a hundred years, we can use our holodecks to recreate a civilization that has been gone for a thousand years, complete with clothing, hair styles, technology and language.:) But that's just me.
I'm suprised, but I didn't really find it that funny, or that informative. Most of the humor struck me as quite sophmoric. Which, in turns, suprised me that many on/. think he is funny, then didn't suprise me quite so much....
Perhaps his prior "State of the Onion"s are better... can't say I've read them.
I don't know Mr. Wall, but from the way others gush about him, I suspect he is an interesting fellow, and I certainly love Perl... but his humor doesn't appear to be his strong point.:(
His talk really could have been only 10 seconds:
o The movers of the world tend to be the unreasonable.
o Deconstructionism is about understanding and breaking down "oppressive" memes.
o Postmodernism is about using a common word to mean its opposite.
o Perl5 is done, a new Perl 5 based on Parrot will be called Ponie and will be the transition step to Perl 6, which will also be based on Parrot. (Which everyone who cares about Perl already knew anyway.)
If this a typical "State of the Onion", I hope the organizers cut him down to those ten seconds sooner, rather than later...
The US government is not in, nor should it be in, the business of software development or steering the direction of software development.
This is wrong in a couple of different ways. The government has specific requirements for its software ALL THE TIME. It requires that some software interact with certain other software, that there are certain security considerations, that there are certain mechanisms for backup, that there are certain effeciency requirements. They also sometimes require that software is tested in a certain way, developed in a certain way, written in certain languages, written for certain platforms...
The government has been "steering the direction of software development" for a very long time, and it is perfectly reasonable. The government has specific requirements, driven from many different needs, that software vendors, who want to provide s/w to the government, must conform to.
Requiring that any file formats (and I would include protocols) should be open is consistent with the governments history of requirements, and (I would argue) a clear need that the government has overlooked for far too long.
The first link that returns is an old kernel patch, specifically for enabling the L2 cache on a Celeron, although with "powerleap", whatever that is. That is something to try though, just make sure you have a backup kernel to boot from.
Also, there was a post to lkml with a similar question here without a solution.
If you don't find a solution, the best place to post isn't slashdot but to LKML.
I have actually seen DVDs that force me to watch both the FBI warning AND the studio's intro. It really is a legitimate issue that I have with DVD players.
What I'd like to see is some open source "PROMs" that contain all the code to parse the DVD... to tell the damn machine to ignore any commands that would make it ignore MY commands...
Basically, it irks me that the machine is no longer behaving like a VCR or a CD player... that it won't LET me do certain things that the author decides I shouldn't do...
Or perhaps I should replace my Panasonic DVD player with one that does ignore those commands, if such a thing exists...
I guess fundementally, this is the exact same issue as the one in the article. "Who can control how you use copyrighted material you own?"
The best thing on that channel is "Eyedrops", I love it. Indi short animations, typically CG, but not always. It's great. It's actually where I first ran across "The Terrible Secrets of Space".
I've picked up the animations from SIGGRAPH, just because of those sort of things.
Max Headroom is good, but I've got them all on tape, from a marathon some time ago... But you are right, most of the rest of TechTV is crap, though most channels strike me as being mostly crap, with an occassional good show.
I too have had thoughts about joining the ranks of The Game Developers. I would bring a lot to the table, I've done driver/kernel development and embedded systems (thus handhelds/consoles are a good option, and thus a fair bit of low-level debugging skills), I've done project management to various degrees for a number of years, and I've got a strong math background with some significant AI and graphics work. I've been doing some game development in my spare time, and reading Game Developer Magazine pretty regularly for a few years.
So, how would I go about getting into game development? I'd look for a position as a developer doing the sort of game work I want to be involved with, with the intention of evolving into a lead developer/project manager in the nearish future.
I would not expect to be dropped into a game dev project management position without a year or more of project management experience, particularly if I hadn't had any game PM or development experience before.
But, besides the above, I have to wonder if what you think is the role of the project manager is what the role really is.... My understanding is that the PM tends to have a lot of responsibilty, but not as much as design control as people sometimes think. For larger companies much of the initial design comes from "on high", so to speak.
I've done a 'plug-in' like architecture before, in that case the modules weren't loaded dynamically, but were configured at load time (kinda sorta like winamp, ya gotta reload it).
The key design element method is to make it object oriented, take the class's interface as your API, and bang, you've got a plugin interface.
A little info on my design. I was working on a driver to interface with a custom communication board. Well, we had an original version of the board that we abandoned, a later version which was really used, a test board for that one, and then one or two more.... Each board did communication with a companion board on another device.
My design was to abstract out the UART control, the low-level protocol, the FPGA control code and a couple of other things into seperate interchangable objects. These were objects, but implemented in C, since it wasn't possible to use C++ in the kernel on this platform.
Each of those components were configured and plugged into the system at driver load time.
Now, I could have made this slightly different, by pulling out the individual components into seperate modules, loaded as needed, but in this case, that would have been overkill. But the principle is identical.
Back to your original question. I didn't have any books, or other guides to assist with the design. The design fell out of the original needs, after a reasonable amount of refactoring, and a bit of good architecture skill.
In your case, without knowing more details about the application, it's hard to help much. If this is for a general use application, your API will probably be insufficient the first time, so it would be worth your time to think about how you will handle large scale changes to the api. (Are you going to maintain backward compatibility? Are you going to support multiple APIs at the same time? Are you going to add additional specific interfaces over time?) But the core idea again is an OO design where the plug-in is just an object.
A link to a summary of the actual Aberdeenreport on AMD. You must register to actually see the article... and in so doing, they say (almost) that they will spam you... bah.
So, I guess it will be business as usual on Slashdot, commenting without actually reading the article.
However, from the summary, it does sound like they are taking the wrong tack. They claim that the AMD methodology is wrong, because they are using the wrong aspects of the processor to measure. However, the argument they completely ignore is that MHz is a stupid way to measure anything in the first place... Whatever. It certainly sounds purchased.
From all the articles I've seen on Tom's and elsewhere clearly state that the rating is a somewhat conservative way of comparing Intel and AMD.
Now, from my standpoint, I don't really care about Mhz (although whenever I upgrade, I want to double my Mhz!), I do care about relative performance and cost. It'd be nice if Intel and AMD (and others!) could agree on some benchmarking methodology, but baring that, AMD comparing their number with Intel Mhz does exactly what it needs to, helps people understand how AMD processors compare with Intel processors using Intel's own method, clock speed.
I developed 'plug-ins' for SMIT, as well as custom install packages. It is a very slow, bloated piece of software. But it is not very different from other system admin type tools. I'd suggest you not be impressed with the package as a whole because of one feature. (Although it may be a cool feature.)
Admittedly it's been perhaps 5 years since I worked on SMIT, so perhaps it is cleaner now...
The Economist had an article written by Peter Drucker called The Next Society (subscription required... sorry). He writes, with essentially the same conclusion, that society will shift from a society with people working FOR some company to people working AT some compnay, but FOR some 3rd party. People will be more mobile, working for companies where there is much more flexible worktime and far more job variety.
Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.
I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.
Just to add a bit of clarification to why this sort of thing can be a problem, that might not want to be solved by just upgrading the power supply.
Let us say that this is for MANY machines, not just a workstation or server in a box. Let us further say that existing harddrives and powersupplies are already in inventory.
This could be a very real concern for many sorts of embedded/commercial applications.
Tossing in a little dongle with a cap and a transistor in-line might work, along with an extra soft-reset... but presumably any EE should be able to design something that can do it, for cheap.
Not true. It depends on WHY. In this case, perhaps the poster for a $.20 part that can be added to an existing production line, rather than a $10 increase in cost for a larger power supply, plus costs of wasted pre-purchased equipment...
Besides, it's a startup problem, not a normal operation problem.
Okay, so this is ranging further offtopic (but it's meta-ontopic!), but my preferred science periodical is Science news, pricy, but good articles on a variety of topics, and is sorta just a summary of a lot of the stuff that is going on. I stopped my subscription about 6 months ago, because it got to be too expensive in a $/page_read sort of way...;/
I suspect the big problem with these topics are two or three fold: I suspect a lot of people are interested, but don't know a lot about some of the topics (admittedly, this is slashdot, but still). I suspect the frontpage issue (that others brought up). I suspect that it isn't quite as controversial as other things, like MS, encryption, fair-use, cloning, etc.
Wish I had a little more to contribute regarding BioInformatics....
Gah, I HATE it when projects I've worked on
store their code based on language... perl in one directory, C++ in another, SQL in another... or all top-level code in one directory (regardless of use) and all 'function-files' in another directory...
In general, I'd suggest basing the heirarchy on functionality.... something along the lines of "node_type/functional_area/process/{main|libs}/*". Sure, there are difficulties with that too, but symbolic links are a good thing!;)
Although a bad tree is difficult, the most painful thing I've encountered is how the 'product' is released. That you need to specify that up front, that everything is built in it's own dir, but installs itself into a "release" area, that can be tarred up/archived/copied as necessary. To be fair, it depends a lot on your product, but I hate it when there isn't a release process, you just have to know the files, and where to copy them... bleck.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't really evolution, since there is no determination of fitness. With normal GAs you (somehow) evaluate the "fitness" of the creature, which is typically used to drive how often, and with whom, the creature reproduces.
In the stuff I've done, general lifespan is driven by genes, as are reproduction behaviors, movement and eating habits. Available "energy" i.e. food eaten, put additional limits on lifespan and mating. Thus, there are some "natural" fitness measurements, if a creature dies off before it mates, it wasn't fit enough... If it doesn't have enough energy to share with it's offspring, that allows them both to survive, it wasn't fit enough.
One of the more interesting genes I've been using lately is a "mutation rate". If I start out with some base creatures, that I know are likely to survive, but aren't great, they will frequently evolve to the point where they are co-existing with the environment pretty well, and once that point has been reached, their mutation rate drops to nearly zero.
Regarding IBM, I'm still not convinced that the anti-trust angle you quoted contradicts (or perhaps contraindicates?) what I described regarding their new products vs. existing products/markets...
From the way you describe it, it doesn't make much sense to me. From the bits I've read on it, it sounded like there were two divisions, with the mainframe division continuing on as they did, and the PC division being told not to sell into places where they might be able to sell a mainframe, or similarly, don't develop solutions that would compete with the mainframe offerings.
It seems that your description doesn't jive with mine, so I'm a little confused... (Also, but unrelated to my confusion, is that IBM isn't an isolated example of what I was describing, Drucker has described a number of companies like that. I believe that a similar issue appears in "The Innovator's Dilemma", regarding disruptive technologies, which it seems we are kinda talking about.
WRT MS, I'm claiming (or Drucker might claim) that it doesn't really matter if MS buys it's way into other areas if they aren't making the same magnitudes of money, since their core area that they are protecting is eroding, and they can't escape their current theory of business to truely migrate into a new area.
The company must protect these core products. "The prime directive at Microsoft is to protect Windows and get customers to buy Windows and upgrades to Windows," says Matt Rosoff, lead analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based newsletter.
If this is really the mindset at MS, it is one of the continuing problems with a lot of big businesses, which is based on their "theory of business". The problem that Peter Drucker lays out is that a company continues to use a theory of business that may have been VERY successful at one time in their earlier years, but because the environment changes, it is no longer successful. But the company isn't able to review their theory of business and create a new one that takes advantage of their current environment.
A typical symptom that Drucker points out is sacrificing new business oportunities for old ones. This was a problem IBM had when creating the PC market, it frequently sacrificed PC sales to it's mainframe line, and stunted itself for some time.
One aspect that seems to particularly apply here is Drucker's story about GM. GM apparently was very good at improving the performance of existing businesses (I don't recall exactly how it did this though). Over a period of years, it bought a number of other well established businesses (in a variety of fields and for seemingly too much money) and dramatically improved their performance. The idea is that GM had a great theory of business, which no longer applied to it's own field, but still worked in other areas.
It seems like MS is trying to do this, expanding into MSN, the Xbox and other areas, but that still there is something in it's theory of business that is holding it back from dominating those areas. Perhaps they haven't gone far enough afield from their core business... (or perhaps their ToB is too Windows centric)...
Interesting food for thought.
It was called the "Wild West" for a reason. There were periods of time where it was difficult and/or dangerous and time-consuming to get from the East coast to the West coast. This isn't talking about 10 years ago...
Sorry, I didn't realize I needed to spell out every aspect that defines a culture... Moron yourself.
The idea is that other languages embody higher-order logics that we haven't yet discovered in western cultures. Consequently, when a language is lost, we've lost another opportunity to learn those logics and apply them to programming.
Now, personally, I find the idea silly. The paper that is linked from the article is pretty deep, and talking about Sanskrit particularly, which has a long history, and a lot of deep algorithmic aspects. Most of the languages that are disappearing are tiny languages, which may be interesting in their own right, but probably wouldn't revolutionize programming...
Also personally, it's too bad that these languages are disappearing, if in fact they are. However, I'm all in favor of languages becoming unused. Culling the herd and all that... but each language is a piece of our culture, and I'd personally like them to be archived, so that in a hundred years, we can use our holodecks to recreate a civilization that has been gone for a thousand years, complete with clothing, hair styles, technology and language. :) But that's just me.
Perhaps his prior "State of the Onion"s are better... can't say I've read them.
I don't know Mr. Wall, but from the way others gush about him, I suspect he is an interesting fellow, and I certainly love Perl... but his humor doesn't appear to be his strong point. :(
His talk really could have been only 10 seconds:
o The movers of the world tend to be the unreasonable.
o Deconstructionism is about understanding and breaking down "oppressive" memes.
o Postmodernism is about using a common word to mean its opposite.
o Perl5 is done, a new Perl 5 based on Parrot will be called Ponie and will be the transition step to Perl 6, which will also be based on Parrot. (Which everyone who cares about Perl already knew anyway.)
If this a typical "State of the Onion", I hope the organizers cut him down to those ten seconds sooner, rather than later...
This is wrong in a couple of different ways. The government has specific requirements for its software ALL THE TIME. It requires that some software interact with certain other software, that there are certain security considerations, that there are certain mechanisms for backup, that there are certain effeciency requirements. They also sometimes require that software is tested in a certain way, developed in a certain way, written in certain languages, written for certain platforms...
The government has been "steering the direction of software development" for a very long time, and it is perfectly reasonable. The government has specific requirements, driven from many different needs, that software vendors, who want to provide s/w to the government, must conform to.
Requiring that any file formats (and I would include protocols) should be open is consistent with the governments history of requirements, and (I would argue) a clear need that the government has overlooked for far too long.
I agree, it should really be the BIOS' job to turn on the cache, and there were some references to buggy BIOSes in the minor searching I did.
The first link that returns is an old kernel patch, specifically for enabling the L2 cache on a Celeron, although with "powerleap", whatever that is. That is something to try though, just make sure you have a backup kernel to boot from.
Also, there was a post to lkml with a similar question here without a solution.
If you don't find a solution, the best place to post isn't slashdot but to LKML.
What I'd like to see is some open source "PROMs" that contain all the code to parse the DVD... to tell the damn machine to ignore any commands that would make it ignore MY commands...
Basically, it irks me that the machine is no longer behaving like a VCR or a CD player... that it won't LET me do certain things that the author decides I shouldn't do...
Or perhaps I should replace my Panasonic DVD player with one that does ignore those commands, if such a thing exists...
I guess fundementally, this is the exact same issue as the one in the article. "Who can control how you use copyrighted material you own?"
I've picked up the animations from SIGGRAPH, just because of those sort of things.
Max Headroom is good, but I've got them all on tape, from a marathon some time ago... But you are right, most of the rest of TechTV is crap, though most channels strike me as being mostly crap, with an occassional good show.
What the hell are you thinking!
So, how would I go about getting into game development? I'd look for a position as a developer doing the sort of game work I want to be involved with, with the intention of evolving into a lead developer/project manager in the nearish future.
I would not expect to be dropped into a game dev project management position without a year or more of project management experience, particularly if I hadn't had any game PM or development experience before.
But, besides the above, I have to wonder if what you think is the role of the project manager is what the role really is.... My understanding is that the PM tends to have a lot of responsibilty, but not as much as design control as people sometimes think. For larger companies much of the initial design comes from "on high", so to speak.
Anyway, hope this a little useful.
The key design element method is to make it object oriented, take the class's interface as your API, and bang, you've got a plugin interface.
A little info on my design. I was working on a driver to interface with a custom communication board. Well, we had an original version of the board that we abandoned, a later version which was really used, a test board for that one, and then one or two more.... Each board did communication with a companion board on another device.
My design was to abstract out the UART control, the low-level protocol, the FPGA control code and a couple of other things into seperate interchangable objects. These were objects, but implemented in C, since it wasn't possible to use C++ in the kernel on this platform. Each of those components were configured and plugged into the system at driver load time.
Now, I could have made this slightly different, by pulling out the individual components into seperate modules, loaded as needed, but in this case, that would have been overkill. But the principle is identical.
Back to your original question. I didn't have any books, or other guides to assist with the design. The design fell out of the original needs, after a reasonable amount of refactoring, and a bit of good architecture skill.
In your case, without knowing more details about the application, it's hard to help much. If this is for a general use application, your API will probably be insufficient the first time, so it would be worth your time to think about how you will handle large scale changes to the api. (Are you going to maintain backward compatibility? Are you going to support multiple APIs at the same time? Are you going to add additional specific interfaces over time?) But the core idea again is an OO design where the plug-in is just an object.
If they are before them film, they aren't trailers, they're headers!
So, I guess it will be business as usual on Slashdot, commenting without actually reading the article.
However, from the summary, it does sound like they are taking the wrong tack. They claim that the AMD methodology is wrong, because they are using the wrong aspects of the processor to measure. However, the argument they completely ignore is that MHz is a stupid way to measure anything in the first place... Whatever. It certainly sounds purchased.
From all the articles I've seen on Tom's and elsewhere clearly state that the rating is a somewhat conservative way of comparing Intel and AMD.
Now, from my standpoint, I don't really care about Mhz (although whenever I upgrade, I want to double my Mhz!), I do care about relative performance and cost. It'd be nice if Intel and AMD (and others!) could agree on some benchmarking methodology, but baring that, AMD comparing their number with Intel Mhz does exactly what it needs to, helps people understand how AMD processors compare with Intel processors using Intel's own method, clock speed.
Admittedly it's been perhaps 5 years since I worked on SMIT, so perhaps it is cleaner now...
Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.
I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.
Let us say that this is for MANY machines, not just a workstation or server in a box. Let us further say that existing harddrives and powersupplies are already in inventory.
This could be a very real concern for many sorts of embedded/commercial applications.
Tossing in a little dongle with a cap and a transistor in-line might work, along with an extra soft-reset... but presumably any EE should be able to design something that can do it, for cheap.
Besides, it's a startup problem, not a normal operation problem.
I suspect the big problem with these topics are two or three fold: I suspect a lot of people are interested, but don't know a lot about some of the topics (admittedly, this is slashdot, but still). I suspect the frontpage issue (that others brought up). I suspect that it isn't quite as controversial as other things, like MS, encryption, fair-use, cloning, etc.
Wish I had a little more to contribute regarding BioInformatics....
In general, I'd suggest basing the heirarchy on functionality.... something along the lines of "node_type/functional_area/process/{main|libs}/*". Sure, there are difficulties with that too, but symbolic links are a good thing! ;)
Although a bad tree is difficult, the most painful thing I've encountered is how the 'product' is released. That you need to specify that up front, that everything is built in it's own dir, but installs itself into a "release" area, that can be tarred up/archived/copied as necessary. To be fair, it depends a lot on your product, but I hate it when there isn't a release process, you just have to know the files, and where to copy them... bleck.
babble... babble.