Like the brave Ithacans who faced down the deadly cyclops, these legislators are facing down the awful realities of trying to legislate technological progress
Hehe, I had a good giggle, nice image there.:-)
Sadly, a far more accurate metaphor would be more boring and less funny: the blind leading the blind into greater darkness.
The US today is little more than a fundamentalist religious/moralist state, interested not in progress but in protecting vested interests, and with by far the most anti-intellectual population that has appeared since the Renaissance.
The cyclops could be defeated. Unfortunately, lawyers and the culture of litigation that they spearhead are those deadly rocks which tore the Ithacans to shread, and in the ways of metaphor there is no way of defeating immoveable rock.
The army of legal parasites protecting a batallion of backward-facing dinosaurs lead from behind by a bunch of gibbering idiots is devouring all before it. The US is moving back into a new dark age.
If Americans, particularly their political leaders were less stupid, there would be fewer losses at WTC
If political leaders everywhere including the wannabes were put in the fields to do hard labor, there would be no death and destruction in the world at all, except for natural causes.
Maybe it's the absence of audience laughter cues or something, I don't know, but the irony in Tridgell's demo and in The Register's writeup of it was entirely obvious to me. I had a really good chuckle.
Didn't you RTFA, maybe? Here are the relevant sentences:
Tridgell demonstrated the procedure to disprove accusations that his detractors in the Torvalds/McVoy camp had made against him. Principally, that he was some kind of "an evil genius" reverse engineer.
The demo showed that the work was obviously not reverse engineeering in any real sense of the word, nor was it even remotely describable as "genius" work... so Tridgell made his point admirably that there has been a mountain made up out of a molehill of nothingness.
And he made us laugh at the same time too. You didn't?
>> Most patents are in the U.S., most (current) innovation and technology growth is in India.
>> They have nothing to gain from adopting software patents.
Your "smart move" response offers the defence of smartness to both sides --- smart of India to bar software patents because they have nothing to gain, and smartness by the US to uphold software patents because they do have something to gain.
Unfortunately the last part of that is only true under the extraordinarily myopic worldview that most innnovations are in the past, and that therefore it is worth protecting the greater old at the expense of harming the lesser new.
Well that's stunningly short-sighted. The future is pretty much infinite, whereas technological progress of the patentable type has been around for a couple of centuries at most, and software patents even less, so the inventions of the past represent effectively zero percent of the body of technical development.
There could hardly be a greater condemnation of the inability of the supporters of patents to see beyond the ends of their noses.
But the data isn't trival in this case, and the data doesn't exist solely to keep some hardware from working.
I think you're forgetting that the third letter of DMCA stands for Copyright. Hardware has nothing to do with it, except incidentally.
Regarding "trivial data", well the data in question seems to be 3 floating point numbers, representing BlueBalance, RedBalance, and WhitePoint. (Might be different in the D2X, I took this from a D70.) Is that considered trivial or not? This kind of question has no significant purpose other than to line lawyers' pockets.
The second part of your sentence is much simpler to address though: the WB data is a key that I require to decode my photo accurately, and without it I get only an inferior representation (ie. with a color cast) which I have to tweak by hand with guesswork and which can never be "original quality".
So yes, the encryption exists solely to deny me access to an original work, which I happen to own.
You're assuming the white balance information is considered "part of the photograph". However, this is just calibration information
Whether it's in the photo or not, it's still my information, not theirs. I took the picture, and it's my white balance.
Furthermore, "just calibration information" misses the point that this is crucial information for delivering the exact picture I took. Tweaking the WB by hand will only approximate the desired result, never get it precise. This information is very much a KEY to my photo, without it I only get a poor quality version.
On top of that, I selected the WB personally, so if anyone has copyright on it it's me. Nikon have no business encrypting MY information just because they want me to buy their decrypting package to reveal MY photo accurately.
The reason why he's able to even phrase some sort of odd point about root is that he hasn't *got* Unix yet. Given 65k possible UIDs on his private box, he chooses to use only one for his "non-root" usage, and then claim that all his personal eggs are in one basket.
Doh! Of course they are, if you put them all in a single basket then they're all at risk of being broken together.
But if that were how Unix were meant to be run then we'd only need two UIDs, one for "root" and one for "user". Well fortunately Unix presuposes that we're less dumb than that.
If he got off his ass and put different datasets under different users and shared the lot through read-only permissions and separate write spaces, then he wouldn't be making such silly comments about root not being more risky.
Reeves' article really is classic, and hugely valid even today. However, one of his most important points is left dangling.
The software design is not complete until it has been coded and tested.
100% true. The problem is, designers in traditional or semi-traditional development teams usually get only the most rudimentary feedback from test, usually just along the lines of "This doesn't work very well". In some places I've worked in (I'm freeelance), designers pretty much sat in their ivory towers almost without accountability for their designs. XP is different since the designer is more often than not the programmer and tester too, but most dev teams are still structured along traditional lines.
What Reeves needed to stress but didn't was traceability, from each element of design through to the results returned from test. Those elements of design which are too abstract to have actual live machine-generated tests need to have a scoreboard assigned to them, on which the testers can ++ or -- design hits and design misses.
And this very issue of traceability is the key to TFA's question as well, because all documentation except for overviews should be viewed as testable in the same way as any design feature. In particular, modules and smaller components all need to carry their own descriptions, and the accuracy of those descriptions needs to be subject to testing and QA signoff after each change.
It's not a simple area, but where there is a will there is always a way. And many designers do have the will to make their designs stand up to the rigours of testing and quality assurance.
Please note, amoral (without morals), not immoral (with bad morals).
In other words, they'll defend the worst torturing serial killer with the same aplomb and indifference as they'll defend the most innocent child. It's in the nature of the profession, to do their utmost for their clients with total clarity and detachment.
It sounds good, but unfortunately, this is also why they prosecute 11-year olds and grannies on behalf of the RIAA.
If you're looking for morals and socially beneficial conduct, attorneys and their related legal brethren would not be the best place to start looking. An attorney with a personal agenda to do good (or bad) would be a corrupt attorney, unable to perform his legal duties fairly.
I've often wondered on the impact of political correctness on roles such as Trillian's. She (or rather, the director) trod an unknowingly delicate path in the TV series I imagine, but those were innocent days and one rarely even thought of how perceptions might develop in the future.
Hers was probably the most complex actual character in the whole work, mixing several stereotypical characters that usually occupy diametrically opposed corners in one very interestingly balanced person showing no overt signs of internal contradiction. Maybe Trillian's IQ is just too high to be affected by such primitive issues.:-)
Anyway, an interesting aspect of HHGG for me. If there is a question in this, it's "What is Trillian, really?".
That's pretty hilarious just in its title. Music may be popular, but the restrictions on growth have come entirely from the music industry. Digital commerce tried to take off by itself as soon as MP3 appeared and bandwidth allowed, and it was very forcefully blocked.
The title is disingenuous in that it implies kudos to the wrong party altogether. It should have tacked "Despite Music Industry" on the end.
I doubt if there's a person in the music industry (even inside the CRIA & RIAA themselves) who isn't aware that the vast bulk of their losses are entirely self-inflicted, and that the P2P thing is a red herring. P2P *is* a threat to them because it results in loss of control, but it's not a financial threat to any large extent. It brings huge marketting advantages by creating additional buzz and promoting music, by allowing real CD buyers to preview, and on top of that it's merely the successor to home taping off friends and off the radio anyway. Those who like to buy CDs will still buy CDs, whether they use P2P or not.
What it really comes down to is that, to fight against their loss of control, they are basically talking total bollocks about huge marketting losses. It's little different to the tobacco industry talking total bollocks for 2-3 decades to minimize the perceived health issues of smoking. There is no logic to it, it's just noise to cover their entirely obvious business goals.
The article did a pretty good job of dissecting their claims, it seemed to me.
arguably a better learning technique from a usability standpoint
Yes, it might well be a better learning technique from a usability standpoint... but only for a content-free "discipline" like sociology or other pseudo-sciences.
Cargo cults a la Feynman are all about form, and this tool can indeed detect the presence of form and even distinguish form that is considered "good" by some metric from form that is considered "bad".
But unless it actually understands what is being written through deep semantic analysis performed against a thorough database of relation-interlinked concepts, then there is no way the tool can detect hard scientific content (to the small extent that it occurs in sociology) from gibberish that just obeys the right forms.
As Brent himself says, "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms." And that pretty much sums it up.
They haven't, but what interests me is that Sony is in a unique position to make hacks (or independent development) go mainstream and capitalize on it to become the market leader in this area, or if it doesn't work out, just write it off as a failed experiment.
After all, they've produced hundreds of thousands of different consumer devices, many of which have undersold their projected targets and hence are failed products in a business sense, and this mega giant just goes from there on to the next idea. Pocket change.
Like many have said, Sony is probably paralized from creating an open device by business dogma that would make it akin to consorting with the devil. However, at some level it definitely sees open source in a favourable light of some kind otherwise it wouldn't have released those Linuxes for some of its consoles.
Maybe there is hope in this direction yet. I certainly don't see any such hope from the smaller console developers owing to issues of scale and significance of possible losses, nor from Microsoft for obvious reasons, but Sony just might be able to pull this one off, if it ever wanted to.
I think we're on chapter 3-4 of a pretty interesting book that could be written about the history of the FOSS movement, in maybe 6 years' time. In fact, I'm ready to put down a deposit for my copy!
And I know exactly the three people who would probably be the most appropriate for writing it...:-)))))
The only problem is, they'd have to become somewhat closer buddies than at present... but I'm sure they could work at that over the next few years.;-)
I'm assuming that this is simple humour, or even a remnant from April 1st.
$22 million is pocket change for a huge number of private americans, let alone for thousands of corporations. I just cannot believe that a project with such a huge public profile (even non-nerds have heard of Voyager) could be axed to save crumbs.
It is interesting that the writer didn't tell us what option he'd prefer
Well that's no surprise, given that the article said nothing of any substance whatsoever.
In effect what we have here is a manager of some sort seeking justification for his role in applying "strategy management" to open source. I bet the managers around him think that he's really cool and clued up on all this.
In reality, he just doesn't understand that the value of FOSS doesn't come from the financial muscle and longevity of its corporate backers at all. His entire position is 100% ill-founded, and he has no clue whatsoever about the power that FOSS can give his company. "Just another licensing model" says it all, really.
More like just another PHB or management type, totally out of his depth but still eager for control.
Defamation, historical inaccuracy and other kinds of misrepresentation can be important enough to litigate over, but this particular issue is just plain ridiculous.
"The law does not concern itself with trivialities."
The judge should just throw this out immediately and sternly warn both sides not to waste the court's time.
I'm not so sure that the "bounceback" is begining.
I'm not sure the question is even meaningful. Like all first-world countries, the US will continue to consume new technology at the maximum rate its consumers and corporations can afford, because it is no longer possible to even contemplate living without it.
The bigger question is whether the US will be creating much of it, rather than merely consuming what the rest of the world delivers. I think that there's every likelihood that it won't be creating anywhere near as much new technology as it used to, simply because in the last few years it has created for itself an utterly stiffling regulatory environment that benefits only lawyers and megacorps, and so breaks the widespread positive feedback that fuels innovation.
It doesn't look good to me, not for the US nor for the rapidly self-immolating Europe. This century seems to be tipping in favor of the far east.
Technology never went away, even if there was a reduction in investment and a slowdown in markets. The reason is very simple: civilization is now so deep into technological dependency that it is quite impossible for the first world to function without its modern accoutrements. That makes any apparent breaks or slowdowns in the march of technology merely temporary and largely illusory anyway --- engineers and scientists continue doing their thing regardless of investor indifference. In adverse economic conditions, their efforts come to life in products later rather than sooner, that's all.
Technological progress has something equivalent to inertia, in that it resists any attempt to stop or even slow it down. In part this is because insight and innovation occurs more in the head than in the lab, and budget cutbacks never stopped anyone thinking. On top of that, science and technology is subject to positive feedback and exponential growth not just in scale but in number of dimensions as well, so it's no surprise that technology sees almost no slowdown regardless of the lack of helpful but non-critical investment.
Hehe, that gave me a chuckle. Like you though, I'd love to see a Slashdot interview on the capacity planning and technical side of Wikipedia, both to inform us and to oil the donations machinery.
Not knowing your architecture, your mention of 40 servers possibly turning into 200 or 500 got me worried. I sure hope that the huge majority of these are caching machines spread across the community, otherwise you have a severe problem. The sort of non-scalability that those 3 numbers suggest is the sort that will fold a centralized project, absolutely without fail, multi-million dollar backing from IBM etc excepted.
Huge server farms are sexy only to those who haven't had to run one (I have). There's no easy future in that direction, so I hope you're not heading there.
I hope you get that Slashdot interview some time. I'd like to learn more!
Whatever the reasons why the presentation failed in this particular case, in general it is a bad idea to use non-wired technologies for important presentations where reliability needs to be assured.
Infrared and bluetooth and wifi are great for use at home where the environment is stable and controlled, but in a major international event like CES, the conditions are exactly the opposite. If one could see in the IR band, I bet the CES stage would have appeared swamped in a blizzard of unwanted IR confetti from numerous sources.
Slashdot Mirror
Like the brave Ithacans who faced down the deadly cyclops, these legislators are facing down the awful realities of trying to legislate technological progress
:-)
Hehe, I had a good giggle, nice image there.
Sadly, a far more accurate metaphor would be more boring and less funny: the blind leading the blind into greater darkness.
The US today is little more than a fundamentalist religious/moralist state, interested not in progress but in protecting vested interests, and with by far the most anti-intellectual population that has appeared since the Renaissance.
The cyclops could be defeated. Unfortunately, lawyers and the culture of litigation that they spearhead are those deadly rocks which tore the Ithacans to shread, and in the ways of metaphor there is no way of defeating immoveable rock.
The army of legal parasites protecting a batallion of backward-facing dinosaurs lead from behind by a bunch of gibbering idiots is devouring all before it. The US is moving back into a new dark age.
If Americans, particularly their political leaders were less stupid, there would be fewer losses at WTC
If political leaders everywhere including the wannabes were put in the fields to do hard labor, there would be no death and destruction in the world at all, except for natural causes.
Sadly the plants would suffer.
The Register doesn't sit on the fence about anything much, they always make a clear stand for or against any major issue.
:-)
It's their hallmark, "Biting the hand that feeds IT".
Pretty much like Slashdot, but without the dups.
Maybe it's the absence of audience laughter cues or something, I don't know, but the irony in Tridgell's demo and in The Register's writeup of it was entirely obvious to me. I had a really good chuckle.
... so Tridgell made his point admirably that there has been a mountain made up out of a molehill of nothingness.
Didn't you RTFA, maybe? Here are the relevant sentences:
Tridgell demonstrated the procedure to disprove accusations that his detractors in the Torvalds/McVoy camp had made against him. Principally, that he was some kind of "an evil genius" reverse engineer.
The demo showed that the work was obviously not reverse engineeering in any real sense of the word, nor was it even remotely describable as "genius" work
And he made us laugh at the same time too. You didn't?
>> Most patents are in the U.S., most (current) innovation and technology growth is in India.
>> They have nothing to gain from adopting software patents.
Your "smart move" response offers the defence of smartness to both sides --- smart of India to bar software patents because they have nothing to gain, and smartness by the US to uphold software patents because they do have something to gain.
Unfortunately the last part of that is only true under the extraordinarily myopic worldview that most innnovations are in the past, and that therefore it is worth protecting the greater old at the expense of harming the lesser new.
Well that's stunningly short-sighted. The future is pretty much infinite, whereas technological progress of the patentable type has been around for a couple of centuries at most, and software patents even less, so the inventions of the past represent effectively zero percent of the body of technical development.
There could hardly be a greater condemnation of the inability of the supporters of patents to see beyond the ends of their noses.
But the data isn't trival in this case, and the data doesn't exist solely to keep some hardware from working.
I think you're forgetting that the third letter of DMCA stands for Copyright. Hardware has nothing to do with it, except incidentally.
Regarding "trivial data", well the data in question seems to be 3 floating point numbers, representing BlueBalance, RedBalance, and WhitePoint. (Might be different in the D2X, I took this from a D70.) Is that considered trivial or not? This kind of question has no significant purpose other than to line lawyers' pockets.
The second part of your sentence is much simpler to address though: the WB data is a key that I require to decode my photo accurately, and without it I get only an inferior representation (ie. with a color cast) which I have to tweak by hand with guesswork and which can never be "original quality".
So yes, the encryption exists solely to deny me access to an original work, which I happen to own.
You're assuming the white balance information is considered "part of the photograph". However, this is just calibration information
Whether it's in the photo or not, it's still my information, not theirs. I took the picture, and it's my white balance.
Furthermore, "just calibration information" misses the point that this is crucial information for delivering the exact picture I took. Tweaking the WB by hand will only approximate the desired result, never get it precise. This information is very much a KEY to my photo, without it I only get a poor quality version.
On top of that, I selected the WB personally, so if anyone has copyright on it it's me. Nikon have no business encrypting MY information just because they want me to buy their decrypting package to reveal MY photo accurately.
The reason why he's able to even phrase some sort of odd point about root is that he hasn't *got* Unix yet. Given 65k possible UIDs on his private box, he chooses to use only one for his "non-root" usage, and then claim that all his personal eggs are in one basket.
Doh! Of course they are, if you put them all in a single basket then they're all at risk of being broken together.
But if that were how Unix were meant to be run then we'd only need two UIDs, one for "root" and one for "user". Well fortunately Unix presuposes that we're less dumb than that.
If he got off his ass and put different datasets under different users and shared the lot through read-only permissions and separate write spaces, then he wouldn't be making such silly comments about root not being more risky.
Jeez.
He's dead right, Linux users running everything as root is the only strategy that would offer any safety for Microsoft.
Reeves' article really is classic, and hugely valid even today. However, one of his most important points is left dangling.
The software design is not complete until it has been coded and tested.
100% true. The problem is, designers in traditional or semi-traditional development teams usually get only the most rudimentary feedback from test, usually just along the lines of "This doesn't work very well". In some places I've worked in (I'm freeelance), designers pretty much sat in their ivory towers almost without accountability for their designs. XP is different since the designer is more often than not the programmer and tester too, but most dev teams are still structured along traditional lines.
What Reeves needed to stress but didn't was traceability, from each element of design through to the results returned from test. Those elements of design which are too abstract to have actual live machine-generated tests need to have a scoreboard assigned to them, on which the testers can ++ or -- design hits and design misses.
And this very issue of traceability is the key to TFA's question as well, because all documentation except for overviews should be viewed as testable in the same way as any design feature. In particular, modules and smaller components all need to carry their own descriptions, and the accuracy of those descriptions needs to be subject to testing and QA signoff after each change.
It's not a simple area, but where there is a will there is always a way. And many designers do have the will to make their designs stand up to the rigours of testing and quality assurance.
Please note, amoral (without morals), not immoral (with bad morals).
In other words, they'll defend the worst torturing serial killer with the same aplomb and indifference as they'll defend the most innocent child. It's in the nature of the profession, to do their utmost for their clients with total clarity and detachment.
It sounds good, but unfortunately, this is also why they prosecute 11-year olds and grannies on behalf of the RIAA.
If you're looking for morals and socially beneficial conduct, attorneys and their related legal brethren would not be the best place to start looking. An attorney with a personal agenda to do good (or bad) would be a corrupt attorney, unable to perform his legal duties fairly.
I've often wondered on the impact of political correctness on roles such as Trillian's. She (or rather, the director) trod an unknowingly delicate path in the TV series I imagine, but those were innocent days and one rarely even thought of how perceptions might develop in the future.
:-)
Hers was probably the most complex actual character in the whole work, mixing several stereotypical characters that usually occupy diametrically opposed corners in one very interestingly balanced person showing no overt signs of internal contradiction. Maybe Trillian's IQ is just too high to be affected by such primitive issues.
Anyway, an interesting aspect of HHGG for me. If there is a question in this, it's "What is Trillian, really?".
"Music is Driving Growth in Digital Commerce"
That's pretty hilarious just in its title. Music may be popular, but the restrictions on growth have come entirely from the music industry. Digital commerce tried to take off by itself as soon as MP3 appeared and bandwidth allowed, and it was very forcefully blocked.
The title is disingenuous in that it implies kudos to the wrong party altogether. It should have tacked "Despite Music Industry" on the end.
You know the reason for your losses ...
I doubt if there's a person in the music industry (even inside the CRIA & RIAA themselves) who isn't aware that the vast bulk of their losses are entirely self-inflicted, and that the P2P thing is a red herring. P2P *is* a threat to them because it results in loss of control, but it's not a financial threat to any large extent. It brings huge marketting advantages by creating additional buzz and promoting music, by allowing real CD buyers to preview, and on top of that it's merely the successor to home taping off friends and off the radio anyway. Those who like to buy CDs will still buy CDs, whether they use P2P or not.
What it really comes down to is that, to fight against their loss of control, they are basically talking total bollocks about huge marketting losses. It's little different to the tobacco industry talking total bollocks for 2-3 decades to minimize the perceived health issues of smoking. There is no logic to it, it's just noise to cover their entirely obvious business goals.
The article did a pretty good job of dissecting their claims, it seemed to me.
arguably a better learning technique from a usability standpoint
... but only for a content-free "discipline" like sociology or other pseudo-sciences.
Yes, it might well be a better learning technique from a usability standpoint
Cargo cults a la Feynman are all about form, and this tool can indeed detect the presence of form and even distinguish form that is considered "good" by some metric from form that is considered "bad".
But unless it actually understands what is being written through deep semantic analysis performed against a thorough database of relation-interlinked concepts, then there is no way the tool can detect hard scientific content (to the small extent that it occurs in sociology) from gibberish that just obeys the right forms.
As Brent himself says, "In sociology, we want them to learn the terms." And that pretty much sums it up.
Hacks gone Mainstream?
They haven't, but what interests me is that Sony is in a unique position to make hacks (or independent development) go mainstream and capitalize on it to become the market leader in this area, or if it doesn't work out, just write it off as a failed experiment.
After all, they've produced hundreds of thousands of different consumer devices, many of which have undersold their projected targets and hence are failed products in a business sense, and this mega giant just goes from there on to the next idea. Pocket change.
Like many have said, Sony is probably paralized from creating an open device by business dogma that would make it akin to consorting with the devil. However, at some level it definitely sees open source in a favourable light of some kind otherwise it wouldn't have released those Linuxes for some of its consoles.
Maybe there is hope in this direction yet. I certainly don't see any such hope from the smaller console developers owing to issues of scale and significance of possible losses, nor from Microsoft for obvious reasons, but Sony just might be able to pull this one off, if it ever wanted to.
I think we're on chapter 3-4 of a pretty interesting book that could be written about the history of the FOSS movement, in maybe 6 years' time. In fact, I'm ready to put down a deposit for my copy!
... :-)))))
... but I'm sure they could work at that over the next few years. ;-)
And I know exactly the three people who would probably be the most appropriate for writing it
The only problem is, they'd have to become somewhat closer buddies than at present
I'm assuming that this is simple humour, or even a remnant from April 1st.
$22 million is pocket change for a huge number of private americans, let alone for thousands of corporations. I just cannot believe that a project with such a huge public profile (even non-nerds have heard of Voyager) could be axed to save crumbs.
Current microwave ovens operate at a nominal frequency of 2450 MHz, a band assigned by the FCC.
... :)
I think you'll find that the physics of water molecule resonance had something to do with choice of this band.
Funny how every other country in the world chose the same band, despite not being ruled by the FCC
It is interesting that the writer didn't tell us what option he'd prefer
Well that's no surprise, given that the article said nothing of any substance whatsoever.
In effect what we have here is a manager of some sort seeking justification for his role in applying "strategy management" to open source. I bet the managers around him think that he's really cool and clued up on all this.
In reality, he just doesn't understand that the value of FOSS doesn't come from the financial muscle and longevity of its corporate backers at all. His entire position is 100% ill-founded, and he has no clue whatsoever about the power that FOSS can give his company. "Just another licensing model" says it all, really.
More like just another PHB or management type, totally out of his depth but still eager for control.
I thought it wasn't defamation if it was true.
America has gone litigation-mad.
Defamation, historical inaccuracy and other kinds of misrepresentation can be important enough to litigate over, but this particular issue is just plain ridiculous.
"The law does not concern itself with trivialities."
The judge should just throw this out immediately and sternly warn both sides not to waste the court's time.
I'm not so sure that the "bounceback" is begining.
I'm not sure the question is even meaningful. Like all first-world countries, the US will continue to consume new technology at the maximum rate its consumers and corporations can afford, because it is no longer possible to even contemplate living without it.
The bigger question is whether the US will be creating much of it, rather than merely consuming what the rest of the world delivers. I think that there's every likelihood that it won't be creating anywhere near as much new technology as it used to, simply because in the last few years it has created for itself an utterly stiffling regulatory environment that benefits only lawyers and megacorps, and so breaks the widespread positive feedback that fuels innovation.
It doesn't look good to me, not for the US nor for the rapidly self-immolating Europe. This century seems to be tipping in favor of the far east.
Technology never went away, even if there was a reduction in investment and a slowdown in markets. The reason is very simple: civilization is now so deep into technological dependency that it is quite impossible for the first world to function without its modern accoutrements. That makes any apparent breaks or slowdowns in the march of technology merely temporary and largely illusory anyway --- engineers and scientists continue doing their thing regardless of investor indifference. In adverse economic conditions, their efforts come to life in products later rather than sooner, that's all.
Technological progress has something equivalent to inertia, in that it resists any attempt to stop or even slow it down. In part this is because insight and innovation occurs more in the head than in the lab, and budget cutbacks never stopped anyone thinking. On top of that, science and technology is subject to positive feedback and exponential growth not just in scale but in number of dimensions as well, so it's no surprise that technology sees almost no slowdown regardless of the lack of helpful but non-critical investment.
Servers? We have servers?
Hehe, that gave me a chuckle. Like you though, I'd love to see a Slashdot interview on the capacity planning and technical side of Wikipedia, both to inform us and to oil the donations machinery.
Not knowing your architecture, your mention of 40 servers possibly turning into 200 or 500 got me worried. I sure hope that the huge majority of these are caching machines spread across the community, otherwise you have a severe problem. The sort of non-scalability that those 3 numbers suggest is the sort that will fold a centralized project, absolutely without fail, multi-million dollar backing from IBM etc excepted.
Huge server farms are sexy only to those who haven't had to run one (I have). There's no easy future in that direction, so I hope you're not heading there.
I hope you get that Slashdot interview some time. I'd like to learn more!
Whatever the reasons why the presentation failed in this particular case, in general it is a bad idea to use non-wired technologies for important presentations where reliability needs to be assured.
Infrared and bluetooth and wifi are great for use at home where the environment is stable and controlled, but in a major international event like CES, the conditions are exactly the opposite. If one could see in the IR band, I bet the CES stage would have appeared swamped in a blizzard of unwanted IR confetti from numerous sources.