That's a very odd war of words between the two parties, since they completely agree with each other. One can put the two statements together into just one:
The Walt Disney Company and Roy Disney together state: "This difficult decision was based on what is best strategically for company business in both the short and long term, to which end it has de-emphasised creativity and is totally indifferent to its impact on the people who helped to make the company great."
I believe potential criminals should be treated like customers too.
While your line sounds funny, it's actually true, since a potential criminal is not a criminal, ie. innocent until proven guilty.
However, while the label deserves credit for not blindly following the myopic behaviour of the big labels and not supporting the police-state behaviour of the RIAA, the system they operate is at heart still wrong. Artists have no business passing ownership of their work to a third party for all eternity, as this just feeds that greed machine and is the real root of all this evil.
There once was a need for placing oneself into perpetual slavery in some circumstances, but that no longer holds in these days of inexpensive small-batch pressing and easy online presence and distribution. Studios and labels nowadays need be no more than technical and promotional subcontractors, not feudal barons squeezing their serfs dry as in previous decades.
The arithmetic of musical serfdom is just plain scary.
By breaking molecular bonds in the cheese, wouldn't that alter the chemistry of the cheese where it had been cut? Could this inadvertently produce carcinogenic compounds (like when you burn meat)?
It sounds like it might, although the article didn't really give enough information to tell. In a nutshell, when you cleave cheese apart with a mechanical cheese cutter like a knife or a wire, the only thing you "break apart" (using the term loosely) is Van der Waals forces, and those do not hold the atomic components within molecules together (as covalent or ionic bonds do) so the action does not generally result in chemical change. Long-chain polymers will get broken too, but they typically have the same chemistry whatever their molecular length.
If the laser is truly breaking the bonds of non-polymeric organic molecules then this doesn't sound too healthy chemically, but that is not the only way that a laser might cut without burning. It is possible to imagine rapid vaporization of water or of other volatiles in the material causing sudden expansion which would cleave sections apart through vapor pressure, in a manner very similar to mechanical cutting, and hence safely.
We'll have to wait for further information on what is really going on before we know whether there are any concerns about chemical side effects.
I'm also disappointed that they're probably going to make Trillian into a bimbo again; she was supposed to be an astrophysicist.
You're way off the mark there by thinking only of her chosen appearance and happy disposition. Trillian was always portrayed as bright and level headed --- in fact she was just about the only sane person around in a universe of loonies.:-) The fact that she was pretty just let her take advantage of men's usual attitude towards the "weaker sex" (not that there was ever much of it in HHGG), which is a sign of intelligence, not bimboness. And she had a great voice for the part too, very consistent with the position of the mice in the story --- at first sight just rodents, but actually in charge. So was she.
Why open doors and carry stuff when there are loads of willing servants around?:-)
LOL, that post made the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sound like a secretive spy satellite.:-)
Actually, WMAP is a hugely successful astronomical microwave observatory which sits at Earth's second Lagrange Point (L2). L2 is 1.5 million kilometers on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. This informative page shows the location and how the probe got there very clearly.
The WMAP was launched in June of 2001 and has made a map of the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with much higher resolution, sensitivity, and accuracy than its predecessor, COBE. It has been a huge success.
The wider adoption of web forums for mailing-list type conversations has been thwarted by forums typically mandating particular interfaces instead of allowing people to choose their own.
There's no reason in principle why clicking on the reply link in something like a phpBB forum cannot pop up your own favorite editor, prefilter the original post and/or your your reply text through your own special filters if you wish (eg. to handle quoting), or indeed allow people to employ their own highly complex GUI app to handle the reply interface in the manner they chose and like best.
Unfortunately it's just not been done in the forums world, or at least not widely enough to be noticed. So, power mail users who have no desire to use someone else's idea of a good human interface will continue to use their email client, even when a forum interface would sometimes be convenient.
The green movement is always telling us how trains are good for the environment and hence ultimately healthy for us.
What they fail to mention is that standing on platforms freezing to death in the rain and sleet waiting for your train to arrive is bad for your health. They also fail to mention the effect of going to work packed like sardines alongside a pile of coughing and wheezing commuters. Nor do they say anything about the stress of sharing a vehicle with occasional knife and gun-toting juviniles or hard criminals, or just plain abusive or dodgy people.
It's not just theory either. As a freelancer I occasionally take contracts that require commuting by train, along with others where I commute by car. The state of my health directly mirrors the form of transport, and when trains result in a direct and blatantly obvious loss of health then only a fool can consider trains as good.
The problem with public transport isn't that it's public, but that it's mass, packing in everyone like a herd of animals. We're not animals.
The US blocking of clone research is pretty consistent with US denial of nanotechnology research funding.
A few weeks ago, the US effectively denied government funding of nanotechnology despite its public position of wishing to support it. The funding initiative (NNI) which was set up expressly to fund US research into nanotechnology was hijacked by US big business interests through a hilarious or appalling (depends on your point of view) technicality which resulted in nil dollars going to molecular nanotechnology. Yes, nil.
This sleight of hand was performed by first defining nanotechnology as being the application of nanoscience, and then positioning the huge US presence in chemical, biotech and materials sciences as already operating in nanoscience. As a result, 100% of NNI funds were allocated to those megacorps, and zero dollars to the small and powerless sector that currently does the real research into molecular nanotechnology.
It makes you wonder what the hell is happening in the US when such key research areas are blocked through government being concerned entirely with the protection of big business's current interests instead of being allowed to plan for the country's future.
The whole idea that a kernel module needs to be GPL is absolutely absurd.
The whole idea that a third party can compromise the integrity of your kernel is absolutely absurd. It might work in the Microsoft world where flakiness is regarded as normal, but certainly not in an open source O/S.
If binary-only modules are to become acceptable in Linux, it will require an MMU-protected execution environment for them to be created, so that they can do their job with minimum risk to the kernel. Anything else is just dumb engineering.
Pragmatism can be a double-edged sword, but let's assume that pragmatism is a good thing in this area.
Binary modules need to be tolerated - fine. But kernel instability cannot be tolerated, ever. Put these two things together and I can think of only one way out of the dilemma: binary modules must be run within a restricted execution environment where the harm that they can do is reduced to a minimum. Existing taint+symbol controls do not provide such protection.
What this means is, we should use the MMU to allow non-GPL modules access only to a small section of kernel space for interfacing purposes, and not to the entire kernel. This is pretty easy to do as far as code access is concerned (they should not be calling kernel code anyway if they claim to be independent), but it would impact markedly on data handling since data would have to be copied first into module-space buffers before a binary module could access it. This would make GPL modules run faster than binary-only modules in most cases. That seems fair.
Anyone that's done some control theory knows how to solve the problem --- just add some hysteresis into the feedback loop, ie. response delay in both directions.
All forms of instability are reduced in their effect by this means, so it doesn't matter whether the instability stems from human error, bugs, or system glitches arising from other things.
And exactly how would one do this? There's a ton of ways, and quite a few of them simply entail holding quoted prices steady for a mandated period, plus a few adornments.
There are much more creative ones around though which could probably work even better, like allowing only audio readouts in trading rooms so that info comes in slowly like in tickertape days, or the one I like best, allowing traders to use no equipment other than the morning's financial newspaper, plus a pen and notepad.:-)
The part of the article that I found most interesting was:
Linux actually resides on only a comparatively small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.
The "stripped down operating system" must be the distribution nucleus on the compute-only subnodes, presumably something that allow the Linux nodes to distribute the code and I/O of computations to them and to query or control their state during debugging, and to reaccquire lost processor control.
It's only a matter of time before those of us who already have sizeable LANs at home will have embedded compute-only clusters within them too. Those would differ substantially from the typical Linux clustering for high availability. Instead of a non-Linux nucleus on those subnodes though, I'd prefer to see a pretty ordinary Linux kernel running slaved to remote masters.
Is anyone already playing with something like this in their Linux clusters?
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
You're spot on, but for the wrong reason. The Vogons never really considered the Kurzweil poet AI as worthy competition for their poetry, but this possibility did give the mice an excellent excuse for having the Earth destroyed while hiding the real reason why this had to be done.
Because you see, earlier in the experiment that led to the creation of planet Earth, a catastrophic error was made: they forgot to weed out latent patent clerks from among the management consultants and telephone sanitizers that were sent off on Ark B, as a result of which by the end of the 2nd millennium the planet was completely overrun with demented patent clerks that brought all technical progress to a standstill.
While some computer scientists (well, OK, just Bill Joy) declared this to be conclusive proof for the Halting Problem, all sentient life everywhere recognized the extreme danger of Earth's patent clerk infecting the rest of the universe with insanity, so planetary termination became non-optional.
The Vogons were of course happy to carry out the task, but their fondness for hyperspace bypasses really had nothing to do with it. To understand the Vogon eagerness to destroy Earth, you just need to consider the fact that patent clerks cannot distinguish original poetry from age-old nursery rhymes, and being non-sentient, nor can they feel the sadistic pain of Vogon poetry recitals. Put those two things together and it was only a question of which Vogon captain would reach Earth first. Even without the benefit of a Vogon background, it's easy to see their point.
My feelings on this are simple: do it right or don't do it at all.
Very true. Another way of saying the same thing is that difficulty is no excuse for incompetence. If something is hard then it can take a long time to do it properly, and if that results in collosal patent processing times then either get more staff or accept the long waiting lists for approval, which might even be a good thing.
In any event, the current state of patents is nothing short of a catastrophe in the world of ideas, and the blame lies squarely with patent office incompetence. Please note that this is being extremely generous; a less generous interpretation involves widescale corruption.
If you have a job to do, do it well or don't do it at all, like the poster said. Don't operate with an effective IQ of zero and let your incompetence lay waste to progress right across the US-affected world.
If you're searching for the motive force behind wars, I think you're looking at too long a period of fluctuation in the 11-year sunspot cycle, because the relevant periodicity is a 24-hour one.
The sun goes down, people engage in a spot of fun hanky panky, a politician is born, and you have wars. Pretty simple, very accurate, and as predictable as night follows day, which indeed it does.
Actually, all those technologies sank on the rocks of hardy-enough materials being too expensive to mass produce.
That's not going to change for quite a while, but when it does, there's every reason to believe that dozens of advanced transport technnologies will get a huge shot in the arm. Nanotechnology is where the hopes are pinned for this at the moment, for the very good reason that materials 50 times stronger than current ones seem to pop out of nanotech research almost without trying, and very light ones at that.
It's very early days in this area though. Don't expect mass production of atomically precise structural materials for at least a decade or two, and that's assuming no major hiccups along the road.
Pointing doesn't give you property, but nor do physical markers, government laws, planetary authorizations, galactic leases or anything else.
Your property is what you can hold on to, and anything else is just hot air and handwaving.
Hot air and handwaving aren't necessarily worthless, because after all they reduce the pain and suffering in what we loosely call civilization, but to believe that rights have any fundamental substance is simply a delusion. The fact that those delusions are often imposed by force just proves the point.
It all boils down to what you can defend, and nothing more.
every cent you can shave of the production costs of a unit makes a big difference
Your reasoning is spot on for any console manufacturer, but it's especially important for Microsoft because of the dreadful arithmetic of long-duration per-box losses resulting from slow growth of Xbox against the PS2.
The problem there is that Microsoft doesn't write a whole lot of games itself, so they're at the mercy of the usual game dev companies' choice of platform and rate of production. That rate has been slow, and every month that the ramp-up drags on with the PS2 light-years ahead in terms of game numbers represents another chunk of losses stemming from the high cost of the console versus number of games sold.
Exactly why Xbox hasn't exploded onto the scene and become a head-for-head PS2 rival after all this time is a good question which I haven't seen explained anywhere. It's nice hardware from a dev perspective, so why so few games? (Even the Xbox mags are disappearing from shops. Looks bad.)
With the present sluggish rate of new releases and with way under 200 Xbox games in most of the "Coming Soon" lists despite Xmas approaching, I don't see any light at the end of the Xbox tunnel for a long time to come. Under these inauspicious circumstances, I'd have to guess (and we can only guess) that bringing down the pre-console loss must be extraordinarily important to MS.
I don't understand how somebody can care so little about the environment.
LOL, if you think that government and politicians care about anything at all except themselves then you haven't been around much.
A few politicians do start off as idealists, but it rarely lasts long, and it never lasts beyond the point where they acquire political office. You see, it can't last beyond that, because the first-world political environment is one where only hyenas thrive. A dove will only survive by circling high out of reach, but inevitably, without any effect whatsoever on the politics of government.
My advice to the environmentalists (or indeed to any faction without major $$$ lobbying power) is not to waste time on government and politics, and to put your resources into changing the world directly through your own actions. One tree planted by yourself is vastly more than you'll ever get your president or prime minister to do for your planet.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but there isn't a government on the planet with the slightest intention of modifying their political agendas to assist the planet in any way at all. (I'm not actually saying that they should, but merely pointing out that they are not.)
Very occasionally you hear a little pro-conservation posturing when it may help raise someone's fading political profile by a small amount, and occasionally grand gestures like Kyoto are organized, but you need to understand that all of these are just gestures, and they fade from the agenda the instant that they are over.
The problem is simply that politicians are by their very nature uncommitted to anything except their own electoral future. A hypothetical politician that is committed to doing good for others simply will not last within our first world's political systems, even if he or she manages to gain entrance once. The few that manage to stay become compromised --- "corrupted" may sound harsh but the label is not entirely inaccurate.
To those who are interested in (for example) reducing the amount of C02 that is accumulating in the atmosphere, I would suggest that a far more profitable avenue than relying on politicians is to actually do something about it directly: get into the forestry business, convert farms to high-CO2 consumption crops, promote, develop and market electric vehicles, and so on.
Relying on politicians is a dead loss. If you want something useful done, just do it.
This isn't the first time that a manager has felt himself becoming powerless by being cut out of the loop, and is now reacting badly. Shock horror, "his" teccies can now modify the code freely themselves, he is losing control, it's the ultimate catastrophe.:-)
Those that cannot do, manage. Those than cannot manage in the face of change, complain. Ignore him.
There really is no point in letting this kind of nonsense get to you, for two reasons.
The first reason is that it's false anyway and the world is full of people saying false things on purpose or simply because they are dumb. Wasting your time on either type is, well, simply a waste of time.
And the second reason is that the situation is self-correcting: those without the ability to see the value in our treasure chest will not benefit from it and hence will lag further and further behind until they themselves become extinct or irrelevant.
So, don't let their ramblings get to you, not even when phrased as mildly amusing parodies, in fact don't even bother acknowledging their existence, especially when they are just clueless PHBs as in this case. Those that cannot do, manage, and it sounds like Howard Strauss cannot even manage so he writes dumb opinion pieces. Ignore it.
Ah yes,socialized medicine is great, as long as you do not have to pay the price of research.
That's the kind of misinformation we often hear from the IP/investment-led corporate bullshit classes, but hopefully most technical people can see through it.
As an ex-researcher, let me tell you about research. Researchers do not develop ideas in a vacuum, and their pay packets do not magically transform into inventions. And the stuff from which ideas are made is not created by dumping invester's money into labs.
Ideas come when good researchers interact with other clever people working in that area across the world. In part it's interactive, but of vastly more significance is the continuous process of staying on top of the massive torrent of world literature, which is a treasure chest of untapped riches. It's a sea of ideas out there, with everyone's contributions pushing the wavefront of knowledge along just a little bit further. Sometimes just a quaint turn of phrase or even a linguistic mistake spurs a line of thought. How many dollars have been invested in one's lab figures far far down the lists of important contributions.
It's typical company bullshit to try to take all the credit for research done in a company's labs by one's paid employees. It just shows how most company people are totally clueless on how the scientific creative process works.
No matter how brilliant the person that records a new scientific discovery is, and no matter how much his company is paying him nor how many trillions they have spent on his lab, that idea arose only in very small part from his own work. 99% or more is a direct result of his standing on the shoulders of a world full of very bright people, and it's largely immaterial who delivers the final brushstroke.
You simply can't put a super hot P4 in an embedded environment.
I agree, but it goes further than that.
Actually, you can't sensibly put a super hot P4 into a normal home user PC either, but Intel and Microsoft haven't felt the heat because the hot potato has been dumped onto the laps of end users, and they've more or less coped with the problem.
However, with Xbox, the problem is in Microsoft's lap, and I bet that they have felt the heat. For a start, a hot CPU requires a fan, and fans are noisy in a lounge hifi environment. Hot CPUs also place a lower limit on size and therefore on cost of the console, so it's inevitable that x86 has had a detrimental effect on the Xbox balance sheet. You can tell just by lifting it up that the Xbox has had much more engineering put into it than is normal for loss-leading hardware in the games industry, and part of the reason for that will inevitably be heat management.
On that basis, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if X2 replaces x86 by G5 technology. Intel (and AMD) have simply lost the thread in their current direction. Ultimately, everything wants to be "embedded", and you can't embed things that run red hot.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a very odd war of words between the two parties, since they completely agree with each other. One can put the two statements together into just one:
:-)
The Walt Disney Company and Roy Disney together state: "This difficult decision was based on what is best strategically for company business in both the short and long term, to which end it has de-emphasised creativity and is totally indifferent to its impact on the people who helped to make the company great."
Why have a war when there is agreement?
I believe potential criminals should be treated like customers too.
While your line sounds funny, it's actually true, since a potential criminal is not a criminal, ie. innocent until proven guilty.
However, while the label deserves credit for not blindly following the myopic behaviour of the big labels and not supporting the police-state behaviour of the RIAA, the system they operate is at heart still wrong. Artists have no business passing ownership of their work to a third party for all eternity, as this just feeds that greed machine and is the real root of all this evil.
There once was a need for placing oneself into perpetual slavery in some circumstances, but that no longer holds in these days of inexpensive small-batch pressing and easy online presence and distribution. Studios and labels nowadays need be no more than technical and promotional subcontractors, not feudal barons squeezing their serfs dry as in previous decades.
The arithmetic of musical serfdom is just plain scary.
By breaking molecular bonds in the cheese, wouldn't that alter the chemistry of the cheese where it had been cut? Could this inadvertently produce carcinogenic compounds (like when you burn meat)?
It sounds like it might, although the article didn't really give enough information to tell. In a nutshell, when you cleave cheese apart with a mechanical cheese cutter like a knife or a wire, the only thing you "break apart" (using the term loosely) is Van der Waals forces, and those do not hold the atomic components within molecules together (as covalent or ionic bonds do) so the action does not generally result in chemical change. Long-chain polymers will get broken too, but they typically have the same chemistry whatever their molecular length.
If the laser is truly breaking the bonds of non-polymeric organic molecules then this doesn't sound too healthy chemically, but that is not the only way that a laser might cut without burning. It is possible to imagine rapid vaporization of water or of other volatiles in the material causing sudden expansion which would cleave sections apart through vapor pressure, in a manner very similar to mechanical cutting, and hence safely.
We'll have to wait for further information on what is really going on before we know whether there are any concerns about chemical side effects.
I'm also disappointed that they're probably going to make Trillian into a bimbo again; she was supposed to be an astrophysicist.
:-) The fact that she was pretty just let her take advantage of men's usual attitude towards the "weaker sex" (not that there was ever much of it in HHGG), which is a sign of intelligence, not bimboness. And she had a great voice for the part too, very consistent with the position of the mice in the story --- at first sight just rodents, but actually in charge. So was she.
:-)
You're way off the mark there by thinking only of her chosen appearance and happy disposition. Trillian was always portrayed as bright and level headed --- in fact she was just about the only sane person around in a universe of loonies.
Why open doors and carry stuff when there are loads of willing servants around?
LOL, that post made the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) sound like a secretive spy satellite. :-)
Actually, WMAP is a hugely successful astronomical microwave observatory which sits at Earth's second Lagrange Point (L2). L2 is 1.5 million kilometers on the opposite side of the Earth from the Sun. This informative page shows the location and how the probe got there very clearly.
The WMAP was launched in June of 2001 and has made a map of the temperature fluctuations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation with much higher resolution, sensitivity, and accuracy than its predecessor, COBE. It has been a huge success.
The wider adoption of web forums for mailing-list type conversations has been thwarted by forums typically mandating particular interfaces instead of allowing people to choose their own.
There's no reason in principle why clicking on the reply link in something like a phpBB forum cannot pop up your own favorite editor, prefilter the original post and/or your your reply text through your own special filters if you wish (eg. to handle quoting), or indeed allow people to employ their own highly complex GUI app to handle the reply interface in the manner they chose and like best.
Unfortunately it's just not been done in the forums world, or at least not widely enough to be noticed. So, power mail users who have no desire to use someone else's idea of a good human interface will continue to use their email client, even when a forum interface would sometimes be convenient.
The green movement is always telling us how trains are good for the environment and hence ultimately healthy for us.
What they fail to mention is that standing on platforms freezing to death in the rain and sleet waiting for your train to arrive is bad for your health. They also fail to mention the effect of going to work packed like sardines alongside a pile of coughing and wheezing commuters. Nor do they say anything about the stress of sharing a vehicle with occasional knife and gun-toting juviniles or hard criminals, or just plain abusive or dodgy people.
It's not just theory either. As a freelancer I occasionally take contracts that require commuting by train, along with others where I commute by car. The state of my health directly mirrors the form of transport, and when trains result in a direct and blatantly obvious loss of health then only a fool can consider trains as good.
The problem with public transport isn't that it's public, but that it's mass, packing in everyone like a herd of animals. We're not animals.
The US blocking of clone research is pretty consistent with US denial of nanotechnology research funding.
A few weeks ago, the US effectively denied government funding of nanotechnology despite its public position of wishing to support it. The funding initiative (NNI) which was set up expressly to fund US research into nanotechnology was hijacked by US big business interests through a hilarious or appalling (depends on your point of view) technicality which resulted in nil dollars going to molecular nanotechnology. Yes, nil.
This sleight of hand was performed by first defining nanotechnology as being the application of nanoscience, and then positioning the huge US presence in chemical, biotech and materials sciences as already operating in nanoscience. As a result, 100% of NNI funds were allocated to those megacorps, and zero dollars to the small and powerless sector that currently does the real research into molecular nanotechnology.
It makes you wonder what the hell is happening in the US when such key research areas are blocked through government being concerned entirely with the protection of big business's current interests instead of being allowed to plan for the country's future.
The whole idea that a kernel module needs to be GPL is absolutely absurd.
The whole idea that a third party can compromise the integrity of your kernel is absolutely absurd. It might work in the Microsoft world where flakiness is regarded as normal, but certainly not in an open source O/S.
If binary-only modules are to become acceptable in Linux, it will require an MMU-protected execution environment for them to be created, so that they can do their job with minimum risk to the kernel. Anything else is just dumb engineering.
Pragmatism can be a double-edged sword, but let's assume that pragmatism is a good thing in this area.
Binary modules need to be tolerated - fine. But kernel instability cannot be tolerated, ever. Put these two things together and I can think of only one way out of the dilemma: binary modules must be run within a restricted execution environment where the harm that they can do is reduced to a minimum. Existing taint+symbol controls do not provide such protection.
What this means is, we should use the MMU to allow non-GPL modules access only to a small section of kernel space for interfacing purposes, and not to the entire kernel. This is pretty easy to do as far as code access is concerned (they should not be calling kernel code anyway if they claim to be independent), but it would impact markedly on data handling since data would have to be copied first into module-space buffers before a binary module could access it. This would make GPL modules run faster than binary-only modules in most cases. That seems fair.
Anyone that's done some control theory knows how to solve the problem --- just add some hysteresis into the feedback loop, ie. response delay in both directions.
:-)
All forms of instability are reduced in their effect by this means, so it doesn't matter whether the instability stems from human error, bugs, or system glitches arising from other things.
And exactly how would one do this? There's a ton of ways, and quite a few of them simply entail holding quoted prices steady for a mandated period, plus a few adornments.
There are much more creative ones around though which could probably work even better, like allowing only audio readouts in trading rooms so that info comes in slowly like in tickertape days, or the one I like best, allowing traders to use no equipment other than the morning's financial newspaper, plus a pen and notepad.
Really, what's the point of a review if we're left to figure out if the reviewer liked it or not? :-)
The part of the article that I found most interesting was:
Linux actually resides on only a comparatively small number of processors; the bulk of the chips run a stripped-down operating system that lets it carry out the instructions of the Linux nodes.
The "stripped down operating system" must be the distribution nucleus on the compute-only subnodes, presumably something that allow the Linux nodes to distribute the code and I/O of computations to them and to query or control their state during debugging, and to reaccquire lost processor control.
It's only a matter of time before those of us who already have sizeable LANs at home will have embedded compute-only clusters within them too. Those would differ substantially from the typical Linux clustering for high availability. Instead of a non-Linux nucleus on those subnodes though, I'd prefer to see a pretty ordinary Linux kernel running slaved to remote masters.
Is anyone already playing with something like this in their Linux clusters?
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
You're spot on, but for the wrong reason. The Vogons never really considered the Kurzweil poet AI as worthy competition for their poetry, but this possibility did give the mice an excellent excuse for having the Earth destroyed while hiding the real reason why this had to be done.
Because you see, earlier in the experiment that led to the creation of planet Earth, a catastrophic error was made: they forgot to weed out latent patent clerks from among the management consultants and telephone sanitizers that were sent off on Ark B, as a result of which by the end of the 2nd millennium the planet was completely overrun with demented patent clerks that brought all technical progress to a standstill.
While some computer scientists (well, OK, just Bill Joy) declared this to be conclusive proof for the Halting Problem, all sentient life everywhere recognized the extreme danger of Earth's patent clerk infecting the rest of the universe with insanity, so planetary termination became non-optional.
The Vogons were of course happy to carry out the task, but their fondness for hyperspace bypasses really had nothing to do with it. To understand the Vogon eagerness to destroy Earth, you just need to consider the fact that patent clerks cannot distinguish original poetry from age-old nursery rhymes, and being non-sentient, nor can they feel the sadistic pain of Vogon poetry recitals. Put those two things together and it was only a question of which Vogon captain would reach Earth first. Even without the benefit of a Vogon background, it's easy to see their point.
My feelings on this are simple: do it right or don't do it at all.
Very true. Another way of saying the same thing is that difficulty is no excuse for incompetence. If something is hard then it can take a long time to do it properly, and if that results in collosal patent processing times then either get more staff or accept the long waiting lists for approval, which might even be a good thing.
In any event, the current state of patents is nothing short of a catastrophe in the world of ideas, and the blame lies squarely with patent office incompetence. Please note that this is being extremely generous; a less generous interpretation involves widescale corruption.
If you have a job to do, do it well or don't do it at all, like the poster said. Don't operate with an effective IQ of zero and let your incompetence lay waste to progress right across the US-affected world.
If you're searching for the motive force behind wars, I think you're looking at too long a period of fluctuation in the 11-year sunspot cycle, because the relevant periodicity is a 24-hour one.
:-)
The sun goes down, people engage in a spot of fun hanky panky, a politician is born, and you have wars. Pretty simple, very accurate, and as predictable as night follows day, which indeed it does.
QED
Actually, all those technologies sank on the rocks of hardy-enough materials being too expensive to mass produce.
That's not going to change for quite a while, but when it does, there's every reason to believe that dozens of advanced transport technnologies will get a huge shot in the arm. Nanotechnology is where the hopes are pinned for this at the moment, for the very good reason that materials 50 times stronger than current ones seem to pop out of nanotech research almost without trying, and very light ones at that.
It's very early days in this area though. Don't expect mass production of atomically precise structural materials for at least a decade or two, and that's assuming no major hiccups along the road.
Pointing doesn't give you property, but nor do physical markers, government laws, planetary authorizations, galactic leases or anything else.
Your property is what you can hold on to, and anything else is just hot air and handwaving.
Hot air and handwaving aren't necessarily worthless, because after all they reduce the pain and suffering in what we loosely call civilization, but to believe that rights have any fundamental substance is simply a delusion. The fact that those delusions are often imposed by force just proves the point.
It all boils down to what you can defend, and nothing more.
every cent you can shave of the production costs of a unit makes a big difference
Your reasoning is spot on for any console manufacturer, but it's especially important for Microsoft because of the dreadful arithmetic of long-duration per-box losses resulting from slow growth of Xbox against the PS2.
The problem there is that Microsoft doesn't write a whole lot of games itself, so they're at the mercy of the usual game dev companies' choice of platform and rate of production. That rate has been slow, and every month that the ramp-up drags on with the PS2 light-years ahead in terms of game numbers represents another chunk of losses stemming from the high cost of the console versus number of games sold.
Exactly why Xbox hasn't exploded onto the scene and become a head-for-head PS2 rival after all this time is a good question which I haven't seen explained anywhere. It's nice hardware from a dev perspective, so why so few games? (Even the Xbox mags are disappearing from shops. Looks bad.)
With the present sluggish rate of new releases and with way under 200 Xbox games in most of the "Coming Soon" lists despite Xmas approaching, I don't see any light at the end of the Xbox tunnel for a long time to come. Under these inauspicious circumstances, I'd have to guess (and we can only guess) that bringing down the pre-console loss must be extraordinarily important to MS.
I don't understand how somebody can care so little about the environment.
LOL, if you think that government and politicians care about anything at all except themselves then you haven't been around much.
A few politicians do start off as idealists, but it rarely lasts long, and it never lasts beyond the point where they acquire political office. You see, it can't last beyond that, because the first-world political environment is one where only hyenas thrive. A dove will only survive by circling high out of reach, but inevitably, without any effect whatsoever on the politics of government.
My advice to the environmentalists (or indeed to any faction without major $$$ lobbying power) is not to waste time on government and politics, and to put your resources into changing the world directly through your own actions. One tree planted by yourself is vastly more than you'll ever get your president or prime minister to do for your planet.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but there isn't a government on the planet with the slightest intention of modifying their political agendas to assist the planet in any way at all. (I'm not actually saying that they should, but merely pointing out that they are not.)
Very occasionally you hear a little pro-conservation posturing when it may help raise someone's fading political profile by a small amount, and occasionally grand gestures like Kyoto are organized, but you need to understand that all of these are just gestures, and they fade from the agenda the instant that they are over.
The problem is simply that politicians are by their very nature uncommitted to anything except their own electoral future. A hypothetical politician that is committed to doing good for others simply will not last within our first world's political systems, even if he or she manages to gain entrance once. The few that manage to stay become compromised --- "corrupted" may sound harsh but the label is not entirely inaccurate.
To those who are interested in (for example) reducing the amount of C02 that is accumulating in the atmosphere, I would suggest that a far more profitable avenue than relying on politicians is to actually do something about it directly: get into the forestry business, convert farms to high-CO2 consumption crops, promote, develop and market electric vehicles, and so on.
Relying on politicians is a dead loss. If you want something useful done, just do it.
This isn't the first time that a manager has felt himself becoming powerless by being cut out of the loop, and is now reacting badly. Shock horror, "his" teccies can now modify the code freely themselves, he is losing control, it's the ultimate catastrophe. :-)
Those that cannot do, manage. Those than cannot manage in the face of change, complain. Ignore him.
There really is no point in letting this kind of nonsense get to you, for two reasons.
The first reason is that it's false anyway and the world is full of people saying false things on purpose or simply because they are dumb. Wasting your time on either type is, well, simply a waste of time.
And the second reason is that the situation is self-correcting: those without the ability to see the value in our treasure chest will not benefit from it and hence will lag further and further behind until they themselves become extinct or irrelevant.
So, don't let their ramblings get to you, not even when phrased as mildly amusing parodies, in fact don't even bother acknowledging their existence, especially when they are just clueless PHBs as in this case. Those that cannot do, manage, and it sounds like Howard Strauss cannot even manage so he writes dumb opinion pieces. Ignore it.
Ah yes,socialized medicine is great, as long as you do not have to pay the price of research.
That's the kind of misinformation we often hear from the IP/investment-led corporate bullshit classes, but hopefully most technical people can see through it.
As an ex-researcher, let me tell you about research. Researchers do not develop ideas in a vacuum, and their pay packets do not magically transform into inventions. And the stuff from which ideas are made is not created by dumping invester's money into labs.
Ideas come when good researchers interact with other clever people working in that area across the world. In part it's interactive, but of vastly more significance is the continuous process of staying on top of the massive torrent of world literature, which is a treasure chest of untapped riches. It's a sea of ideas out there, with everyone's contributions pushing the wavefront of knowledge along just a little bit further. Sometimes just a quaint turn of phrase or even a linguistic mistake spurs a line of thought. How many dollars have been invested in one's lab figures far far down the lists of important contributions.
It's typical company bullshit to try to take all the credit for research done in a company's labs by one's paid employees. It just shows how most company people are totally clueless on how the scientific creative process works.
No matter how brilliant the person that records a new scientific discovery is, and no matter how much his company is paying him nor how many trillions they have spent on his lab, that idea arose only in very small part from his own work. 99% or more is a direct result of his standing on the shoulders of a world full of very bright people, and it's largely immaterial who delivers the final brushstroke.
You simply can't put a super hot P4 in an embedded environment.
I agree, but it goes further than that.
Actually, you can't sensibly put a super hot P4 into a normal home user PC either, but Intel and Microsoft haven't felt the heat because the hot potato has been dumped onto the laps of end users, and they've more or less coped with the problem.
However, with Xbox, the problem is in Microsoft's lap, and I bet that they have felt the heat. For a start, a hot CPU requires a fan, and fans are noisy in a lounge hifi environment. Hot CPUs also place a lower limit on size and therefore on cost of the console, so it's inevitable that x86 has had a detrimental effect on the Xbox balance sheet. You can tell just by lifting it up that the Xbox has had much more engineering put into it than is normal for loss-leading hardware in the games industry, and part of the reason for that will inevitably be heat management.
On that basis, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if X2 replaces x86 by G5 technology. Intel (and AMD) have simply lost the thread in their current direction. Ultimately, everything wants to be "embedded", and you can't embed things that run red hot.