I have been using SVN for couple of years on my current project (and I don't know how many years on other projects).
I started running GIT on the side in order to such changes from the open source components so I could make the open source changes available outside the proprietary project I get paid to work.
So I have SVN and GIT running side by side on a Windows system for work. I have a linux system that is used for the open source development outside of work.
Conclusion: SVN is way, way, way slower. On windows. Git is way, way, way faster than SVN, almost instantaneous. On Windows.
But I can't get the company to move to GIT. Why?
Maven integration. Maven doesn't talk to GIT.
JIRA integration. I don't think JIRA talks to GIT (but I haven't looked at it as much).
Eclipse Integration. Now this one I don't understand. But it matters to other people on the team.
GIT Downside: It took me a weekend to learn it. Stupid stuff setting up a repository on repo.or.cz, getting Putty to provide keys and crap. Nothing I can't document and make easy for someone else, but a pain in any event.
SVN Downside: It really is slow. Tortoise is a wonderful thing for Windows Integration. However, it remains true that one has to constantly clean one's trees, and we have spreadsheets in our project (don't ask! Please!) and Excel locks horns with SVN if you are not careful to kill Excel first, etc. etc.
I would like to use GIT. It is wonderful. But the issues above are killers at work.
On my own and for projects I manage, I will use GIT with a SVN publishing face for consumers.
The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.
The primary and universal purpose of an OS isn't to provide interfaces to hardware, abstractions, UI, or functionality. If that were so, how is it that the fundamental issue with Solaris brought up in this thread revolve around configuration issues?
The primary purpose of an OS is to support, maintain, and protect the configuration of a set of applications onto your hardware. Nobody cares *how* that happens (i.e. whether the functionality involved comes from the applications or from the OS).
Virtualization merely wraps up the functionality of an OS so that the OS and a set of applications can be deployed as something that looks like just another an application.
In that sense, virtualization makes the configuration problem easier. The applications only have to be configured into some standard OS image, and the OS that deploys the virtualization only has to manage the configuration of the "virtualized OS".
Solaris will succeed or fail in a domain such as the enterprise or desktop domains based on how well they solve the configuration issues in those domains.
Anyone that would complain about what Dr. Parr has contributed to the "compiler compiler" crowd simply hasn't tried to do work like this themselves. It is time consuming and draining to work on a project of this magnitude in addition to a job, and on top of that write decent documentation.
I couldn't quite get Antlr 2.0 to work for my Domain Specific Language application (a Decision Table based Rules Engine), and that mostly because digging through all the online documentation answered my questions at simply too slow a pace. So I did yet another Flex/CUP implementation.
But now with a book in hand, I am ready to give it another shot. I don't just appreciate Dr. Parr's efforts in putting together a book, I prefer them organized in this form.
$30 (including shipping) just isn't that much for my company to pay for a handy and effective reference.
In the article, the author scaled the performance based on the clock speed each time a comparison was made between chips with different clock speeds. This was mostly done in favor of the new Intel chips.
The problem is right there in the Author's analysis. For example:
"If you extrapolate the data, then the Yorkfield processor is really about 12-21% faster than the Kentsfield at the same clock speed. This is almost entirely due to the 50% larger cache in the Yorkfield processor. The very large 81% boost in DivX 6.6.1 is again mostly due to SSE4-optimized code in DivX."
But But But!!!! Changing the clock speed doesn't make the cache any bigger! You can't then assume a linear relationship between performance and clockspeed if the difference is primarily how long you are going to have to wait to fill the cache!
The article isn't too flawed. They give actual results. But do yourself a favor as you read the aritcle and completely discount any "extrapolation" done by the author to get "really" numbers. When comparing processors, the "really" numbers are always the hard cold facts, not the "I wish" numbers generated by speculating what would happen if you changed the processors in some way.
Sure, normal everyday people might not understand what a breadboard is, and might mistake it for a bomb. But the people that didn't understand what a breadboard is (a block of plastic used to prototype circuits), the people that couldn't understand that to make a bomb you would need to hook the circuit TO something, the people that couldn't see the difference between paint and putty were....
Wait for it.... The people were....
The ones that couldn't look at this and figure it out, were....
The ones with the guns were....
THE PEOPLE WE HAVE SUPPOSEDLY TRAINED TO RECOGNIZE THIS STUFF AND PROTECT THE REST OF US FROM THIS!!!!
And they are going to charge this girl with a crime because they can't figure out what a bread board is by just looking at it!
I am often amazed when people claim you can't legislate morality...
The only reasonable laws are moral laws. Where laws are nothing but arbitrary, then they are not moral and thus are not just.
What most people mean when they say this is that legislation cannot be used to define morality. In other words, many immoral behaviors (lying, cheating at cards, being mean, being a jerk, etc. etc. etc.) will always be legal. The set of behaviors allowed by law will never be the same as the set of moral behaviors.
Computer control of cars will occur. It will get to the point that what we do when we "drive" is instruct the computer where we wish to go.
Central control? Only to the same extent that your desktop is "centrally controlled". Cars will be able to navigate completely on their own. This is mandated by the fact that navigation decisions to adjust course, avoid accidents, etc. are too time critical to be done remotely. Gross routing can be done over a network, but this simply points out how many additional data points an automated system can factor into decisions when compared to people.
The automated car can use infrared sensors that detect deer, moose, dogs, etc. Maybe even video to detect and avoid hitting endangered species. People can't do that.
Even the most skilled driver can be killed by a drunk. An automated vehicle protects everyone else from the drunk, i.e. it can effectively enforce rules like "no driving head on into the oncoming station wagon". If the drunk is in a non-automated vehicle, the automated car may be more effective at recognizing the risk and avoiding them. Automated vehicles never get tired, bored, or distracted, and can monitor any number of inputs to help make such decisions.
I suspect at some point we will see a series of tests in simulation proving that an automated vehicle can avoid accidents and fatalities that no human can avoid. And I'd like to be able to claim that the reason I long for the day of automated cars is that the 40,000 people killed per year on American highways have to be addressed.
However, if the truth be known, what I really want is to take a nap now and then on long car trips.
VMWare forces one to ask, "What exactly is an OS?" I sort of know what an application is (it looks like a word processor or a video game), and I know what a storage system is (it looks like a file system or a database), and I know what a UI is (it looks like Windows, or Swing, or XWindows).
But when I can take an entire configuration of a computer and pack it up with a virtual machine like VMWare and deploy it in a lump.... Where is the OS? Didn't I just convert the whole OS/Application/Storage think into just another application?
Isn't that exactly what MS is afraid of, Vista is just another application?
An Operating System today doesn't really exist as a unique computational concept. It is simply another way to package software libraries (and all the UI support) and make all this code available to applications to use. There is certainly a component of the OS that provides the interfaces between programs and the hardware, but!!! what VMWare demonstrates is that managing the hardware interfaces is a pretty trivial part of today's Operating Systems.
What bothers MS but what most folks don't realize is that VMWare provides us a preview of the future of Operating Systems: Just do the hardware support job, and leave the rest to whatever approach the developer wants to take to build and configure their application.
The power to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is to pull all the software libraries out of the OS and package them together in the application. This is radical because all the Software types and everything we have learned has told us that we can abstract all the problems of programming into some other space where "everything becomes easy". If you have "the right" OS with the "right" framework, and everyone follows "the plan", then configuration problems don't happen, viruses don't happen, and the sun shines brightly on us all!!
The real world has been pretty rough on such dreams.
Instead, we need mechanisms to configure and deploy components in a reliable fashion to a number of systems. Those systems need to have what they need. That is what VMWare does without restricting developers to one vendor or one approach. And as our computers begin to have dozens if not hundreds of independent cores, we are going to start doing such deployments within a single machine right there on the desktop/laptop.
The future isn't with Operating Systems. The future is Configuration Systems.
And VMWare is closer to the future than Microsoft.
Re:The Amiga was a quantum leap for computers
on
AmigaOS 4
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
What do you *REALLY* have to do to leap over the current OS approach?
Toss the OS. It is just a stupid way to distribute software libraries anyway. Instead, build a "Configuration System" that knows how to build virtual systems, configure them to talk to each other, and deploy them.
This is what we are ultimately going to need anyway. What use is an "OS" when the typical computer system will have many independent Cores (or CPUs or whatever you want to call them) each with plenty of memory and plenty of bandwidth to some sort of persistant storage. Such a system will easily support a number of Linux deployments, a few BSD deployments, a few Amiga deployments (maybe under immulation), XP, Mac, etc. etc.
We do this now for web applications. You deploy a database, a few appliction servers, some web servers, some firewalls, toss in some systems for load balancing and failover. This stuff takes people weeks and sometimes months to configure.
So how are we going to configure and deploy all this crap in the future? The best idea is to build complete descriptions of virtual machines. If the developer wants to develop "on Linux" or "on Windows" go ahead. Then generate the virtual machine and ship it.
If I have to call Microsoft over another activation problem
Why should I as a business owner or shareholder spend my money to do a task whose result isn't a benefit to the business, but to some other company from whom I bought a product? In other words, when a business pays someone to solve an "activation" problem, they have paid someone to insure that Microsoft was paid. The business receives no benefit, but they are out the money anyway.
When Microsoft pours money into research on how to develop technologies that seek to avoid theft of their product, that is fine until part of their solution increases the cost of ownership. When Microsoft pours money into "securing digital rights", that's fine until part of their solution increases the cost of access to content.
Microsoft and others are struggling to survive in a future where computers have nearly unlimited disk space, increasing numbers of processors, vast memory spaces, and high bandwidth to other computers. Very soon we should be able to run multiple operating systems on a single computer at the same time. Running on virtual machines will be the norm, if for no other reason than to allow applications the freedom they need to run and not step on each other or get killed by viruses and compromised by spyware.
Everyone would be impressed if Microsoft was embracing this future and working to leverage all this power for the sake of the user. Instead, Microsoft appears to be working late into the night doing everything they can to insure each day dawns according to the same old paradigms that made them billions in the past.
Sony should not be considered some kind of open minded hero company. They defended not the consumers, but their right to sell video recorders. And they did so before they had any interest in Media.
Who knows what today's Sony would do. They Likely look at the dollars and go where the money is from their current persective. It might not be on the recorder (and consumer) side today.
Sony does lots of really stupid things, like require you to pay for drivers for cameras and computers you have already purchased, if you are so silly as to misplace your CDs. Sony only aims for the buck, and nothing more.
One wonders if the methods of this paper err in assumptions about the types of content being indexed. If the increase in pages indexed by Yahoo is due to formal, published content, or non-English content, or (pick an option), then it might not translate into more hits given obscure word combinations. That is because the additional content isn't a random selection of possible web pages.
I find it difficult to believe that those examining this patent failed to realize that XML is the child of SGML (ISO 8879), a data format whose purpose was structure documents for easy algorithmic manipulation, and whose development was funded largely by public funds. From the W3C:
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web.
You can continue to own the piece of stock... As I do in one company whose shares now trade at about 7 cents a share (down from the $1.90 where I bought it).
As for housing prices... I sold a house in Austin after the bust and had to *pay* about 30K out of pocket to do so. At least with the stock, I still have $25 dollars in "value" should I decide to get out.
The only way to "back up" execution is to save your state as you go. In Computational Theory, this amounts to the fact that, given a particular UTM in a particular state (state, position on the tape, values on the tape) an infinite number of UTMs exist which, at some point in their execution, arrive at a state equal to that particular state. (we leave the proof to the reader)
Thus the only way to "back up" computation is to know the past of that machine, i.e. a state log of the execution of the program.
BTW, I wrote a Rules Engine for the State of Texas and the Texas TIERS project. I logged each state change as the decision tables are executed, and then wrote a tool that uses this log to wind forward and backward the state of the rules engine. This does exactly for policy what these guys are claiming for program development.
I provided a tree view of the execution through the decision tables, and a state view that allows you to "jump" to the the place in execution where a particular variable was last set (from the perspective of where you happen to be in the execution of your program). I'd expect they also provide such features.
Execution logs (especially very complete logs) are make the implementation of very wonderful and magical debugging tools possible.
BTW, I don't know if they have attempted to patent the use of execution logs in the implemenation of such tools, but if so my TIERS work is quite clearly documented in a Federal/state project, and clearly uses these techniques and dates back to 2002 or so. I've used the technique to do this far before that, but I'm not sure if it is publicly documented.
Harvard and ApplyYourself were required to honor that stipulation... Posting the information to the applicant's account, even if no link was yet available, is the fault of Harvard, not the applicant.
What are they to do if their letter arrives a day early? Sit and wait till the notification date?
The ethics being taught by Harvard here is the typical Business ethics we see in the papers... If you err, blame someone else , independent of the damage that might do to them, because you are more more important then them.
Now you have got to be kidding. That fact that there is a process that is kept private and that the school will notify aplicants at a certain time certainly does implicity imply that you should not know the outcome until they notify you.
Now that is hogwash. Whose responsiblity is it to keep the process private, and to respect the notification dates? Is this the responsiblity of the student, or of ApplyYourself and Harvard? The fact that some information was incompletely published, and this fact was discovered points to a failure of the processes used by Harvard and ApplyYourself, not an ethical lapse of the applicants.
So by your example, if someone induces another to divulge that information, then that is unethical, but because that same person induced a computer to do divulge that information, that is not unethical?
I would note that it is common practice to edit URLs in the navigation of the web. There is nothing about such navigation which is unethical. The applicants didn't "induce" the computers to publish this information... It was already published by ApplyYourself.
I have not yet heard that Harvard will no longer use ApplyYourself, the actual guilty party.
This isn't about ethics, it is about redirecting blame.
Re:Biologists and Psychologists Abuse this...
on
Digital Biology
·
· Score: 1
Tired of the comparisons? You should be, for the very reasons you sight. There *are* comparisons, but they have been missed by almost everyone, biologists and programmers alike.
DNA isn't code, because DNA doesn't *do* anything. DNA defines the total set of processes that can be expressed in a cell for an organism. This can be seen by the fact that the roughly 200 cell types in a human only express 10 percent or less of the available DNA.
Thus DNA is the definitions avaiable for a system. Just like that pile of installation disks that an MIS department holds for configuring a computer system.
When DNA is expressed, it results in RNA (to really simplify the transcription process). RNA is the "program store" for a cell. RNA defines the processes that are active in a cell. This isn't at all unlike the programs you have installed on your computer system. What processes a cell will perform and its configuration is driven by the particular genes that have been expressed (copied into RNA) for that cell. These are selected in such a way that the cell can effectively perform its role.
Yet actually carrying out these processes requires yet another step, the translation of RNA into the proteins that drive biological processes. Just like loading a program into memory and executing it is required to have something happen in a computer, building proteins is required to make a process occur in a cell.
A program store serves a very useful purpose. Both in computer systems and biological cells, it allows a cell to be instantly ready to perform the tasks required of it. If another protein is needed, the RNA is ready and able to translate another copy. Or on a computer system, if you need to run that spreadsheet, that program is ready to be load another copy in to memory for your use.
The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology states:
DNA -> RNA -> Proteins
More generally, this can be understood as:
definition -> expression -> function
What we need to learn to do in computer systems is understand how the architecture in biological systems results in self configuring distributed processes. We can do it the hard way (where we fight the mechanical metaphors such that every positive step to more configurable computer systems requires a non-intutive step against the mechanical metaphor), or we can do it the easy way (where we recognize that biological systems have already *solved* the configuration and distribution problems).
The really amazing thing to me about biological systems and computer systems is how long this simple observation has escaped everyone. The mixed-up metaphors (like Microsoft's DNA) are simply painful.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why we keep shooting it up into space on satellites.... It hopes to get back into contact with Xenu and the Galactic Confederacy!
I have been using SVN for couple of years on my current project (and I don't know how many years on other projects).
I started running GIT on the side in order to such changes from the open source components so I could make the open source changes available outside the proprietary project I get paid to work.
So I have SVN and GIT running side by side on a Windows system for work. I have a linux system that is used for the open source development outside of work.
Conclusion: SVN is way, way, way slower. On windows. Git is way, way, way faster than SVN, almost instantaneous. On Windows.
But I can't get the company to move to GIT. Why?
Maven integration. Maven doesn't talk to GIT.
JIRA integration. I don't think JIRA talks to GIT (but I haven't looked at it as much).
Eclipse Integration. Now this one I don't understand. But it matters to other people on the team.
GIT Downside: It took me a weekend to learn it. Stupid stuff setting up a repository on repo.or.cz, getting Putty to provide keys and crap. Nothing I can't document and make easy for someone else, but a pain in any event.
SVN Downside: It really is slow. Tortoise is a wonderful thing for Windows Integration. However, it remains true that one has to constantly clean one's trees, and we have spreadsheets in our project (don't ask! Please!) and Excel locks horns with SVN if you are not careful to kill Excel first, etc. etc.
I would like to use GIT. It is wonderful. But the issues above are killers at work.
On my own and for projects I manage, I will use GIT with a SVN publishing face for consumers.
If that ever happens.
The purpose of the operating system is to act between the hardware, system abstractions, and the algorithms. But now that virtualization is taking over, the hardware responsibility of OSes is being minimized -- or centralized. Therefore, the advantages of one hardware platform can be more easily decoupled from those of an OS.
The primary and universal purpose of an OS isn't to provide interfaces to hardware, abstractions, UI, or functionality. If that were so, how is it that the fundamental issue with Solaris brought up in this thread revolve around configuration issues?
The primary purpose of an OS is to support, maintain, and protect the configuration of a set of applications onto your hardware. Nobody cares *how* that happens (i.e. whether the functionality involved comes from the applications or from the OS).
Virtualization merely wraps up the functionality of an OS so that the OS and a set of applications can be deployed as something that looks like just another an application.
In that sense, virtualization makes the configuration problem easier. The applications only have to be configured into some standard OS image, and the OS that deploys the virtualization only has to manage the configuration of the "virtualized OS".
Solaris will succeed or fail in a domain such as the enterprise or desktop domains based on how well they solve the configuration issues in those domains.
No different than any other OS.
Anyone that would complain about what Dr. Parr has contributed to the "compiler compiler" crowd simply hasn't tried to do work like this themselves. It is time consuming and draining to work on a project of this magnitude in addition to a job, and on top of that write decent documentation.
I couldn't quite get Antlr 2.0 to work for my Domain Specific Language application (a Decision Table based Rules Engine), and that mostly because digging through all the online documentation answered my questions at simply too slow a pace. So I did yet another Flex/CUP implementation.
But now with a book in hand, I am ready to give it another shot. I don't just appreciate Dr. Parr's efforts in putting together a book, I prefer them organized in this form.
$30 (including shipping) just isn't that much for my company to pay for a handy and effective reference.
In the article, the author scaled the performance based on the clock speed each time a comparison was made between chips with different clock speeds. This was mostly done in favor of the new Intel chips.
The problem is right there in the Author's analysis. For example:
"If you extrapolate the data, then the Yorkfield processor is really about 12-21% faster than the Kentsfield at the same clock speed. This is almost entirely due to the 50% larger cache in the Yorkfield processor. The very large 81% boost in DivX 6.6.1 is again mostly due to SSE4-optimized code in DivX."
But But But!!!! Changing the clock speed doesn't make the cache any bigger! You can't then assume a linear relationship between performance and clockspeed if the difference is primarily how long you are going to have to wait to fill the cache!
The article isn't too flawed. They give actual results. But do yourself a favor as you read the aritcle and completely discount any "extrapolation" done by the author to get "really" numbers. When comparing processors, the "really" numbers are always the hard cold facts, not the "I wish" numbers generated by speculating what would happen if you changed the processors in some way.
Sure, normal everyday people might not understand what a breadboard is, and might mistake it for a bomb. But the people that didn't understand what a breadboard is (a block of plastic used to prototype circuits), the people that couldn't understand that to make a bomb you would need to hook the circuit TO something, the people that couldn't see the difference between paint and putty were....
Wait for it.... The people were....
The ones that couldn't look at this and figure it out, were....
The ones with the guns were....
THE PEOPLE WE HAVE SUPPOSEDLY TRAINED TO RECOGNIZE THIS STUFF AND PROTECT THE REST OF US FROM THIS!!!!
And they are going to charge this girl with a crime because they can't figure out what a bread board is by just looking at it!
This is so wrong!
I am often amazed when people claim you can't legislate morality...
The only reasonable laws are moral laws. Where laws are nothing but arbitrary, then they are not moral and thus are not just.
What most people mean when they say this is that legislation cannot be used to define morality. In other words, many immoral behaviors (lying, cheating at cards, being mean, being a jerk, etc. etc. etc.) will always be legal. The set of behaviors allowed by law will never be the same as the set of moral behaviors.
Computer control of cars will occur. It will get to the point that what we do when we "drive" is instruct the computer where we wish to go.
Central control? Only to the same extent that your desktop is "centrally controlled". Cars will be able to navigate completely on their own. This is mandated by the fact that navigation decisions to adjust course, avoid accidents, etc. are too time critical to be done remotely. Gross routing can be done over a network, but this simply points out how many additional data points an automated system can factor into decisions when compared to people.
The automated car can use infrared sensors that detect deer, moose, dogs, etc. Maybe even video to detect and avoid hitting endangered species. People can't do that.
Even the most skilled driver can be killed by a drunk. An automated vehicle protects everyone else from the drunk, i.e. it can effectively enforce rules like "no driving head on into the oncoming station wagon". If the drunk is in a non-automated vehicle, the automated car may be more effective at recognizing the risk and avoiding them. Automated vehicles never get tired, bored, or distracted, and can monitor any number of inputs to help make such decisions.
I suspect at some point we will see a series of tests in simulation proving that an automated vehicle can avoid accidents and fatalities that no human can avoid. And I'd like to be able to claim that the reason I long for the day of automated cars is that the 40,000 people killed per year on American highways have to be addressed.
However, if the truth be known, what I really want is to take a nap now and then on long car trips.
VMWare forces one to ask, "What exactly is an OS?" I sort of know what an application is (it looks like a word processor or a video game), and I know what a storage system is (it looks like a file system or a database), and I know what a UI is (it looks like Windows, or Swing, or XWindows).
But when I can take an entire configuration of a computer and pack it up with a virtual machine like VMWare and deploy it in a lump.... Where is the OS? Didn't I just convert the whole OS/Application/Storage think into just another application?
Isn't that exactly what MS is afraid of, Vista is just another application?
An Operating System today doesn't really exist as a unique computational concept. It is simply another way to package software libraries (and all the UI support) and make all this code available to applications to use. There is certainly a component of the OS that provides the interfaces between programs and the hardware, but!!! what VMWare demonstrates is that managing the hardware interfaces is a pretty trivial part of today's Operating Systems.
What bothers MS but what most folks don't realize is that VMWare provides us a preview of the future of Operating Systems: Just do the hardware support job, and leave the rest to whatever approach the developer wants to take to build and configure their application.
The power to reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is to pull all the software libraries out of the OS and package them together in the application. This is radical because all the Software types and everything we have learned has told us that we can abstract all the problems of programming into some other space where "everything becomes easy". If you have "the right" OS with the "right" framework, and everyone follows "the plan", then configuration problems don't happen, viruses don't happen, and the sun shines brightly on us all!!
The real world has been pretty rough on such dreams.
Instead, we need mechanisms to configure and deploy components in a reliable fashion to a number of systems. Those systems need to have what they need. That is what VMWare does without restricting developers to one vendor or one approach. And as our computers begin to have dozens if not hundreds of independent cores, we are going to start doing such deployments within a single machine right there on the desktop/laptop.
The future isn't with Operating Systems. The future is Configuration Systems.
And VMWare is closer to the future than Microsoft.
14th century? Islam was established in roughly 630 AD.
http://www.religionfacts.com/islam/timeline.htm
What do you *REALLY* have to do to leap over the current OS approach?
Toss the OS. It is just a stupid way to distribute software libraries anyway. Instead, build a "Configuration System" that knows how to build virtual systems, configure them to talk to each other, and deploy them.
This is what we are ultimately going to need anyway. What use is an "OS" when the typical computer system will have many independent Cores (or CPUs or whatever you want to call them) each with plenty of memory and plenty of bandwidth to some sort of persistant storage. Such a system will easily support a number of Linux deployments, a few BSD deployments, a few Amiga deployments (maybe under immulation), XP, Mac, etc. etc.
We do this now for web applications. You deploy a database, a few appliction servers, some web servers, some firewalls, toss in some systems for load balancing and failover. This stuff takes people weeks and sometimes months to configure.
So how are we going to configure and deploy all this crap in the future? The best idea is to build complete descriptions of virtual machines. If the developer wants to develop "on Linux" or "on Windows" go ahead. Then generate the virtual machine and ship it.
If I have to call Microsoft over another activation problem
Why should I as a business owner or shareholder spend my money to do a task whose result isn't a benefit to the business, but to some other company from whom I bought a product? In other words, when a business pays someone to solve an "activation" problem, they have paid someone to insure that Microsoft was paid. The business receives no benefit, but they are out the money anyway.
When Microsoft pours money into research on how to develop technologies that seek to avoid theft of their product, that is fine until part of their solution increases the cost of ownership. When Microsoft pours money into "securing digital rights", that's fine until part of their solution increases the cost of access to content.
Microsoft and others are struggling to survive in a future where computers have nearly unlimited disk space, increasing numbers of processors, vast memory spaces, and high bandwidth to other computers. Very soon we should be able to run multiple operating systems on a single computer at the same time. Running on virtual machines will be the norm, if for no other reason than to allow applications the freedom they need to run and not step on each other or get killed by viruses and compromised by spyware.
Everyone would be impressed if Microsoft was embracing this future and working to leverage all this power for the sake of the user. Instead, Microsoft appears to be working late into the night doing everything they can to insure each day dawns according to the same old paradigms that made them billions in the past.
Sony should not be considered some kind of open minded hero company. They defended not the consumers, but their right to sell video recorders. And they did so before they had any interest in Media.
Who knows what today's Sony would do. They Likely look at the dollars and go where the money is from their current persective. It might not be on the recorder (and consumer) side today.
Sony does lots of really stupid things, like require you to pay for drivers for cameras and computers you have already purchased, if you are so silly as to misplace your CDs. Sony only aims for the buck, and nothing more.
www.googlefight.com
Yahoo wins, 295,000,000 to 270,000,000
Oddly, a manual Yahoo search yeilds:
Yahoo wins, 866,000,000 to 473,000,000
One wonders if the methods of this paper err in assumptions about the types of content being indexed. If the increase in pages indexed by Yahoo is due to formal, published content, or non-English content, or (pick an option), then it might not translate into more hits given obscure word combinations. That is because the additional content isn't a random selection of possible web pages.
Just a thought.
I do lots of video editing... My typical source file size is about 3 gig, and the output is generally the same.
I'm guessing a pair of these puppies would vastly improve the performance of generating transistions, filtering video, etc.
I find it difficult to believe that those examining this patent failed to realize that XML is the child of SGML (ISO 8879), a data format whose purpose was structure documents for easy algorithmic manipulation, and whose development was funded largely by public funds. From the W3C:
The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web.
http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity
You can continue to own the piece of stock... As I do in one company whose shares now trade at about 7 cents a share (down from the $1.90 where I bought it).
As for housing prices... I sold a house in Austin after the bust and had to *pay* about 30K out of pocket to do so. At least with the stock, I still have $25 dollars in "value" should I decide to get out.
Investments all have their risks.
The only way to "back up" execution is to save your state as you go. In Computational Theory, this amounts to the fact that, given a particular UTM in a particular state (state, position on the tape, values on the tape) an infinite number of UTMs exist which, at some point in their execution, arrive at a state equal to that particular state. (we leave the proof to the reader)
Thus the only way to "back up" computation is to know the past of that machine, i.e. a state log of the execution of the program.
BTW, I wrote a Rules Engine for the State of Texas and the Texas TIERS project. I logged each state change as the decision tables are executed, and then wrote a tool that uses this log to wind forward and backward the state of the rules engine. This does exactly for policy what these guys are claiming for program development.
I provided a tree view of the execution through the decision tables, and a state view that allows you to "jump" to the the place in execution where a particular variable was last set (from the perspective of where you happen to be in the execution of your program). I'd expect they also provide such features.
Execution logs (especially very complete logs) are make the implementation of very wonderful and magical debugging tools possible.
BTW, I don't know if they have attempted to patent the use of execution logs in the implemenation of such tools, but if so my TIERS work is quite clearly documented in a Federal/state project, and clearly uses these techniques and dates back to 2002 or so. I've used the technique to do this far before that, but I'm not sure if it is publicly documented.
Paul
Harvard and ApplyYourself were required to honor that stipulation... Posting the information to the applicant's account, even if no link was yet available, is the fault of Harvard, not the applicant. What are they to do if their letter arrives a day early? Sit and wait till the notification date? The ethics being taught by Harvard here is the typical Business ethics we see in the papers... If you err, blame someone else , independent of the damage that might do to them, because you are more more important then them.
Now you have got to be kidding. That fact that there is a process that is kept private and that the school will notify aplicants at a certain time certainly does implicity imply that you should not know the outcome until they notify you.
Now that is hogwash. Whose responsiblity is it to keep the process private, and to respect the notification dates? Is this the responsiblity of the student, or of ApplyYourself and Harvard? The fact that some information was incompletely published, and this fact was discovered points to a failure of the processes used by Harvard and ApplyYourself, not an ethical lapse of the applicants.
So by your example, if someone induces another to divulge that information, then that is unethical, but because that same person induced a computer to do divulge that information, that is not unethical?
I would note that it is common practice to edit URLs in the navigation of the web. There is nothing about such navigation which is unethical. The applicants didn't "induce" the computers to publish this information... It was already published by ApplyYourself.
I have not yet heard that Harvard will no longer use ApplyYourself, the actual guilty party.
This isn't about ethics, it is about redirecting blame.
Tired of the comparisons? You should be, for the very reasons you sight. There *are* comparisons, but they have been missed by almost everyone, biologists and programmers alike.
e netics
DNA isn't code, because DNA doesn't *do* anything. DNA defines the total set of processes that can be expressed in a cell for an organism. This can be seen by the fact that the roughly 200 cell types in a human only express 10 percent or less of the available DNA.
Thus DNA is the definitions avaiable for a system. Just like that pile of installation disks that an MIS department holds for configuring a computer system.
When DNA is expressed, it results in RNA (to really simplify the transcription process). RNA is the "program store" for a cell. RNA defines the processes that are active in a cell. This isn't at all unlike the programs you have installed on your computer system. What processes a cell will perform and its configuration is driven by the particular genes that have been expressed (copied into RNA) for that cell. These are selected in such a way that the cell can effectively perform its role.
Yet actually carrying out these processes requires yet another step, the translation of RNA into the proteins that drive biological processes. Just like loading a program into memory and executing it is required to have something happen in a computer, building proteins is required to make a process occur in a cell.
A program store serves a very useful purpose. Both in computer systems and biological cells, it allows a cell to be instantly ready to perform the tasks required of it. If another protein is needed, the RNA is ready and able to translate another copy. Or on a computer system, if you need to run that spreadsheet, that program is ready to be load another copy in to memory for your use.
The Central Dogma of Molecular Biology states:
DNA -> RNA -> Proteins
More generally, this can be understood as:
definition -> expression -> function
What we need to learn to do in computer systems is understand how the architecture in biological systems results in self configuring distributed processes. We can do it the hard way (where we fight the mechanical metaphors such that every positive step to more configurable computer systems requires a non-intutive step against the mechanical metaphor), or we can do it the easy way (where we recognize that biological systems have already *solved* the configuration and distribution problems).
The really amazing thing to me about biological systems and computer systems is how long this simple observation has escaped everyone. The mixed-up metaphors (like Microsoft's DNA) are simply painful.
--Paul
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SoftwareG