Massively parallel software development will move towards the mainstream as CPUs with 4 or more cores start to become mainstream. Inherently parallel languages such as system C intended for hardware design (and never really took off in this arena) may garner a second life as a way to reuse C/C++ libraries in environments with large numbers of processor cores running in parallel. Software engineers will eventually have to wrap their brain around the concepts found in HDL languages such as Verilog/VHDL whee everything is assumed to happen in parallel, with program state changes at defined synchronization/clock intervals.
By coincidence I recently gave a copy of the latest (6.10) Ubantu to a hardware engineer at work who wanted to give Linux a spin. This is a guy who wants it to "just work" and not fiddle with scripts or anything. Today he told me that he ran into problems with his Sympatico internet connection. I was rather surprised - I had PPPoE working under Linux, a long time ago (Late 1999? I wrote a YaST script for a user mode implementation) albeit with a long more difficulty. Another HW guy at work was willing to try out Linux, so this time I gave him a SuSE 10.1 DVD to try instead. (This is what I run on my basement server and firewall) I will find out how he manages sometime later this week.
Stuff like that gives new users a very bad experience. First and foremost, stuff has to work out of the box. Secondly, there has to be solid, high quality software available that does what you want it to, and it has to install and upgrade with minimal effort and mucking about.
It is strangely ironic that if alien visitors show up in 100K years, the most obvious evidence of our presence will be the Apollo landing sites, and the battered remains of satellites in geostationary orbit. LEO satellites will long since have spiralled in and burned up. The stuff we sent to mars would be long buried in the blowing sand. The chance of ET running across one of our interstellar probes would be about one in a google or so. Space is just too big.
I think the species will probably split, but not in the way he thinks. (Assuming we don't wipe ourselves out of existance which is highly likley, but that is another thread)
Humans will evolve to live in the sea, and with the pressure and gravity difference of other worlds. We will adapt and evolve as our environments dictate, and if technology eventually permits we will actually rewrite our own genetic code to suit our whims.
I am probably going to get flamed to a crisp for this, but what the heck, I have karma to burn...
If Linus continues to dig in and refuses to accept GPLV3 with its anti-DRM provisions, what is is for the linux developers who truly want to move to a GPL V3 model to contribute the fruits of their labour to a GPLV3 fork of the kernel. (Freenix anybody?) Note that they wouldn't have to stop contributing to Linux, they can dual licence as GPL V2/V3 for as long as they wish.
Actually the linux kernel could be forked from the existing code base licenced as GPLV2 with ongoing contributions to the new kernel licenced as GPLV3. Users would be bound by the terms of both licences, which would default to the more restrictive GPLV3 unless they took the time to strip out all of the newly contributed GPLV3 code. Support for DRMed media and hardware would done through clean room design, and hosted from servers in DMCA free countries. Does DVD Jon have some friends and a bit of spare bandwidth?
I really love linux, use it in my home servers and would use it on my desktop if I wasn't doing contract windows development as well. But I disagree with Linus's stand on DRM and the proposed GPLV3. RMS is an arrogant pain in the butt, but in this he is dead right. I like where GPLV3 is going, but we need to build a full featured OS around it.
So what happens if a majority (not necessarily 100%) decide that future contributions to the kernel shall be under GPLv3? Or if they forked the kernel the way XF86 became X.org? The current kernel would be grandfathered as GPLv2, but any new code contributions would be GPLv3. The result would be a kernel that has some code licenced under GPLv2 and increasing amounts under GPLv3, and unless the recipient is willing to strip out the GPLv3 stuff, (an increasingly difficult and impractical task) they would be subject to the restrictions of both licences. This would make it subject to the more restrictive GPLv3 by default. Code with multiple licences are not at all unusual, early versions of Windows had a lot of BSD stuff. Eventually the GPLv2 stuff would be written out and the kernel would be entirely GPLv3.
I have already spoken with two members of Parliament and raised this issue with people I work with. But I feel helpless to stop the numbnuts running the show south of the border, and once it passes there, the rest of the world will be pressured to "harmonize" or we will be stuck with US-legal crippled consumer electronics in our stores.
I spoke with him and a fellow cabinet minister in person yesterday about C-60, and let them both know my concerns about the bill. Face time is worth a dozen letters.
There was a time when I put tried to save every cent I could - pay down the mortgage, maximize my retirement savings, etc. So what happened? An expensive divorce from a rather greedy ex-wife and most of my savings were depleted. (I was within 2 years of being completely mortgage free at the time) Now I take a more fatalistic attitute - work hard, but live more for today and try to let tomorrow take care of itself, because I may not be around to see it. (I am a type 1 diabetic, which cuts my life expectancy by an average of 15 years anyway) If you die with a million dollars in the bank, you don't get to spend it in the afterlife.
This seems like a deliberate attempt to force obsolesence, since there is no technical reason why they would have to downgrade the signal coming from the analog output.
Why didn't he go with a multi-core motherboard? This seems like a good application for a multicore/multi CPU motherboard, (with a lower per CPU clock) and it would run a lot cooler than a high GHz single core.
I remember the doctor even refused to stop blowing smoke in his patients face! I guess that also falls under smoker's "rights"? When somebody does that to me, I am half tempted to fart in their face or urinate on them - assuming they enjoy my wearing my bodily waste as much as I enjoy breathing theirs, but I digress...
Next season comes the pro-drunk driving messages. Maybe one episode will have the pilots playing chicken or competing to see who can land their fighers on deck after slugging back insane amounts of alcohol.
Maybe the real message here is that we are being out evolved by the Cylons, and that they are just accelerating the process by wiping humanity out. Aside from that I do enjoy the show, although I am really still suffering from B5 withdrawl.
I thought it would stink when I read about the changes they had made to the original such as making Starbuck a woman, but it has turned out to be pretty good overall. There are a few things I wish they hadn't changed. There was something I like about those polished chrome Cylons, and the old fighters. (Both Cylon and Colonia)
And after watching the original series again for the first time in over 20 years, it wasn't nearly as good as I remember - even the first season before it started going south. (I won't even mention Galactica 1980) I was only 12 or so at the time the originals came out, so my standards in entertainment were probably lower. On a negative note, I would swear both original and new series must have been sponsored by a tobacco company.
I hope next season will be still showing on weekends in HD.
I wonder when the six million dollar man remake comes out?
The problem can exist for any drivers that operate under kernel mode, which is unfortunately true for Linux as well. Fortunately, while Linux supports fewer devices than windows and the functionality is often more spartan, (i.e. 3D graphics cards) we are fortunate that they don't make it into the kernel until the are solid.
The BSD zealots have a point here - it is more secure to have all drivers run in separate sandboxes, so a borked driver won't bring down the whole OS.
for digitizing my parents 8mm home movies without Hollywood's consent?
Sorry, but I find Life south of the border is getting loonier by the minute. Please remind me who won the cold war? I think Stalin is laughing in his grave.
Unless they have a CYA in the EULA, (and they probably do) like that used in spyware, adware and other "phone home" software. Which is why I would not let the kids install that ATRAK crap on the PC.
Ironically, I would actually feel safer downloading my music from Kazaa.
Quite an interesting tour - when the military decided they didn't need it anymore, they initially put it up for sale. One of the only bidders was the Hell's angels - it would have been fun to watch the RCMP try to conduct a drug raid on a facility designed to resist a nuclear attack.
Eventually the local townsfolk in Carp Ontario decided it would make an interesting museum, and I was one of the first to tour it.
Here in Canada, it is only illegal if it can be seen from outside the vehicle. Which this essentially means is it's ok, as long as you don't get caught!
I didn't know that I was somehow obligated to purchase a particular game for my kids, just cause they asked for it once. I guess saying no occasionally qualifies me as a tyrant. Does failing to cough up the requisite $50 per month for each of them to play Everquest instead of doing homework qualifies as a human rights violation?
BTW, I said "try" because BNet.D is still hosted on servers in the other 98% of the world that was smart enough not to follow the US in enact the DMCA. (Including mine) I know my member of parliament quite well, and I made sure he was aware of my concerns when the government proposed changes to our copyright laws. I have a letter from him assuring me that the doctrine of fair use still exists in this country, and will continue to do so.
I am sorry for this pettiness, but not too surprised. GMs can become "little Hitlers" who relish in their power, much like the shift manager in the local burger joint who gets off on bullying the wage slave high school students.
Besides, how do you think the BNet.d creators feel after Blizzard tried to screw them out of their hard work?
I enjoyed Starcraft and Diablo 1/2, but I am not buying the kids another Blizzard game until they soften their policies. Besides, I get more work done without these crack-addiction games anyway.
When people went looking for pictures from the Mars Pathfinder project, many instinctively to nasa.com instead of nasa.gov
At the time, nasa.com was a porn site, so visitors got quite an eyeful. The real NASA invoked some government edict from the 1960s that stated the acronymn NASA was reserved for use by their agency, and were able to unseat them. Yet when I go to nasa.com today, I find some sort of private detective agency, I am not sure what happened in the meantime...
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Massively parallel software development will move towards the mainstream as CPUs with 4 or more cores start to become mainstream. Inherently parallel languages such as system C intended for hardware design (and never really took off in this arena) may garner a second life as a way to reuse C/C++ libraries in environments with large numbers of processor cores running in parallel. Software engineers will eventually have to wrap their brain around the concepts found in HDL languages such as Verilog/VHDL whee everything is assumed to happen in parallel, with program state changes at defined synchronization/clock intervals.
By coincidence I recently gave a copy of the latest (6.10) Ubantu to a hardware engineer at work who wanted to give Linux a spin. This is a guy who wants it to "just work" and not fiddle with scripts or anything. Today he told me that he ran into problems with his Sympatico internet connection. I was rather surprised - I had PPPoE working under Linux, a long time ago (Late 1999? I wrote a YaST script for a user mode implementation) albeit with a long more difficulty. Another HW guy at work was willing to try out Linux, so this time I gave him a SuSE 10.1 DVD to try instead. (This is what I run on my basement server and firewall) I will find out how he manages sometime later this week.
Stuff like that gives new users a very bad experience. First and foremost, stuff has to work out of the box. Secondly, there has to be solid, high quality software available that does what you want it to, and it has to install and upgrade with minimal effort and mucking about.
It is strangely ironic that if alien visitors show up in 100K years, the most obvious evidence of our presence will be the Apollo landing sites, and the battered remains of satellites in geostationary orbit. LEO satellites will long since have spiralled in and burned up. The stuff we sent to mars would be long buried in the blowing sand. The chance of ET running across one of our interstellar probes would be about one in a google or so. Space is just too big.
I think the species will probably split, but not in the way he thinks. (Assuming we don't wipe ourselves out of existance which is highly likley, but that is another thread)
Humans will evolve to live in the sea, and with the pressure and gravity difference of other worlds. We will adapt and evolve as our environments dictate, and if technology eventually permits we will actually rewrite our own genetic code to suit our whims.
I am probably going to get flamed to a crisp for this, but what the heck, I have karma to burn...
If Linus continues to dig in and refuses to accept GPLV3 with its anti-DRM provisions, what is is for the linux developers who truly want to move to a GPL V3 model to contribute the fruits of their labour to a GPLV3 fork of the kernel. (Freenix anybody?) Note that they wouldn't have to stop contributing to Linux, they can dual licence as GPL V2/V3 for as long as they wish.
Actually the linux kernel could be forked from the existing code base licenced as GPLV2 with ongoing contributions to the new kernel licenced as GPLV3. Users would be bound by the terms of both licences, which would default to the more restrictive GPLV3 unless they took the time to strip out all of the newly contributed GPLV3 code. Support for DRMed media and hardware would done through clean room design, and hosted from servers in DMCA free countries. Does DVD Jon have some friends and a bit of spare bandwidth?
I really love linux, use it in my home servers and would use it on my desktop if I wasn't doing contract windows development as well. But I disagree with Linus's stand on DRM and the proposed GPLV3. RMS is an arrogant pain in the butt, but in this he is dead right. I like where GPLV3 is going, but we need to build a full featured OS around it.
So what happens if a majority (not necessarily 100%) decide that future contributions to the kernel shall be under GPLv3? Or if they forked the kernel the way XF86 became X.org? The current kernel would be grandfathered as GPLv2, but any new code contributions would be GPLv3. The result would be a kernel that has some code licenced under GPLv2 and increasing amounts under GPLv3, and unless the recipient is willing to strip out the GPLv3 stuff, (an increasingly difficult and impractical task) they would be subject to the restrictions of both licences. This would make it subject to the more restrictive GPLv3 by default. Code with multiple licences are not at all unusual, early versions of Windows had a lot of BSD stuff. Eventually the GPLv2 stuff would be written out and the kernel would be entirely GPLv3.
I have already spoken with two members of Parliament and raised this issue with people I work with. But I feel helpless to stop the numbnuts running the show south of the border, and once it passes there, the rest of the world will be pressured to "harmonize" or we will be stuck with US-legal crippled consumer electronics in our stores.
I spoke with him and a fellow cabinet minister in person yesterday about C-60, and let them both know my concerns about the bill. Face time is worth a dozen letters.
There was a time when I put tried to save every cent I could - pay down the mortgage, maximize my retirement savings, etc. So what happened? An expensive divorce from a rather greedy ex-wife and most of my savings were depleted. (I was within 2 years of being completely mortgage free at the time) Now I take a more fatalistic attitute - work hard, but live more for today and try to let tomorrow take care of itself, because I may not be around to see it. (I am a type 1 diabetic, which cuts my life expectancy by an average of 15 years anyway) If you die with a million dollars in the bank, you don't get to spend it in the afterlife.
This seems like a deliberate attempt to force obsolesence, since there is no technical reason why they would have to downgrade the signal coming from the analog output.
Why didn't he go with a multi-core motherboard? This seems like a good application for a multicore/multi CPU motherboard, (with a lower per CPU clock) and it would run a lot cooler than a high GHz single core.
I remember the doctor even refused to stop blowing smoke in his patients face! I guess that also falls under smoker's "rights"? When somebody does that to me, I am half tempted to fart in their face or urinate on them - assuming they enjoy my wearing my bodily waste as much as I enjoy breathing theirs, but I digress...
Next season comes the pro-drunk driving messages. Maybe one episode will have the pilots playing chicken or competing to see who can land their fighers on deck after slugging back insane amounts of alcohol.
Maybe the real message here is that we are being out evolved by the Cylons, and that they are just accelerating the process by wiping humanity out. Aside from that I do enjoy the show, although I am really still suffering from B5 withdrawl.
I thought it would stink when I read about the changes they had made to the original such as making Starbuck a woman, but it has turned out to be pretty good overall. There are a few things I wish they hadn't changed. There was something I like about those polished chrome Cylons, and the old fighters. (Both Cylon and Colonia)
And after watching the original series again for the first time in over 20 years, it wasn't nearly as good as I remember - even the first season before it started going south. (I won't even mention Galactica 1980) I was only 12 or so at the time the originals came out, so my standards in entertainment were probably lower. On a negative note, I would swear both original and new series must have been sponsored by a tobacco company.
I hope next season will be still showing on weekends in HD.
I wonder when the six million dollar man remake comes out?
The problem can exist for any drivers that operate under kernel mode, which is unfortunately true for Linux as well. Fortunately, while Linux supports fewer devices than windows and the functionality is often more spartan, (i.e. 3D graphics cards) we are fortunate that they don't make it into the kernel until the are solid.
The BSD zealots have a point here - it is more secure to have all drivers run in separate sandboxes, so a borked driver won't bring down the whole OS.
for digitizing my parents 8mm home movies without Hollywood's consent?
Sorry, but I find Life south of the border is getting loonier by the minute. Please remind me who won the cold war? I think Stalin is laughing in his grave.
Unless they have a CYA in the EULA, (and they probably do) like that used in spyware, adware and other "phone home" software. Which is why I would not let the kids install that ATRAK crap on the PC.
Ironically, I would actually feel safer downloading my music from Kazaa.
http://www.diefenbunker.ca/
Quite an interesting tour - when the military decided they didn't need it anymore, they initially put it up for sale. One of the only bidders was the Hell's angels - it would have been fun to watch the RCMP try to conduct a drug raid on a facility designed to resist a nuclear attack.
Eventually the local townsfolk in Carp Ontario decided it would make an interesting museum, and I was one of the first to tour it.
The (ugly) radical feminists would have run them off campus.
Just as long as Dr. Van Parijs, formerly of MIT's biology department had absolutely no involvement with collecting the data.
Here in Canada, it is only illegal if it can be seen from outside the vehicle. Which this essentially means is it's ok, as long as you don't get caught!
I was expecting an article describing how home PCs are attacked and turned into remotely controlled spambots.
I really hate having to type a 24 digit product key number every time I install something.
Seriously, I still need XP for games and contract development work, although my back-end is entirely Linux based.
Assuming you are not just trolling:
I didn't know that I was somehow obligated to purchase a particular game for my kids, just cause they asked for it once. I guess saying no occasionally qualifies me as a tyrant. Does failing to cough up the requisite $50 per month for each of them to play Everquest instead of doing homework qualifies as a human rights violation?
BTW, I said "try" because BNet.D is still hosted on servers in the other 98% of the world that was smart enough not to follow the US in enact the DMCA. (Including mine) I know my member of parliament quite well, and I made sure he was aware of my concerns when the government proposed changes to our copyright laws. I have a letter from him assuring me that the doctrine of fair use still exists in this country, and will continue to do so.
I am sorry for this pettiness, but not too surprised. GMs can become "little Hitlers" who relish in their power, much like the shift manager in the local burger joint who gets off on bullying the wage slave high school students.
Besides, how do you think the BNet.d creators feel after Blizzard tried to screw them out of their hard work?
I enjoyed Starcraft and Diablo 1/2, but I am not buying the kids another Blizzard game until they soften their policies. Besides, I get more work done without these crack-addiction games anyway.
When people went looking for pictures from the Mars Pathfinder project, many instinctively to nasa.com instead of nasa.gov
At the time, nasa.com was a porn site, so visitors got quite an eyeful. The real NASA invoked some government edict from the 1960s that stated the acronymn NASA was reserved for use by their agency, and were able to unseat them. Yet when I go to nasa.com today, I find some sort of private detective agency, I am not sure what happened in the meantime...