In the early 80's, this same group of Japanese electronics giants got together and signed a formal agreement to forward the purposes of the TRON project, which was the result of a large amount of computer science research done by a number of Japans top computer scientists.
The purpose of TRON (this was *BEFORE* the movie) was to create a single kernel architecture that can be used in multiple electronics devices, with an *open* (to the industry at that time, open meant they shared the specs with each other) communications protocol.
In essence: ubiquitous computing.
This resulted in a huge decrease in product design costs for the Japanese consumer electronics market, as TRON kernels have been used in everything from microwave ovens to robotic car manufacture assembly lines.
This effort waned somewhat during the late 90's due in part to the costs associated with keeping TRON up to date with microprocessor development, and the Japanese economic depression certainly played a part as well.
So it makes *total sense* and is very good news indeed, to hear that these electronics giants are continuing the TRON-like effort using Linux, and using the GNU-like methodology for maintaining this project in the future.
As an avid follower of the machinations of Japanese consumer electronics giants, this is some very good news to me indeed.
BTW, details about TRON are out there on the 'net, for those that are interested. One of Japans leading computer scientists was involved in the project during the early 80's, and his vision was very much driven by the Japanese manic sci-fi ethos. It makes for some crazy reading, for sure, but it all happened and is evident in all that Japanese consumer electronics gear around you.
Do a bit of scanning through a binary dump of the kernel in your digital camera/microwave oven/VCR/MiniDisc player, and you may find some interesting references to the TRON kernel, and/or leading consulting firms in Japan that were a part of the TRON kernel software development industry...
I've been a Linux user for almost as long as its been available on the 'net for download, and always will be, but personally I'm looking forward to the release of Mac OS X as my next personal desktop OS. Linux has served me really nicely as a server OS, far better than NT for my needs, but I don't think I'll ever really get into using it as a desktop personal OS.
Mac OS X will (hopefully) fulfill my needs of a very media friendly OS with support from a company with balls and muscle enough to support it (unlike Be, which I was so damned close to switching to for good).
Your post touched a chord here, anyway. I'll be looking forward to Mac OS X as my front-end on Apple's sexy hardware, and continue putting Linux to work on hardcore backend boxes...
I'd really like to see what Lazarus is up to as a project - does anyone have any clue where it's at, as I can't seem to get through to the web site I was using a few months ago:
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Of course, having a release of FreePascal is still very cool on its own right, but I'd like to see where the IDE is up to as well...
It would be great if they could implement something like the VCL in every version of their product, regardless of the platform it runs on. The added advantage being that it makes porting apps a lot easier.
They are working on this - its called CLX. You might find this interesting:
Forcing NASA to *STOP WASTING OUR GODAMN TAX PAYERS MONEY ON OVERBUDGETED, OVERPRICED CRAP*.
Which will then force NASA to make missions cheaper and more cost effective - which takes *REAL* engineering, not just budget-flyboy science.
Get rid of the motivation for the incredibly wasteful *hobbyhorsing* that goes on at NASA, and we'll start seeing some really refined stuff coming from the engineers, but continue to pay the exorbitant "NASA Tax" being demanded in order to pull off basic science missions, and the US Gov't is only encouraging wasteful, costly flights of fancy for NASA managers to get wet pants over.
We could go to Mars for US$50billion, but NASA tells us it'll cost $500billion, because there are too many hobbyhorsers in the ranks beefing up the budget estimates for their own special projects.
Cut funds, make NASA leaner and meaner, and we'll get to space faster and cheaper.
I've been running my main development system on a Pentium Pro/200 for about 4 years, and resisted doing an upgrade through *3* independent releases of new processors from Intel - the Pentium II, the Pentium III, and the Xeon (4 if you count the Celeron, but by that point I was too disgusted at Intel to even bother working out what a Celeron is...)
I recently decided that my compile times were just too long, and started looking for options - I chose an AMD 750. Mostly because AMD have a good chip, it works well, floating point is really nice, and it was very inexpensive.
Sure, AMD do the speedbump marketing bit - they have to, or Intel would eat their lunch. But at the lower price, playing speedbump catchup with AMD is at least a little more reasonable.
I think my AMD 750 system will keep me happy for a year or two, and hopefully by that time Transmeta or some other such company will have released a more cost-effective processor that can support another one of my personal policies for buying computers, which is to buy one for whatever function needs filled.
I don't try to cram all the functionality I need into one big mega-computer - that has proven too unstable and a pain in the butt to administer. Instead, I opt for getting cheaper secondary/tertiary computers for whatever function.
I have a laptop for email, correspondence, and general r&d work on code. I have my aforementioned AMD 750 for major development work (music software, telephony, etc). I have a Mac G4 for all of my audio needs - this recently replaced dedicated hardware sequencers for the job. I have a cheap old-skool Pentium for bookkeeping and print serving on the 'net. I have a couple of Pentium boxes (cheap and generic) for Linux development - no GUI required, and they sit idle most of the time. I have a fast P2/400 for my Linux web and mail server and it's idle most of the time as well.
All of this has been quite successful from the standpoint of low-cost, low-administration, low-risk if something goes wrong, and I hope that things change with the CPU mfr's to make cheaper computing a lot more feasible. These superfast chips with super-$ price tags are not what we need...
Still, its going to be pretty damned cool to watch those guys float up the coast. Never ceases to amaze me how they navigate those sorts of distances...
What is it that penguins use, anyway, astronavigation or something like waterflow/current recognition? Smell? Geographical landmarks?
If a woman wants a technical career, she has just as many options -- if not more, than a man. This is the year 2000. It isn't 1950. A woman isn't going to apply for a computer science scholorship and be told by the people who handle her applicant, "Oh, dearie -- don't you think a nice course in domestic engineering would be more suitable to a nice young lady like yourself?"
She may not be told this by the people who handle her application, but she may very well be told that by the other people in her life that may influence the decision - her parents, her friends, maybe her husband/boyfriend?
The point of this is not that the attitude is necessarily prevalent in the *industry* (though, the fact that the industry itself is even looking at this at all means that it's somewhat self perpetuated), but that the social condition exists that precludes women getting into highly technical endeavours - because, traditionally, the tech industry is *viewed* and (more importantly) *portrayed* as being male dominant.
This needs to change, on a social level, not an industrial one, and one of the things that can be done to assist this process by those in tech industries responsible for dictacting how the industry is portrayed (heck, you and I, lowly programmers/non-marketing types, definitely have a modicum of responsibility for this) is to make gender non-relevant in that portrayal.
i.e. don't even *bring it up* that there is a lack of women/men, but portray it in as gender-neutral a manner as possible. If this means balancing between interviewing male and female computer scientists for such banal things as Discovery channel documentaries on the subject of computer intelligence, etc. then so be it, but even that feeds the problem.
Because it's this *portrayal* that allows the social aberration of gender-bias to persist, and it's this aberration that precludes a lot of women from choosing high tech careers.
In other words: quit complaining that there aren't any hot chick programmers around. You're perpetuating the problem.
I too once had this same perspective, until a wisened Slashdotter pointed out to me that the case for Mars, and against the Moon, has been madeq quite well in Zubrins book "The Case for Mars" (good title, eh?).
Essentially, what it boils down to, is that the Moon has very little of the resources needed to sustain a colony by itself, whereas Mars has an ample abundance of such things as hydrogen and carbon.
Plus, it doesn't take very much more effort to get to Mars than it does the Moon.
And, lastly, self-sufficiency is the name of the game. Being able to manufacture ones own fuel *on* Mars is a big part of what's required to stay there and do enough research, and this is not something that'd happen if we put the beans into setting up a base on the Moon. It may one day be that Mars will be a strong provider of resources for other bases, including the Moon and Asteroid Belt, and therefore it makes more sense to get there, set up base, learn how to be self-sufficient on the only other habitable planet in our system, etc.
Get Zubrins book (I'd provide a link, but I'm lazy) and check it out. It's an astonishingly good read, and it convinced me that Mars could actually happen within my lifetime.
Why is everybody calling this "business" as if it's some kind of slimy dealing?
I don't recall saying anything along the lines of "slimy" in my post.
Are you just automatically assuming that "big business == slimy" or something? In which case, you have no right to refer to a "bunch of wussy crack smokers", since you are being blinded by your own prejudice.
I never said big business is slimy - in fact I never said big bugsiness is anything. It was you who inferred it. Personally, I happen to respect big business for what its done, generally, for my life, even though there are aspects of it that totally suck ass.
Its just that they probably have better lawyers writing the contracts with the PI's to ensure that Microsofts privacy in the matter is sealed shut, tighter than Mr. Gates asshole at a Linux convention.
Its a totally common practice in big business. I have a friend who has been employed as an investigator for years, and some of the things he's told me about what he's been asked to find out about company presidents are astounding.
So this should come as no surprise. Well, a little surprise - I'm surprised that Oracle were so brazen as to admit it, anyway. They've got balls, that's for sure.
You happen to have a reference on social spending handy?
The Internet is a funny thing. Just this morning I was having a discussion with some friends about the Mars program, and why we need to put money into it, and the same tired old "we should feed people first" argument came up. I happen to *know* that we spend more on social programs than we do on the space program, but I don't have any hardcore references.
So, you got any? I'd really like to continue this discussion with my friends, but it sort of went flat when I couldn't produce any hard evidence. They both seemed shocked that I'd even consider that we spend trillions of dollars on social programs...
I was using 'dorks' in the semi-affectionate sense, though it's not obvious. I honestly do appreciate having read your thread.
And I automatically (not through moderation) get a score of 2 because of my existing karma rating, which, with posts like this one, is getting trashed daily.
Slashdot Mirror
Got a bit lazy in my post, but discovered I'd had a few links on the subject of TRON/CTRON/ITRON stashed away for those that are interested:
o n-93.94.html / panph96.html
http://www.tron.org/
http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/itron.html
http://www.atip.or.jp/public/atip.reports.94/tr
http://tron.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/TRON/ITRON/panph96
Should be some good reading for you in there, enjoy!
:)
In the early 80's, this same group of Japanese electronics giants got together and signed a formal agreement to forward the purposes of the TRON project, which was the result of a large amount of computer science research done by a number of Japans top computer scientists.
The purpose of TRON (this was *BEFORE* the movie) was to create a single kernel architecture that can be used in multiple electronics devices, with an *open* (to the industry at that time, open meant they shared the specs with each other) communications protocol.
In essence: ubiquitous computing.
This resulted in a huge decrease in product design costs for the Japanese consumer electronics market, as TRON kernels have been used in everything from microwave ovens to robotic car manufacture assembly lines.
This effort waned somewhat during the late 90's due in part to the costs associated with keeping TRON up to date with microprocessor development, and the Japanese economic depression certainly played a part as well.
So it makes *total sense* and is very good news indeed, to hear that these electronics giants are continuing the TRON-like effort using Linux, and using the GNU-like methodology for maintaining this project in the future.
As an avid follower of the machinations of Japanese consumer electronics giants, this is some very good news to me indeed.
BTW, details about TRON are out there on the 'net, for those that are interested. One of Japans leading computer scientists was involved in the project during the early 80's, and his vision was very much driven by the Japanese manic sci-fi ethos. It makes for some crazy reading, for sure, but it all happened and is evident in all that Japanese consumer electronics gear around you.
Do a bit of scanning through a binary dump of the kernel in your digital camera/microwave oven/VCR/MiniDisc player, and you may find some interesting references to the TRON kernel, and/or leading consulting firms in Japan that were a part of the TRON kernel software development industry...
I've been a Linux user for almost as long as its been available on the 'net for download, and always will be, but personally I'm looking forward to the release of Mac OS X as my next personal desktop OS. Linux has served me really nicely as a server OS, far better than NT for my needs, but I don't think I'll ever really get into using it as a desktop personal OS.
Mac OS X will (hopefully) fulfill my needs of a very media friendly OS with support from a company with balls and muscle enough to support it (unlike Be, which I was so damned close to switching to for good).
Your post touched a chord here, anyway. I'll be looking forward to Mac OS X as my front-end on Apple's sexy hardware, and continue putting Linux to work on hardcore backend boxes...
Yeah, too true. Personally, I'm gonna go home, kiss the wife, and then read myself to sleep.
Never gonna go to random fucker links ever again.
I'd really like to see what Lazarus is up to as a project - does anyone have any clue where it's at, as I can't seem to get through to the web site I was using a few months ago:
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/
Of course, having a release of FreePascal is still very cool on its own right, but I'd like to see where the IDE is up to as well...
In fact, there are none.
Well, maybe, Delphi and VB share the ability to drag and drop stuff to create a GUI, but then thats a similarity that Delphi shares with VC++ too.
But other than that, Delphi is more similar to VC++ than it is to Visual Basic.
It would be great if they could implement something like the VCL in every version of their product, regardless of the platform it runs on. The added advantage being that it makes porting apps a lot easier.
c h.html
They are working on this - its called CLX. You might find this interesting:
http://www.borland.com/about/press/2000/trollte
And I'm sure a million other geeks will too ...
... is completely cut NASA's budget.
Forcing NASA to *STOP WASTING OUR GODAMN TAX PAYERS MONEY ON OVERBUDGETED, OVERPRICED CRAP*.
Which will then force NASA to make missions cheaper and more cost effective - which takes *REAL* engineering, not just budget-flyboy science.
Get rid of the motivation for the incredibly wasteful *hobbyhorsing* that goes on at NASA, and we'll start seeing some really refined stuff coming from the engineers, but continue to pay the exorbitant "NASA Tax" being demanded in order to pull off basic science missions, and the US Gov't is only encouraging wasteful, costly flights of fancy for NASA managers to get wet pants over.
We could go to Mars for US$50billion, but NASA tells us it'll cost $500billion, because there are too many hobbyhorsers in the ranks beefing up the budget estimates for their own special projects.
Cut funds, make NASA leaner and meaner, and we'll get to space faster and cheaper.
It's an overfed cow right now.
Hah hah! You two are at it too!
FIGHT FIGHT FIGH... ermmm...
JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY JERRY!!!
In conclusion, fuck off!
Hah hah, fight! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!!!
In conclusion, I love you guys.
I've been running my main development system on a Pentium Pro/200 for about 4 years, and resisted doing an upgrade through *3* independent releases of new processors from Intel - the Pentium II, the Pentium III, and the Xeon (4 if you count the Celeron, but by that point I was too disgusted at Intel to even bother working out what a Celeron is...)
I recently decided that my compile times were just too long, and started looking for options - I chose an AMD 750. Mostly because AMD have a good chip, it works well, floating point is really nice, and it was very inexpensive.
Sure, AMD do the speedbump marketing bit - they have to, or Intel would eat their lunch. But at the lower price, playing speedbump catchup with AMD is at least a little more reasonable.
I think my AMD 750 system will keep me happy for a year or two, and hopefully by that time Transmeta or some other such company will have released a more cost-effective processor that can support another one of my personal policies for buying computers, which is to buy one for whatever function needs filled.
I don't try to cram all the functionality I need into one big mega-computer - that has proven too unstable and a pain in the butt to administer. Instead, I opt for getting cheaper secondary/tertiary computers for whatever function.
I have a laptop for email, correspondence, and general r&d work on code. I have my aforementioned AMD 750 for major development work (music software, telephony, etc). I have a Mac G4 for all of my audio needs - this recently replaced dedicated hardware sequencers for the job. I have a cheap old-skool Pentium for bookkeeping and print serving on the 'net. I have a couple of Pentium boxes (cheap and generic) for Linux development - no GUI required, and they sit idle most of the time. I have a fast P2/400 for my Linux web and mail server and it's idle most of the time as well.
All of this has been quite successful from the standpoint of low-cost, low-administration, low-risk if something goes wrong, and I hope that things change with the CPU mfr's to make cheaper computing a lot more feasible. These superfast chips with super-$ price tags are not what we need...
Lets see how sexy you are.
I didn't say that the moon had no resources. I said that it has very little of the resources needed to maintain a self-sustaining colony.
Big difference.
So he's had a head start.
By a couple days (5? I forget, closed the page).
Still, its going to be pretty damned cool to watch those guys float up the coast. Never ceases to amaze me how they navigate those sorts of distances...
What is it that penguins use, anyway, astronavigation or something like waterflow/current recognition? Smell? Geographical landmarks?
If a woman wants a technical career, she has just as many options -- if not more, than a man. This is the year 2000. It isn't 1950. A woman isn't going to apply for a computer science scholorship and be told by the people who handle her applicant, "Oh, dearie -- don't you think a nice course in domestic engineering would be more suitable to a nice young lady like yourself?"
She may not be told this by the people who handle her application, but she may very well be told that by the other people in her life that may influence the decision - her parents, her friends, maybe her husband/boyfriend?
The point of this is not that the attitude is necessarily prevalent in the *industry* (though, the fact that the industry itself is even looking at this at all means that it's somewhat self perpetuated), but that the social condition exists that precludes women getting into highly technical endeavours - because, traditionally, the tech industry is *viewed* and (more importantly) *portrayed* as being male dominant.
This needs to change, on a social level, not an industrial one, and one of the things that can be done to assist this process by those in tech industries responsible for dictacting how the industry is portrayed (heck, you and I, lowly programmers/non-marketing types, definitely have a modicum of responsibility for this) is to make gender non-relevant in that portrayal.
i.e. don't even *bring it up* that there is a lack of women/men, but portray it in as gender-neutral a manner as possible. If this means balancing between interviewing male and female computer scientists for such banal things as Discovery channel documentaries on the subject of computer intelligence, etc. then so be it, but even that feeds the problem.
Because it's this *portrayal* that allows the social aberration of gender-bias to persist, and it's this aberration that precludes a lot of women from choosing high tech careers.
In other words: quit complaining that there aren't any hot chick programmers around. You're perpetuating the problem.
I too once had this same perspective, until a wisened Slashdotter pointed out to me that the case for Mars, and against the Moon, has been madeq quite well in Zubrins book "The Case for Mars" (good title, eh?).
Essentially, what it boils down to, is that the Moon has very little of the resources needed to sustain a colony by itself, whereas Mars has an ample abundance of such things as hydrogen and carbon.
Plus, it doesn't take very much more effort to get to Mars than it does the Moon.
And, lastly, self-sufficiency is the name of the game. Being able to manufacture ones own fuel *on* Mars is a big part of what's required to stay there and do enough research, and this is not something that'd happen if we put the beans into setting up a base on the Moon. It may one day be that Mars will be a strong provider of resources for other bases, including the Moon and Asteroid Belt, and therefore it makes more sense to get there, set up base, learn how to be self-sufficient on the only other habitable planet in our system, etc.
Get Zubrins book (I'd provide a link, but I'm lazy) and check it out. It's an astonishingly good read, and it convinced me that Mars could actually happen within my lifetime.
I don't recall saying anything along the lines of "slimy" in my post.
Are you just automatically assuming that "big business == slimy" or something? In which case, you have no right to refer to a "bunch of wussy crack smokers", since you are being blinded by your own prejudice.
I never said big business is slimy - in fact I never said big bugsiness is anything. It was you who inferred it. Personally, I happen to respect big business for what its done, generally, for my life, even though there are aspects of it that totally suck ass.
I'm curious, how does one go about becoming an amateur metalworker, metallurgy hobbyist? Are there any good books or web sites on the subject?
Its just that they probably have better lawyers writing the contracts with the PI's to ensure that Microsofts privacy in the matter is sealed shut, tighter than Mr. Gates asshole at a Linux convention.
Its a totally common practice in big business. I have a friend who has been employed as an investigator for years, and some of the things he's told me about what he's been asked to find out about company presidents are astounding.
So this should come as no surprise. Well, a little surprise - I'm surprised that Oracle were so brazen as to admit it, anyway. They've got balls, that's for sure.
You happen to have a reference on social spending handy?
The Internet is a funny thing. Just this morning I was having a discussion with some friends about the Mars program, and why we need to put money into it, and the same tired old "we should feed people first" argument came up. I happen to *know* that we spend more on social programs than we do on the space program, but I don't have any hardcore references.
So, you got any? I'd really like to continue this discussion with my friends, but it sort of went flat when I couldn't produce any hard evidence. They both seemed shocked that I'd even consider that we spend trillions of dollars on social programs...
As I have so recently found out, neither of these things are needed to go to Mars.
Read Zubrins "The Case for Mars" for details on why.
I was using 'dorks' in the semi-affectionate sense, though it's not obvious. I honestly do appreciate having read your thread.
And I automatically (not through moderation) get a score of 2 because of my existing karma rating, which, with posts like this one, is getting trashed daily.
Or a link to the DC-UK magazine somewhere?