Speaking as another geeky types with college degrees and bad hair who works on things like this (distributed data storage/high end computing) I'd agree with point 1 & disagree with point two.
There was a revolution to put computing power on the desk, we did it, it's been done, it's time to move on to more interesting things. A century or two ago the commoners knew nothing about medicine leaving everything to the *professionals*. Now adays most of my dept can do CPR, basic first aid, diagnosise of common ailments. This doesn't make them doctors - just as using Office doesn't make people Computer Scientists.
Point 2. Computers are now getting bigger and more mainframe-y The defining point of the mainframes was their fixed location for processing, with requests being sent from essentailly dumb terminals.
The current research interest is in tying high end systems together as a utility Grid like resource where lots of mainframes are tied together to either provide a specific service or to do the job in the quickest time possible. This deviates from the mainframe concept in the eighties in the idea that there is no one central point for the system and that processing, storage etc can be done wherever is easist/cheapest without having to spend money on redundant resources.
Cases to prove my point are: IBMs investment of $4 billion for server farms/grid archietcture for businesses, the dutch governments four location grid, the Uk governments £120 million investment in a National Grid with lots of nice new supercomputers & data storage all linked together, NSFs $53 million investment in a Teraflop+ processing grid shared between SDSC, NSCA & two other sites.
So if Media Player isn't included what replaces it? It's all very well saying Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to place just their media products in the system but could the Commission *force* Microsoft to allow the bundling of other products by OEMs?
If I remember rightly, the last time this was tried with the browsers Microsoft said OEM's could either have MSN or MSN + others or nothing on the desktop. Or suffer the concequences. Can the Commission protect the OEM's from Microsoft?
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
Yes but they're hardware manufacturers. I'd assume that they have a limited number of software guys especially ones with lots of experience in this area as they tend to be expensive just to have hanging around. Anyway with everyone downsizing at the moment who are the hardware guys going to get rid of first? The designers of the next generation hardware which they need or a load of expensive software guys which bring political problems with them (see next comment).
The costs in doing so would, as far as I can tell, not be too large and this could give them more bargaining power against software companies
You can imagine just how popular they would be with MS if they did this e.g. no more large discounts, last to get the latest updates, bug issues remaining unresolved etc. The cost itself probably wouldn't be the issue, more the political concequences.
I'm not sure that it would. Blimps do need to be teathered when loading & unolading and a reasonable amount of space to do this in - while for the cargo shipments I can imagine blimps hovering over a building and winching the load down this puts them in a dangerous position if there is a small amount of wind and couldn't be used for passangers.
Plus you have to have some sort of infrastructure in place and airports would be a logical place. Especially since you're less likely to have to worry about overhead power cables, telephone lines or buildings to bump into. Also what about customs controls?
I could see them becoming like a bus service with a lot more collection/drop off points than airplanes but not as the equiv. of a taxi service.
But anything which reduces noise pollution can only be a good thing.
it doesn't look like it seats a great many people. How competitive is it going to be when placed against a 747?
I seriously doubt it would ever be set in competition against the international airlines, however as an alternative to things like paddle steamers, canal boats etc it may gain some market share with the more mature, middle class segment - imagine a candle lit dinner at 10,000 in a 1930's style blimp. *grin*
Comparing a 19 seat blimp to a 747 is like comparing Windows to Unix - they have different markets, different cultures and different ways of looking at things. If they market it right they could be on to a winner, especially as they have first mover advantage and the barriers to entry are quite high (complying with FAA regulations, design, testing, maintanance etc).
Maybe Microsoft'll buy a couple and replace the GoodYear blimp?
There was an article in Wired magazine the other year about this. It seems the US government controls about 80% of the worlds reserves of helium, which is of course nonflammable but due to the tensions of the 1930's refused to export to Germany leading to the use of hydrogen instead.
Of course the interesting point is the supposedly hugh amounts of helium on the Moon, any excuse for a trip I guess!
On another note: I'm currently waiting for a delivery of a new Server system - which is stuck in a traffic jam, if only these blimps were available now we could have real blue sky computing 8)
commercial development has the same problems - programmers don't stick around for ever, and it can be tough to maintain someone else's code
I agree with the second part (since thats what I'm doing at the moment). However as to the former, companies do have the advantage of stock options and lock in periods.
That's what's allowed Microsoft to gain the position it has done, staff are recruited for a project and they only get their stock options if they stay for 4.5 years or more. This way you can get the same people working on at least 3 releases of a product, so by the end of their tenure they should be able to solve most problems and know the code inside out.
And of course at the end of 4.5 years the company can then offer them even more to stay or go away. 8)
I agree having the source is good insurance but it still costs money to get people up to speed if the documentations crap so firms will always go to the org. which can supply the help required (e.g. support staff, documentation, bug fixes) even if it costs more in the short term.
I'd agree with the article that the Open Source offerings currently have many limitations when compared to the commercial ones, but this is more due to their lack of maturity than anything else.
We should remember that oracle & db2 have had over 20 years to get to where they are now. Have a look at this article to see what I mean about maturity of products.
However the open source community has several advantages and disadvantages over the commercial players. 1. we dont have all the legacy bloatware which makes the commercial offerings so large 2. we're able to design using current best practice, not something which was dreamed up 20 years ago and no longer applies (no I'm not talking about the relational model but things like distributed storage, sans, nas etc).
However, we also don't have the guarentee that the original developers will still be here in 10 years time, working on the software and adapting it for new needs. Admit it, how many people are prepared to dedicate their careers to a single piece of software? not many. so can you understand why commercial companies are less than eager to use open source for critical/production systems?
Re:still the windows metaphor
on
Windows in 2020
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· Score: 1
No, but I think marketing may consider changing the name. Let's see, we've had windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000, 2001... this doesn't inspire confidence now does it.
"Don't worry Maw, we'll have the last bug out in Windows 21000"
But more seriously, Windows was called that as the generic name for the paradigm. What should we be using for the next one? 'Head Space' for VR? 'Wheres the network gone?' for mobiles?
Very little of the system time is likely to go to waste. I'd say a likely down time is only a couple of % since there's always a long queue waiting to get on and there's a lot of stuff being done at the moment in this area. Or to put it another way - it's not going to waste
If you look at the details of the system it doesn't handle email or web traffic, just physics programs which will be submitted through a single node which then distributes it out to the 128 processors so there wont be any user data on the machines just temp files from the data being run on each processor.
Backing up data is likely to occur through the huge amount of storage currently being purchased for the UK-GRID and tape. What is there to protect? Monte Carlo simulations of cosmology experiments? this isn't personal or corporate data, one bogus result is unlikely to throw the experiment off.
Anyway, this is only one of a few new systems in the UK which are getting announced at the moment, so although they aren't as large as the ones being *talked* about in the states they're here, now and working while it'll take 2 years before the american ones come online.
In fairness they're going to be used for the next generation of particle physics experiments at cern, fermilab, slac and a couple of other places, some bio work on protein folding and a few other things.
While I'm sure many members of the audience would like to see NSA's hand in here somewhere the processing power is needed since CERN's sending out data from the experiments at 40TB a second (ok, ok I know it gets filtered down to only 100MB/sec)
Which is the problem, while these 4 systems make a nice addition to the GRID we need more supercomputers!!!
I agree, I've never understood why the American government bother. If a foreign gov wants encryption it can always pick up the latest release through its embassy staff in the US.
Failing that American universities aren't the only ones in the world with cryptography/math/comp. sci experts and a lot of it's based on maths not computer power.
Of course if decent encryption was available for everyone then more people would purchase online and a lot of this money would make its way back to american companies. So the question is - whats more important guys, intercepting email or corporate profits?
---
Helping spend your tax dollars for a better tomorrow since 1999
The story has been out for months and people obviously haven't been paying attention or at least have failed to see just how concerted this effort is. This technology isn't new, but it's just a small part of the whole if you know where to look.
The new systems sound great, but they're tiny compared to what it's going to be like when the GRID is up and running.
What the story fails to mention is that this system is likely to be connected to the other GRID environments in the States and the new ones in Europe at which stage you wont be talking about just 4 super computer centres but nearly a hundred, each with several Tflops of processing power and a few petabytes (10**15) of storage.
I would suggest that to put this in the proper perspective you also look at IBM's contract to do the same to 4 sites in the Netherlands, the UK GRID which has 9 sites, the German one which I dont know much about but is fairly advanced and the CERN DataGrid. These are all interconnected with the same people working on several at a time.
Or you could have a look at the top500, find all the supercomputers in Europe & the US which aren't classified or commercial and then figure out what their combined processing power is. You should then have a fair idea just how much processing power there will be in a couple of years time 8)
Yes but to get to the stage you are at now you had to go through that stage and in my case I occasionally wonder why no one pused me off a cliff.
Howevere it leads to an interesting discussion. I think most of the people on/. would agree that their education and experiences are non-main stream in one form or another but I think we would all agree most of us have *interesting* backgrounds. If the more interesting members of a community have arrived there by non-standard means then how can we create a standard non-standard way of creating interesting people?
These's a debate in the UK at the moment over the value of gap years - a year spent doing charity work / travelling overseas between finishing high school and starting at college. Originally it was an interesting way of gaining experience, maturity and learning to grow up. Now its a case of middle class kids being expected to do this and all following a set formula for where they go and what they do while away.
So are these script kiddies actually breaking the mould or doing exactly what the previous generation did but for the wrong reasons? I've always wondered whether the net community follows the three generation rule* or whether, because we get people from so many different backgrounds we mitigate the effects and avoid revolution. Any comments?
*Three generation rule - First generation do things because of a flaw in the system and to fulfil a need. The second generation are indoctrinated but usually dont question. Third generation question second and fail to get reasonable responses. Thus revolution and the next cycle.
From what I remember the Church of Scientology went after it and they shut down rather than handing over any users real identities. Well done them!
As to a P2P system with crypto, don't hold your breath! Have a look at the Grid computing initiatives from IBM & CERN since this covers much of the same ground - distributed storage, various formats & operating systems, authentication and encryption. While I'm sure we'll have something available *really soon now* the idea has been kicking around for 3 years and most of the work in this area is poor.
The problem of course is remembering where the data is. Its all very well suggesting it get broken down into chunks and then distributed but you then have to start thinking about what if the person storing it has a systems crash and loses it? do I replicate once, twice, three times? And what do you do about finding it? A central database (or even a replicated hierarchical one)? would you trust the org which is hosting it? They may not be able to access the information if its encrypted but they know where it all is if the gov wants it. Which puts us back in the same position as Napster.
I think the author is looking at the concept of teenagers with power from a questionable viewpoint. The question isn't what power the kids have now but what they're likely to do in 10 years time when they have the opportunity and chance for the first time to work on policy.
I was 16 in 1995 when the Internet craze really started and had just got my first PC (386DX40, 4MB RAM & A 200MB HDD) and more importantly first modem (33.6k). I think the Internet was one of the defining things in my life, I know it effected the decisions of a lot of my age group and gave some of us a far better view of the world than we would otherwise have had, but more importantly a lot of us are still around in the IT community. The culture and ideas from then helped us to define how we saw things and what was important.
Thats my point, everyone back then talked about how a 16 year old with a little html could make millions and some did, but a far larger number stayed in the system and only now are starting to make their presence felt.
I'm not dissing teenagers but I think its far more important that we look at how society effects them than in how they effect society. So how are this generation going to turn out? any parents in the audience?
-----
"I'm sure you can tell me all about Michelangelo and question his relationship with David, but can you tell me what it feels like to stand in the Sistine Chapel and look at his work yourself?" Good Will Hunting
The concept of computers becoming "smart" is a bit vague. While accepting that modern computers may appear smarter than their predecessors they aren't. Its just that as processor speeds increase more instructions can be done in a finite period of time and therefore the program can evaluate more information/possibility combinations making you think its smarter. The IBM machine which beat the Grand Master had been programmed with the assistance of 10 other grand masters to look for certain combinations which would lead to victory so it wasnt just evaluating every possibility but only those likely to result in a win.
As to taking away peoples jobs of course computers will. Most jobs are boring, dull and totally pointless. Would you want to spend your entire career screwing nuts onto wheels in some car manufacturing plant or actually designing the next generation of cars while a robot did the dull stuff?
Strange though it may seem, everytime computers take away jobs people become better trained and get to do things which they wouldn't have otherwise. Look at the increases in higher education in the past few decades, the improvements in the standard of living for the majority of people, would you give it up for dumber computers?
And in answer to your final question: The world is becoming more complex. Fun isn't it? 8)
yes, no and kinda. By not everyone, individuals and most researchers can't access the grid at the moment (and in fairness the ones who can are already the ones with access to the big iron machines). Its going to be about 3 years before access becomes wide spread at universities, prob 5 for government and industry to start using it and 10+ for home users and small businesses. How the system works can best be described as Virtual organisations. For which the best description is An organisation that can be created for a specific project, which can last from days to years with facilities, people and data distributed throughout the world, all of which need access to data which is protected from unauthorised access and with the ability to request processing from a variety of sources according to their needs by the use of software agents. e.g. Tell your agent "I want to do a galaxy simulation requiring X Gflops of processing" the agent goes away, finds out whose supercomputer is available, agrees price to process and then runs returning results to the user. The difficult part at the moment (and I get to write my PhD thesis on how we solve it 8( ) is how we can authenticate and track millions upon millions of systems with different resources and then have a billing structure in place so people get compensated accordingly.
Of course the fun part is having different operating systems, different data formats, time zones, certificate authorities and a host of other problems to deal with especially billing. This isn't the free flow of information which the internet is *supposed* to be, these are physical assets which cost money and there is an opportunity cost in using processors in terms of power, support, initials costs etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as another geeky types with college degrees and bad hair who works on things like this (distributed data storage/high end computing) I'd agree with point 1 & disagree with point two.
There was a revolution to put computing power on the desk, we did it, it's been done, it's time to move on to more interesting things. A century or two ago the commoners knew nothing about medicine leaving everything to the *professionals*. Now adays most of my dept can do CPR, basic first aid, diagnosise of common ailments. This doesn't make them doctors - just as using Office doesn't make people Computer Scientists.
Point 2. Computers are now getting bigger and more mainframe-y The defining point of the mainframes was their fixed location for processing, with requests being sent from essentailly dumb terminals.
The current research interest is in tying high end systems together as a utility Grid like resource where lots of mainframes are tied together to either provide a specific service or to do the job in the quickest time possible. This deviates from the mainframe concept in the eighties in the idea that there is no one central point for the system and that processing, storage etc can be done wherever is easist/cheapest without having to spend money on redundant resources.
Cases to prove my point are: IBMs investment of $4 billion for server farms/grid archietcture for businesses, the dutch governments four location grid, the Uk governments £120 million investment in a National Grid with lots of nice new supercomputers & data storage all linked together, NSFs $53 million investment in a Teraflop+ processing grid shared between SDSC, NSCA & two other sites.
So if Media Player isn't included what replaces it? It's all very well saying Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to place just their media products in the system but could the Commission *force* Microsoft to allow the bundling of other products by OEMs?
If I remember rightly, the last time this was tried with the browsers Microsoft said OEM's could either have MSN or MSN + others or nothing on the desktop. Or suffer the concequences. Can the Commission protect the OEM's from Microsoft?
It's really surprising that so few hardware manufacturers have their own Linux distributions. At least to me it would really just make sense for a hardware company to tailor a version of Linux (or maybe *BSD) to their own hardware and sell it pre installed.
Yes but they're hardware manufacturers. I'd assume that they have a limited number of software guys especially ones with lots of experience in this area as they tend to be expensive just to have hanging around. Anyway with everyone downsizing at the moment who are the hardware guys going to get rid of first? The designers of the next generation hardware which they need or a load of expensive software guys which bring political problems with them (see next comment).
The costs in doing so would, as far as I can tell, not be too large and this could give them more bargaining power against software companies
You can imagine just how popular they would be with MS if they did this e.g. no more large discounts, last to get the latest updates, bug issues remaining unresolved etc. The cost itself probably wouldn't be the issue, more the political concequences.
The FBI (at least to my knowledge) doesn't claim that its their god given right to rule the country.
....
On the other hand if we could get together a small army and march on London
-----
They may take out LAN's but they'll never take our Firewire DVD's!!!
well that might be bad news for the local airport
I'm not sure that it would. Blimps do need to be teathered when loading & unolading and a reasonable amount of space to do this in - while for the cargo shipments I can imagine blimps hovering over a building and winching the load down this puts them in a dangerous position if there is a small amount of wind and couldn't be used for passangers.
Plus you have to have some sort of infrastructure in place and airports would be a logical place. Especially since you're less likely to have to worry about overhead power cables, telephone lines or buildings to bump into. Also what about customs controls?
I could see them becoming like a bus service with a lot more collection/drop off points than airplanes but not as the equiv. of a taxi service.
But anything which reduces noise pollution can only be a good thing.
it doesn't look like it seats a great many people. How competitive is it going to be when placed against a 747?
I seriously doubt it would ever be set in competition against the international airlines, however as an alternative to things like paddle steamers, canal boats etc it may gain some market share with the more mature, middle class segment - imagine a candle lit dinner at 10,000 in a 1930's style blimp. *grin*
Comparing a 19 seat blimp to a 747 is like comparing Windows to Unix - they have different markets, different cultures and different ways of looking at things. If they market it right they could be on to a winner, especially as they have first mover advantage and the barriers to entry are quite high (complying with FAA regulations, design, testing, maintanance etc).
Maybe Microsoft'll buy a couple and replace the GoodYear blimp?
There was an article in Wired magazine the other year about this. It seems the US government controls about 80% of the worlds reserves of helium, which is of course nonflammable but due to the tensions of the 1930's refused to export to Germany leading to the use of hydrogen instead.
Of course the interesting point is the supposedly hugh amounts of helium on the Moon, any excuse for a trip I guess!
On another note: I'm currently waiting for a delivery of a new Server system - which is stuck in a traffic jam, if only these blimps were available now we could have real blue sky computing 8)
commercial development has the same problems - programmers don't stick around for ever, and it can be tough to maintain someone else's code
I agree with the second part (since thats what I'm doing at the moment). However as to the former, companies do have the advantage of stock options and lock in periods.
That's what's allowed Microsoft to gain the position it has done, staff are recruited for a project and they only get their stock options if they stay for 4.5 years or more. This way you can get the same people working on at least 3 releases of a product, so by the end of their tenure they should be able to solve most problems and know the code inside out.
And of course at the end of 4.5 years the company can then offer them even more to stay or go away. 8)
I agree having the source is good insurance but it still costs money to get people up to speed if the documentations crap so firms will always go to the org. which can supply the help required (e.g. support staff, documentation, bug fixes) even if it costs more in the short term.
I'd agree with the article that the Open Source offerings currently have many limitations when compared to the commercial ones, but this is more due to their lack of maturity than anything else.
We should remember that oracle & db2 have had over 20 years to get to where they are now. Have a look at this article to see what I mean about maturity of products.
However the open source community has several advantages and disadvantages over the commercial players. 1. we dont have all the legacy bloatware which makes the commercial offerings so large 2. we're able to design using current best practice, not something which was dreamed up 20 years ago and no longer applies (no I'm not talking about the relational model but things like distributed storage, sans, nas etc).
However, we also don't have the guarentee that the original developers will still be here in 10 years time, working on the software and adapting it for new needs. Admit it, how many people are prepared to dedicate their careers to a single piece of software? not many. so can you understand why commercial companies are less than eager to use open source for critical/production systems?
No, but I think marketing may consider changing the name. Let's see, we've had windows 1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000, 2001 ... this doesn't inspire confidence now does it.
"Don't worry Maw, we'll have the last bug out in Windows 21000"
But more seriously, Windows was called that as the generic name for the paradigm. What should we be using for the next one? 'Head Space' for VR? 'Wheres the network gone?' for mobiles?
Very little of the system time is likely to go to waste. I'd say a likely down time is only a couple of % since there's always a long queue waiting to get on and there's a lot of stuff being done at the moment in this area. Or to put it another way - it's not going to waste
If you look at the details of the system it doesn't handle email or web traffic, just physics programs which will be submitted through a single node which then distributes it out to the 128 processors so there wont be any user data on the machines just temp files from the data being run on each processor.
Backing up data is likely to occur through the huge amount of storage currently being purchased for the UK-GRID and tape. What is there to protect? Monte Carlo simulations of cosmology experiments? this isn't personal or corporate data, one bogus result is unlikely to throw the experiment off.
Anyway, this is only one of a few new systems in the UK which are getting announced at the moment, so although they aren't as large as the ones being *talked* about in the states they're here, now and working while it'll take 2 years before the american ones come online.
In fairness they're going to be used for the next generation of particle physics experiments at cern, fermilab, slac and a couple of other places, some bio work on protein folding and a few other things.
While I'm sure many members of the audience would like to see NSA's hand in here somewhere the processing power is needed since CERN's sending out data from the experiments at 40TB a second (ok, ok I know it gets filtered down to only 100MB/sec)
Which is the problem, while these 4 systems make a nice addition to the GRID we need more supercomputers!!!
I agree, I've never understood why the American government bother. If a foreign gov wants encryption it can always pick up the latest release through its embassy staff in the US.
Failing that American universities aren't the only ones in the world with cryptography/math/comp. sci experts and a lot of it's based on maths not computer power.
Of course if decent encryption was available for everyone then more people would purchase online and a lot of this money would make its way back to american companies. So the question is - whats more important guys, intercepting email or corporate profits?
---
Helping spend your tax dollars for a better tomorrow since 1999
The story has been out for months and people obviously haven't been paying attention or at least have failed to see just how concerted this effort is. This technology isn't new, but it's just a small part of the whole if you know where to look.
...
The new systems sound great, but they're tiny compared to what it's going to be like when the GRID is up and running.
What the story fails to mention is that this system is likely to be connected to the other GRID environments in the States and the new ones in Europe at which stage you wont be talking about just 4 super computer centres but nearly a hundred, each with several Tflops of processing power and a few petabytes (10**15) of storage.
I would suggest that to put this in the proper perspective you also look at IBM's contract to do the same to 4 sites in the Netherlands, the UK GRID which has 9 sites, the German one which I dont know much about but is fairly advanced and the CERN DataGrid. These are all interconnected with the same people working on several at a time.
Or you could have a look at the top500, find all the supercomputers in Europe & the US which aren't classified or commercial and then figure out what their combined processing power is. You should then have a fair idea just how much processing power there will be in a couple of years time 8)
Now back to the Particle Physics experiments
Yes but to get to the stage you are at now you had to go through that stage and in my case I occasionally wonder why no one pused me off a cliff.
/. would agree that their education and experiences are non-main stream in one form or another but I think we would all agree most of us have *interesting* backgrounds. If the more interesting members of a community have arrived there by non-standard means then how can we create a standard non-standard way of creating interesting people?
Howevere it leads to an interesting discussion. I think most of the people on
These's a debate in the UK at the moment over the value of gap years - a year spent doing charity work / travelling overseas between finishing high school and starting at college. Originally it was an interesting way of gaining experience, maturity and learning to grow up. Now its a case of middle class kids being expected to do this and all following a set formula for where they go and what they do while away.
So are these script kiddies actually breaking the mould or doing exactly what the previous generation did but for the wrong reasons? I've always wondered whether the net community follows the three generation rule* or whether, because we get people from so many different backgrounds we mitigate the effects and avoid revolution. Any comments?
*Three generation rule - First generation do things because of a flaw in the system and to fulfil a need. The second generation are indoctrinated but usually dont question. Third generation question second and fail to get reasonable responses. Thus revolution and the next cycle.
From what I remember the Church of Scientology went after it and they shut down rather than handing over any users real identities. Well done them!
...
As to a P2P system with crypto, don't hold your breath! Have a look at the Grid computing initiatives from IBM & CERN since this covers much of the same ground - distributed storage, various formats & operating systems, authentication and encryption. While I'm sure we'll have something available *really soon now* the idea has been kicking around for 3 years and most of the work in this area is poor.
The problem of course is remembering where the data is. Its all very well suggesting it get broken down into chunks and then distributed but you then have to start thinking about what if the person storing it has a systems crash and loses it? do I replicate once, twice, three times? And what do you do about finding it? A central database (or even a replicated hierarchical one)? would you trust the org which is hosting it? They may not be able to access the information if its encrypted but they know where it all is if the gov wants it. Which puts us back in the same position as Napster.
And as to voting stuff off
I think the author is looking at the concept of teenagers with power from a questionable viewpoint. The question isn't what power the kids have now but what they're likely to do in 10 years time when they have the opportunity and chance for the first time to work on policy.
I was 16 in 1995 when the Internet craze really started and had just got my first PC (386DX40, 4MB RAM & A 200MB HDD) and more importantly first modem (33.6k). I think the Internet was one of the defining things in my life, I know it effected the decisions of a lot of my age group and gave some of us a far better view of the world than we would otherwise have had, but more importantly a lot of us are still around in the IT community. The culture and ideas from then helped us to define how we saw things and what was important.
Thats my point, everyone back then talked about how a 16 year old with a little html could make millions and some did, but a far larger number stayed in the system and only now are starting to make their presence felt.
I'm not dissing teenagers but I think its far more important that we look at how society effects them than in how they effect society. So how are this generation going to turn out? any parents in the audience?
-----
"I'm sure you can tell me all about Michelangelo and question his relationship with David, but can you tell me what it feels like to stand in the Sistine Chapel and look at his work yourself?" Good Will Hunting
which king would bill gates be then? and could we chop off his head?
The concept of computers becoming "smart" is a bit vague. While accepting that modern computers may appear smarter than their predecessors they aren't. Its just that as processor speeds increase more instructions can be done in a finite period of time and therefore the program can evaluate more information/possibility combinations making you think its smarter. The IBM machine which beat the Grand Master had been programmed with the assistance of 10 other grand masters to look for certain combinations which would lead to victory so it wasnt just evaluating every possibility but only those likely to result in a win.
As to taking away peoples jobs of course computers will. Most jobs are boring, dull and totally pointless. Would you want to spend your entire career screwing nuts onto wheels in some car manufacturing plant or actually designing the next generation of cars while a robot did the dull stuff?
Strange though it may seem, everytime computers take away jobs people become better trained and get to do things which they wouldn't have otherwise. Look at the increases in higher education in the past few decades, the improvements in the standard of living for the majority of people, would you give it up for dumber computers?
And in answer to your final question: The world is becoming more complex. Fun isn't it? 8)
yes, no and kinda. By not everyone, individuals and most researchers can't access the grid at the moment (and in fairness the ones who can are already the ones with access to the big iron machines). Its going to be about 3 years before access becomes wide spread at universities, prob 5 for government and industry to start using it and 10+ for home users and small businesses. How the system works can best be described as Virtual organisations. For which the best description is An organisation that can be created for a specific project, which can last from days to years with facilities, people and data distributed throughout the world, all of which need access to data which is protected from unauthorised access and with the ability to request processing from a variety of sources according to their needs by the use of software agents. e.g. Tell your agent "I want to do a galaxy simulation requiring X Gflops of processing" the agent goes away, finds out whose supercomputer is available, agrees price to process and then runs returning results to the user. The difficult part at the moment (and I get to write my PhD thesis on how we solve it 8( ) is how we can authenticate and track millions upon millions of systems with different resources and then have a billing structure in place so people get compensated accordingly. Of course the fun part is having different operating systems, different data formats, time zones, certificate authorities and a host of other problems to deal with especially billing. This isn't the free flow of information which the internet is *supposed* to be, these are physical assets which cost money and there is an opportunity cost in using processors in terms of power, support, initials costs etc.