Microsoft and Intel spend something like 25% of their annual budgets on computer security. Going all the way from instruction sets, interrupts, supervisors and hypervisors, to DLL and kernel layouts, secure computing initiatives like SecureBIOS, hardware checksumming, file and network virus scanners, authentication protocols, network security applications, best practice virtual network layouts (separate virtual networks for different application levels). Even with all that, a standard desktop system still needs around 250 Megabytes of disk space to store all the anti-virus signature definition files.
That's why the "walled garden" approach to applications is so attractive. You can avoid the overhead of dedicating computing resources to all of those things if they are screened before download.
You don't need to be sprint running or mountain climbed to keep fit. You just need to walk 30 minutes every day. Walking up and down staircases is even better. Avoid high-fructose corn syrup drinks and processed meat. Then the weight just melts off.
Trees work on the flow of water from the roots to the leaves through narrow tubes allow photosynthesis. There are different layers of food that have different functions. Basically the trunk of a tree is one giant artery. The inner core of the trunk, the heartwood is for strength, while it is the sapwood which transports water. The outer layer is for protection only.
Due to disease and old age, the sapwood will become damaged and no longer carry water.
My next door neighbor was plumber. He didn't just clear blocked pipes and drains. He designed entire bathrooms and house renovations down to specifying the electric systems, insulation, types of wood, varnish, filing planning permission applications as well as the plumbing and drainage. In fact this was why there was a shortage of plumbers in the UK. They were all making more money from home renovations than from basic repairs.
Usually there is so much inertia in the political system, than any single person with drive and enthusiasm will be slowed down if not stopped entirely. Then if anything does gain momentum it's due to grass roots support or political lobbying.
Middle class jobs have already been replaced in the past - you just weren't around at the time.
Newspapers used to have huge print departments - entire teams of hundreds of people employed to take the stories that journalists wrote, convert them into metal boilerplate on drums, choosing appropriate font sizes, laying out rows of text, leaving space for pictures and photographs, doing a run of hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages, then tearing down this boilerplate and putting all the letters back into the appropriate boxes for each font. All done within a day. When WYSIWYG edit systems came out, the journalists and editors could do this by themselves. The print unions went on strike demanding that they be the ones to operate these systems. Known as the Wapping Dispute where 6000 workers went on strike over the sudden vaporisation of their jobs. In-house print departments have been replaced by Powerpoint and laser printers. They might still be around for presentation posters.
Corporate structures have become flatter. Some companies used to have a 3 to 1 ratio for managers to subordinates, so there would be 10 people between an engineer and the CEO. Typing secretaries have been replaced by admins and personal assistants, and executaries. Weaving loom operators have been replaced by Photoshop artists and machine technicians. Telephone operators have been replaced by automatic exchanges. Workers either emigrate, set up their own companies and/or move onto doing something diffferent.
Africans could feed themselves with enough food to export as well. Shame they spend so much time on pointless wars burying landmines everywhere. But even then, you would have to shift millions away from subsistence farming so that fields could be ploughed and crops grown according to modern farming rotation methods.
Around 1995, Sony had the Playstation, SEGA Saturn still had developers. Around 1996, ID Software had published Quake which did software based texture-mapping in real-time. SGI freaked out and pushed to make a software-based version of OpenGL. Microsoft saw the success of Sony and how this was cutting into PC game profits and brought up a startup to make their own 3D API, DirectX. 3Dfx brought out a piggy-back board, followed by NVidia forming their own chip company. ID Software moved Quake over to hardware based 3D acceleration. Then the 3D chip wars began with about 40 different vendors all racing each other to bring out 3D chips that fully implemented a graphics pipeline including transform, lighting and clipping. Then Microsoft realized they had to make their own console system to rival Sony. The only way they could get a PC to match the cost of a console was to eliminate all the different variations and combinations of hardware, and the XBox was formed.
They used to be called "the 300lb gorilla in the living room" . They'd just squash, stomp and squish anything that remotely looked like it might be a threat to them; web browsers, 3D API's, GUI libraries. Their goal was always to be the interface between the hardware and the user. In the past corporate customers had to buy an Intel CPU desktop with a Windows operating system just to read email.
Problem is tha now, for the majority of users who want to read email or surf the web for leisure, a tablet, ipad or netbook suits their needs. For watching videos from the internet Smart-TV's with network connections are becoming available. If a tablet or netbook is too clunky, a smartphone is enough. Console systems cover the gaming angle for someone who doesn't want the hassle of constantly upgrading a desktop PC.
For high-performance computing a sixteen core CPU with multiple Kepler and GPU boards is the choice (Boxx). Even SGI is back making workstations like the Octane III, Tezro and Onyx. That just leaves office applications as the main purpose of a desktop PC.
Maybe he had the idea of the next wikipedia or mathipedia, perhaps jstoripedia or something similar. All the research papers would be hyperlinked and cross-reference in a graph form by keyword vs. year.
Extend that to photographs and postcards. I've seen postcards of villages from 90 years ago, and they haven't changed. The most haunting one was to see pictures of the shop-owners and their children. The shops and homes were the same with minor modifications. But it was so strange to realize that none of those people were around any more.
I do find the study of modern urban legends fascinating. Back in the 1960's there was an urban legend that the original "Avengers" series had did some trial runs using color film reels as an experiment. Nobody ever saw or heard more about those reels for decades. They looked round all the film archives at the studio and other places, but the studio has thrown them out all those years ago. Then one day, a woman is clearing out an old shed owned by her husband when she came across some flat metal cans. She didn't know what they were, called in some studio engineers, and they identified them as those very reels.
Even in a modern computer office or lab, there will be somebody that remembers that some contractor or senior engineer did some experimental work years ago before leaving. Nobody can find the work until years later, when some old server powered down for reliability is found and powered up again.
Yes. Some people I know would need a Head-Up Display embedded in the bottom of the glass to know that it was they who were having stability problems and not the room that was spinning.
Or embed them at the base of the glass so it doesn't make cleaning any harder. I thought of having a glass with the ice cubes fixed in place, but that would be impossible to clean.
Microsoft's problem is probably that they have too many customer who expect different things from user interface. On any windows system the general theme of default background, fonts and colors can make all the difference to a user depending on their profession. Hand-drawn grafitti spray-can style artwork on brick walls might look hip and trendy to an artist, but will look awful to a precision design engineer. Basic blue and gray tones would be appreciated by business user who just wants to edit spreadsheets, but boring to an artists. Whenever the GUI designers change something that people like to something worse, it will be seen as change for the sake of change. Microsoft originally promoted Windows 95 as standardizing all applications to look identical. Then they promoted Windows XP as allowing developers to have custom skins.
Just about every Linux user has changed Linux distro's at one time or another simply because they couldn't stand missing applications (control panels), default layouts of desktops.
I agree about the use of disk drive letters. Best thing they could do would be to get rid of multiple versions of DLL's.
Each drone would emit a radio signal . When other drones detect that signal they would slow down accordingly. The radio signal could encode location as GPS coordinate and altitude, as well as velocity.
Great for drug dealers! Drone comes with money, replace money with drugs, and off it goes!
If only it were so easy...
Ideally, you'd want something capable of travelling over rough terrain, has more than three legs for stability, has a homing instinct, can scavenge for food, and can travel in groups for safety. Like a donkey train...
Even then, it's not the cost of the materials for the home, it's the "value" placed on the financial worth of the land. If one CEO is earning $1.5 million and can afford a ten acre lot, that sets the price for everyone else earning $500,000 and $50,000.
Usually, if something hasn't been in their family diet for several generations, people find they are allergic too it, or it gives them digestion problems.
Peanuts, gluten based products are a couple of examples.
So what's wrong with labelling food as GMO if it contains custom proteins? In any case, all food packaging contains a list of ingredients including items like sodium chloride (salt), preservatives, anti-oxidisers, food stabilizers, flavorants, artificial colors. People have become used to those.
"In this paper, we describe a method of representing the US income tax declaration form in the form of a fish tank decorated with ornaments. We placed fish food at locations representing sources of income, while taxes were represented by obstacles in the form of fish tank ornaments. The statistical average time taken by the fish to feed determined the final amount of tax due."
It's not going to be entirely broken up and sold as scrap. As the system is superscalar, the universities and mining institutes want to split the system into three blocks : UNM wants 10 racks, New Mexico State University want 4 racks, and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology would take 2 racks. They are each going to have their own physical campus space and energy consumption budgets, so no one could afford the entire system.
Look at the statistics of the system:
Type of system: SGI Altix ICE 8200 cluster Number of racks: 28 Number of processor cores per rack: 500 Total number of cores: 14000 Processing power: 172 Trillion calculations per second Power consumption 32 Kilowatts per cabinet (not sure if racks == cabinets, but that would mean 896 Kilowatts/hour if it were the case)
Normally, when someone requests time on a supercomputer, they put forward a funding bid, get some grant money which pays for fixed amount of time and number of cores. The administration of the system, then book in the time and schedule it with the other tasks running. If there are just a few regular customers and they each have a fixed amount of funding, then it's going to be cheaper for each of them to have their own portion of the system.
I'd imagine Intel and SGI thought they could work together to build this system, house it somewhere locally, and lease it out to whoever needed it, and gain experience with parallel processing as well as make a healthy profit, slowly gaining number of customers. Prospective customers probably freaked out at the cost of doing their processing on an external system that wasn't under their control versus running on desktop PC's with Kepler/CUDA/OpenCL systems.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft and Intel spend something like 25% of their annual budgets on computer security. Going all the way from instruction sets, interrupts, supervisors and hypervisors, to DLL and kernel layouts, secure computing initiatives like SecureBIOS, hardware checksumming, file and network virus scanners, authentication protocols, network security applications, best practice virtual network layouts (separate virtual networks for different application levels). Even with all that, a standard desktop system still needs around 250 Megabytes of disk space to store all the anti-virus signature definition files.
That's why the "walled garden" approach to applications is so attractive. You can avoid the overhead of dedicating computing resources to all of those things if they are screened before download.
You don't need to be sprint running or mountain climbed to keep fit. You just need to walk 30 minutes every day. Walking up and down staircases is even better. Avoid high-fructose corn syrup drinks and processed meat. Then the weight just melts off.
Trees work on the flow of water from the roots to the leaves through narrow tubes allow photosynthesis. There are different layers of food that have different functions. Basically the trunk of a tree is one giant artery. The inner core of the trunk, the heartwood is for strength, while it is the sapwood which transports water. The outer layer is for protection only.
Due to disease and old age, the sapwood will become damaged and no longer carry water.
My next door neighbor was plumber. He didn't just clear blocked pipes and drains. He designed entire bathrooms and house renovations down to specifying the electric systems, insulation, types of wood, varnish, filing planning permission applications as well as the plumbing and drainage. In fact this was why there was a shortage of plumbers in the UK. They were all making more money from home renovations than from basic repairs.
Usually there is so much inertia in the political system, than any single person with drive and enthusiasm will be slowed down if not stopped entirely. Then if anything does gain momentum it's due to grass roots support or political lobbying.
Middle class jobs have already been replaced in the past - you just weren't around at the time.
Newspapers used to have huge print departments - entire teams of hundreds of people employed to take the stories that journalists wrote, convert them into metal boilerplate on drums, choosing appropriate font sizes, laying out rows of text, leaving space for pictures and photographs, doing a run of hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages, then tearing down this boilerplate and putting all the letters back into the appropriate boxes for each font. All done within a day. When WYSIWYG edit systems came out, the journalists and editors could do this by themselves. The print unions went on strike demanding that they be the ones to operate these systems. Known as the Wapping Dispute where 6000 workers went on strike over the sudden vaporisation of their jobs. In-house print departments have been replaced by Powerpoint and laser printers. They might still be around for presentation posters.
Corporate structures have become flatter. Some companies used to have a 3 to 1 ratio for managers to subordinates, so there would be 10 people between an engineer and the CEO. Typing secretaries have been replaced by admins and personal assistants, and executaries. Weaving loom operators have been replaced by Photoshop artists and machine technicians. Telephone operators have been replaced by automatic exchanges.
Workers either emigrate, set up their own companies and/or move onto doing something diffferent.
Africans could feed themselves with enough food to export as well. Shame they spend so much time on pointless wars burying landmines everywhere. But even then, you would have to shift millions away from subsistence farming so that fields could be ploughed and crops grown according to modern farming rotation methods.
Around 1995, Sony had the Playstation, SEGA Saturn still had developers. Around 1996, ID Software had published Quake which did software based texture-mapping in real-time. SGI freaked out and pushed to make a software-based version of OpenGL. Microsoft saw the success of Sony and how this was cutting into PC game profits and brought up a startup to make their own 3D API, DirectX. 3Dfx brought out a piggy-back board, followed by NVidia forming their own chip company. ID Software moved Quake over to hardware based 3D acceleration. Then the 3D chip wars began with about 40 different vendors all racing each other to bring out 3D chips that fully implemented a graphics pipeline including transform, lighting and clipping.
Then Microsoft realized they had to make their own console system to rival Sony. The only way they could get a PC to match the cost of a console was to eliminate all the different variations and combinations of hardware, and the XBox was formed.
They used to be called "the 300lb gorilla in the living room" . They'd just squash, stomp and squish anything that remotely looked like it might be a threat to them; web browsers, 3D API's, GUI libraries. Their goal was always to be the interface between the hardware and the user. In the past corporate customers had to buy an Intel CPU desktop with a Windows operating system just to read email.
Problem is tha now, for the majority of users who want to read email or surf the web for leisure, a tablet, ipad or netbook suits their needs. For watching videos from the internet Smart-TV's with network connections are becoming available. If a tablet or netbook is too clunky, a smartphone is enough. Console systems cover the gaming angle for someone who doesn't want the hassle of constantly upgrading a desktop PC.
For high-performance computing a sixteen core CPU with multiple Kepler and GPU boards is the choice (Boxx). Even SGI is back making workstations like the Octane III, Tezro and Onyx. That just leaves office applications as the main purpose of a desktop PC.
I saw a green cross like image in the sky around midnight in 1989 during the solar storm. Just like this one, but the sky was darker and there was a tinge of red:
http://travelblog.viator.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Norway-Northern-Lights2-540x405.jpg
It also had the effect of making signals from FM radio stations from Norway strong enough to be heard on radio systems in Scotland.
There was another event that led to modification of the natural isotopes in North America:
http://ie.lbl.gov/paleo/paleo.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/nuclear.html
Maybe he had the idea of the next wikipedia or mathipedia, perhaps jstoripedia or something similar. All the research papers would be hyperlinked and cross-reference in a graph form by keyword vs. year.
Extend that to photographs and postcards. I've seen postcards of villages from 90 years ago, and they haven't changed. The most haunting one was to see pictures of the shop-owners and their children. The shops and homes were the same with minor modifications. But it was so strange to realize that none of those people were around any more.
You mean like the Bernhard Goetz shooting, that only made it to the front page of Time magazine?
Bernhard Goetz
I do find the study of modern urban legends fascinating. Back in the 1960's there was an urban legend that the original "Avengers" series had did some trial runs using color film reels as an experiment. Nobody ever saw or heard more about those reels for decades. They looked round all the film archives at the studio and other places, but the studio has thrown them out all those years ago. Then one day, a woman is clearing out an old shed owned by her husband when she came across some flat metal cans. She didn't know what they were, called in some studio engineers, and they identified them as those very reels.
Even in a modern computer office or lab, there will be somebody that remembers that some contractor or senior engineer did some experimental work years ago before leaving. Nobody can find the work until years later, when some old server powered down for reliability is found and powered up again.
Yes. Some people I know would need a Head-Up Display embedded in the bottom of the glass to know that it was they who were having stability problems and not the room that was spinning.
Or embed them at the base of the glass so it doesn't make cleaning any harder. I thought of having a glass with the ice cubes fixed in place, but that would be impossible to clean.
Microsoft's problem is probably that they have too many customer who expect different things from user interface. On any windows system the general theme of default background, fonts and colors can make all the difference to a user depending on their profession. Hand-drawn grafitti spray-can style artwork on brick walls might look hip and trendy to an artist, but will look awful to a precision design engineer. Basic blue and gray tones would be appreciated by business user who just wants to edit spreadsheets, but boring to an artists. Whenever the GUI designers change something that people like to something worse, it will be seen as change for the sake of change. Microsoft originally promoted Windows 95 as standardizing all applications to look identical. Then they promoted Windows XP as allowing developers to have custom skins.
Just about every Linux user has changed Linux distro's at one time or another simply because they couldn't stand missing applications (control panels), default layouts of desktops.
I agree about the use of disk drive letters. Best thing they could do would be to get rid of multiple versions of DLL's.
I only use duck tape and WD40 - just about holding it together and slowly creaking along.
Each drone would emit a radio signal . When other drones detect that signal they would slow down accordingly. The radio signal could encode location as GPS coordinate and altitude, as well as velocity.
Great for drug dealers! Drone comes with money, replace money with drugs, and off it goes!
If only it were so easy...
Ideally, you'd want something capable of travelling over rough terrain, has more than three legs for stability, has a homing instinct, can scavenge for food, and can travel in groups for safety. Like a donkey train ...
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/drug-mules-caught-transporting-marijuana-donkey-lesotho-south-africa
The only disadvantage is that at some point, a human has to collect the cargo.
Even then, it's not the cost of the materials for the home, it's the "value" placed on the financial worth of the land. If one CEO is earning $1.5 million and can afford a ten acre lot, that sets the price for everyone else earning $500,000 and $50,000.
Usually, if something hasn't been in their family diet for several generations, people find they are allergic too it, or it gives them digestion problems.
Peanuts, gluten based products are a couple of examples.
So what's wrong with labelling food as GMO if it contains custom proteins? In any case, all food packaging contains a list of ingredients including items like sodium chloride (salt), preservatives, anti-oxidisers, food stabilizers, flavorants, artificial colors. People have become used to those.
"In this paper, we describe a method of representing the US income tax declaration form in the form of a fish tank decorated with ornaments. We placed fish food at locations representing sources of income, while taxes were represented by obstacles in the form of fish tank ornaments. The statistical average time taken by the fish to feed determined the final amount of tax due."
It's not going to be entirely broken up and sold as scrap. As the system is superscalar, the universities and mining institutes want to split the system into three blocks : UNM wants 10 racks, New Mexico State University want 4 racks, and New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology would take 2 racks. They are each going to have their own physical campus space and energy consumption budgets, so no one could afford the entire system.
Look at the statistics of the system:
Type of system: SGI Altix ICE 8200 cluster
Number of racks: 28
Number of processor cores per rack: 500
Total number of cores: 14000
Processing power: 172 Trillion calculations per second
Power consumption 32 Kilowatts per cabinet (not sure if racks == cabinets, but that would mean 896 Kilowatts/hour if it were the case)
Normally, when someone requests time on a supercomputer, they put forward a funding bid, get some grant money which pays for fixed amount of time and number of cores. The administration of the system, then book in the time and schedule it with the other tasks running. If there are just a few regular customers and they each have a fixed amount of funding, then it's going to be cheaper for each of them to have their own portion of the system.
I'd imagine Intel and SGI thought they could work together to build this system, house it somewhere locally, and lease it out to whoever needed it, and gain experience with parallel processing as well as make a healthy profit, slowly gaining number of customers. Prospective customers probably freaked out at the cost of doing their processing on an external system that wasn't under their control versus running on desktop PC's with Kepler/CUDA/OpenCL systems.