It is actual production. I go to work and can create more of my final product (in this case software) because I spend less time managing my time. At home I able to accomplish more because the things I need to do take less time.
Spreadsheets have reduced the number of people required per equal unit of work. There are still a lot of accountants, money managers and such because there is more work to do. These "more elaborate models" enable people to properaly and quickly plan their finances and move on to other productive activities. I used to write stock option and bond software. Did this eliminate the need for a trader? No, but it allowed him to make better, faster decisions. This let him produce more in the same amount of time and effort.
Coms are dropping because they were not using the data produced by these models. Data that indicated that you have to make a profit to stay in business.
Travel: Cars are safer for people and environment. The cars of today may look like the cars of yesterday but I the insides are different in many ways. Most planes may be 20 years old but we are now entering a time when massive upgrades must occur. As the old planes are replaced with new ones, technology will jump. Often change occurs in spurts. This is an example.
About 50% of the adults in this country are using the Internet. Most internet usage is long range. My favorites sites physically exist in other states and often other countries. Many people now use e-mail and IM to communicate with friends far away. Often these services are less expensive than traditional communication services.
In my lifetime of 24 years, I have seen AIDS and cancer go from death sentences to treatable illnesses. Without the advances in blood pressure medication and medical imaging my mother might not still be alive today.
Smallpox is now considered one of the most dangerous biological weapons that could be used. Vaccine production is increasing and innoculations may come back in full force.
I can't think of an apropriate respone to the plumbing. You got me on that one...
Your kids are watching reruns of a movie what would not have been possible just a few decades ago. Now you will be looking up in the sky at a space station that is visable from earth and built by nations working together. I can drive a vehicle whose only waste product is water.
While many great things happened in the past, great things are happening today and will happen tomorrow. The best is always yet to come.
"The law of diminishing returns is gripping us?" You compare to sets of clock speeds and claim this means the end of history? Even if you were right about a slowdown (which I think you are not), it would not mean the end. Evolution seems to occur in spurts. If you are right, we are just not in one right now.
Actually, Vinge has been right on. Take a read at the inventions of the year in Discover. Amazing discoveries in food, computers, physics, and about everything else will change the world around us in incredible ways. Technology is increasing at ever increasing rates. There are bumps in the road but it keeps moving. Continuous speech recognition is becoming a reality. I can call a 800 number and ask about movies, get the information I need, and never talk to a human being. Computers are interacting with us in more human way. Most tutorial programs now talk the user through the learning. As computer power grows, the little annoying paper clip will become your virtual personal assistant. It is happening already. Operating Systems and the software around them have become so customizable that each person's system is unique. They gain personality. I am not talking about wallpaper and screensaves, I mean the ways in which we interact. Web sites have moved from static digital representations of print to customized, unique, living, breathing swirls of personal information. When I visit/., yahoo, cnn and netscape, it is my site I find. No one else sees that exact same site. Site are learning our habits. I am finally starting to get spam about things I care about. Amazon usually makes pretty good suggestions to me. Computers are already building computers. Engineers use software to help design the latest hardware. Some parts of software are written by software itself with humans only guiding it to the solution. Society is also changing at a dramatic pace. Cultures shift and change in months instead of years, years instead of decades. Technology has lead this increase in the rate of change. Ideas now move great distances at swift rates. The readers of our posts live in many different places, with varying societies and cultures. As a young girl in Canada and an old man in China interact, they change a little bit. As they change they change the society and culture around them. As those cultures change, the world changes. End game? No, I think the game is just beginning...
This guy must have never talked to any of his older relatives and compared notes with his younger ones.
For one thing, the author throws away the importance of computers and the internet. I find this unbelievable. I am a computer scientist, as are many of/.'s readers. My whole science was just forming. Computer science means as much to me as physics to a rocket scientist. The author talks about marginal gains in communications. Marginal? It once would have cost me hundres of dollors to interact with someone a half a world away and hours of research to find people there that are interested in what I am interested. Computers and the Internet allow me to communicate to anyone, anywhere, for viturally no cost. I am easily able to find people like and unlike me and exchange ideas. The Internet is at least as revolutionary as the telegraph. It breaks down barriers in unbelievable ways and allows ordinary people to band together in extraordinary ways. Take Linux. This phenomenon would never have occured without the power of the Internet to spread ideas across near infinite distances.
Computer science has created whole new sub-cultures. I find it amazing to look at/. and think of its humble beginings. I also find it beautifull that this technology has given us nerds, geeks, and other outcasts a place to find peace with like minded people. How many lives have been totally changed by this technology? I have wanted to be a programmer since my first TRS-80 Model III. This shaped my entire life in truly deep ways and still does today.
He marginalizes the amazing gains in medicine. I am sure the author would not feel this way if he saw these "marginal" gains save his loved one's lives, as I have. How many of us know someone who would have been dead if they had their heart attack 50 years ago? This is marginal?
He talks about a slight gain in productivity. Strange, the Greenspan's biggest reason for the rise of the stock market is increases in productivity, especially due gains in technology. I guess Allan doesn't know what he is talking about. Today I pay my bills online in seconds. I manage my budget in minutes. I can plan my week in minutes. I am many times more productive than I would have been without those technologies. The gains in computing speed made the impossible a reality with the Human Genome Project. Productivity is not measure in word processors. My mother is an accountant. Ask her how much time she saves with spreadsheets and databases over pen and paper. She once told me, "Thank God that when I have to do the books, they are not really books anymore!"
He completly ignores changes in society. While still not totally free, information is far less censered than in the 50s. We find Nick at Nite quaint, not because of it's acurate portrayal of 50s life but it's portrayal of silly 50s TV standards. Today, we can find information about many things that were hidden in the past. Sexuality is much more open today than it was 50 years ago. While it still has a way to go, the treatment of minorities is much better than 50 years ago. They are protected by laws that give the same chances a white male as in the workplace, at the bank, at school, and in the media. Women no longer are stuck at home in the "Mrs. Cleaver" role and now the Beave has friends that are Blacks, Latinos, and Asians of various orignal nationalities. These changes have huge ramifications on the world we live in.
Progess shouldn't be measured in blenders and cars. We may be unhappy that we don't have HAL, personal rocket packs, flying cars, and PanAm flights to space but there has been a lot of progress in the last 50 years.
Any know how many qbits are they are up to in a single machine now? Last I heard it was around 7 or so. The article here is a bit fuzzy on details but includes a link to qubit.org's intro. Some of the stuff I have read about this seems amazing, almost SciFi like. Applying this technology to cryptography and computing in general could really change things. The "photon takes two paths at once" thing still blows my mind. The world of the very small is a very strange world indeed. I find the idea of qbit based storage and parallel processing the most interesting. Some say quantum computing will never really work but if it does...just imagine where this stuff is going to take us. I can't wait!
"I want to put up a web site but I don't want any traffic on it." What!? If you don't want traffic, make the site secure. Simple. Your argument could be applied to almost anything. If a tv show uses a beverage, which causes people to go out and buy the beverage, which causes the beverage company to spend more money making the beverage, should they sue the tv show? If you business model is such that growth means negative earnings growth, then you shouldn't be in business.
It doesn't make sense to charge for a link to a free, public page. This would reduce links to the site and reduce ad revenue. I used to work for a banner ad software company, RealMedia, Inc. Companies don't charge by just click-through. It is now believed that just seeing the ads has an effect and thus should be charged for. Links increase page views, and page views increase ad revenue. This scheme will only backfire and reduce ad revenue as sites decide not to link when threatened. Since they don't link, there will not be any link revenue to compensate. This is just a dumb idea.
Which is worse...that they are trying to charge for linking to a public page, that there is a company whose whole business revolves around this, or that other companies are actually paying for it? It seems that the larger the net gets, the lower the average IQ of a net business gets. I guess they figure link revenue can make up for lost.com banner advertising? I really don't understand who would back these plans. What VC actually funded this? You would think that with the.com shakeout VCs would be more carefull about where they put their money. I guess not. Next they will charge you for linking to a site that links to their site. Then search engines will have to pay infinite amounts of money...
This sounds like a lot of standard techniques already in use in storage today. Many storage controlers (FibreChannel/SCSI, RAID/nonRAID) support battery backup power that will let them finish writes. Most use internal write and read cache and include lots of memory. Transaction support already exists in some ways. If I send a command to write 1024 bytes to a disk that does 512 byte writes, a good controller will attempt to make the 1024 byte operation atomic even though it is internally broken up into multiple 512 byte writes. File systems fragment the pieces of a file and thus have to issue multiple non-sequential commands for a given operation. This is where the problem errupts. Some controllers support combining multiple operations into one call but this is usually done without FS knowledge; it just fills a buffer of ops and then dumps it. RAID already handles the issue of non-sequential operations by hiding them. RAID may present a 1 terrabyte drive as sequential data when it is really stripped across various areas of various drives. When RAID is told to write 1 sequential GB out it is done as one operation, even though it involves many non-sequential writes to multiple locations on multiple disks. The trick is to put file system support in the storage controllers or RAID systems. With file system support, it will attempt to make sure that physically non-sequential writes that are sequential at the file level are completely written out. This doesn't happen much because for various reasons but does exist. For example, some RAID systems support running the file system on their system directly.
What does this do that is so different? At $300, it may be less expensive than similar solutions but I do not see "how it differs from everything out there".
Maybe I am picky but what is FireWire's fastest speed? 400 Mbps/50 MBps? The current FibreChannel spec supports much more. The last FibreChannel controller I worked on did around 200 MBps on one loop. FibreChannel can use a hub/switch topology. FC may be a bit storage centric but no more than SCSI is. The only thing I find compelling about FireWire is its price. That is why my main point was that companies should work on making the best technologies less expensive rather than cheaper but lower performing alternatives. In my opinion FireWire and USB are just watered down options. They are cheap but slow. IDE, Serial ports, classic ports, etc. are even cheaper but even slower. How does FireWire not fit into this?
InfiniBand is looking out to be a great replacment for PCI. It gives you the ability to pull the bus out of the box and also uses a hub/switch network like topology. It supports various speeds and a memory model that lends itself to clustering. While InfiniBand is pretty new, the industry is backing it. Intel already has a Target Controllers ready. Host controllers are coming soon.
Combined they give you a lot of flexibility. The Infiniband network for all data traffic and the FibreChannel network for all storage traffic.
Why can't these companies concentrate on making the good technologies out there cheaper? Enough of these watered down attempts like USB and FireWire. Enough with PCI and PCI-X. We know we have things that are better. I am so tired of good hardware costing so much more just because the vendors can get away with charging more. They claim you are paying for performance, development costs, etc. but I think you are paying for a lack of real competition. All these companies that make SCSI drives yet prices in this market didn't fall like the IDE market? Does it really cost that much more to build a scsi drive than an IDE one? What about a fibre channel controller and drives vs. similar SCSI controller and drives? It is unbelievable!
By the by...although InfiniBand is pretty new it has great potential. It makes a great platform for both storage and network traffic. I am currently working on drivers for storage (fc) and network (GB ethernet) devices over InfiniBand. And our first target platform is...Linux!
Sure the non-commercial sites will survive regardless. The most popular sites on the net are commercial though. Even good ol'/. is a commercial site./., like all commercial sites, exits to make money for the shareholders of the company that owns it. End of story. If the site does not make them money, then it dies. It may reform in some freebie fasion but its size becomes limited by the time people are able to donate to it. The point is that there are a lot of good, important, commercial sites out there that will need to find ways to make money to survive.
I used to work for RealMedia, a company who provides banner advertising software and solutions. One of their biggest clients is the NYT. They are doing pretty well with their ad revenue and plan to continue with a free site supported by ads.
It costs money to keep up good web sites, especially dynamic sites like news sites. Either you are going to have payments per story, monthly subscriptions, or ads. The ads will get harder and harder to avoid. Redirects to ads served off a server near or the same as the content server are hard to block.
Of course you can disable your browser. If you really hate graphical ads you can go to lynx and deal with text based ads. Do you really hate ads that much? If you watch TV or listen to the radio you are already dealing with ads. What makes the web different?
Neat stuff but... it still doesn't address two big issues:
1. On most platforms stack memory allocate is much faster than dynamic. As far as I know, Java does not support allocating structures on the stack.
2. With limited resources, programmers need tight control over memory deallocation. While you can force a call to the GC, it is usually not a synchronous call. Sometimes you need to know all the memory from step 1 is free before going to to step 2.
A bit about this paticular JVM. It does not support 64-bit data types. 64-bit PCI, PCI-X and Infiniband all require 64-bit addressing. That makes this unusable for most I/O adapters unless this JVM supports 64-bit addressing with its references types but hides it from the user.
Oh well...
I have written in java before actually. I wrote both applets and stand alone programs for stock option and bond calculations. I did find java to be a fast way to get a gui application on to many platforms. I found it horrible for the math side of what I did with many VMs. Of course you can write command line applications with java. I do not deny that. I have seen java forced into so many environments from applets to servlets. It can do all of these things but only a few of them very well.
I agree with you that java and java chips may be a good fit for PDAs and settop boxes but I work more in the I/O controller space. I also thought that Sun's licensing was pretty strict about partial java implementations being official java. I always thought it odd that so much the java api was considered mandatory parts of the language rather than optional extra libraries. If an official java can exclude the extras they do not need, that I stand corrected about the vm size. If the chips can stand up to the current crop of I/O processors, you have got me there. But I doubt it because...
Speed and low level control are still very important for I/O controllers and real time applications. The language hides things that most low level developers need or want. For example, they want total control of memory allocation and deallocation. They want direct access to memory. Java just doesn't have this. So even with a fast, inexpesive chip running java native, you still have the lack of control. Heck, for a certain routines, assembly comes into play in this space.
When I first heard about embedded java I put it right with WinCE in the "Why?!" catagories. I believe that java is a pretty good RAD language and it is nice to have a web enabled platform independent gui standard. These are its strengths and they are great for web programs where bandwidth is often the limiting factor, not code spead and control. Put more in the VM and make the code that is moved about smaller. Let someone write to one gui standard.
In the world of gigabit NICs and FibreChannel RAID controllers running on InfiniBand, java just doesn't fit. Sure you can take a chainsaw to it and cut out what you don't need. This isn't java anymore though. If it doesn't run all the sun APIs, it isn't java. Now if sun starts bending on that for publicity and cash ("How much does a java logo cost?") than they look real hipocritical considering their battle with MS.
Even with a chainsawed java, it still doesn't make sense. Java has no stack structures except for primitives. It gives the author little control of memory deallocation. This is a big issue when you have limited amounts RAM and no swap. Also, having "secret" threads running around freeing memory while the author needs code to run at a specific rate really hurts. Graphics? What does an anti-lock breaking system need with graphics code?
I suspect there is reason that most embedded/realtime OSs are written in C/assembly and have those types of APIs. Even C++ is feared due to sense of lack of control. The STL is never used without source control of it. At these levels programmers are pulled back to the days when size and speed really mattered. Java can't give you that. A JVM takes up too much space in software and java chips are often too big, require too much power or are too expensive or all of the above. I suspect that JVMs in an embedded environment would find it hard to achieve C/assembly speeds. In the gui feature rich world it doesn't matter that much. In the world were the two major features are send and receive, size and speed are king.
It seems that a lack of IM interoperability is really more of pain that a real FCC/FTC issue. All this IM talk makes me run back to the safe world of irc. They talk about creating a standard for internet chat when there has been one for years.
Since all of these programs are free and only bring in revenue through advertising, I really don't see what the problem is. There are always lots of incompatibilities between programs. There always will be. AOL is not using its market dominance in the IM arena to take over another area. This is not the same as when MS told OEMs to build IE and not Netscape or lose Windows. Nor is it like when MS gave IE away for free to kill Netscape while MS made its money elsewhere.
To put it another way, what if Real format became the very popular and Real refused to license the player code to anyone else. Should the government force them to open up the Real format? It would be nice from a user standpoint but it would not be needed from a governmental standpoint.
I am much more worried about regulation of cable lines. I believe that cable will become the next standard in home internet connectivity. It has higher throughput and less of a distance limitation than DSL and home wireless internet is still some time away. Internet connectivity and the services that bring it (standard voice line, DSL, cable, wireless) really should be thought of as a neccessity that people need goverment protection for rather than a luxury that the government doesn't need to involve themselves with. In my area I am stuck between various monopolies and trusts. You want DSL? I don't care what ISP you use it will be Verizon's lines in the end. They also own nearly all the fibre in this area, with PECO (our local power company) coming in second. Ok, I'll take cable access. I must go with Adelphia cable due to where I live and that means @Home. Even if I move...the entrire tri-state is almost completely @Home. They are the provider for Comcast, Suburban, and Adelphia. To top it off, all of these cable companies have AT&T connections. Often the name on the bill is not your actual provider as your account is bumped around from provider for a fee. Each time you are bumped, your line upgrades fall to the back of the list.
It is the cable lines that need opening, not the IMs!
In colleges, you are right. In the private sector engineers tend to fit the first description though. Software engineers are probably the least professional of all the engineering sciences. The "what if Microsoft made cars?" type stories are funny but somewhat true of the field as a whole. Look at what is happening with FireStone and Ford. If I put software that bad...nothing would happen to me at all. In fact, I probably wouldn't even have to hide the issues. I could even charge more money for a better working product. "Working" is now a feature and one that is charged more for. MS advertises that NT is 40 times more stable than 98. If they know that 98 is this bad, how can they legally sell it at all? This type of attitude permeates through the CS world. Language zealots are just another example.
more than make programmers makes software slow
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Granted there are a lot of bad programmers out there. Too many developers don't have the education required (reading Learn C++ in 21 days does not count) to really be programmers. They are often better prepared for QA, Tech. Writing or technical support. This is not to say they are not as smart or good; many good developers would not do well in these other areas. I really think that degrees in computer science (for people young enough to have gone to a school with a CS department) are a prerequisite to becoming a good programmer. I learned a ton in college about developing high quality software. Yes, every programmer should know a little assembly. This what all code gets down to eventually and it is important to understand the tool you are using, the computer. Assembly teaches you that. It also enforces commenting and structed programming techniques because without them you will fail to write even the most modest of programs.
Even with this issue I still feel that the major problem with software out there is bad managment. Managers rarely are able to stand up for engineering princibles. This is one reason why computer science is often not taken seriously by many in the world. What other engineering science would produce such a horrible group of products? What if car and sky scrapper engineers produced products at our level? Even in companies that sell software, the head of engineering almost never has enough power to say, "Hey I know that marketing wants it yesterday but to do it right we need more time!" All too often they are forced to just push the developers to the max. If they don't another manager is found. The battle between engineering and marketing/sales is slanted heavily towards the sales guys. In many companies' minds, sales people make money while developers cost money. They want to minimize costs and maximize revenues. "Bugs? Isn't that what we have a Tech. Support for? Why don't we charge for that? Heck, why don't we make the thing so hard to use that our users will have to pay us to learn how to use it!" It goes on and on.
Somewhere in the 90's companies like MS managed to prove that you could make a lot of money by focusing on features that sort of worked rather than a high quality product. Most people are so cynical about software you hear things like "Never try x.0" and "wait for at least the 3rd service pack." They expect things not to work. If you claim that your software is bug free they will just not believe it. Then they will buy the one with more features figuring your software probably had as many bugs in it. This kind of attitude makes it very hard to focus on software quality. Most software companies may have a QA/Testing department but often these groups are more focused on CYA (cover your ass) activity than real quality. Sadly, in most areas, it is not profitable to make high quality software. At least it is not believed to be.
Two of the areas left where quality really matters are open source software and enterprise software. I have worked on device drivers for network and fibre channel cards where a 24/7 server is the target. This things have to be fast and reliable. We had to make (sorry Ford) quality job #1. This is one case where software quality is neccessary for profitability. Of course, in open source the developers are judged only on the quality of their code. Then again, many developers could give a flying fig about what others think about the quality of their code without some incentive (fix this or you are fired).
I really wish the computer scientists, software engineers, programmers, developers, or whatever we are to be called would have a real professional orgranization, like lawyers and doctors have. This org could help with quality control like other orgs do with their professions. There are many cs orgs but none with any real power in the public eye. You wouldn't use a lawyer who was not bar certified but what about a programmer? What about a supposedly technical manager?
Hmmm, FibreChannel seems to do as well or better in a bunch of areas:
Speed - 4.24 Gbps
Topologies - Point-to-point loop hub, switched, fabric. FC controllers can talk to fc hard disks and fc tapes drives without an os. FC hub/switches can talk to all devices on the loop for administrative control.
HotPlug - Just plug it in, plug it in. To a closed loop, a hub, a switch, a fabric, etc.
Device Limit - Don't have exact number but I remember it being way over 63...anyone have it? In my testing of my old company's fc controller we had as many as 300 devices on one loop.
Distance - 10 Km. Who needs wireless when you have a long cable?:-)
Ribben cables - You can use fibre optical or copper based connectors. Either way, the cable is small and bendable.
I think that FireWire has a ways to go to catch up to FC. I would like to see one standard but the best technologies are the most expensive and the average user doesn't have the money or the need for the best technologies. Let FireWire, USB, and SCSI slug it out while FC holds the server crown. Oh...and somebody please kill off IDE!
FireWire may be faster than SCSI but I don't believe that FireWire is faster than FibreChannel. A FibreChannel controller that I worked on did around 190 megabytes per second. Can any FireWire controllers push that kind of data? (not trying to be cocky, just asking)
When I said, "Writing things the correct way the first time," I was talking handling porting code and the commenting out code issue. Here you have a simple decision that will effect coding efforts many months or years into the future.
I agree that in general writing things the correct way is not easy and nobody is perfect should expect perfection. The difference is that here you have a single decision where you know that one way you couldn't get away with on the job or in school. In this case you just know that by simply commenting out code you are taking the easy way out. What kind of grade/raise would you get for that? What would your coworkers think when they get a bug in this comment trail?
On your personal notes....
Actually, I gave free CS and math help in college and happily give directions when I know them. At work I write requirement and functional specifications and I write code. What is wrong with specifications? Should we just give up on documenting anything? I guess we could write even more unreadable, unmaintainable code and provide instant job security. Nah, I think I will stick to making my fellow programmers' lives easier so they will do the same for me.
Sure you could note why you commented it out but does this make the code any more readable? You could just as easily check in the original code into CVS (or something similar), make the changes, check in the new code with a nice CVS comment. Then you could later use cvs diff and log to see the history. Think long term and think about other maintainers. Commented out code may work for you or for a quick kludge but it will get pretty bad as time goes on. File sizes will swell and there will be no chance of making one set of source.
If you really want to see both sets of code, try using something that could result in one set of super source that will compile anywhere. I work on software that builds unmodified on Linux, BSDi, FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix, AIX, and NT4/Win2k. There are various methods to handle bits of code that must be native. You could try general public view classes with native cat classes beneath. Or for a more c style solution try general api frontends to all native functions. The native functions are then implemented in special native only files. For example File.cpp is a general File API but FileWin32.cpp implents file handling for Windows while FilePosix.cpp implements File handling Unix style. Throw in configure script or make handling and your project will adjust to use the correct files for the correct platform.
By seperating the common from the native only code, you improve readability, establish a common API, and make future changes easier.
As I said, I wrote code like this everyday. It works with everything from back-end code to UI code. Trying to maintain commented out code in some sort of "port the original's changes" becomes very difficult. When the original changes you have to match his changes with your commented out changes and then rewrite again? ARG! I have seen places try to walk down that road too many times. It doesn't work well at all. Eventually, the constant porting effort becomes too expensive in money and/or time and it gets killed or key features get killed. One set of source that works everywhere automatically is the goal we should be going for, not a quick hack port.
Sure you could provide that information in the code block but it still kills readablity for future maintainers. Ever try to read a word doc with track changes turned on? Files with commented out code are similar. They end up looking like some kind of rough draft of code, not "final draft" code.
My feeling is that if you couldn't hand it in to your college professors in school, why should you do it in life? Just because you are not getting graded does not mean you should be lazy. Take the time to use a source repository and use check in comments. If you check in changes often with good comments, you can figure things out much easier then just leaving comments like/* Code below worked on windows but doesn't here so rewrote..... */ .
Yes, you are right aobut the syntax comment. I took it a bit farther than the author may have intended. But I really disagree with that even being the most important part. As I said, I like seeing all the different parts of the syntax colored differently. It makes the code easier to follow and look more structured. Comment highlighting is usefull but it is only a part of the whole.
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It is actual production. I go to work and can create more of my final product (in this case software) because I spend less time managing my time. At home I able to accomplish more because the things I need to do take less time.
Spreadsheets have reduced the number of people required per equal unit of work. There are still a lot of accountants, money managers and such because there is more work to do. These "more elaborate models" enable people to properaly and quickly plan their finances and move on to other productive activities. I used to write stock option and bond software. Did this eliminate the need for a trader? No, but it allowed him to make better, faster decisions. This let him produce more in the same amount of time and effort.
Coms are dropping because they were not using the data produced by these models. Data that indicated that you have to make a profit to stay in business.
While many great things happened in the past, great things are happening today and will happen tomorrow. The best is always yet to come.
"The law of diminishing returns is gripping us?" You compare to sets of clock speeds and claim this means the end of history? Even if you were right about a slowdown (which I think you are not), it would not mean the end. Evolution seems to occur in spurts. If you are right, we are just not in one right now. /., yahoo, cnn and netscape, it is my site I find. No one else sees that exact same site. Site are learning our habits. I am finally starting to get spam about things I care about. Amazon usually makes pretty good suggestions to me. Computers are already building computers. Engineers use software to help design the latest hardware. Some parts of software are written by software itself with humans only guiding it to the solution. Society is also changing at a dramatic pace. Cultures shift and change in months instead of years, years instead of decades. Technology has lead this increase in the rate of change. Ideas now move great distances at swift rates. The readers of our posts live in many different places, with varying societies and cultures. As a young girl in Canada and an old man in China interact, they change a little bit. As they change they change the society and culture around them. As those cultures change, the world changes. End game? No, I think the game is just beginning...
Actually, Vinge has been right on. Take a read at the inventions of the year in Discover. Amazing discoveries in food, computers, physics, and about everything else will change the world around us in incredible ways. Technology is increasing at ever increasing rates. There are bumps in the road but it keeps moving. Continuous speech recognition is becoming a reality. I can call a 800 number and ask about movies, get the information I need, and never talk to a human being. Computers are interacting with us in more human way. Most tutorial programs now talk the user through the learning. As computer power grows, the little annoying paper clip will become your virtual personal assistant. It is happening already. Operating Systems and the software around them have become so customizable that each person's system is unique. They gain personality. I am not talking about wallpaper and screensaves, I mean the ways in which we interact. Web sites have moved from static digital representations of print to customized, unique, living, breathing swirls of personal information. When I visit
This guy must have never talked to any of his older relatives and compared notes with his younger ones. /.'s readers. My whole science was just forming. Computer science means as much to me as physics to a rocket scientist. The author talks about marginal gains in communications. Marginal? It once would have cost me hundres of dollors to interact with someone a half a world away and hours of research to find people there that are interested in what I am interested. Computers and the Internet allow me to communicate to anyone, anywhere, for viturally no cost. I am easily able to find people like and unlike me and exchange ideas. The Internet is at least as revolutionary as the telegraph. It breaks down barriers in unbelievable ways and allows ordinary people to band together in extraordinary ways. Take Linux. This phenomenon would never have occured without the power of the Internet to spread ideas across near infinite distances.
/. and think of its humble beginings. I also find it beautifull that this technology has given us nerds, geeks, and other outcasts a place to find peace with like minded people. How many lives have been totally changed by this technology? I have wanted to be a programmer since my first TRS-80 Model III. This shaped my entire life in truly deep ways and still does today.
For one thing, the author throws away the importance of computers and the internet. I find this unbelievable. I am a computer scientist, as are many of
Computer science has created whole new sub-cultures. I find it amazing to look at
He marginalizes the amazing gains in medicine. I am sure the author would not feel this way if he saw these "marginal" gains save his loved one's lives, as I have. How many of us know someone who would have been dead if they had their heart attack 50 years ago? This is marginal?
He talks about a slight gain in productivity. Strange, the Greenspan's biggest reason for the rise of the stock market is increases in productivity, especially due gains in technology. I guess Allan doesn't know what he is talking about. Today I pay my bills online in seconds. I manage my budget in minutes. I can plan my week in minutes. I am many times more productive than I would have been without those technologies. The gains in computing speed made the impossible a reality with the Human Genome Project. Productivity is not measure in word processors. My mother is an accountant. Ask her how much time she saves with spreadsheets and databases over pen and paper. She once told me, "Thank God that when I have to do the books, they are not really books anymore!"
He completly ignores changes in society. While still not totally free, information is far less censered than in the 50s. We find Nick at Nite quaint, not because of it's acurate portrayal of 50s life but it's portrayal of silly 50s TV standards. Today, we can find information about many things that were hidden in the past. Sexuality is much more open today than it was 50 years ago. While it still has a way to go, the treatment of minorities is much better than 50 years ago. They are protected by laws that give the same chances a white male as in the workplace, at the bank, at school, and in the media. Women no longer are stuck at home in the "Mrs. Cleaver" role and now the Beave has friends that are Blacks, Latinos, and Asians of various orignal nationalities. These changes have huge ramifications on the world we live in.
Progess shouldn't be measured in blenders and cars. We may be unhappy that we don't have HAL, personal rocket packs, flying cars, and PanAm flights to space but there has been a lot of progress in the last 50 years.
Any know how many qbits are they are up to in a single machine now? Last I heard it was around 7 or so. The article here is a bit fuzzy on details but includes a link to qubit.org's intro. Some of the stuff I have read about this seems amazing, almost SciFi like. Applying this technology to cryptography and computing in general could really change things. The "photon takes two paths at once" thing still blows my mind. The world of the very small is a very strange world indeed. I find the idea of qbit based storage and parallel processing the most interesting. Some say quantum computing will never really work but if it does...just imagine where this stuff is going to take us. I can't wait!
"I want to put up a web site but I don't want any traffic on it." What!? If you don't want traffic, make the site secure. Simple. Your argument could be applied to almost anything. If a tv show uses a beverage, which causes people to go out and buy the beverage, which causes the beverage company to spend more money making the beverage, should they sue the tv show? If you business model is such that growth means negative earnings growth, then you shouldn't be in business.
It doesn't make sense to charge for a link to a free, public page. This would reduce links to the site and reduce ad revenue. I used to work for a banner ad software company, RealMedia, Inc. Companies don't charge by just click-through. It is now believed that just seeing the ads has an effect and thus should be charged for. Links increase page views, and page views increase ad revenue. This scheme will only backfire and reduce ad revenue as sites decide not to link when threatened. Since they don't link, there will not be any link revenue to compensate. This is just a dumb idea.
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.com banner advertising? I really don't understand who would back these plans. What VC actually funded this? You would think that with the .com shakeout VCs would be more carefull about where they put their money. I guess not. Next they will charge you for linking to a site that links to their site. Then search engines will have to pay infinite amounts of money...
Which is worse...that they are trying to charge for linking to a public page, that there is a company whose whole business revolves around this, or that other companies are actually paying for it? It seems that the larger the net gets, the lower the average IQ of a net business gets. I guess they figure link revenue can make up for lost
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This sounds like a lot of standard techniques already in use in storage today. Many storage controlers (FibreChannel/SCSI, RAID/nonRAID) support battery backup power that will let them finish writes. Most use internal write and read cache and include lots of memory. Transaction support already exists in some ways. If I send a command to write 1024 bytes to a disk that does 512 byte writes, a good controller will attempt to make the 1024 byte operation atomic even though it is internally broken up into multiple 512 byte writes. File systems fragment the pieces of a file and thus have to issue multiple non-sequential commands for a given operation. This is where the problem errupts. Some controllers support combining multiple operations into one call but this is usually done without FS knowledge; it just fills a buffer of ops and then dumps it. RAID already handles the issue of non-sequential operations by hiding them. RAID may present a 1 terrabyte drive as sequential data when it is really stripped across various areas of various drives. When RAID is told to write 1 sequential GB out it is done as one operation, even though it involves many non-sequential writes to multiple locations on multiple disks. The trick is to put file system support in the storage controllers or RAID systems. With file system support, it will attempt to make sure that physically non-sequential writes that are sequential at the file level are completely written out. This doesn't happen much because for various reasons but does exist. For example, some RAID systems support running the file system on their system directly.
What does this do that is so different? At $300, it may be less expensive than similar solutions but I do not see "how it differs from everything out there".
Maybe I am picky but what is FireWire's fastest speed? 400 Mbps/50 MBps? The current FibreChannel spec supports much more. The last FibreChannel controller I worked on did around 200 MBps on one loop. FibreChannel can use a hub/switch topology. FC may be a bit storage centric but no more than SCSI is. The only thing I find compelling about FireWire is its price. That is why my main point was that companies should work on making the best technologies less expensive rather than cheaper but lower performing alternatives. In my opinion FireWire and USB are just watered down options. They are cheap but slow. IDE, Serial ports, classic ports, etc. are even cheaper but even slower. How does FireWire not fit into this?
InfiniBand is looking out to be a great replacment for PCI. It gives you the ability to pull the bus out of the box and also uses a hub/switch network like topology. It supports various speeds and a memory model that lends itself to clustering. While InfiniBand is pretty new, the industry is backing it. Intel already has a Target Controllers ready. Host controllers are coming soon.
Combined they give you a lot of flexibility. The Infiniband network for all data traffic and the FibreChannel network for all storage traffic.
Why can't these companies concentrate on making the good technologies out there cheaper? Enough of these watered down attempts like USB and FireWire. Enough with PCI and PCI-X. We know we have things that are better. I am so tired of good hardware costing so much more just because the vendors can get away with charging more. They claim you are paying for performance, development costs, etc. but I think you are paying for a lack of real competition. All these companies that make SCSI drives yet prices in this market didn't fall like the IDE market? Does it really cost that much more to build a scsi drive than an IDE one? What about a fibre channel controller and drives vs. similar SCSI controller and drives? It is unbelievable!
By the by...although InfiniBand is pretty new it has great potential. It makes a great platform for both storage and network traffic. I am currently working on drivers for storage (fc) and network (GB ethernet) devices over InfiniBand. And our first target platform is...Linux!
Sure the non-commercial sites will survive regardless. The most popular sites on the net are commercial though. Even good ol' /. is a commercial site. /., like all commercial sites, exits to make money for the shareholders of the company that owns it. End of story. If the site does not make them money, then it dies. It may reform in some freebie fasion but its size becomes limited by the time people are able to donate to it. The point is that there are a lot of good, important, commercial sites out there that will need to find ways to make money to survive.
I used to work for RealMedia, a company who provides banner advertising software and solutions. One of their biggest clients is the NYT. They are doing pretty well with their ad revenue and plan to continue with a free site supported by ads.
It costs money to keep up good web sites, especially dynamic sites like news sites. Either you are going to have payments per story, monthly subscriptions, or ads. The ads will get harder and harder to avoid. Redirects to ads served off a server near or the same as the content server are hard to block.
Of course you can disable your browser. If you really hate graphical ads you can go to lynx and deal with text based ads. Do you really hate ads that much? If you watch TV or listen to the radio you are already dealing with ads. What makes the web different?
Neat stuff but ... it still doesn't address two big issues:
1. On most platforms stack memory allocate is much faster than dynamic. As far as I know, Java does not support allocating structures on the stack.
2. With limited resources, programmers need tight control over memory deallocation. While you can force a call to the GC, it is usually not a synchronous call. Sometimes you need to know all the memory from step 1 is free before going to to step 2.
A bit about this paticular JVM. It does not support 64-bit data types. 64-bit PCI, PCI-X and Infiniband all require 64-bit addressing. That makes this unusable for most I/O adapters unless this JVM supports 64-bit addressing with its references types but hides it from the user.
Oh well...
I have written in java before actually. I wrote both applets and stand alone programs for stock option and bond calculations. I did find java to be a fast way to get a gui application on to many platforms. I found it horrible for the math side of what I did with many VMs. Of course you can write command line applications with java. I do not deny that. I have seen java forced into so many environments from applets to servlets. It can do all of these things but only a few of them very well.
I agree with you that java and java chips may be a good fit for PDAs and settop boxes but I work more in the I/O controller space. I also thought that Sun's licensing was pretty strict about partial java implementations being official java. I always thought it odd that so much the java api was considered mandatory parts of the language rather than optional extra libraries. If an official java can exclude the extras they do not need, that I stand corrected about the vm size. If the chips can stand up to the current crop of I/O processors, you have got me there. But I doubt it because...
Speed and low level control are still very important for I/O controllers and real time applications. The language hides things that most low level developers need or want. For example, they want total control of memory allocation and deallocation. They want direct access to memory. Java just doesn't have this. So even with a fast, inexpesive chip running java native, you still have the lack of control. Heck, for a certain routines, assembly comes into play in this space.
When I first heard about embedded java I put it right with WinCE in the "Why?!" catagories. I believe that java is a pretty good RAD language and it is nice to have a web enabled platform independent gui standard. These are its strengths and they are great for web programs where bandwidth is often the limiting factor, not code spead and control. Put more in the VM and make the code that is moved about smaller. Let someone write to one gui standard.
In the world of gigabit NICs and FibreChannel RAID controllers running on InfiniBand, java just doesn't fit. Sure you can take a chainsaw to it and cut out what you don't need. This isn't java anymore though. If it doesn't run all the sun APIs, it isn't java. Now if sun starts bending on that for publicity and cash ("How much does a java logo cost?") than they look real hipocritical considering their battle with MS.
Even with a chainsawed java, it still doesn't make sense. Java has no stack structures except for primitives. It gives the author little control of memory deallocation. This is a big issue when you have limited amounts RAM and no swap. Also, having "secret" threads running around freeing memory while the author needs code to run at a specific rate really hurts. Graphics? What does an anti-lock breaking system need with graphics code?
I suspect there is reason that most embedded/realtime OSs are written in C/assembly and have those types of APIs. Even C++ is feared due to sense of lack of control. The STL is never used without source control of it. At these levels programmers are pulled back to the days when size and speed really mattered. Java can't give you that. A JVM takes up too much space in software and java chips are often too big, require too much power or are too expensive or all of the above. I suspect that JVMs in an embedded environment would find it hard to achieve C/assembly speeds. In the gui feature rich world it doesn't matter that much. In the world were the two major features are send and receive, size and speed are king.
It seems that a lack of IM interoperability is really more of pain that a real FCC/FTC issue. All this IM talk makes me run back to the safe world of irc. They talk about creating a standard for internet chat when there has been one for years.
Since all of these programs are free and only bring in revenue through advertising, I really don't see what the problem is. There are always lots of incompatibilities between programs. There always will be. AOL is not using its market dominance in the IM arena to take over another area. This is not the same as when MS told OEMs to build IE and not Netscape or lose Windows. Nor is it like when MS gave IE away for free to kill Netscape while MS made its money elsewhere.
To put it another way, what if Real format became the very popular and Real refused to license the player code to anyone else. Should the government force them to open up the Real format? It would be nice from a user standpoint but it would not be needed from a governmental standpoint.
I am much more worried about regulation of cable lines. I believe that cable will become the next standard in home internet connectivity. It has higher throughput and less of a distance limitation than DSL and home wireless internet is still some time away. Internet connectivity and the services that bring it (standard voice line, DSL, cable, wireless) really should be thought of as a neccessity that people need goverment protection for rather than a luxury that the government doesn't need to involve themselves with. In my area I am stuck between various monopolies and trusts. You want DSL? I don't care what ISP you use it will be Verizon's lines in the end. They also own nearly all the fibre in this area, with PECO (our local power company) coming in second. Ok, I'll take cable access. I must go with Adelphia cable due to where I live and that means @Home. Even if I move...the entrire tri-state is almost completely @Home. They are the provider for Comcast, Suburban, and Adelphia. To top it off, all of these cable companies have AT&T connections. Often the name on the bill is not your actual provider as your account is bumped around from provider for a fee. Each time you are bumped, your line upgrades fall to the back of the list.
It is the cable lines that need opening, not the IMs!
In colleges, you are right. In the private sector engineers tend to fit the first description though. Software engineers are probably the least professional of all the engineering sciences. The "what if Microsoft made cars?" type stories are funny but somewhat true of the field as a whole. Look at what is happening with FireStone and Ford. If I put software that bad...nothing would happen to me at all. In fact, I probably wouldn't even have to hide the issues. I could even charge more money for a better working product. "Working" is now a feature and one that is charged more for. MS advertises that NT is 40 times more stable than 98. If they know that 98 is this bad, how can they legally sell it at all? This type of attitude permeates through the CS world. Language zealots are just another example.
Granted there are a lot of bad programmers out there. Too many developers don't have the education required (reading Learn C++ in 21 days does not count) to really be programmers. They are often better prepared for QA, Tech. Writing or technical support. This is not to say they are not as smart or good; many good developers would not do well in these other areas. I really think that degrees in computer science (for people young enough to have gone to a school with a CS department) are a prerequisite to becoming a good programmer. I learned a ton in college about developing high quality software. Yes, every programmer should know a little assembly. This what all code gets down to eventually and it is important to understand the tool you are using, the computer. Assembly teaches you that. It also enforces commenting and structed programming techniques because without them you will fail to write even the most modest of programs.
Even with this issue I still feel that the major problem with software out there is bad managment. Managers rarely are able to stand up for engineering princibles. This is one reason why computer science is often not taken seriously by many in the world. What other engineering science would produce such a horrible group of products? What if car and sky scrapper engineers produced products at our level? Even in companies that sell software, the head of engineering almost never has enough power to say, "Hey I know that marketing wants it yesterday but to do it right we need more time!" All too often they are forced to just push the developers to the max. If they don't another manager is found. The battle between engineering and marketing/sales is slanted heavily towards the sales guys. In many companies' minds, sales people make money while developers cost money. They want to minimize costs and maximize revenues. "Bugs? Isn't that what we have a Tech. Support for? Why don't we charge for that? Heck, why don't we make the thing so hard to use that our users will have to pay us to learn how to use it!" It goes on and on.
Somewhere in the 90's companies like MS managed to prove that you could make a lot of money by focusing on features that sort of worked rather than a high quality product. Most people are so cynical about software you hear things like "Never try x.0" and "wait for at least the 3rd service pack." They expect things not to work. If you claim that your software is bug free they will just not believe it. Then they will buy the one with more features figuring your software probably had as many bugs in it. This kind of attitude makes it very hard to focus on software quality. Most software companies may have a QA/Testing department but often these groups are more focused on CYA (cover your ass) activity than real quality. Sadly, in most areas, it is not profitable to make high quality software. At least it is not believed to be.
Two of the areas left where quality really matters are open source software and enterprise software. I have worked on device drivers for network and fibre channel cards where a 24/7 server is the target. This things have to be fast and reliable. We had to make (sorry Ford) quality job #1. This is one case where software quality is neccessary for profitability. Of course, in open source the developers are judged only on the quality of their code. Then again, many developers could give a flying fig about what others think about the quality of their code without some incentive (fix this or you are fired).
I really wish the computer scientists, software engineers, programmers, developers, or whatever we are to be called would have a real professional orgranization, like lawyers and doctors have. This org could help with quality control like other orgs do with their professions. There are many cs orgs but none with any real power in the public eye. You wouldn't use a lawyer who was not bar certified but what about a programmer? What about a supposedly technical manager?
I think that FireWire has a ways to go to catch up to FC. I would like to see one standard but the best technologies are the most expensive and the average user doesn't have the money or the need for the best technologies. Let FireWire, USB, and SCSI slug it out while FC holds the server crown. Oh...and somebody please kill off IDE!
FireWire may be faster than SCSI but I don't believe that FireWire is faster than FibreChannel. A FibreChannel controller that I worked on did around 190 megabytes per second. Can any FireWire controllers push that kind of data? (not trying to be cocky, just asking)
When I said, "Writing things the correct way the first time," I was talking handling porting code and the commenting out code issue. Here you have a simple decision that will effect coding efforts many months or years into the future.
I agree that in general writing things the correct way is not easy and nobody is perfect should expect perfection. The difference is that here you have a single decision where you know that one way you couldn't get away with on the job or in school. In this case you just know that by simply commenting out code you are taking the easy way out. What kind of grade/raise would you get for that? What would your coworkers think when they get a bug in this comment trail?
On your personal notes....
Actually, I gave free CS and math help in college and happily give directions when I know them. At work I write requirement and functional specifications and I write code. What is wrong with specifications? Should we just give up on documenting anything? I guess we could write even more unreadable, unmaintainable code and provide instant job security. Nah, I think I will stick to making my fellow programmers' lives easier so they will do the same for me.
Sure you could note why you commented it out but does this make the code any more readable? You could just as easily check in the original code into CVS (or something similar), make the changes, check in the new code with a nice CVS comment. Then you could later use cvs diff and log to see the history. Think long term and think about other maintainers. Commented out code may work for you or for a quick kludge but it will get pretty bad as time goes on. File sizes will swell and there will be no chance of making one set of source.
If you really want to see both sets of code, try using something that could result in one set of super source that will compile anywhere. I work on software that builds unmodified on Linux, BSDi, FreeBSD, Solaris, Irix, AIX, and NT4/Win2k. There are various methods to handle bits of code that must be native. You could try general public view classes with native cat classes beneath. Or for a more c style solution try general api frontends to all native functions. The native functions are then implemented in special native only files. For example File.cpp is a general File API but FileWin32.cpp implents file handling for Windows while FilePosix.cpp implements File handling Unix style. Throw in configure script or make handling and your project will adjust to use the correct files for the correct platform.
By seperating the common from the native only code, you improve readability, establish a common API, and make future changes easier.
As I said, I wrote code like this everyday. It works with everything from back-end code to UI code. Trying to maintain commented out code in some sort of "port the original's changes" becomes very difficult. When the original changes you have to match his changes with your commented out changes and then rewrite again? ARG! I have seen places try to walk down that road too many times. It doesn't work well at all. Eventually, the constant porting effort becomes too expensive in money and/or time and it gets killed or key features get killed. One set of source that works everywhere automatically is the goal we should be going for, not a quick hack port.
Sure you could provide that information in the code block but it still kills readablity for future maintainers. Ever try to read a word doc with track changes turned on? Files with commented out code are similar. They end up looking like some kind of rough draft of code, not "final draft" code. /* Code below worked on windows but doesn't here so rewrote ..... */ .
My feeling is that if you couldn't hand it in to your college professors in school, why should you do it in life? Just because you are not getting graded does not mean you should be lazy. Take the time to use a source repository and use check in comments. If you check in changes often with good comments, you can figure things out much easier then just leaving comments like
Yes, you are right aobut the syntax comment. I took it a bit farther than the author may have intended. But I really disagree with that even being the most important part. As I said, I like seeing all the different parts of the syntax colored differently. It makes the code easier to follow and look more structured. Comment highlighting is usefull but it is only a part of the whole.