In other news, the estimate number of people in development, production and support of intelligent robots in the year 2030 is... 3.5 millon people.
Only problem with this is the skill level of the people being eliminated and the new jobs produced. The 3.5MPeople being displaced will be more manual laborers and lower income. While it will be nice to have a subsequent boost of 3.5M jobs for "skilled" technology/machine laborers, those 3.5M displaced will suddenly place a large burden on various social programs as it becomes increasingly harder for them to find work. And that leads to all the various social implications of having a significant number of unemployed, "non skilled" workers.
On the other hand, if InterTrust wins the patent licensing fees will probably make DRM much less of a nuisance,
Nope, it just means legit things like the iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic will have to charge more money to cover the licensing costs. It means that other attempts to figure ways to legitimatly allow users inexpensive online access to content will be stalled/aborted. It means that the RIAA and their ilk will continue to have a convenient excuse to go after file sharers because there STILL won't be a viable legal alternative.
While it's tempting to get a laugh out of a little company handing it to Microsoft for its use of DRM technology
Read the article, InterTrust is owned jointly by Sony and Phillips. This is NOT David vs Goliath. It states that Sony/Phillips bought the company with the explicit intention of going after companies armed with the patent portfolio. Call it what you will, but this is not Good vs Evil, this is Evil vs Evil.
Also, don't miss another statement made about Microsoft just being the first. They wanted to go after the big fish, so all the other fish will fall in line once the big one falls.
the body also burns fat more effeciently than it burns carbohydrates
hmmm, I always heard it was the other way around. The body converts carbs into glucose, which it then burns. Fat takes more effort to burn. Your body will burn off available carbs FIRST, then go to it's fat stores. This is why you have to exercise beyond a certain amount to actually lose weight, vs the amount you have to exercise to simply keep weight off. If what you said was true, long distance atheletes should be doing the exact opposite of what they current do. They'd want to have a minimum of carbs in their system, so their bodies would burn the "easier" burning fat.
I mean, what's up with these low bit rates? Do people really think this stuff sounds good?
Simple, download times and bandwidth. Many (most?) customers don't want to wait too long for songs to download (it's that whole instant gratification thing), I don't even know if they are trying to also attract modem go'ers, so they want to keep download times reasonable for most users. Secondly, they're probably paying for bandwidth, so the smaller the files, the lower the expenses for them.
Now what makes sense is to allow the user to select the quality they want and to charge more to cover the extra expense.
So, how different is this from running several websites on one machine? Your home gateway (or maybe a specialized cell phone gateway) can route the packets to the appropriate device based on header values (DEVICE_NAME, MAC_ADDRESS, evil bit, etc.)
That was my whole point, that it wasn't a big deal, just not as simple as addressing a specific device. Your routers will have to become more intelligent to forward properly. Compare this to using dns (bob.cellphone.smith.com, mary.cellphone.smith.com, masterbd.tv.smith.com, toaster.smith.com) to address the devices. The latter way fits easily into existing infrastructure.
As with everything like this, the powers-that-be (i.e., the telcos and ISPs) will drag their heels until they are either forced to change, or they are convinced it will increase profits
What cads, for them to drag their heels on such a lofty goal at the expense of profits and even survival (for many of them in this "economy that is in the toilet"). Of course every nerd will run right out and purchase ipv6 hardware/software (or take the time to upgrade if no purchases need to be made) immediately without "dragging their heels" regardless of their financial situation or they're convinced that they can download porn faster and regardless of whatever else is going on in their lives at the moment.
That's fine but unless you're talking about incoming originating comms. With NAT, you have to rely on ports instead of ips to address specific items. This means a mod to your dns (or whatever replaces it). You can't just assume that the cell phone port is port 32768, since the household may have several different cell phones (or toasters, or tv's, or whatever). Not a huge problem, but it does require more changes than would simply assigning everything it's own unique id.
Another deal with Microsoft. Heck the NT Kernel is portable and is currently being ported to itanium2 and amd64 why not ppc 970?
It is already ported to PPC (maybe not 970, but PPC) and has been since 3.51. Even with that, I _highly_ doubt that Microsoft will venture down that road again. Back in the late 80's/early 90's when RISC was the "NEXT BIG THING", M$ was hedging their bets by making sure that NT was available for all manner of RISC flavours. Now that RISC is "NOT THE NEXT BIG THING", I really don't think M$ cares anymore, to them it's just another platform they'd have to support and probably wouldn't make any money off of.
Now having it run Linux is a no brainer. IBM is obviously in Linux in a big way, so having some 970 based boxen are obvious. Now having "generic" white box 970's designed to run Linux is a different story. I don't know if this would make sense from a market perspective. Perhaps cheaper commodity based servers? Perhaps giving Dell a run for their money in the Linux market for higher end workstations? Hard to say, esp the latter since IBM is notorious for not wanting to cannibalize their higher end sales by having lower end box's with better price/performance ratios.
BTW, you can kiss off the Apple clone notion. Makes absolutely no sense for Apple unless they can assure themselves of at least doubling Mac market share by such a move. Anything less would mean a repeat of their previous foray, which Stever would never allow to happen.
.. there was no mention of the actual search technology Amazon would be using to allow searching the text of such a large archive of books (why only non-fiction I wonder).
This type of text searching has been around for a gazillion years and is not really that complex. It really depends on how flexible they want to make the searching. Case in point, wildcards. Google sacrifices flexibility by not allowing you to search on wildcards in their news searches in order to gain speed. Ditto for things like phrase searching, etc. The actual # of docs is pretty much irrelevant wrt search speed (at least directly). It depends more on the features you allow in your query language and the # of hits returned by each part of your query. Plus you're dealing with static data that can easily be distributed.
The tough part of all this is getting the stuff in digital format. I assume for most current books it won't be a problem. The hassle would be older books that you'd actually have to OCR. Though once they're done, they would have a pretty valuable asset.
... someone writes a distributed bot to query targeting a specific book and sections to finally retrieve the entire book. If it's a distributed app, then it would be tougher for Amazon to block. You could even have it only go after certain parts of the books at different times to make it tougher. Now not to say that this is a good use of effort, but that never stopped anyone from doing such a thing before:)
You don't really describe the kind of apps you will be running to know if your observations matter in the slightest. You say that you get poor performance when your app does a lot of reflection, why is it doing reflection? Is this really a need, or are you just doing it "because you can"? Are you using this app when you further state that your performance drops by a factor of 10 vs static html? Why would you be comparing the two anyway? If you're serving static pages you shouldn't be looking at a webservice anyway, so no real sense comparing the two.
You mentioned db issues, what type of access are you doing with your databases? Are you thinking replication to deal with scaling across a server farm? Is this data being constantly updated by the servers, or is it mainly static? If you have simple primarily read only data, then something like mysql would be a far better choice, you just don't need the overhead of a full blown db server (like sqlserver, or oracle or even postgres).
Really what you need is to identify what your requirements are and tailor the end result to the systems that best meet those requirements. This also includes support and things like backups (e.g. can the db you choose do online backups if that's a requirement, etc).
As great is this might be to farmers in australia, my question is how long will it take to automate my lawn care?
There is already something like this. It doesn't use gps (it uses wires similar to pet invisible fences) and an algorithm that produces a "random" path. But it effectively does what you want, to mow the lawn for you so you don't have to.
1. "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make:(
2. "Expensive". The difference in price from highest to lowest is $45, not too shabby and hardly worth the difference once you take in other considerations (like how many toasters cheap drive a produces). I have fond memories of creating shelves of cd toasters on our $3000 Ricoh 2x CDR when the cd blanks were $25 a piece on this one project. Ouch, thank god we weren't paying for those things, I bet we wen't through over $10K worth of blanks.
3. No checking of valid DVD video. He mentions people wanting to backup their DVD's, but then never tests to make sure any DVD backups actually play in most dvd players. I know for me this is critically important and I would want to see the results of such a test.
a real-time early-warning system for chemical, biological and nuclear threats
Next time they should order the words the same as in the acronym (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) so those of us who are not terrorism experts can stop wondering why the peacock network poses such a threat to our well being.
If you keep an open mind, the SGI bug will bite you, and someday, you too might have an Onyx XL in your dining room.:)
Does one in your garage count? Don't have 220v in the dining room so that's a no go (that and the thought of being bludgened to death by my wife with a 4 processor R4400 board).
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display. Now to be honest, 486 to low end Pentium would be a better comparison. Of course assuming these machines had some type of video capture board installed and a pretty kick butt scsi setup. Not the best things in the world for day to day tasks, but if you're doing the right thing, then they are quite nice (Indy less so since it's not as expandable, but one can create a pretty beefy I2. Not to mention the O2.
Why is this somehow only related to software development. People are forced to make this decision all the time in almost all facets of their lives. We have limited resources and infinite desires. Should you blow everything you have on that Lexus (good reliable car, lots of features, etc) or get a Corolla (still good and reliable, not as many features, etc). Just depends on what's important to you at the time you make the decision. There is no "right" answer.
If you are going to lose a make or break deal if you don't get it done next week, then you do what it takes to get it done next week, whatever that is. If you need to get it done next week because some idiot manager put it there on the schedule "just because", then you have a lot more leeway in deciding to push the date to achieve something "better".
A rather silly question really. You do the best you can do given the resources you have to do it.
I can't find any info on any motherboard. Everything they have is only about the cpu. Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but can anyone point me to where the VIA site discusses the actual motherboard. I was getting very jazzed thinking that I might be able to purchase a motherboard and use it for some projects (low heat, low power, small form factor, nice).
When Rambus started suing DDR ram manufactors. Did it effect the DDR ram market? No. When MS was sued for antitrust violations did it effect their market? No.
Completely different scenarios here. Rambus never threatened to sue everyone who purchased DDR, nor did the DOJ threaten to sue (or jail) anyone who purchased a M$ product. SCO is actually going to users and saying that their use of the "offending" product might open the users themselves to action, this is a completely different ball of wax.
Your two examples were actions taken against specific corps whose only effect on customers was perhaps higher future prices, not against direct litigation/lawsuits.
right, but since you have three ledgers that are supposed to be the exact same, you can check to see if anyones been tampering by doing a simple check to verify that the contents of all three tables are the same. If you had a single ledger, you wouldn't even have that simple check. The point being that 3 ledgers is certainly no worse than 1 ledger, it just creates more work and requires a slightly (and I mean slightly) more savy cheater since they would have to get the mods to three different ledgers "right" to make there changes unnoticable. And again, a simple check to make sure the ledgers are the same would instantly uncover any wrong doing. Not a great way, but again, not worse than a single one.
The point being if you had full access to the db, ANY changes you made would be "invisible". What extra security does having a single ledger have over having 3? If you have three supposidly identical ledgers, one can do a trivial check to make sure all 3 databases are exactly the same, if there are ANY differences, someones been messing with the system. This is something you CAN'T do with a single ledger. Again, not exactly the best idea for security, but it does make things a bit tougher (a very little bit), and judging by the responses of those who replied to my post, it would actually be effective as people blindly changed only one of the ledgers, so once someone with a clue did a simple db comparision they would INSTANTLY find out if someones been messing with the system.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, the estimate number of people in development, production and support of intelligent robots in the year 2030 is ... 3.5 millon people.
Only problem with this is the skill level of the people being eliminated and the new jobs produced. The 3.5MPeople being displaced will be more manual laborers and lower income. While it will be nice to have a subsequent boost of 3.5M jobs for "skilled" technology/machine laborers, those 3.5M displaced will suddenly place a large burden on various social programs as it becomes increasingly harder for them to find work. And that leads to all the various social implications of having a significant number of unemployed, "non skilled" workers.
... apoligize to Sony about the XBox and just drop it altogether in exchange for a favorable license?
On the other hand, if InterTrust wins the patent licensing fees will probably make DRM much less of a nuisance,
Nope, it just means legit things like the iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic will have to charge more money to cover the licensing costs. It means that other attempts to figure ways to legitimatly allow users inexpensive online access to content will be stalled/aborted. It means that the RIAA and their ilk will continue to have a convenient excuse to go after file sharers because there STILL won't be a viable legal alternative.
While it's tempting to get a laugh out of a little company handing it to Microsoft for its use of DRM technology
Read the article, InterTrust is owned jointly by Sony and Phillips. This is NOT David vs Goliath. It states that Sony/Phillips bought the company with the explicit intention of going after companies armed with the patent portfolio. Call it what you will, but this is not Good vs Evil, this is Evil vs Evil.
Also, don't miss another statement made about Microsoft just being the first. They wanted to go after the big fish, so all the other fish will fall in line once the big one falls.
the body also burns fat more effeciently than it burns carbohydrates
hmmm, I always heard it was the other way around. The body converts carbs into glucose, which it then burns. Fat takes more effort to burn. Your body will burn off available carbs FIRST, then go to it's fat stores. This is why you have to exercise beyond a certain amount to actually lose weight, vs the amount you have to exercise to simply keep weight off. If what you said was true, long distance atheletes should be doing the exact opposite of what they current do. They'd want to have a minimum of carbs in their system, so their bodies would burn the "easier" burning fat.
I mean, what's up with these low bit rates? Do people really think this stuff sounds good?
Simple, download times and bandwidth. Many (most?) customers don't want to wait too long for songs to download (it's that whole instant gratification thing), I don't even know if they are trying to also attract modem go'ers, so they want to keep download times reasonable for most users. Secondly, they're probably paying for bandwidth, so the smaller the files, the lower the expenses for them.
Now what makes sense is to allow the user to select the quality they want and to charge more to cover the extra expense.
So, how different is this from running several websites on one machine? Your home gateway (or maybe a specialized cell phone gateway) can route the packets to the appropriate device based on header values (DEVICE_NAME, MAC_ADDRESS, evil bit, etc.)
That was my whole point, that it wasn't a big deal, just not as simple as addressing a specific device. Your routers will have to become more intelligent to forward properly. Compare this to using dns (bob.cellphone.smith.com, mary.cellphone.smith.com, masterbd.tv.smith.com, toaster.smith.com) to address the devices. The latter way fits easily into existing infrastructure.
As with everything like this, the powers-that-be (i.e., the telcos and ISPs) will drag their heels until they are either forced to change, or they are convinced it will increase profits
What cads, for them to drag their heels on such a lofty goal at the expense of profits and even survival (for many of them in this "economy that is in the toilet"). Of course every nerd will run right out and purchase ipv6 hardware/software (or take the time to upgrade if no purchases need to be made) immediately without "dragging their heels" regardless of their financial situation or they're convinced that they can download porn faster and regardless of whatever else is going on in their lives at the moment.
That's fine but unless you're talking about incoming originating comms. With NAT, you have to rely on ports instead of ips to address specific items. This means a mod to your dns (or whatever replaces it). You can't just assume that the cell phone port is port 32768, since the household may have several different cell phones (or toasters, or tv's, or whatever). Not a huge problem, but it does require more changes than would simply assigning everything it's own unique id.
The sticker on the ATM that says "please ignore the camera". Oh and the finger prints you're leaving on the keypad.
Another deal with Microsoft. Heck the NT Kernel is portable and is currently being ported to itanium2 and amd64 why not ppc 970?
It is already ported to PPC (maybe not 970, but PPC) and has been since 3.51. Even with that, I _highly_ doubt that Microsoft will venture down that road again. Back in the late 80's/early 90's when RISC was the "NEXT BIG THING", M$ was hedging their bets by making sure that NT was available for all manner of RISC flavours. Now that RISC is "NOT THE NEXT BIG THING", I really don't think M$ cares anymore, to them it's just another platform they'd have to support and probably wouldn't make any money off of.
Now having it run Linux is a no brainer. IBM is obviously in Linux in a big way, so having some 970 based boxen are obvious. Now having "generic" white box 970's designed to run Linux is a different story. I don't know if this would make sense from a market perspective. Perhaps cheaper commodity based servers? Perhaps giving Dell a run for their money in the Linux market for higher end workstations? Hard to say, esp the latter since IBM is notorious for not wanting to cannibalize their higher end sales by having lower end box's with better price/performance ratios.
BTW, you can kiss off the Apple clone notion. Makes absolutely no sense for Apple unless they can assure themselves of at least doubling Mac market share by such a move. Anything less would mean a repeat of their previous foray, which Stever would never allow to happen.
.. there was no mention of the actual search technology Amazon would be using to allow searching the text of such a large archive of books (why only non-fiction I wonder).
This type of text searching has been around for a gazillion years and is not really that complex. It really depends on how flexible they want to make the searching. Case in point, wildcards. Google sacrifices flexibility by not allowing you to search on wildcards in their news searches in order to gain speed. Ditto for things like phrase searching, etc. The actual # of docs is pretty much irrelevant wrt search speed (at least directly). It depends more on the features you allow in your query language and the # of hits returned by each part of your query. Plus you're dealing with static data that can easily be distributed.
The tough part of all this is getting the stuff in digital format. I assume for most current books it won't be a problem. The hassle would be older books that you'd actually have to OCR. Though once they're done, they would have a pretty valuable asset.
... someone writes a distributed bot to query targeting a specific book and sections to finally retrieve the entire book. If it's a distributed app, then it would be tougher for Amazon to block. You could even have it only go after certain parts of the books at different times to make it tougher. Now not to say that this is a good use of effort, but that never stopped anyone from doing such a thing before :)
You don't really describe the kind of apps you will be running to know if your observations matter in the slightest. You say that you get poor performance when your app does a lot of reflection, why is it doing reflection? Is this really a need, or are you just doing it "because you can"? Are you using this app when you further state that your performance drops by a factor of 10 vs static html? Why would you be comparing the two anyway? If you're serving static pages you shouldn't be looking at a webservice anyway, so no real sense comparing the two.
You mentioned db issues, what type of access are you doing with your databases? Are you thinking replication to deal with scaling across a server farm? Is this data being constantly updated by the servers, or is it mainly static? If you have simple primarily read only data, then something like mysql would be a far better choice, you just don't need the overhead of a full blown db server (like sqlserver, or oracle or even postgres).
Really what you need is to identify what your requirements are and tailor the end result to the systems that best meet those requirements. This also includes support and things like backups (e.g. can the db you choose do online backups if that's a requirement, etc).
done
As great is this might be to farmers in australia, my question is how long will it take to automate my lawn care?
There is already something like this. It doesn't use gps (it uses wires similar to pet invisible fences) and an algorithm that produces a "random" path. But it effectively does what you want, to mow the lawn for you so you don't have to.
RoboMower
1. "Roundup", hardly. Three drives does not a roundup make :(
2. "Expensive". The difference in price from highest to lowest is $45, not too shabby and hardly worth the difference once you take in other considerations (like how many toasters cheap drive a produces). I have fond memories of creating shelves of cd toasters on our $3000 Ricoh 2x CDR when the cd blanks were $25 a piece on this one project. Ouch, thank god we weren't paying for those things, I bet we wen't through over $10K worth of blanks.
3. No checking of valid DVD video. He mentions people wanting to backup their DVD's, but then never tests to make sure any DVD backups actually play in most dvd players. I know for me this is critically important and I would want to see the results of such a test.
a real-time early-warning system for chemical, biological and nuclear threats
Next time they should order the words the same as in the acronym (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) so those of us who are not terrorism experts can stop wondering why the peacock network poses such a threat to our well being.
If you keep an open mind, the SGI bug will bite you, and someday, you too might have an Onyx XL in your dining room. :)
Does one in your garage count? Don't have 220v in the dining room so that's a no go (that and the thought of being bludgened to death by my wife with a 4 processor R4400 board).
Hmm, let's see a 8086 do realtime capturing and displaying of an ntsc video source on a 24bit 1280x1024 display. Now to be honest, 486 to low end Pentium would be a better comparison. Of course assuming these machines had some type of video capture board installed and a pretty kick butt scsi setup. Not the best things in the world for day to day tasks, but if you're doing the right thing, then they are quite nice (Indy less so since it's not as expandable, but one can create a pretty beefy I2. Not to mention the O2.
Why is this somehow only related to software development. People are forced to make this decision all the time in almost all facets of their lives. We have limited resources and infinite desires. Should you blow everything you have on that Lexus (good reliable car, lots of features, etc) or get a Corolla (still good and reliable, not as many features, etc). Just depends on what's important to you at the time you make the decision. There is no "right" answer.
If you are going to lose a make or break deal if you don't get it done next week, then you do what it takes to get it done next week, whatever that is. If you need to get it done next week because some idiot manager put it there on the schedule "just because", then you have a lot more leeway in deciding to push the date to achieve something "better".
A rather silly question really. You do the best you can do given the resources you have to do it.
VIA just came out with a new laptop motherboard
I can't find any info on any motherboard. Everything they have is only about the cpu. Maybe I'm just not seeing it, but can anyone point me to where the VIA site discusses the actual motherboard. I was getting very jazzed thinking that I might be able to purchase a motherboard and use it for some projects (low heat, low power, small form factor, nice).
When Rambus started suing DDR ram manufactors. Did it effect the DDR ram market? No. When MS was sued for antitrust violations did it effect their market? No.
Completely different scenarios here. Rambus never threatened to sue everyone who purchased DDR, nor did the DOJ threaten to sue (or jail) anyone who purchased a M$ product. SCO is actually going to users and saying that their use of the "offending" product might open the users themselves to action, this is a completely different ball of wax.
Your two examples were actions taken against specific corps whose only effect on customers was perhaps higher future prices, not against direct litigation/lawsuits.
right, but since you have three ledgers that are supposed to be the exact same, you can check to see if anyones been tampering by doing a simple check to verify that the contents of all three tables are the same. If you had a single ledger, you wouldn't even have that simple check. The point being that 3 ledgers is certainly no worse than 1 ledger, it just creates more work and requires a slightly (and I mean slightly) more savy cheater since they would have to get the mods to three different ledgers "right" to make there changes unnoticable. And again, a simple check to make sure the ledgers are the same would instantly uncover any wrong doing. Not a great way, but again, not worse than a single one.
The point being if you had full access to the db, ANY changes you made would be "invisible". What extra security does having a single ledger have over having 3? If you have three supposidly identical ledgers, one can do a trivial check to make sure all 3 databases are exactly the same, if there are ANY differences, someones been messing with the system. This is something you CAN'T do with a single ledger. Again, not exactly the best idea for security, but it does make things a bit tougher (a very little bit), and judging by the responses of those who replied to my post, it would actually be effective as people blindly changed only one of the ledgers, so once someone with a clue did a simple db comparision they would INSTANTLY find out if someones been messing with the system.