SGI's real day in the sun was about 5-6 years before the debut of the O2, back when very few companies were serious about hardware driven 3D graphics.
I remember masquerading as a vendor (ya, I must have fooled em at 18) and sneaking into a local tech show I'd heard had SGI in attendance back around 1989-90. Being an avid 3D amateur (on the ol'Amiga) without the means for the necessary hardware, I was totally blown away by the refrigerator sized 8-way gun metal grey Power Challenge doing multiple real time 24bit textured/shaded ray tracing demos. Even the slightly pointless 3D desktop with flying buttons impressed in that day. Well established in my morally devoid youth, I left that show thinking "If only I could steal that sucker", since I obviously didn't have the 6-figure sum to buy it. What could be cooler than that 5x3x3 foot box taking pride of place in the living room, I thought.
I rooted for them for quite a long time, but the O2 was expensive for what you got and by that stage the writing was on the wall anyhow. MIPs was gasping its last breaths, PC CPUs were on par in performance, OSS *nix was up to scratch, OpenGL was giving everyone a leg up, and the commodity 3D card market was finally coming into existence. It was confirmed when SGI started selling indigo coloured Intel boxes running Windows NT, but still selling them at workstation prices.
Ah well, an Iris 4D makes one seriously robust doorstop.
Developers Developers .. gasp .. developers!
on
Ballmer on Innovation
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I have a hard time taking any interest in what Mr Ballmer says, especially after that ridiculous "developers" chant he performed recently. Not to say much more about the crowd that, rather than laughing him off the stage, clapped and cheered.
One fella came close, went by the name of Homer. Seven feet tall he was, with arms like tree trunks. His eyes were like steel, cold and hard. Had a shock of hair, red, like the fires of Hell.
Yes, I have read more than once that large companies claim these frivolous patents are protective measures, that we should not be alarmed by their appearance, but who would bet that when the day comes that an upstart seriously threatens these companies market share or future business plans, that these patents don't become a giant cudgel.
Rather than having to resort to monopoly practices to maintain their dominance, they can simply patent their future competitors out of the race before they even exist.
For smaller parties, patenting is a costly process. The cost of developing and filing a patent tempers the rate at which an individual or small business is capable of taking them out. I'd expect that, although the cost would not be irrelevent to a corporation, it is far less of a concern. To my mind, it gives an unfair advantage to corporations and large companies that was never intended by the spirit of a patent system.
In the Information Age, there should be some acknowledgement that the basic manipulation of that ever increasing body of information is not, in and of itself, patentable.
I do not know what the terminology might be, if it exists, but I would call most of these patents 0th or 1st order manipulations. Either looking directly and collected data (0th), or creating direct relationships between that collected data (1st). These are just too obvious, regardless of whether the application is new, to be considered novel.
Certainly, but the Edict resulted in roughly two thirds of the Jewish population leaving Spain, and the remaining third to convert to Christanity. That is a fairly momentous change.
The Muslims and Jews of the time actually lived together quite well in comparison.
The historical migration of Sepharadic Jews began in Spain in 1492. After taking Granada (the last Muslim outpost in Christendom), the Spainish King and Queen ordered all Muslims to convert or face deportation. Granada also had a large population of Jews, and in the same year, Spain issued the Edict of Expulsion: Jews were given the choice of conversion or deportation.
Some converted, some moved to Portugal, and some travelled to the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans and North Africa). Many that went to Portugal later migrated to places such as Amsterdam, close to the 16th century, since it was still oppressive in Portugal. This group is sometimes refered to as the Marranos: used by Christians to refer to them at the time, though unkind, meaning "pig".
So, the root of the Spanish diaspora exists in ~1500AD, but afterwards branches to fairly different histories: the two groups isolated well enough from each other to develop variations in religious practice.
This all came to be shortly after the Spanish Inquisition officially got underway in 1483.
From the article, it seems as though the author is confusing stating the obvious, with quantifying it. Many studies would seem pointless from sufficiently superficial perspective. Certainly, some studies may not be contributing a great deal for the money that was spent, but you shouldn't castigate research whose purpose wasn't to prove something is so, but to objectively quantify it.
It may not be as sexy as the rare eureka moments enjoyed by a lucky few, but it embodies the corner stone of the scientific method. Would we prefer the diametric opposite: taking an established belief for granted as true? Which would be the more foolish?
Engineers certainly couldn't achieve much without quantification, and it often leads to new insight when interacting systems do not agree at a given level of detail.
I would be wary of people with another agenda attempting to ridicule science.
I wouldn't call him an idiot, he simply does what he likes, and has a habit of ignoring details he considers minor or obscure. He does it both with physics and the lore of the universe. I'd personally like to see a greater attention to detail, and if he feels it's the necessary outcome of triage, then he should simply defer these details to subordinates.
I honestly think Peter Jackson would make a better Star Wars film than Lucas, he seems to delegate much more effectively. Heck, the dialog comes out better too.
It's definitely about the feel. My first introduction to these keyboards was at university, when I wrangled an account for the IBM RS/6000 workstation lab as an undergraduate. I'd get some funny looks from the graduate/postgraduates, but hey, they were making so little use of the resources. Fear the undergraduate that loves computation.
Anyway, initially I found the sound of the keyboard a little strange, even anachronistic, but typing just felt so much more precise. By the end of the semester, I was really aware of just how crappy standard membrane keyboards were. This was without the assistance of people like me claiming they are great, most people at the time thought they were old fashioned and lame.
The end result of my experience was to obtain an original IBM Model M keyboard (circa 1984) second hand (it even has a Wordperfect f-key sticker). I actually took it to work, and bought another two much newer (circa 1999) "old stock" IBM keyboards from an online vendor for home.
Although the newer keyboards have the same mechanism as the original one (with the same feel), they have fallen prey to some internal cost reductions, the old one is about twice as heavy. It would make a great home defense tool.
Seriously though, a keyboard that has been in use for 21 years (had some spills) and still functioning perfectly. My future plan is to lecture the youth of 2044 about just how great my 70 year old keyboard is, while weakly waving it around.
If anything, entirely useful 21 year old peripherals make you wonder about the lack of inovation, or at least the lack of adoption of inovation.
Since we've strayed onto the subject of Paul Erdös, I would like to build a bridge back by mentioning that George Dantzig had an Erdös number of 2, meaning that he co-authored a paper with a co-author of Erdös.
Something most any academic would be proud to claim. Erdös' publised 1521 papers, and was very fond of collaboration regardless of political divisions.
Read "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", a very interesting book.
I think distributors are still concerned about the efficacy of the DRM employed. As much as DVDs are a pretty decent source, I suspect they really want to avoid the possibility that master copies escape into the wild.
There is also the practicality of how they sell the film to the cinemas. Last I noticed the selling mechanism was going to run contrary to the way cinemas currently operate. I believe cinemas hire the film for a certain length of time, and are free to make their own choices about the number of screenings, and whether to cease showing a flop early to free up screens for better performing films (though they're stuck with their initial hire.)
The digital version was going to be streamed and paid for per showing, all tied to an identified projector. I believe the concern was that cinemas would be forced to schedule showings and lose the control the currently possess. Basically, the system was going to annoy cinema operators in a similar way to how individual consumers are frustrated by the limitations of DRM'd content.
An elaboration on how the PBS functions might shed more light on the situation. Very roughly, the PBS convenes a board, who using studies, both local and international, considers the potential benefit any new drug affords the public. The price of that drug is then determined by its value relative to what current drugs offer, and this of course relates to the illnesses it treats. The ultimate goal of the process being the cool and objective assessment of value, free from marketing bias.
Federal regulation also heavily regulates the marketing of drugs directly to the public. You will not see any advertising on Television for the plethora of prescription drugs that you see advertised in the US. This of course severely curtails the drug companies' ability to market directly to the consumer, the purpose of which has always been to prompt the consumer to desire what they might not actually need or substantially benefit from. This tempering of pharmaceutical demand is very important when a country attempts to offer a socialized health care system. Blow-outs in cost for unnecessary, expensive or ineffective treatment, can lead to its ruin. To put it short, treatment efficacy in benefit/dollar terms is very important.
The drug companies have of late been trying their best to concoct methods of getting around these limitations. They of course will look to find weak points at which to apply pressure. Entanglements produced as an outcome of trade agreements would be one obviously way in. The Australian health care system is already under pressure from rising costs as we live longer and treatable illness becomes increasingly possible.
There are experts that believe the pricing system employed by Australia should be used as a benchmark. The pharmaceutical industry on the other hand hates it.
The information was most likely taken from a press release by Celera. Press releases tend lean to hyperbole so long as it remains technically truthful. Either there were a heck of a lot of mice and rat genomes, which along side the human totaled to 30Gbp, or much of the data is redundant.
Anyone interested in the HGP should grab one of the many books written on the subject. I highly recommend The Common Thread by John Sulston & Georgine Ferry. Noble laureate Sulston was there right at the very beginning of the public project, and could take a great deal of the credit for the projects existance if he was less than the disinterested scientist he is.
The book is very readable, and from my own experiences rings of the truth.
I'm afraid that sounds awfully like a romantic myth. There was a multitude of reasons why the HGP went from a 20 years to 3 years (and that depends on where you begin counting), but it was not because of any one person. It was first begun in England, and before most people considered it prudent to do so. The sequencing machines were fairly cumbersome to prepare, the analysis lacked many of the automatic programs available today, and the money was lacking.
However the progenitors had the forsight (rightly so) to assume that much of this would improve over time, and the project would naturally speed up as a result.
Still, even with much faster machines and much of the analysis automated, the choice of approach and demands on "quality" alter the timescale a great deal. The public project was focused on finished sequence, which can take an inordinate amount of time compared to producing a draft sequence. Then Celera appeared and was intending to run a parallel project at maximum speed, without much thought about the problems they'd have to solve at the end (their main intention being to find genes to patent.) The public project realised that the only means of preventing Celera from attempting to patent every putative gene they discovered, was to speed up their own process (do drafts) and adopt an incremental release to the public domain, thereby stiffling attempts at patenting.
Desipte abandoning finished sequence, the public project had invested a great deal of time in preparing the genome for orderly sequencing. Whereas Celera resorted to whole genome shotgun (a brute force approach with much less preparation time) in an effort to leap frog the public project.
In the end, when the HGP was declared complete by the politicians of the day, and black tie parties ensued, a great deal (years) of finishing work was still left to complete.
This is false. The public sequencing project's data was always of higher quality and it is only Celera's spin and lazy news reporters, who listen to Venter and take his quotes as gospel, that the general public believes the opposite.
Because of Celera's choice of approach (whole genome shotgun) they could not even successfully assemble the millions of small stretches of sequence into the chromosomes. They resorted to using the public sequence to assemble their own data, very much like using another person's solution to a puzzle to solve it yourself; not a trivial hint.
Celera also wavered on exactly what limitations they would impose on their subscribers. They slowly backed away from unworkably restrictive EULAs but that was only in response to the lack of subscriptions.
I recently attended a preview of Hitchhiker's held in Sydney Australia, where Robbie Stamp spoke -- a great deal (the man can talk) -- about the saga of bringing the work to the screen. The security was a little over the top considering in total we might have seen 2-3 minutes of actual film, the rest being the Internet trailer and production staff interviews. Black suited Buena Vista staffers searched bags and stood around the hall like secret service agents, all a little ludicrous.
That said, the scene they did show (The Vogon constructor fleet destroying Earth) was great. I look forward to seeing the film, it looks like it was made with a lot of heart.
What puzzled me was the tight lips about the budget. In isolation, how much is spent is irrelevant, it's what you produce for the money that matters. I can only assume that the budget for the film was much smaller than the increasing prevalence for $100M films, and the unwillingness to answer questions was out of concern that it would reflect negatively on the film.
So my question is,
Have we gone full circle, from when spending $150M was considered laughably unnecessary and wasteful, to when not spending that much is considered the sign of a weak or starved production?
It didn't appear that way to me, and you would think a congratulations is in order if you make a quality film in Hollywood for much less.
Why is it that in the USA, the $50 and $100 bill are considered large bills and treated strangely by cashiers?
I think it's the only country (and the wealthiest) I've visited where these fairly practical denominations are looked upon as something you don't pay with, unless perhaps the bill is quite large (like in the hundreds). My hotel Starbucks for instance refused a $50 (saying they don't accept anything over $20) when I tried to pay a bill in the neighbourhood of $15. That's not very handy when Australian banks hand you US $50s and $100s if you arrange to get a few hundred dollars in cash before flying over.
Is it an acknowledgement that US currency has weak anti-counterfeiting measures? I mean weak in comparison to the active effort to counterfeit the currency. Microsoft might use that argument to deflect criticism, but it ultimately doesn't change the fact a problem exists.
I moved to Australia in 1991 and it took me a while to adjust to the realisation that every show was behind by roughly a year. New shows like Friends were often not even known quantities until an Australian station finally got around to showing it.
What happens though, is that you become accustom to the lag, and so it effectively disappears. I don't begrudge the realities of a smaller market. However, it became increasingly hard to maintain that bubble of ignorance as the Internet developed commerically and its level of adoption by the wider public grew.
Australian distributors -- across all media -- have been capitalising on that lag for years. They wait to see which products were successful, they wait for the products to cost a little bit less, etc.
In the end the increasing general prevalency of piracy comes down to distribution. When left to wait, people naturally move to the shortest line. Either you play the arms race game, erecting increasingly stout aritificial barricades, in order to prevent line switching or you make your line move faster.
So the solution is to replace a perfectly functional DVD player -- that a few years ago was the only option -- or switch to a region that prevents you from using local DVDs and then buy it all online?
I sort of still like the concept of renting a film, watching it and returning it. I save 50%-75% of the purchase price while acknowledging the likelihood of desiring a 2nd viewing makes the risk of wanting to do so drastically less than the savings. I know this doesn't follow the current trend of constantly buying DVDs and then plonking them on a self to gather dust.
There is more than enough to read, hear and see in the world without self imposed reruns, and I get much more satisfaction from the experience than from the satisfaction of ownership.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember masquerading as a vendor (ya, I must have fooled em at 18) and sneaking into a local tech show I'd heard had SGI in attendance back around 1989-90. Being an avid 3D amateur (on the ol'Amiga) without the means for the necessary hardware, I was totally blown away by the refrigerator sized 8-way gun metal grey Power Challenge doing multiple real time 24bit textured/shaded ray tracing demos. Even the slightly pointless 3D desktop with flying buttons impressed in that day. Well established in my morally devoid youth, I left that show thinking "If only I could steal that sucker", since I obviously didn't have the 6-figure sum to buy it. What could be cooler than that 5x3x3 foot box taking pride of place in the living room, I thought.
I rooted for them for quite a long time, but the O2 was expensive for what you got and by that stage the writing was on the wall anyhow. MIPs was gasping its last breaths, PC CPUs were on par in performance, OSS *nix was up to scratch, OpenGL was giving everyone a leg up, and the commodity 3D card market was finally coming into existence. It was confirmed when SGI started selling indigo coloured Intel boxes running Windows NT, but still selling them at workstation prices.
Ah well, an Iris 4D makes one seriously robust doorstop.
What a weird world that must be.
One fella came close, went by the name of Homer. Seven feet tall he was, with arms like tree trunks. His eyes were like steel, cold and hard. Had a shock of hair, red, like the fires of Hell.
Rather than having to resort to monopoly practices to maintain their dominance, they can simply patent their future competitors out of the race before they even exist.
For smaller parties, patenting is a costly process. The cost of developing and filing a patent tempers the rate at which an individual or small business is capable of taking them out. I'd expect that, although the cost would not be irrelevent to a corporation, it is far less of a concern. To my mind, it gives an unfair advantage to corporations and large companies that was never intended by the spirit of a patent system.
In the Information Age, there should be some acknowledgement that the basic manipulation of that ever increasing body of information is not, in and of itself, patentable.
I do not know what the terminology might be, if it exists, but I would call most of these patents 0th or 1st order manipulations. Either looking directly and collected data (0th), or creating direct relationships between that collected data (1st). These are just too obvious, regardless of whether the application is new, to be considered novel.
Drink Mococo coffee!
The Muslims and Jews of the time actually lived together quite well in comparison.
Some converted, some moved to Portugal, and some travelled to the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans and North Africa). Many that went to Portugal later migrated to places such as Amsterdam, close to the 16th century, since it was still oppressive in Portugal. This group is sometimes refered to as the Marranos: used by Christians to refer to them at the time, though unkind, meaning "pig".
So, the root of the Spanish diaspora exists in ~1500AD, but afterwards branches to fairly different histories: the two groups isolated well enough from each other to develop variations in religious practice.
This all came to be shortly after the Spanish Inquisition officially got underway in 1483.
Invoking the power of Samuel L.,
Cease, and desist! .. Mother fker!
It may not be as sexy as the rare eureka moments enjoyed by a lucky few, but it embodies the corner stone of the scientific method. Would we prefer the diametric opposite: taking an established belief for granted as true? Which would be the more foolish?
Engineers certainly couldn't achieve much without quantification, and it often leads to new insight when interacting systems do not agree at a given level of detail.
I would be wary of people with another agenda attempting to ridicule science.
I honestly think Peter Jackson would make a better Star Wars film than Lucas, he seems to delegate much more effectively. Heck, the dialog comes out better too.
Anyway, initially I found the sound of the keyboard a little strange, even anachronistic, but typing just felt so much more precise. By the end of the semester, I was really aware of just how crappy standard membrane keyboards were. This was without the assistance of people like me claiming they are great, most people at the time thought they were old fashioned and lame.
The end result of my experience was to obtain an original IBM Model M keyboard (circa 1984) second hand (it even has a Wordperfect f-key sticker). I actually took it to work, and bought another two much newer (circa 1999) "old stock" IBM keyboards from an online vendor for home.
Although the newer keyboards have the same mechanism as the original one (with the same feel), they have fallen prey to some internal cost reductions, the old one is about twice as heavy. It would make a great home defense tool.
Seriously though, a keyboard that has been in use for 21 years (had some spills) and still functioning perfectly. My future plan is to lecture the youth of 2044 about just how great my 70 year old keyboard is, while weakly waving it around.
If anything, entirely useful 21 year old peripherals make you wonder about the lack of inovation, or at least the lack of adoption of inovation.
Something most any academic would be proud to claim. Erdös' publised 1521 papers, and was very fond of collaboration regardless of political divisions.
Read "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", a very interesting book.
http://www.oakland.edu/enp/readme.html
There is also the practicality of how they sell the film to the cinemas. Last I noticed the selling mechanism was going to run contrary to the way cinemas currently operate. I believe cinemas hire the film for a certain length of time, and are free to make their own choices about the number of screenings, and whether to cease showing a flop early to free up screens for better performing films (though they're stuck with their initial hire.)
The digital version was going to be streamed and paid for per showing, all tied to an identified projector. I believe the concern was that cinemas would be forced to schedule showings and lose the control the currently possess. Basically, the system was going to annoy cinema operators in a similar way to how individual consumers are frustrated by the limitations of DRM'd content.
Federal regulation also heavily regulates the marketing of drugs directly to the public. You will not see any advertising on Television for the plethora of prescription drugs that you see advertised in the US. This of course severely curtails the drug companies' ability to market directly to the consumer, the purpose of which has always been to prompt the consumer to desire what they might not actually need or substantially benefit from. This tempering of pharmaceutical demand is very important when a country attempts to offer a socialized health care system. Blow-outs in cost for unnecessary, expensive or ineffective treatment, can lead to its ruin. To put it short, treatment efficacy in benefit/dollar terms is very important.
The drug companies have of late been trying their best to concoct methods of getting around these limitations. They of course will look to find weak points at which to apply pressure. Entanglements produced as an outcome of trade agreements would be one obviously way in. The Australian health care system is already under pressure from rising costs as we live longer and treatable illness becomes increasingly possible.
There are experts that believe the pricing system employed by Australia should be used as a benchmark. The pharmaceutical industry on the other hand hates it.
The information was most likely taken from a press release by Celera. Press releases tend lean to hyperbole so long as it remains technically truthful. Either there were a heck of a lot of mice and rat genomes, which along side the human totaled to 30Gbp, or much of the data is redundant.
The book is very readable, and from my own experiences rings of the truth.
However the progenitors had the forsight (rightly so) to assume that much of this would improve over time, and the project would naturally speed up as a result.
Still, even with much faster machines and much of the analysis automated, the choice of approach and demands on "quality" alter the timescale a great deal. The public project was focused on finished sequence, which can take an inordinate amount of time compared to producing a draft sequence. Then Celera appeared and was intending to run a parallel project at maximum speed, without much thought about the problems they'd have to solve at the end (their main intention being to find genes to patent.) The public project realised that the only means of preventing Celera from attempting to patent every putative gene they discovered, was to speed up their own process (do drafts) and adopt an incremental release to the public domain, thereby stiffling attempts at patenting. Desipte abandoning finished sequence, the public project had invested a great deal of time in preparing the genome for orderly sequencing. Whereas Celera resorted to whole genome shotgun (a brute force approach with much less preparation time) in an effort to leap frog the public project.
In the end, when the HGP was declared complete by the politicians of the day, and black tie parties ensued, a great deal (years) of finishing work was still left to complete.
Because of Celera's choice of approach (whole genome shotgun) they could not even successfully assemble the millions of small stretches of sequence into the chromosomes. They resorted to using the public sequence to assemble their own data, very much like using another person's solution to a puzzle to solve it yourself; not a trivial hint.
Celera also wavered on exactly what limitations they would impose on their subscribers. They slowly backed away from unworkably restrictive EULAs but that was only in response to the lack of subscriptions.
That is inclusive of the 3% of invalid votes assumed from the quoted values in the article.
That said, the scene they did show (The Vogon constructor fleet destroying Earth) was great. I look forward to seeing the film, it looks like it was made with a lot of heart.
What puzzled me was the tight lips about the budget. In isolation, how much is spent is irrelevant, it's what you produce for the money that matters. I can only assume that the budget for the film was much smaller than the increasing prevalence for $100M films, and the unwillingness to answer questions was out of concern that it would reflect negatively on the film.
So my question is,
Have we gone full circle, from when spending $150M was considered laughably unnecessary and wasteful, to when not spending that much is considered the sign of a weak or starved production?
It didn't appear that way to me, and you would think a congratulations is in order if you make a quality film in Hollywood for much less.
I think it's the only country (and the wealthiest) I've visited where these fairly practical denominations are looked upon as something you don't pay with, unless perhaps the bill is quite large (like in the hundreds). My hotel Starbucks for instance refused a $50 (saying they don't accept anything over $20) when I tried to pay a bill in the neighbourhood of $15. That's not very handy when Australian banks hand you US $50s and $100s if you arrange to get a few hundred dollars in cash before flying over.
Is it an acknowledgement that US currency has weak anti-counterfeiting measures? I mean weak in comparison to the active effort to counterfeit the currency. Microsoft might use that argument to deflect criticism, but it ultimately doesn't change the fact a problem exists.
Armed also with my sword of rhetoric, I layeth the smack down upon thee; for all to witness.
Operor non fatigo exsisto gauisus!
I believe it's an alien being of pure energy. Someone is infringing on the Star Trek universe, or the latest Hollywood storyboarding technique.
What happens though, is that you become accustom to the lag, and so it effectively disappears. I don't begrudge the realities of a smaller market. However, it became increasingly hard to maintain that bubble of ignorance as the Internet developed commerically and its level of adoption by the wider public grew.
Australian distributors -- across all media -- have been capitalising on that lag for years. They wait to see which products were successful, they wait for the products to cost a little bit less, etc.
In the end the increasing general prevalency of piracy comes down to distribution. When left to wait, people naturally move to the shortest line. Either you play the arms race game, erecting increasingly stout aritificial barricades, in order to prevent line switching or you make your line move faster.
I sort of still like the concept of renting a film, watching it and returning it. I save 50%-75% of the purchase price while acknowledging the likelihood of desiring a 2nd viewing makes the risk of wanting to do so drastically less than the savings. I know this doesn't follow the current trend of constantly buying DVDs and then plonking them on a self to gather dust.
There is more than enough to read, hear and see in the world without self imposed reruns, and I get much more satisfaction from the experience than from the satisfaction of ownership.