One of my kids is a court lawyer. While the case lasts, the client is as pure as Alaskan snow and is opposed by evil, lying scum. The moment the cash is in the bank the lying loser deserves everything he got. The better you are at thinking like this, the more you really believe it, the better you are as a lawyer. It was said of my father that he could always see at least three sides to any case, so he was hopeless at litigation.
Yes, we're in the exact same position. This is what I meant. It looks to me as if it's what we need for server-centric applications and thin clients, and that benefits the IBM/Sun/Oracle world more than the Microsoft desktop world. I think.
That was going to revolutionise memory a few years back? But didn't. Remember diamond semiconductors that were going to revolutionise processors, from around 1990? But didn't. Remember GMR heads that were going to revolutionise hard drives? Oops, they did. Didn't fix the slow random access data rate much, but changed the paradigm for backup devices.
Perhaps this is going to be the one that is going to change the bottleneck in the system from the slow memory to the newly slow processor. And the very slow HDD. And the very slow I/O.
Having made which cynical observation, I wonder what impact this could have on database client server? Keeping the database in memory? Multiway processors? It looks like the only people really able to make use of the technology are going to be at IBM, and possibly Sun.
Some of the ruby rods we were getting in the early 80s were such poor quality, I wouldn't be surprised if they were single atom lasers. Pity we didn't know it would one day be leading edge research.
I know, I know, I actually read the article. I can remember when lasers were interesting, before they were just cheap modern replacements for phonograph needles.
In the past I've had to fire PhDs because they couldn't get the job done. PhDs tend to know a great deal about a very small subject - a very necessary thing in any difficult field, but it does tend to restrict their ability when it is necessary to have a big picture. And, unfortunately, good systems design needs a big picture appreciation. When it comes to assessing Java versus C++ versus the P languages, I'll listen to a guy who has developed a banking system or two, even if he never went near a university comp sci course.
Schwarz wants this because it is a way for Symantec to gain power. Briefly, if these activities are criminalised the income for lawyers will go up, but so will the income for expert witnesses and analysts - which means Symantec is in a position to sell what are effectively consulting services at the higher prices that start the moment the legal clock starts ticking. They are also in a position to gain more influence in Washington because they would be seen as being in a position to advise representatives. If Symantec could effectively corner the market in expertise over a law they themselves have been involved in drafting, they would also gain influence in the IT industry because of their ability to influence the government in matters concerning software design and deployment, thus having some measure of control over other companies.
As Shaw said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Applied judiciously, it can also be very profitable.
Some of my earliest development work for embedded systems was done on the old 1802 processor. The intended environments were transportation related and pretty hostile. It's nice to know that we made such a good choice, and that an 1802 holds the record for the longest traveled microprocessor ever built.
You may not have had a proper subroutine mechanism, you may have had a bizarre instruction set (with a SEX instruction no less), but you were the first processor for which I ever wrote a set of floating point routines. Rest in peace, old friend.
Trade issues like IP and patentability are among the roots of wars, famine and poverty. It is a small step from this issue to the availability of cheap AIDS medicines in Third World countries, or the exploitation of Third World farmers by Western control of genetically modified monocultures. If we want to do something about international justice we need to start at home - and that means things we understand better than most. I am not qualified to explain the problems of GM crops to a representative, but I am qualified to explain the problems created by software patents. So that's what I should do. Don't criticise the people trying to bring down the wall with pickaxes because other people are using hammers.
Obviously the magnetic induction loops in churches and halls that transmit the sound to hearing aids don't count because they are some primitive old technology.
Actually, I have to wear a hearing aid in one ear due to mid-ear damage, and I'm expecting before long to have an inductive loop for my cell phone that means handsfree use without any kind of additional earpiece. Apart from convincing people that I'm completely mad and talking to myself in the street, it should be a considerable improvement over bluetooth headsets, which, compared to either of my hearing aids, are heavy and have poor frequency response.
Yup. I constantly come across people who try and do a complete DTP job in Word. Need I say that printers hate it? Or that the people doing it cannot understand why formatting goes wrong, fonts don't look right, and why 1G of memory is barely enough and their computers grind to a crawl.
I also happen to feel that PIM is an enterprise function that should not be bundled with an Office package.
If you use 95% of Word, well and good, but how many people out there actually do?
I've been telling clients to delay buying Office upgrades till this came out, and I think they'll thank me for it. There are things SO won't do that Office will, but I would stick my neck out and say that in many cases those are things that shouldn't be done with an office package. In particular I have been testing the SO database connectivity heavily. It's solid and I think this is going to form part of my future solutions. Being able to drive SO in Java could lead to some really neat presentation layer work.
I'm not knocking any of the completely OSS suites, far from it. But I think Sun is doing everybody a service by demonstrating to the PHBs that a major software player can produce credible competition for Office and sell it for peanuts. I want to see people making money out of FOSS - because that will keep it developing - and if Sun's work leads others to produce customised and extended office suites based on other OSS suites, that should get back the pace of development that has been so held back by the MS monopoly.
Also, although I'm too old to use the terminology without looking sad, the XML output format rocks. People will be able to do some really creative things with this.
Remember: once upon a time almost all tires were crossply. Then along came radial. No technology has a right to a monopoly for longer than it takes for something better to come along.
Completely agree. But then I would. Look at my handle.
I'm a great fan of Rabelais, among whose interests was the usefulness of hemp. It gets an extensive mention in Gargantua et Pantagruel under the name of Pantagruelion, where he points out, inter alia, its use for making superior ropes - which, at the time he wrote, were crucial to marine technology, the only realistic way of moving heavy payloads long distances.
In fact, why aren't we trying to replace 3rd world drug crops with biomass fuel crops? Support poor farmers, reduce dependence on imported oil, benefit the population as a whole rather than the drug cartels and the oil company executives...oops, there went the economies of Florida and Texas. Why don't I think it's going to happen? Because biomass is good for the public, but it's bad for the bushes.
Actually, the profiling shouldn't worry about pinkos and commies. Since when did they go in for terrorism? Oppressive governments perhaps, but that's different. It takes a real fundamentalist to go in for terrorism, and they seem to be pretty right wing. And the instability in the Middle East is hardly being caused by social democrat governments. I'd be all for giving the likes of Charlton Heston, Pat Buchanan and Ariel Sharon a hard time at airports.
All schemes like this increase the chance that evil people will target low risk travelers for identity theft.
Scenario: terrorists identify suitable target in fairly remote location. Break in, force target to purchase tickets over the internet, disclose PIN numbers to credit cards etc., kill target and catch plane. It takes a bit more organisation and time, but these people seem to have plenty of that. You can't even rely on those sneaky people to be darker shades of brown: the white English-speaking world has shown an ability to produce home-grown bombers, in the US, Northern Ireland and the UK.
If this is going to be a substitute for airport security (and I suspect it will be) all I can say is, fortunately I rarely need to travel by plane nowadays.
I'm going to confess that I have probably misunderstood the point. The precise bit of the article I was referring to was:
The challenge is similar to the challenge we see in the OS space. My buddies are being killed by supporting all the Linux variants. It is hard to build a product on top of Linux because every other user compiles his own kernel and there are many different species. The main hope for Oracle, DB2, and SQLserver is that the open-source community will continue to fragment. Human nature being what it is, I think Oracle is safe.
DP Is MySQL.com trying to be the Red Hat of MySQL?
JG It could be that they will step forward and provide all of those things that IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle provided, and do it for a much lower price. I think the incumbent vendors will have to be innovative to make their products more attractive.
One thing that works in the incumbents' favor is fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). If you base your company on a database, you are risking a lot. You want to buy the best one. People are usually pretty cautious about where they want to put their data. They want to know that it's going to have a disaster recovery plan, replication, good code quality, and in particular, lots and lots and lots of testing.
The thing that slows Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft down is the testing, and making sure they don't break anything--supporting the legacy. I don't know if the MySQL community has the same focus on that.
At some point, somebody will say, "I'm running my company on MySQL." Indeed, I wish I could hear Scott McNealy [CEO of Sun Microsystems] tell that to Larry Ellison [CEO of Oracle].
DP The whole corporation?
JG Right. Larry Ellison announced that Oracle is now running entirely on Linux. But he didn't say, "Incidentally we're going to run all of Oracle on MySQL on Linux." If you just connected the dots, that would be the next sentence in the paragraph. But he didn't say that, so I believe that Larry actually thinks Oracle will have a lot more value than MySQL has. I do not understand why he thinks the Linux problems are fixable and the MySQL problems are not.
I was concentrating on his claims that building a system on top of Linux is particularly hard, and his mentioning Microsoft in the same sentence as IBM and Oracle. Although I make extensive use of MySQL for small systems in our consultancy, I think it is a long way from being ready for the main enterprise RDBMS. In fact, I felt he was trying to tar Linux with the MySQL brush, if you see what I mean.
I now think he probably did not mean it the way I read it. If anyone cares to mod my original post down, feel free. But I do think that, for a long article, there was actually not a lot of real content.
...semi-seriously. Look at all the stuff about MySQL and Linux in the middle. It's as if a Microsoft Marketoid had suddenly taken over the interview. Or someone who didn't understand the difference between many thousands of developers working on Linux and the smaller number that work on MySQL.
Apart from speculating as to whether this attempt at FUD was the real payload of the article, did it really say anything that most of us haven't already noticed? Whether Flash or fast SCSI, we could do with an intermediate layer of backing store, with faster random access than current IDE HDDs. And we are fast heading for removable IDE drives to be a better and cheaper tape replacement. And the Internet has limited bandwidth. I'm sorry, but you don't need a Turing prize to work any of that out.
The British academic C P Snow spent a lot of time arguing that there are now two cultures which really do not interact: Liberal arts (favored by the people who have the power in society, by the way) and science/engineering. There is very little cross fertilisation. Part of the reason that scientists and engineers for the most part get screwed is that they have this boring addiction to things that are testable, and to objective standards of truth. People who are basically prepared to put spin on anything set off with a huge advantage.
And why this apparently off-topic minor rant? Because we're seeing it here. The ones who probably can't even change a bicycle tire say "Oh that's easy, probably just followed the instruction book", not having the slightest clue about how difficult it is to make something from disparate parts. The ones who have got a clue or have been involved in projects like this have an idea of how difficult it really is, but actually they have no idea of how huge and insuperable the barrier is to 99% of the population - because they themselves are hardwired to know where to start.
It's about disparate rewards. The same level of skill and application this guy showed, applied to basketball or acting, might get him a multimillion dollar income. Why don't we perceive someone who spends hours bouncing a little ball around as being sad and geeky and having too much time on his hands? Why does someone who pretends to be other people, often not very well, get paid so much more than an astronaut or a fighter pilot who does something really, really difficult and dangerous?
Naive ramblings, I guess, but in the conversion of the human race from savannah apes to civilisation, it wasn't the actors and the basketball players that worked out how to bang the rocks together and how to get one stone to stick on top of another.
I'm going to reply to myself and say thank you for the replies, but apparently you've missed the point.
The rising load will exert a normal force on the cable, and this will tend to pull the geosynchronous object out of its orbit. In fact, a rocket motor will be needed to maintain it in orbit whenever anything is rising up the cable. So a supply of propellant will have to be sent up the cable at regular internals to keep the whole system going. The technical problems with this thing are far beyond even the impossibility of making a long nanotube cable and then somehow prepventing it from degradation by cosmic rays, solar flare particles etc.
People frequently observe that these technologies are more expensive than existing power gen.
We are already seeing that the US army is struggling to put enough forces into Iraq to stabilise the situation and get the oil flowing. What happens if there is a fundamentalist coup in Saudi Arabia, and a war with Iran? And if Putin decides that now is the time to reassert Russian power and decides to supply all the oil to the EU? Would the threat of a nuclear attack get the oil flowing again? Are conventional forces big enough? The result of the attack might be even worse (discontinuation of supply for years.)
The probability of that may not be huge, but it actually represents a credible threat to US power. I suspect that the US is far less well equipped to deal with a repeat of the early 70s than it was at the time, because the dependence on imported oil is so much greater and so much population movement has taken place into areas with more difficult climates. The effort to stockpile oil is limited because diverting more oil to stockpiles puts the price up.
If the US economy did not require so much energy just to maintain energy-inefficient buildings, the strategic position would be better. In a war you can require people not to make inessential journeys, share transport and so on, but you cannot make them work in unendurably hot or cold offices with unreliable power. Bottom line: in the long term, this kind of thing is part of long term military strategy, and the budgeting should take this into account.
Re:Bullhoey(energy conversion rates)
on
Solar Window Panes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm not sure you read the article that carefully. There seem to be two claims buried in it. One is a stacked silicon junction, which could have an efficiency greater than the present ones because successive layers presumably absorb light not picked up by the top layer. The second is a means for focussing light from a larger area onto the relatively small silicon photojunctions. This would reduce the cost because the required area of photojunction would be smaller for a given total light absorbing area.
The other interesting ideas are those of placing the light collecting system between the protective window panes which are required for new buildings anyway (cut deployment costs) and that the research seems to be funded by an end user rather than a utility or generator - which means they have a strong interest in having it commercialised rather than buried.
The claims may not all be met but they are not inherently impossible.
But anything that goes up the cable still has to be accelerated to orbital angular velocity, doesn't it?
I'm sure the answer is out there, but exactly how do we do this? Because any force that is applied between payload and cable to accelerate the payload along it is parallel to the cable, whereas the force needed to produce the angular velocity is normal to it. Someone who hasn't forgotten physics please explain.
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One of my kids is a court lawyer. While the case lasts, the client is as pure as Alaskan snow and is opposed by evil, lying scum. The moment the cash is in the bank the lying loser deserves everything he got. The better you are at thinking like this, the more you really believe it, the better you are as a lawyer. It was said of my father that he could always see at least three sides to any case, so he was hopeless at litigation.
Yes, we're in the exact same position. This is what I meant. It looks to me as if it's what we need for server-centric applications and thin clients, and that benefits the IBM/Sun/Oracle world more than the Microsoft desktop world. I think.
Perhaps this is going to be the one that is going to change the bottleneck in the system from the slow memory to the newly slow processor. And the very slow HDD. And the very slow I/O.
Having made which cynical observation, I wonder what impact this could have on database client server? Keeping the database in memory? Multiway processors? It looks like the only people really able to make use of the technology are going to be at IBM, and possibly Sun.
Presumably says that not only will things go wrong if they can, but the rate of their going wrong is doubling every 18 months. Which explains a lot...
I know, I know, I actually read the article. I can remember when lasers were interesting, before they were just cheap modern replacements for phonograph needles.
In the past I've had to fire PhDs because they couldn't get the job done. PhDs tend to know a great deal about a very small subject - a very necessary thing in any difficult field, but it does tend to restrict their ability when it is necessary to have a big picture. And, unfortunately, good systems design needs a big picture appreciation. When it comes to assessing Java versus C++ versus the P languages, I'll listen to a guy who has developed a banking system or two, even if he never went near a university comp sci course.
As Shaw said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Applied judiciously, it can also be very profitable.
You may not have had a proper subroutine mechanism, you may have had a bizarre instruction set (with a SEX instruction no less), but you were the first processor for which I ever wrote a set of floating point routines. Rest in peace, old friend.
Trade issues like IP and patentability are among the roots of wars, famine and poverty. It is a small step from this issue to the availability of cheap AIDS medicines in Third World countries, or the exploitation of Third World farmers by Western control of genetically modified monocultures. If we want to do something about international justice we need to start at home - and that means things we understand better than most. I am not qualified to explain the problems of GM crops to a representative, but I am qualified to explain the problems created by software patents. So that's what I should do. Don't criticise the people trying to bring down the wall with pickaxes because other people are using hammers.
Actually, I have to wear a hearing aid in one ear due to mid-ear damage, and I'm expecting before long to have an inductive loop for my cell phone that means handsfree use without any kind of additional earpiece. Apart from convincing people that I'm completely mad and talking to myself in the street, it should be a considerable improvement over bluetooth headsets, which, compared to either of my hearing aids, are heavy and have poor frequency response.
I also happen to feel that PIM is an enterprise function that should not be bundled with an Office package.
If you use 95% of Word, well and good, but how many people out there actually do?
I'm not knocking any of the completely OSS suites, far from it. But I think Sun is doing everybody a service by demonstrating to the PHBs that a major software player can produce credible competition for Office and sell it for peanuts. I want to see people making money out of FOSS - because that will keep it developing - and if Sun's work leads others to produce customised and extended office suites based on other OSS suites, that should get back the pace of development that has been so held back by the MS monopoly.
Also, although I'm too old to use the terminology without looking sad, the XML output format rocks. People will be able to do some really creative things with this.
Remember: once upon a time almost all tires were crossply. Then along came radial. No technology has a right to a monopoly for longer than it takes for something better to come along.
I'm a great fan of Rabelais, among whose interests was the usefulness of hemp. It gets an extensive mention in Gargantua et Pantagruel under the name of Pantagruelion, where he points out, inter alia, its use for making superior ropes - which, at the time he wrote, were crucial to marine technology, the only realistic way of moving heavy payloads long distances.
In fact, why aren't we trying to replace 3rd world drug crops with biomass fuel crops? Support poor farmers, reduce dependence on imported oil, benefit the population as a whole rather than the drug cartels and the oil company executives...oops, there went the economies of Florida and Texas. Why don't I think it's going to happen? Because biomass is good for the public, but it's bad for the bushes.
Actually, the profiling shouldn't worry about pinkos and commies. Since when did they go in for terrorism? Oppressive governments perhaps, but that's different. It takes a real fundamentalist to go in for terrorism, and they seem to be pretty right wing. And the instability in the Middle East is hardly being caused by social democrat governments. I'd be all for giving the likes of Charlton Heston, Pat Buchanan and Ariel Sharon a hard time at airports.
An Irish terrorist found a dim English girlfriend some years back.
All schemes like this increase the chance that evil people will target low risk travelers for identity theft.
Scenario: terrorists identify suitable target in fairly remote location. Break in, force target to purchase tickets over the internet, disclose PIN numbers to credit cards etc., kill target and catch plane. It takes a bit more organisation and time, but these people seem to have plenty of that. You can't even rely on those sneaky people to be darker shades of brown: the white English-speaking world has shown an ability to produce home-grown bombers, in the US, Northern Ireland and the UK.
If this is going to be a substitute for airport security (and I suspect it will be) all I can say is, fortunately I rarely need to travel by plane nowadays.
Oh dear. Business and law are "Liberal arts". It doesn't mean writers and artists.
I now think he probably did not mean it the way I read it. If anyone cares to mod my original post down, feel free. But I do think that, for a long article, there was actually not a lot of real content.
Apart from speculating as to whether this attempt at FUD was the real payload of the article, did it really say anything that most of us haven't already noticed? Whether Flash or fast SCSI, we could do with an intermediate layer of backing store, with faster random access than current IDE HDDs. And we are fast heading for removable IDE drives to be a better and cheaper tape replacement. And the Internet has limited bandwidth. I'm sorry, but you don't need a Turing prize to work any of that out.
And why this apparently off-topic minor rant? Because we're seeing it here. The ones who probably can't even change a bicycle tire say "Oh that's easy, probably just followed the instruction book", not having the slightest clue about how difficult it is to make something from disparate parts. The ones who have got a clue or have been involved in projects like this have an idea of how difficult it really is, but actually they have no idea of how huge and insuperable the barrier is to 99% of the population - because they themselves are hardwired to know where to start.
It's about disparate rewards. The same level of skill and application this guy showed, applied to basketball or acting, might get him a multimillion dollar income. Why don't we perceive someone who spends hours bouncing a little ball around as being sad and geeky and having too much time on his hands? Why does someone who pretends to be other people, often not very well, get paid so much more than an astronaut or a fighter pilot who does something really, really difficult and dangerous?
Naive ramblings, I guess, but in the conversion of the human race from savannah apes to civilisation, it wasn't the actors and the basketball players that worked out how to bang the rocks together and how to get one stone to stick on top of another.
I'm going to reply to myself and say thank you for the replies, but apparently you've missed the point.
The rising load will exert a normal force on the cable, and this will tend to pull the geosynchronous object out of its orbit. In fact, a rocket motor will be needed to maintain it in orbit whenever anything is rising up the cable.
So a supply of propellant will have to be sent up the cable at regular internals to keep the whole system going. The technical problems with this thing are far beyond even the impossibility of making a long nanotube cable and then somehow prepventing it from degradation by cosmic rays, solar flare particles etc.
We are already seeing that the US army is struggling to put enough forces into Iraq to stabilise the situation and get the oil flowing. What happens if there is a fundamentalist coup in Saudi Arabia, and a war with Iran? And if Putin decides that now is the time to reassert Russian power and decides to supply all the oil to the EU? Would the threat of a nuclear attack get the oil flowing again? Are conventional forces big enough? The result of the attack might be even worse (discontinuation of supply for years.)
The probability of that may not be huge, but it actually represents a credible threat to US power. I suspect that the US is far less well equipped to deal with a repeat of the early 70s than it was at the time, because the dependence on imported oil is so much greater and so much population movement has taken place into areas with more difficult climates. The effort to stockpile oil is limited because diverting more oil to stockpiles puts the price up.
If the US economy did not require so much energy just to maintain energy-inefficient buildings, the strategic position would be better. In a war you can require people not to make inessential journeys, share transport and so on, but you cannot make them work in unendurably hot or cold offices with unreliable power. Bottom line: in the long term, this kind of thing is part of long term military strategy, and the budgeting should take this into account.
The other interesting ideas are those of placing the light collecting system between the protective window panes which are required for new buildings anyway (cut deployment costs) and that the research seems to be funded by an end user rather than a utility or generator - which means they have a strong interest in having it commercialised rather than buried.
The claims may not all be met but they are not inherently impossible.
I'm sure the answer is out there, but exactly how do we do this? Because any force that is applied between payload and cable to accelerate the payload along it is parallel to the cable, whereas the force needed to produce the angular velocity is normal to it. Someone who hasn't forgotten physics please explain.