As already discussed on/. after:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday February 09, @09:46AM
cowmix writes "It turns out that Sun does not eat its own dog food. Specifically, this internal memo from Sun strongly suggests that Java should not be used for Sun's internal projects. More interesting still, they go on to state which other languages fullfil Java's goals better than Java does itself. Finally, the memo states Sun's own Solaris is the cause of many of Java's woes. Yikes."
My favorite pieces to quote:
it appears that the JRE can actually be simpler than the Python RE since Java does at least some of this work at compile time. The example above of "Hello World" is a good method for getting an idea of the minimum support code required at runtime. This support code includes garbage collector, byte code interpreter, exception processor and the like. Hello World written in Java2 requires 9M for this most basic support infrastructure. By comparison, this is slightly larger than automountd on Solaris8. The Python runtime required to execute Hello World is roughly 1.6M.
While the Java VM (as demonstrated above) grows rapidly as more complex code is executed, the Python VM grows quite slowly. Indeed, an inventory control program written entirely in Python having a SQL database, a curses UI, and network connectivity requires only 1.7M of resident set. This seems to indicate that the resident set requirements of the JRE could be reduced by at least 80%.
Examples include modules that used to be called Swing, RTI, IDL, JSSE and JAAS. These are all good things that should be part of Java. Our concern is that these are not separable modules which can evolve as requirements change. The Java system for evolving the interface (deprecation) does not serve production software very well. Once the interface disappears, the product just breaks.
Production quality programs written in Java, like TogetherJ, indicate a specific Java version which must be installed before the program is run. If another program is installed, requiring a higher Java version, the user may be forced to decide which program stays and which goes away.
I think laquer dried surfice is not perfectly flat and that can give problems with readings. Also, it's possible that the technology start internaal reaction after being triggered by air contact.
I wonder, which air component is that trigger. I can put one my DVD player to a place where there will be a gas without such component.
When you move to new appartment or house you will begin getting new/same junk even before you call all you credit/bank/utility services to change you address on the account. You name might not be on the envelop, but you'll get it anyway.
I think Postal offices work for snail mail spammers.
If the patent the property of seeds to resist pesticides then it creates a problem when other farmers use some amounts of pesticeds for years and eventually can get seeds more and more resistent to pesticeds. That could be another seeds, different then Monsanto's, just with the same property. And that eventually can come by itself - plants can mutate in time. Too bad, the patents should not cover properties. It's like patenting a physical law.
If they patent exact DNA then farmers must check every year their crops that they are not accidentally contaminated. Too bad for other farmers, such DNA exam is expensive and that can rulle many farmers out of business.
Instead, they should patent the technology of genetical modification, not plants. If the farmer use the same technology to modify seeds then - jail. If the way of modification was different, even with the same outoming seeds then - live free.
This case is a test of how far bad American patent system goes.
Think of these people as your friends, because even if you don't like them, they are. They help provide for your welfare. Would you report your best friend's smoking weed?
In case of a friend I will at first try to talk to him (or her). If it will fail - I'll go to report. Friend or not friend - whatever is illegal is still illegal. But if I know and keep the silence and thus cover him - that is also illegal. I will warn my friend about it and give him an ultimatum - either he quits or if see it again - I report. In real life I talked like that to my friend and he quited.
Now, let's get back to business. But with a different illegal case: Once I saw that what my boss is doing is illegally stealing money from investors. So, what do you want me to do in that case? Still to think about him as about my friend and thus cover him and thus also participating in such illegal operatiions although not having even a penny from such a risk? Or to talk to my boss and tell him that he is wrong and he should either stop or will go to cops or investors... or he will give me a share and I shut up haveing a sweet reason for it?
In my real career once I was fired b/c I tried to talk to my boss about it. Just in few days after talking. I didn't give him any ultimatum. I did told that I have to report. I have just asked the question: what's going on and why is he doiing it. That was enough.
Return email address is not the subject to be in the whitelist. The key ID is. All mail list subscribers should receive messages signed by the mail-list engine itself, using the private key, which public fingerprint must be in your key-ring.
Moreover, when you post into the mail-list, you sign your message with your ID, the mail-server verifies the signature, and *THEN* signs the message again. Thus, the message is signed twice (MIME takes care it looks nice).
So, I don't see any problems with mail-lists.
Repeat after me: no protection works if it's based on unprotected fields of RFC822. The only way to protect is to use encryption technologies, such as e-signatures, PKI, CA. The only way to use it is to know its basic concepts. Now go to library and read.
I've had some wonderful friendships started with an email out of the blue. If I were to have implemented a whitelist system, I'd have never met those people, or had the experiences. Thus a whitelist wouldn't really work.
Whitelists will work for such situations even better than you think now. People who look for new friends will register themselve in some CA specially dedicated for such "club" relationships. So, if you want accept email from such looking-for-friendship people, then you trust such "club" CA, which may or may not have fee in order to protect CA itself from spammers mimicing for pals.
The rest of us won't trust most of "club" CAs and that the beaty of whitelists: I define whom and what to to trust, either in terms of exact ID or in terms of "club membership" (which CA the key belongs to) or in term so other attributes (which cannot be fake as they are certified with CA).
Many parents (including myself) will be glad to configure MUA of their kids to trust kid club CAs, sleeping after that more comfortable as having less chance that someone in age of 30 will mimic another kid in order to get sexual relationship with the target kid.
Do you have a list of all women from Earth that you don't want to sleep with? I guess no. Instead, you have a list of all women from Earth you want to sleep with. Musch better as the second list must be much shorter than the first one:)
Same thing should be with email. No need to blacklist bad IPs (which might not belong permanently to a spammer) or email addresses (also very temporal). Instead, list all people you trust or all their features that make the being trusted by you. You can guess that I mean e-signatures, public keys and cross-trusted CA network.
P.S. if it's more appropriate, please use for the text above:
That's not really funny. The problem is that there is a reason why very power nuke bombs are prohibitted: b/c there is a chance that if it expoids in the water than H of H2O can start a reaction as there is always some % of of D and T in H and it's a matter of high enough pressure and temperature to trigger the fusion.
Late 70s early 80s there was two extremely dangerous tests: 50 MT underwater by France in Pacific and 100+ MT underground by Soviets on New Zemlya. In second case, despte the fact that underground there was just a limited amount of water, the outcome was much greater than predicted. The shock wave did hit towns in North Russin in thousands of kilometers. The estimtaed energy after all measurements exceeded the originally calculated energey on more than 20 % - that's possible ony b/c the water underground has been involved in the fusion.
So, if they will make too intensive explosion than it's a big chance that they will miss something and trigger something they would not have planned originally. The outcome may include global cracks in the tektonic platforms and can be very catastrophic.
So, please, no more nuke/fusion exploisions - better invest money, resources and efforts into interplanetary communications: I want my vacations in Europe. You got it right - *THAT* Europe:)
Soon I am going to register on Sourforge, Savannah and other project hosting sites several new projects:
Mozilla Web server based on fork of newcoming Zope-3;
Mozilla Linux distro based on mix of Gentoo and ArchLinux;
Mozilla language, Haskell in a syntax of Lisp's S-exps;
and finally - Mozilla database based on fork of Firebird Database, just for fun:)
I am very comfortable that using such good and self-expressive name as Mozilla I can quickly gather very good developers and rapidly develop the code that will take over the world:)
As for Mozilla Browser, well, we may develop such on new Mozilla language, specially to browse Mozilla database. That's what are browsers for anyway, right?
If anyone is looking for volunteers for such researh then I am ready to be connected directly, without keyboards and screens, even without voice and sound - just pure cable, right to my brains. Of course with high-speed access to the Internet and a good firewall - I don't want my brains to be spammed about penis enlargements:)
Well just connect me to my hom PC - I'll do the firewalling by myself. Perhaps using some sort of SAI:))
Semi-artificial intelligence
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Minsky's right: AI as science has died, not because it was impossible to improve the theories, but because it wasn't making any money.
The real money will begin to flow once the humankind will stop being scared of direct integrating of humans into computer networks.
I am not sure when, but ultimately all keyboards, mice and screens will take their places in musiums. People will communicate with computers and each other by connecting computers directly to their brain. Thus, the solid knowledge of natural intelligence will be required.
I think first researchers are already working on it in military-sponsored labs. Of course volunteers realize that they can be seriously damaged or dye, but death is natural in military industry. Military industry operates with huge amounts of money. But that's often not exactly a "free" market - all contracts are signed through lobbiing and bribes.
Once first "Unisolders" will be available on the market (sorry, on the job market), then next to militaries there will be strong demand from real-time traders. And that's a real market. Traders will line up to make a neuro-surgery to be connected to those-days electronic stock markets.
I am not sure when such "UI" will be available on the market, but once it will be there, at some point geeks will buy it. The rest of us will be in the front of the tough choice: to stay 100% "natural" or to win a better job contract.
Now, where is AI? The answer is simple: ultimately there will be nor AI neither NI (N as natural), there will be SAI: Semi-Artificial intelligence. No need to think in English letters if UI can get concepts you think of. No need to count numbers if software can do it for you *AND* some AI can do reasoninig about when, why and how you want it done. The trick is that no need to automate the reasonining 100% as your brain is already connected and can do part of the job in that reasoning.
For example, no need to create a very complicated DB query as SAI can use part of your brain to post-filter a small set of data after the pre-filtering of a big set data is done automated in DB engine.
Many problems of software development can be solved if, in addition to humans using computer, computers will use human brains.
why not call it Multics? After all, that's where it started
Better call it Matrix:
Neo: I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that
you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I
don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is
going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.
I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these
people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a
world....without you. A world without rules and controls. Without
borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where
we go from there, is a choice I leave to you. (Music plays)
Why do you thing that life must have molecular basis? How about electromagnetic and/or plasmoid fields, which can also have self-organized self-replicated competing-for-sources structures? I was reading (in paper, cannot find online) papers showing (and proving mathematically) that if you go in yur math description of neural nets from descrete equations to integral equations then you'll describe such fields, which are consistent from physical point as well. The paper has been presented on few neural-net simposiums and no one found any inconsistency in it. Well, no one found any practical worthness of it either, but that's not a point. The point is: molecules (even based on non-carbon chemistry) are not the only way to build the life form. The question is: are you ready to recognise such alt form?
I would prefer one UI that works well than have the choice of hundreds of inconsistent and incompatable UIs.
1. As a user you should prefer one UI on your own PC, or on you group of PCs. But you cannot demand the whole open source community to collapse to one UI. That would be against the pluralistic concept of the open source community and it will destroy it.
2. The talking like "I prefer one UI" is more appropriate to the manager in a commercial business. You cannot dictate OSS developers what UI they should work on. It's absolutely up to them.
3. If you don't like the pluralism of the open source - you still can stick with the only UI from Microsoft, or to the only UI from Apple (assuming that MacOS9 is already dead).
4. Hmm, actually you might be angry about inconsistency between UIs from Microsoft and Apple as well. See, har far you can go?
5. Conceptually, the fact of having many (honestly - less than "hundreds") UIs, being proposed by various open source development groups and picked up by users, just proves that exactly today it's a time on the market when a lot of innovation ongoing in UI. Once the innovation will stop or slow down then there will be one standard summarizing the choice "obvious" for most of users. Until then let evolution put everything on its own place.
Do you mean "Is it possible to GPL it?"? No, I doubt so and that was a joke. As for the idea itself about one-way tourism, I think it's possible. I can by one-way ticket from San Francisco to London. Why can't I buy one way ticket from Earth to Moon? Personally, in case of available money, I would buy it.
If you copy files than RAM-HDD is your bottleneck. If you work with mission critical databases, then it's most likely you've tuned it to be cached in memory. And you know what? Then you will understand what I mean by CPU-RAM bottleneck. Other people who understand it: who compile a lot, graphical designers, video editors.
What MySQL and PostgreSQL really lack is the ability to replicate on-the-fly and to support running on clusters for *real* failover and fault tolerance.
You certainly don't know PostgreSQL, at least its enterprise level. Check with both PostgreSQL Inc and Lanux. They both will be happy to sell you (yes, the eneterprise level is not free, which is a Good Ting (TM) even for open source projects) ERserver, PostgreSQL replicated for enterprises, and High Availability Solution. Last time I've check with them they achieved 0.5 seconds of failover. Is it "real" for you?
You don't get it: with or without hard-drives, you still have to send bytes between CPU and RAM. In case of terrabytes it can be a real problem.
Very small % of people use PCs for pirating DVDs. Most people solve real tasks on teir computers and those tasks require very intensive calculations. And I don't see any good progress of motherboard design matching the progress of RAM and CPU.
Still 200Mhz for system bus? With all those 4Ghz CPU and nanotube-based memory, seems to me that the motherboards is the worst part of the PC.
Oops, sorry. I forgot cases, where usually there is not enough of power sockets and spaces for additional hard-drives. And don't forget floppy drives - they are still here, in most PCs I see in the store.
I can easyly imagine to see, in a year or two, a PC with several TB of nanotube-based RAM and 1.44MB floppy drive, all connected to AOL with 56K modem.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday February 09, @09:46AM
cowmix writes "It turns out that Sun does not eat its own dog food. Specifically, this internal memo from Sun strongly suggests that Java should not be used for Sun's internal projects. More interesting still, they go on to state which other languages fullfil Java's goals better than Java does itself. Finally, the memo states Sun's own Solaris is the cause of many of Java's woes. Yikes."
My favorite pieces to quote:
I wonder, which air component is that trigger. I can put one my DVD player to a place where there will be a gas without such component.
I think Postal offices work for snail mail spammers.
If the patent the property of seeds to resist pesticides then it creates a problem when other farmers use some amounts of pesticeds for years and eventually can get seeds more and more resistent to pesticeds. That could be another seeds, different then Monsanto's, just with the same property. And that eventually can come by itself - plants can mutate in time. Too bad, the patents should not cover properties. It's like patenting a physical law.
If they patent exact DNA then farmers must check every year their crops that they are not accidentally contaminated. Too bad for other farmers, such DNA exam is expensive and that can rulle many farmers out of business.
Instead, they should patent the technology of genetical modification, not plants. If the farmer use the same technology to modify seeds then - jail. If the way of modification was different, even with the same outoming seeds then - live free.
This case is a test of how far bad American patent system goes.
In case of a friend I will at first try to talk to him (or her). If it will fail - I'll go to report. Friend or not friend - whatever is illegal is still illegal. But if I know and keep the silence and thus cover him - that is also illegal. I will warn my friend about it and give him an ultimatum - either he quits or if see it again - I report. In real life I talked like that to my friend and he quited.
Now, let's get back to business. But with a different illegal case: Once I saw that what my boss is doing is illegally stealing money from investors. So, what do you want me to do in that case? Still to think about him as about my friend and thus cover him and thus also participating in such illegal operatiions although not having even a penny from such a risk? Or to talk to my boss and tell him that he is wrong and he should either stop or will go to cops or investors... or he will give me a share and I shut up haveing a sweet reason for it?
In my real career once I was fired b/c I tried to talk to my boss about it. Just in few days after talking. I didn't give him any ultimatum. I did told that I have to report. I have just asked the question: what's going on and why is he doiing it. That was enough.
Will Mozilla browser UI be based on XUL? If not - does it mean that XUL is dead?
Moreover, when you post into the mail-list, you sign your message with your ID, the mail-server verifies the signature, and *THEN* signs the message again. Thus, the message is signed twice (MIME takes care it looks nice).
So, I don't see any problems with mail-lists.
Repeat after me: no protection works if it's based on unprotected fields of RFC822. The only way to protect is to use encryption technologies, such as e-signatures, PKI, CA. The only way to use it is to know its basic concepts. Now go to library and read.
Whitelists will work for such situations even better than you think now. People who look for new friends will register themselve in some CA specially dedicated for such "club" relationships. So, if you want accept email from such looking-for-friendship people, then you trust such "club" CA, which may or may not have fee in order to protect CA itself from spammers mimicing for pals.
The rest of us won't trust most of "club" CAs and that the beaty of whitelists: I define whom and what to to trust, either in terms of exact ID or in terms of "club membership" (which CA the key belongs to) or in term so other attributes (which cannot be fake as they are certified with CA).
Many parents (including myself) will be glad to configure MUA of their kids to trust kid club CAs, sleeping after that more comfortable as having less chance that someone in age of 30 will mimic another kid in order to get sexual relationship with the target kid.
Same thing should be with email. No need to blacklist bad IPs (which might not belong permanently to a spammer) or email addresses (also very temporal). Instead, list all people you trust or all their features that make the being trusted by you. You can guess that I mean e-signatures, public keys and cross-trusted CA network.
P.S. if it's more appropriate, please use for the text above:
Late 70s early 80s there was two extremely dangerous tests: 50 MT underwater by France in Pacific and 100+ MT underground by Soviets on New Zemlya. In second case, despte the fact that underground there was just a limited amount of water, the outcome was much greater than predicted. The shock wave did hit towns in North Russin in thousands of kilometers. The estimtaed energy after all measurements exceeded the originally calculated energey on more than 20 % - that's possible ony b/c the water underground has been involved in the fusion.
So, if they will make too intensive explosion than it's a big chance that they will miss something and trigger something they would not have planned originally. The outcome may include global cracks in the tektonic platforms and can be very catastrophic.
So, please, no more nuke/fusion exploisions - better invest money, resources and efforts into interplanetary communications: I want my vacations in Europe. You got it right - *THAT* Europe :)
Soon I am going to register on Sourforge, Savannah and other project hosting sites several new projects:
- Mozilla Web server based on fork of newcoming Zope-3;
- Mozilla Linux distro based on mix of Gentoo and ArchLinux;
- Mozilla language, Haskell in a syntax of Lisp's S-exps;
- and finally - Mozilla database based on fork of Firebird Database, just for fun
:)
I am very comfortable that using such good and self-expressive name as Mozilla I can quickly gather very good developers and rapidly develop the code that will take over the worldAs for Mozilla Browser, well, we may develop such on new Mozilla language, specially to browse Mozilla database. That's what are browsers for anyway, right?
If anyone is looking for volunteers for such researh then I am ready to be connected directly, without keyboards and screens, even without voice and sound - just pure cable, right to my brains. Of course with high-speed access to the Internet and a good firewall - I don't want my brains to be spammed about penis enlargements :)
Well just connect me to my hom PC - I'll do the firewalling by myself. Perhaps using some sort of SAI :))
The real money will begin to flow once the humankind will stop being scared of direct integrating of humans into computer networks.
I am not sure when, but ultimately all keyboards, mice and screens will take their places in musiums. People will communicate with computers and each other by connecting computers directly to their brain. Thus, the solid knowledge of natural intelligence will be required.
I think first researchers are already working on it in military-sponsored labs. Of course volunteers realize that they can be seriously damaged or dye, but death is natural in military industry. Military industry operates with huge amounts of money. But that's often not exactly a "free" market - all contracts are signed through lobbiing and bribes.
Once first "Unisolders" will be available on the market (sorry, on the job market), then next to militaries there will be strong demand from real-time traders. And that's a real market. Traders will line up to make a neuro-surgery to be connected to those-days electronic stock markets.
I am not sure when such "UI" will be available on the market, but once it will be there, at some point geeks will buy it. The rest of us will be in the front of the tough choice: to stay 100% "natural" or to win a better job contract.
Now, where is AI? The answer is simple: ultimately there will be nor AI neither NI (N as natural), there will be SAI: Semi-Artificial intelligence. No need to think in English letters if UI can get concepts you think of. No need to count numbers if software can do it for you *AND* some AI can do reasoninig about when, why and how you want it done. The trick is that no need to automate the reasonining 100% as your brain is already connected and can do part of the job in that reasoning.
For example, no need to create a very complicated DB query as SAI can use part of your brain to post-filter a small set of data after the pre-filtering of a big set data is done automated in DB engine.
Many problems of software development can be solved if, in addition to humans using computer, computers will use human brains.
That's what i call SAI.
Better call it Matrix:
Now, is it dead at last?
Why do you thing that life must have molecular basis? How about electromagnetic and/or plasmoid fields, which can also have self-organized self-replicated competing-for-sources structures? I was reading (in paper, cannot find online) papers showing (and proving mathematically) that if you go in yur math description of neural nets from descrete equations to integral equations then you'll describe such fields, which are consistent from physical point as well. The paper has been presented on few neural-net simposiums and no one found any inconsistency in it. Well, no one found any practical worthness of it either, but that's not a point. The point is: molecules (even based on non-carbon chemistry) are not the only way to build the life form. The question is: are you ready to recognise such alt form?
1. As a user you should prefer one UI on your own PC, or on you group of PCs. But you cannot demand the whole open source community to collapse to one UI. That would be against the pluralistic concept of the open source community and it will destroy it.
2. The talking like "I prefer one UI" is more appropriate to the manager in a commercial business. You cannot dictate OSS developers what UI they should work on. It's absolutely up to them.
3. If you don't like the pluralism of the open source - you still can stick with the only UI from Microsoft, or to the only UI from Apple (assuming that MacOS9 is already dead).
4. Hmm, actually you might be angry about inconsistency between UIs from Microsoft and Apple as well. See, har far you can go?
5. Conceptually, the fact of having many (honestly - less than "hundreds") UIs, being proposed by various open source development groups and picked up by users, just proves that exactly today it's a time on the market when a lot of innovation ongoing in UI. Once the innovation will stop or slow down then there will be one standard summarizing the choice "obvious" for most of users. Until then let evolution put everything on its own place.
Do you mean "Is it possible to GPL it?"? No, I doubt so and that was a joke. As for the idea itself about one-way tourism, I think it's possible. I can by one-way ticket from San Francisco to London. Why can't I buy one way ticket from Earth to Moon? Personally, in case of available money, I would buy it.
- 30% Insightful
- 30% Interesting
- 30% Overrated
Conclusion? Most of people either are tired from Intel platform or already know a better one.One less reason to run a Intel platform.
If you copy files than RAM-HDD is your bottleneck. If you work with mission critical databases, then it's most likely you've tuned it to be cached in memory. And you know what? Then you will understand what I mean by CPU-RAM bottleneck. Other people who understand it: who compile a lot, graphical designers, video editors.
You certainly don't know PostgreSQL, at least its enterprise level. Check with both PostgreSQL Inc and Lanux. They both will be happy to sell you (yes, the eneterprise level is not free, which is a Good Ting (TM) even for open source projects) ERserver, PostgreSQL replicated for enterprises, and High Availability Solution. Last time I've check with them they achieved 0.5 seconds of failover. Is it "real" for you?
Very small % of people use PCs for pirating DVDs. Most people solve real tasks on teir computers and those tasks require very intensive calculations. And I don't see any good progress of motherboard design matching the progress of RAM and CPU.
Oops, sorry. I forgot cases, where usually there is not enough of power sockets and spaces for additional hard-drives. And don't forget floppy drives - they are still here, in most PCs I see in the store.
I can easyly imagine to see, in a year or two, a PC with several TB of nanotube-based RAM and 1.44MB floppy drive, all connected to AOL with 56K modem.