I doubt that better compression algorithms will make much of a difference. Current DVDs are big enough for movies, and broadband capable of delivering reasonable quality video is pretty close. Since bandwidth and storage are getting larger but movies aren't getting any longer, that means that most storage and bandwidth improvements will result in better quality and higher resolutions.
MPEG-7, incidentally, is not a compression standar, it's a standard for video meta-data (allowing content-based video retrieval).
No, you are just confusing lots of issues. DNA computing has little to do with genetic networks. It's also unproven whether DNA computing can actually do anything useful.
And while DNA is compact, 2^128 and 2^1000 are really big numbers. 2^128 is about 10^38, and 2^1000 is about 10^300. A pound of hydrogen has about 10^27 atoms, so even if you use one hydrogen atom per key, you need nearly a billion tons of hydrogen just to get 2^128 atoms, let alone a billion DNA molecules.
All this attention from computer scientists to "biocomputing" is mostly hype, and it's probably due to lucrative DARPA grants running out for the old kind of work. There are interesting questions to be asked there and interesting applications to be found, but biologists and mathematicians have been asking those for decades already.
but a drag-and-drop software install/uninstall is clearly the preferred method by desktop users.
Drag-and-drop installation is the reason why I finally just erased OS X from my Macintosh and installed Debian: it is a bloody nuisance trying to keep software up-to-date and consistent, and I just didn't have that much time to waste on a Macintosh. Even InstallShield works better than that. And, of course, Apple isn't using drag-and-drop installation for its own software--Apple is sending you automatic updates.
In any case, there are lots of different distros for lots of different needs. Sure, there is room for more. Maybe there should be a Linux distro for people who grew up on Macintosh, to work just like they are used to. Hey, it's a free country and free software. I doubt anything other than a real Macintosh will ever satisfy Macintosh users, no matter how good the alternative may be technically, but if you have time on your hands, by all means, try and put one together.
Transcription and translation happen at about 45 nucleotides per second in bacteria, meaning it takes at least a few seconds to get a signal through a genetic "gate" or "switch".
Right now, the cost of international patent filings is pretty much the only reason why many patented inventions are still available in source form somewhere--$7000/country/patent plus lawyer fees even matters to corporations.
If companies can just file patents world-wide, it means that source code implementing something patented will probably become unavailable world-wide. This matters even if people don't intend to violate the patent--a lot of open source implementations of patented inventions take place in countries where the invention isn't patented, and as soon as the patent expires, those implementations are available world-wide.
As far as the "small inventor" is concerned, with few exceptions, the patent system stopped working somewhere in the 20th century anyway. Even if you manage to get a patent these days as a small inventor, chances are that whoever has more expensive lawyers and better patent bargaining chips will win, and that won't be the small inventor. All we are discussing when discussing changes to the patent system is how much we want to let ourselves get screwed.
Cisco may be able to make lots of money on corporate accounts with an initial version of this, but if IP telephony catches on, then this sort of thing will just become a commodity, sold at cut-rate prices alongside Linksys wireless gateways (with VOIP) and non-name USB 802.11b dongles.
Computers make decisions. Ants make decisions. People make decisions. Each of them is a complex system that takes actions based on input data. Societies are no different.
When Bush was elected, or when Bush attacked Iraq, or when the health care plan was shot down, or when more money got allocated to prisons than crime prevention, those were "decisions that society made".
By your reasoning, we should say that "people don't make decisions, neurons do". But that's an unnecessarily narrow definition of the term "decision".
I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job.
If pharmaceutical companies aren't efficient at developing cures, we end up wasting lots of money, and as a result, fewer diseases get cured.
And pharmaceutical companies aren't efficient. Given how drugs are paid for right now, we end up paying much more in the long run than if we just funded drug development publicly (it gets even more inefficient because a large fraction of medical research is funded publicly anyway). Worse, pharmaceutical companies allocate funds to profitable drugs, not drugs that are most important from a public health perspective.
Many people have a problem with an attitude that puts more weight on facts than on dogma or unsupported statements.
Yes, and that is particularly true of you. Your prescription that we should consider new technology to be harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite is dogmatic and, by definition, based on the absence of evidence.
Saying "if frogs rise up and eat all mammals every hundred years, it would be very bad" is not a plausible reason for believing that frogs do in fact do that.
In that case we have several thousand years of historical records, together with a detailed knowledge of the behavior and abilities of frogs.
When it comes to new technologies, our experience is necessarily limited. We don't know what a newly synthesized chemical does when released into the environment. We can't even tell reliably how drugs that have gone through clinical trials are going to behave in the real world--that's why so many of them are withdrawn from the market again.
Fear of the unknown is one of the big stumbling blocks.
You bet it is, and it isn't enough of a stumbling block: many new products and compounds are being released with no safety testing.
Again, what's wrong is not your statement that microwaves are harmless, what is wrong is the reasoning you use to arrive at that conclusion. Microwaves are to be considered reasonably safe (within current regulations) because there have been extensive studies designed to test their safety, not because there is an absence of studies that show them to be dangerous. If you don't get the difference, well, you just can't be helped.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason to switch to Itanium right now--it seems to be expensive, slow, and hard to compile for. This "compatibility layer" won't change that. When the Itanium is competitive in both performance and cost, then it's worth looking at again.
but no responsible studies that link microwave antennas to cancer
What's wrong with your statement is not so much about whether microwaves are harmful (I don't think they are, at least compared to many other hazards), it's the general attitude.
The "no responsible study has shown" statements so often made by companies wanting to deploy their technology are just a PR ploy; the real question is: have we sufficiently studied all the ways in which a technology could conceivably cause harm? With any new technology, we should first establish beyond a reasonable doubt what harm it does and doesn't cause. Then, we should have a discussion about whether we are willing to accept that harm. Right now, we are just deploying new technologies widely without regulation and see what happens.
Or maybe he's taking the "hey, at least I'm improving software people actually use" approach;).
And where was that spirit 10 years ago? Why not improve the software UNIX users used instead of writing a 350 page diatribe? Besides, Microsoft and Microsoft's use of C++ in Office are responsible for the success of C++ much more than UNIX. If C++ is as evil as the UHH claims, why not get Microsoft to rewrite Office in something else?
VMS had a reputation for being secure, so it seemed like fun to poke at a VMS server we had around. As I recall, VMS had limited privileges for things like restore-from-backup, network daemons, various operator functions, etc. It was an entertaining puzzle trying to figure out how to make them fall one by one, and turned out to be simpler than doing the equivalent on a Berkeley UNIX system. Partly what helped was the excellent documentation. I think VMS mainly was considered "secure" because nobody bothered breaking in (or, perhaps, because no self-respecting hacker could remember its directory syntax).
Dennis Ritchie did just that: witness Plan 9 and Inferno.
My comment wasn't directed at Dennis Ritchie, it was directed at the UNIX haters.
But you bring up another point: the UHH keeps confusing "UNIX" with "random programs running on UNIX". The UHH contributors complain about Kerberos (user-unfriendly MIT hack), csh (very evil Berkeley hack), NFS (evil Sun hack), X11 (not so evil MIT window system for X11 and VMS), etc. I mean, anybody can write lousy software for even the nicest operating system.
I don't see this as a problem. There are plenty of resources that can be used by only one application at a time. That may make them slightly less useful, but they are still a lot more useful than not having them at all.
Well, judging by the book, he used to hate C++, too. Yet, he is doing code analysis for large C/C++ systems, in particular MS Office. If C/C++ is bad for writing UNIX command line apps, it is even worse for writing huge, long-running interactive apps.
It looks to me that he just has given up caring about good taste in software at all and is taking the "hey, whatever makes money" view. Perhaps that's what a large chunk of MS stock options does to you.
Sort of like people chose Windows now, because it is now better for getting real work done than the alternatives, right ?
An obvious but incorrect analogy. First, Windows isn't displacing for UNIX/Linux at all--UNIX/Linux is going strong, in spite of Microsoft's business tactics. Second, most people don't explicitly choose Windows at all, they just get it by default.
So, how UNIX displaced VMS/Multics isn't at all analogous to the relationship between Windows and UNIX/Linux today. And the thing I criticize Microsoft for isn't primarily the quality of their software, it's that they are not playing on a level playing field. If they were, then I think market forces would take care of Microsoft's software quality issues one way or another.
Most of the people who were on the haters list were actually VMS and Multics users, or like me they had used so many different O/S and written bits of them that they were in a position to make comparisons.
I think this is part of the blinders that you and other people had on at the time. You hacked operating systems and because hacking some particular OS was great fun for you, you thought it was great for users. But for users, none of that mattered.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era.
Maybe from the point of view of a Multics kernel hacker. From the point of view of a user, it looked pretty sweet in comparison to those aging, messy behemoths.
[Lack of security] did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking.
Fortran had dynamic memory allocation, which was widely used (too bad it wasn't standardized) and no bounds checking. So did BCPL. So did many Pascal compilers (and not all Pascal compilers offered bounds checking). So, for that matter, did assembly language.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
The whole UHH book, as well as your posting, reek of arrogance and ignorance. Do you really think people who chose UNIX at the time weren't aware of the problems that the UHH points out? They (myself included) chose UNIX nevertheless because, in the end, it was still better for getting real work done than the alternatives.
What the world could have used was some rolling-up of sleeves and efforts to do better, either by bringing those fabulous other systems to workstation-class hardware, or by at least porting over bits and pieces of them (shells, programming languages, etc.). But, in the end, your emperor had no clothes: while people like you whined and complaied a lot, when it came down to it, you apparently really didn't know how to do any better.
I think one couldn't sum up the book better than Ritchie did. But there are some other funny nuggets in there. For example, observe Zawinski's hilariously incompetent attempts at using "find" (p.167). Or have a look at the suggestion that people should be using Interlisp instead of UNIX (p.175). Obviously, these people had no idea either how to use UNIX or who was using UNIX and why. It also seems quite ironic that Weise now spends his time writing code analysis tools for C/C++.
The only question to me is why people would want to re-publish this monument to their ignorance after another decade. And it's not like any of them can point to a big success, or even significant effort, at doing better than UNIX/Linux either.
1 Watch movies from HD
2 Listen to music (a lot of it)
3 Store pictures from digicam
4 Navigation with all the maps you want
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that the Zaurus is very limited in terms of storage. But it has two slots (SD and CF), so you can put in several gigabytes of solid state or HD storage into it.
5 More or less normal keyboard
Get a PocketTop IR keyboard: it folds down to the size of the Zaurus but is suitable for touch typing.
6 1024x600 display
Yes, that the Zaurus doesn't have. The C700, however, has 640x480.
The P1000 and P2000 series machines are really nice, but you underestimate what modern PDAs can do.
Slashdot Mirror
MPEG-7, incidentally, is not a compression standar, it's a standard for video meta-data (allowing content-based video retrieval).
Oops--that should have read "let alone 2^128 DNA molecules".
I was merely pointing out that size comparisons alone are meaningless. However, some proteins do work on picosecond timescales.
And while DNA is compact, 2^128 and 2^1000 are really big numbers. 2^128 is about 10^38, and 2^1000 is about 10^300. A pound of hydrogen has about 10^27 atoms, so even if you use one hydrogen atom per key, you need nearly a billion tons of hydrogen just to get 2^128 atoms, let alone a billion DNA molecules.
All this attention from computer scientists to "biocomputing" is mostly hype, and it's probably due to lucrative DARPA grants running out for the old kind of work. There are interesting questions to be asked there and interesting applications to be found, but biologists and mathematicians have been asking those for decades already.
Drag-and-drop installation is the reason why I finally just erased OS X from my Macintosh and installed Debian: it is a bloody nuisance trying to keep software up-to-date and consistent, and I just didn't have that much time to waste on a Macintosh. Even InstallShield works better than that. And, of course, Apple isn't using drag-and-drop installation for its own software--Apple is sending you automatic updates.
In any case, there are lots of different distros for lots of different needs. Sure, there is room for more. Maybe there should be a Linux distro for people who grew up on Macintosh, to work just like they are used to. Hey, it's a free country and free software. I doubt anything other than a real Macintosh will ever satisfy Macintosh users, no matter how good the alternative may be technically, but if you have time on your hands, by all means, try and put one together.
Transcription and translation happen at about 45 nucleotides per second in bacteria, meaning it takes at least a few seconds to get a signal through a genetic "gate" or "switch".
But proteins go into a little 3D bag, while transistors need to be packed near a flat surface with current VLSI technologies.
And people have known about them only for, oh, a few decades.
If companies can just file patents world-wide, it means that source code implementing something patented will probably become unavailable world-wide. This matters even if people don't intend to violate the patent--a lot of open source implementations of patented inventions take place in countries where the invention isn't patented, and as soon as the patent expires, those implementations are available world-wide.
As far as the "small inventor" is concerned, with few exceptions, the patent system stopped working somewhere in the 20th century anyway. Even if you manage to get a patent these days as a small inventor, chances are that whoever has more expensive lawyers and better patent bargaining chips will win, and that won't be the small inventor. All we are discussing when discussing changes to the patent system is how much we want to let ourselves get screwed.
Cisco may be able to make lots of money on corporate accounts with an initial version of this, but if IP telephony catches on, then this sort of thing will just become a commodity, sold at cut-rate prices alongside Linksys wireless gateways (with VOIP) and non-name USB 802.11b dongles.
When Bush was elected, or when Bush attacked Iraq, or when the health care plan was shot down, or when more money got allocated to prisons than crime prevention, those were "decisions that society made".
By your reasoning, we should say that "people don't make decisions, neurons do". But that's an unnecessarily narrow definition of the term "decision".
If pharmaceutical companies aren't efficient at developing cures, we end up wasting lots of money, and as a result, fewer diseases get cured.
And pharmaceutical companies aren't efficient. Given how drugs are paid for right now, we end up paying much more in the long run than if we just funded drug development publicly (it gets even more inefficient because a large fraction of medical research is funded publicly anyway). Worse, pharmaceutical companies allocate funds to profitable drugs, not drugs that are most important from a public health perspective.
Yes, and that is particularly true of you. Your prescription that we should consider new technology to be harmless until there are studies that prove the opposite is dogmatic and, by definition, based on the absence of evidence.
Saying "if frogs rise up and eat all mammals every hundred years, it would be very bad" is not a plausible reason for believing that frogs do in fact do that.
In that case we have several thousand years of historical records, together with a detailed knowledge of the behavior and abilities of frogs.
When it comes to new technologies, our experience is necessarily limited. We don't know what a newly synthesized chemical does when released into the environment. We can't even tell reliably how drugs that have gone through clinical trials are going to behave in the real world--that's why so many of them are withdrawn from the market again.
Fear of the unknown is one of the big stumbling blocks.
You bet it is, and it isn't enough of a stumbling block: many new products and compounds are being released with no safety testing.
Again, what's wrong is not your statement that microwaves are harmless, what is wrong is the reasoning you use to arrive at that conclusion. Microwaves are to be considered reasonably safe (within current regulations) because there have been extensive studies designed to test their safety, not because there is an absence of studies that show them to be dangerous. If you don't get the difference, well, you just can't be helped.
As far as I can tell, there is no reason to switch to Itanium right now--it seems to be expensive, slow, and hard to compile for. This "compatibility layer" won't change that. When the Itanium is competitive in both performance and cost, then it's worth looking at again.
What's wrong with your statement is not so much about whether microwaves are harmful (I don't think they are, at least compared to many other hazards), it's the general attitude.
The "no responsible study has shown" statements so often made by companies wanting to deploy their technology are just a PR ploy; the real question is: have we sufficiently studied all the ways in which a technology could conceivably cause harm? With any new technology, we should first establish beyond a reasonable doubt what harm it does and doesn't cause. Then, we should have a discussion about whether we are willing to accept that harm. Right now, we are just deploying new technologies widely without regulation and see what happens.
And where was that spirit 10 years ago? Why not improve the software UNIX users used instead of writing a 350 page diatribe? Besides, Microsoft and Microsoft's use of C++ in Office are responsible for the success of C++ much more than UNIX. If C++ is as evil as the UHH claims, why not get Microsoft to rewrite Office in something else?
VMS had a reputation for being secure, so it seemed like fun to poke at a VMS server we had around. As I recall, VMS had limited privileges for things like restore-from-backup, network daemons, various operator functions, etc. It was an entertaining puzzle trying to figure out how to make them fall one by one, and turned out to be simpler than doing the equivalent on a Berkeley UNIX system. Partly what helped was the excellent documentation. I think VMS mainly was considered "secure" because nobody bothered breaking in (or, perhaps, because no self-respecting hacker could remember its directory syntax).
My comment wasn't directed at Dennis Ritchie, it was directed at the UNIX haters.
But you bring up another point: the UHH keeps confusing "UNIX" with "random programs running on UNIX". The UHH contributors complain about Kerberos (user-unfriendly MIT hack), csh (very evil Berkeley hack), NFS (evil Sun hack), X11 (not so evil MIT window system for X11 and VMS), etc. I mean, anybody can write lousy software for even the nicest operating system.
I don't see this as a problem. There are plenty of resources that can be used by only one application at a time. That may make them slightly less useful, but they are still a lot more useful than not having them at all.
It looks to me that he just has given up caring about good taste in software at all and is taking the "hey, whatever makes money" view. Perhaps that's what a large chunk of MS stock options does to you.
An obvious but incorrect analogy. First, Windows isn't displacing for UNIX/Linux at all--UNIX/Linux is going strong, in spite of Microsoft's business tactics. Second, most people don't explicitly choose Windows at all, they just get it by default.
So, how UNIX displaced VMS/Multics isn't at all analogous to the relationship between Windows and UNIX/Linux today. And the thing I criticize Microsoft for isn't primarily the quality of their software, it's that they are not playing on a level playing field. If they were, then I think market forces would take care of Microsoft's software quality issues one way or another.
I think this is part of the blinders that you and other people had on at the time. You hacked operating systems and because hacking some particular OS was great fun for you, you thought it was great for users. But for users, none of that mattered.
UNIX does come off very baddly compared to the other O/S of its era.
Maybe from the point of view of a Multics kernel hacker. From the point of view of a user, it looked pretty sweet in comparison to those aging, messy behemoths.
[Lack of security] did not work to keep UNIx replacing real O/S like VMS.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Denis Richie effectively invented the buffer overun bug. C was the first computer language that had dynamic memory allocation without dynamic range checking.
Fortran had dynamic memory allocation, which was widely used (too bad it wasn't standardized) and no bounds checking. So did BCPL. So did many Pascal compilers (and not all Pascal compilers offered bounds checking). So, for that matter, did assembly language.
UNIX is unfortunately not the greatest creation of computer science. The fact that so many youngsters look at the pile of offal uncritically is somewhat disappointing.
The whole UHH book, as well as your posting, reek of arrogance and ignorance. Do you really think people who chose UNIX at the time weren't aware of the problems that the UHH points out? They (myself included) chose UNIX nevertheless because, in the end, it was still better for getting real work done than the alternatives.
What the world could have used was some rolling-up of sleeves and efforts to do better, either by bringing those fabulous other systems to workstation-class hardware, or by at least porting over bits and pieces of them (shells, programming languages, etc.). But, in the end, your emperor had no clothes: while people like you whined and complaied a lot, when it came down to it, you apparently really didn't know how to do any better.
The only question to me is why people would want to re-publish this monument to their ignorance after another decade. And it's not like any of them can point to a big success, or even significant effort, at doing better than UNIX/Linux either.
You seem to be under the mistaken assumption that the Zaurus is very limited in terms of storage. But it has two slots (SD and CF), so you can put in several gigabytes of solid state or HD storage into it.
5 More or less normal keyboard
Get a PocketTop IR keyboard: it folds down to the size of the Zaurus but is suitable for touch typing.
6 1024x600 display
Yes, that the Zaurus doesn't have. The C700, however, has 640x480.
The P1000 and P2000 series machines are really nice, but you underestimate what modern PDAs can do.
It's all a trade-off between power, size, and cost. And it doesn't look like Vulcan has any better technology than anybody else.