True, but there were a lot of extension boards which included MMU,
..yeah, but not until most of the market window had passed. It was
certainly too late to help me.
...But that does not mean it is (or was) fundamentally hard. It
just takes a slightly different mindset and approach.
..yes, of course. You can walk up to any computer anywhere, whisper
to it in multithreaded assemly and have it do whatever you want. The
rest of us are human, though. Nor was the Amiga my only experience of
low productivity in multithreaded environments.
The entire AmigaOS software team could fit in a single van
Doesn't that just mean the time for serioup upgrades is even more of a
flag? And, C/A was famously undercapitalized, wasn't it? It didn't
take much to give it financial trouble. And, despite its platform's
success, it was ALWAYS in financial trouble.
As far as slow/late software upgrades - the AmigaOS 2.0/2.04
software upgrade was a long time in coming as the target kept moving
and we had this "99.99% compatible" requirement, . . ..
Yeah, but everybody else has management problems, too. OK, C/A's
really was bad, especially its sales. But, FIVE YEARS to see major
improvements? Also, how much of that target motion was due to the
market window moving while multithreading-related difficulties were
being debugged?
Plus, there were other implications. Half the computer-related
companies in the world were talking about how they were working on an
Amiga port or version of their product. But not so many of those
actually showed up, and those mostly showed up late and had fewer
versions than other platforms.
Since we have no Amiga without AmigaDOS (until Amigix, way too late)
to compare with, of course we don't know how much a less-threaded OS
would've helped or hurt, and how many of its troubles were due to
executive vs technical mistakes, so I'm just speculating.
Amiga was a multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS . . .
But just because it was better than everything else did not assure
it's success. A concept the BeOS fanbois might be familiar with.
Actually, I'd say its high level of threading support was one big reason
it failed. I found writing for it hard because I'd spend vast time
debugging the multithreading and communication bits. They must've
had to pay alot for programmers and their software upgrades were
generally slow to come and late.
Yes, overall, we'll see more and more better-threaded programs because
of widespread multiprocessors, but slowly because they're hard to write.
Notice that, though AmigaDOS could multithread well (except when it
crashed, which happened alot because it had no MMU), that also slowed
down its overall pace of doing things because there's an inevitable
performance overhead for threading. E.g., yeah, you could issue
several graphics programs, but the frames got pretty slow, slower than
they would've been if running in one program.
George W. Bush, who created the mandate for the manned mission to mars, but provided no additional funding to NASA, meaning to do what he wanted NASA would have to stop most other programs. And the NASA director at the time, who actually cancelled other science programs to free up funds for the Mars mission.
...except, it's not actually like that. First, most of the funding for your list comes from places other than the NASA budget. Second, it's a slow and incremental plan. Only a minority of science dollars are affected. An utterly tiny propertion is going to Mars, specifically. Third, most of the money is still going into innovation - just engineering instead of science.
screw a Mars mission until additional funding is provided for it. And that, in the long run, is more likely to get us to Mars than Bush's unfunded mandate
Wait - you said above that it IS funded by gutting science programs. Make up your mind! On the politics, it's Mr. Pursestrings themselves talking this talk. If they wanted to talk about additional NASA funding, they would. Hmm...somehow my ears have failed to pick that bit up.
The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that
make a colony completely out of our league any time in the
future.
Actually, it there is one important thing it would help with. Nothing
complicated, like a colony, can reasonably be done in engineering
without a simpler trial. Lunar base and colonization plans depend
heavily on all sorts of data gathered by the Apollo project. And when
things go wrong, they're going to be looking to Apollo experience to
develop Plan Bs.
We should be working on [long laundry list]
Yep, but we're working on all those things. Who said we should stop
everything to go to Mars?
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip".
It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity.
No doubt that's plenty of people said about Columbus' and Magellan's
voyages. Or do you think we've had enough of this pushy research and
voyaging into new places that brought you Slashdot to waste time on?
And it's the PLANNING phase that's up for cutting, not actually
sending them anywhere. It's an INCREMENTAL plan of pushing farther
and farther, not atall strapping somebody on today's boosters and
letting er rip. It is replacing SOME science missions with some
exploration, which I rather think is also a key NASA mission.
Personally, I think we can both. We did whie getting into orbit and
going to the moon. Or was that all a waste, too?
Re:Emphasis on the light, please.
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't see it working. There are three problems:
(1) Farming doesn't pay. Really. Compared to industries like money,
insurance, and even publishing, farming comes out to terrible labor
conditions and abject poverty. It'll be very hard to find workers or
to ever get as much money as from rent on the same volume.
(2) There's no space crisis in farming, contrary to the webpage - in
fact, many acres have been retired from farming and are being retired
today as well.
(3) Did I mention farming really, really, really doesn't pay?
Ultimately I disagree with several decisions Chavez has made, but he is hugely popular.
Well, the fact that journalists who disagree with him keep getting hurt might make that a little easier for him to attain.
It isn't up for us to decide, but the people.
So true. Not that one can be terribly certain how the people have decided, since Chavez installed the same kind of completely unverifiable voting machines as most places in the US have right in time for the referendum against him. Very handy for a caudillo.
He is the first president who has done anything for the poor, and they are quite thrilled. The local councils are very intriguing.
Has he? Inflation is up rather alot, and his price controls have vamoosed various kinds of food and other supplies from the shelf. And the brain drain is up. And the globalization he's trying to stop in Venezuela is how you get better jobs for all the people.
people just don't like reading books anymore. I can't remember the
name off the top of my head, but he cited a government study showing
how from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of the U.S. population that read
at least 1 book a day for pleasure went down 10% . . . He
hopes that this 'book burning' will start a dialogue in this country
about reading... . . . Remember, the only thing worse than burning a
book is not reading one.
This all looks pretty good to me. There are, of course, three things
he and way too many other people are ignoring in their rush to judge
that the world is going to pot:
o That's PRINT books that have declined. I'm currently working on
an electronic copy of Xenophon. Plenty of younger people take online
books for granted.
o The eyeballs gave partly gone to blogs, which have a rich and much
more interactive intellectual life unto themselves. This IS reading.
o Other eyeballs have gone to games, which have also become
intellectually rich and interactive (and, did I mention, also involve
reading?).
So where's that crisis of reading?
To me, it looks like he's saying, "pay attention to me and give me
money because I'm not paying attention to changes in society and don't
want to think hard to find homes for my books." 2-3 good suggestions
have been made in this thread for what he could've done with them.
when you consider just how many people are living in that
relatively small space, it's per-person impact is so much less.
I keep reading that, but it looks to me like density is more expensive.
Yeah, the commute, a small part of the equation, is more efficient,
just because the traffic's so bad transit is no worse than car. But
the taller an apartment building is,
the more expensive / ft^2 it is, and houses are alot less
expensive to build than apartment buildings. Lots of resources gone
there.
And people in dense places tend to spend more on other things,
too (both high supply and demand). The commute savings might be
overcome by the import costs of Belgian beer alone.... You tend to
spend on a bigger safety net than smaller cities (IMHO good, but it
has a cost).
And I never seem to see a link supporting it (not attacking you,
personally, it's a dime a dozen).
it might even be justified on power savings alone.
Why do I somehow doubt that something needing superchilling for every wire used for this will save power? And wouldn't it almost certainly be alot cheaper (and more power-efficient) to just conventionally cool a handful of the very worst cables?
I notice no sign of justifying math or studies here indicating it would be anything but a loss for any of the goals given. It might even be a loss for cable capacity, if the cooling equipment is too wide.
that would deal a real blow to the country if they came down
True. But this will only DECREASE security.
It's deeply unclear to me why a grid requiring WORKING ULTRACOOLING CHILLERS IN ALL SPOTS would be considered to be a security improvement. You need flowing nitrogen at all spots now.
Not only will this be alot easier to break maliciously, but the superconductor chillers will tend to break down alot. A LOT. This is very complicated and inherently failure-prone equipment. Even in computer rooms and labs. On Manhattan streets, a given line is likely to fail ALOT. They'll have to either accept a very high failure rate or spend a fortune on maintenance crews.
It's estimated to be $50M for one test line. This plan implicitly would take ALOT of those lines to work.
My grumble is that, note, CPA only cared about attacks on Coalition
troops, not about attacks on Iraqis, which were steadily increasing
the whole time. I mean, generally speaking, the point of an
occupation isn't just to have lots of annoying foreign troops arround,
but to KEEP THE OCCUPIED PEOPLE SECURE.
And this shows in the document. Lots of speculation and thought about
ATTACKS ON THE COALITION. You can't even begin to guess what the
security situation for Iraqis on the street is from this document.
The problem is that in real historical content it's obvious that
there is that clear rebirth of fascism in Estonia.
Hello, there, brigadnik. I can't say I welcome you, though.
Link, please? Please to somewhere other than.fsb.ru?
Isn't this propaganda point rather dated? I mean, it's not like
Russia is Communist anymore. Now that Russia is fascist, shouldn't
you be talking about the gathering Commie shadow instead?
But if you have Gold support, you'll at least be routed to real support personnel within a couple minutes, and you'll have replacement hardware within 4 hours.
Really? Are you quite sure?
About a year ago, working for somebody with gold-level service, I had
a laptop motherboard fail. The replacement failed to show up anything
like any 4 hours. The rep promised to have something ready by 24
hours. It was actually 33 hours before he showed up.
This was in Austin, Texas. Less than 20mi from Dell HQ.
True, less moolah for service level still might've gotten still worse
service. But they weren't delivering on their promises that day.
Now, Michael Dell since has taken control back specifically to get
control of this. I suspect it's getting better now.
It's also worth noting that (maybe because of some of these rules?),
Japan is effectively a one-party democracy, severely limiting reform
rates. I think they could use a few fewer election laws.
... a similar project such as HURD coming out earlier could have
> filled the same spot.
Linus deserves a lot of credit, but let's credit him for what he did.
Yes, let's. You clearly don't understand that work on the HURD has
been going on for decades. Still no usable OS.
Hmm, maybe Linus' work is a little more special than you're saying.
For that matter, how useful would Linux be without graphics and a browser
(vast codebases)? Maybe Stallman isn't the alpha and the omega after
all. Maybe it's really an unbelievably huge effort in which there's
credit to go around.
Really, every substantial contributor should be mentioned in the name.
But credit's always allocated unfairly. Get over it.
...Imagine being able to tell instantly what medication a patient is on, their complete medical history, drug allergies, and conditions....
There's something I'm missing here. How would this outperform carrying Yet Another Card around in your wallet? 99% of us already have infrastructure to carry our licenses and insurance cards around 99% of the time, so I'm not convinced by the leaving it at home argument.
Of course, you're dreaming in any case- no way am I spending half my life keeping the world up-to-date on whatever medications I'm on at any given moment. Especially if I have to go to my doctor to get my bracelet updated every time my allergies come on.
They have to be hit with a magnetic flux powerful enough to induce a current in their tiny coils powerful enough to transmit a radio signal which can be picked up at a significant distance.
That's why they have these devices called scanners, that exist solely for the purpose of reading them. You may have heard of them. They cost several $100s, and the price is dropping. Range is currently a little short, but clearly growing to where they could become useful for malicious purposes.
Can you easily track a particular person? No. But a scanner in a popular mall or restaurant or, as suggested earlier, near a stoplight, could yield a good information harvest. Do you want your local crooks knowing your medical info?
I still don't understand why you think RFID could outperform encoded bracelets for medical info. You still haven't explained that.
Or why the govt thought RFID would outperform magstrips for passports. Looks to me like fashionableness of new gadgetry, not real improvement.
I'm fairly certain that privacy will become a myth within my lifetime and most people won't even notice its gone.
I'm missing it. By the way, if any political staff are paying any attention (yeah, I know, it's SLASHDOT), know that I DO, in fact, vote on this issue.
Anybody think Ballmer or Gates are living with UAC on? I bet they turned it off years ago. But that won't keep them from trying to sell it as a reasonable security alternative.
> Linux is a trivial and completely replaceable part of a Free *NIX system.
It is, huh? In fact, the FSF has been trying to develop their own kernel
for about two decades. Still no luck. Because of their decision to
go microkernel, The Hurd remains an expensive failure, run by maybe 10
people. So, no, Linux ISN'T replaceable.
You could go with BSD, but then you're talking - gasp! - that nasty
free BSD license. Can't have that!
Slashdot Mirror
True, but there were a lot of extension boards which included MMU,
The entire AmigaOS software team could fit in a single van
Doesn't that just mean the time for serioup upgrades is even more of a flag? And, C/A was famously undercapitalized, wasn't it? It didn't take much to give it financial trouble. And, despite its platform's success, it was ALWAYS in financial trouble.
As far as slow/late software upgrades - the AmigaOS 2.0/2.04 software upgrade was a long time in coming as the target kept moving and we had this "99.99% compatible" requirement, . . . .
Yeah, but everybody else has management problems, too. OK, C/A's really was bad, especially its sales. But, FIVE YEARS to see major improvements? Also, how much of that target motion was due to the market window moving while multithreading-related difficulties were being debugged?
Plus, there were other implications. Half the computer-related companies in the world were talking about how they were working on an Amiga port or version of their product. But not so many of those actually showed up, and those mostly showed up late and had fewer versions than other platforms.
Since we have no Amiga without AmigaDOS (until Amigix, way too late) to compare with, of course we don't know how much a less-threaded OS would've helped or hurt, and how many of its troubles were due to executive vs technical mistakes, so I'm just speculating.
Amiga was a multi-tasking, multi-threaded OS . . . But just because it was better than everything else did not assure it's success. A concept the BeOS fanbois might be familiar with.
Actually, I'd say its high level of threading support was one big reason it failed. I found writing for it hard because I'd spend vast time debugging the multithreading and communication bits. They must've had to pay alot for programmers and their software upgrades were generally slow to come and late.
Yes, overall, we'll see more and more better-threaded programs because of widespread multiprocessors, but slowly because they're hard to write.
Notice that, though AmigaDOS could multithread well (except when it crashed, which happened alot because it had no MMU), that also slowed down its overall pace of doing things because there's an inevitable performance overhead for threading. E.g., yeah, you could issue several graphics programs, but the frames got pretty slow, slower than they would've been if running in one program.
George W. Bush, who created the mandate for the manned mission to mars, but provided no additional funding to NASA, meaning to do what he wanted NASA would have to stop most other programs. And the NASA director at the time, who actually cancelled other science programs to free up funds for the Mars mission.
screw a Mars mission until additional funding is provided for it. And that, in the long run, is more likely to get us to Mars than Bush's unfunded mandate
Wait - you said above that it IS funded by gutting science programs. Make up your mind! On the politics, it's Mr. Pursestrings themselves talking this talk. If they wanted to talk about additional NASA funding, they would. Hmm...somehow my ears have failed to pick that bit up.
The Mars Mission would basically solve none of the major problems that make a colony completely out of our league any time in the future.
Actually, it there is one important thing it would help with. Nothing complicated, like a colony, can reasonably be done in engineering without a simpler trial. Lunar base and colonization plans depend heavily on all sorts of data gathered by the Apollo project. And when things go wrong, they're going to be looking to Apollo experience to develop Plan Bs.
We should be working on [long laundry list]
Yep, but we're working on all those things. Who said we should stop everything to go to Mars?
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity.
No doubt that's plenty of people said about Columbus' and Magellan's voyages. Or do you think we've had enough of this pushy research and voyaging into new places that brought you Slashdot to waste time on?
And it's the PLANNING phase that's up for cutting, not actually sending them anywhere. It's an INCREMENTAL plan of pushing farther and farther, not atall strapping somebody on today's boosters and letting er rip. It is replacing SOME science missions with some exploration, which I rather think is also a key NASA mission. Personally, I think we can both. We did whie getting into orbit and going to the moon. Or was that all a waste, too?
I don't see it working. There are three problems:
(1) Farming doesn't pay. Really. Compared to industries like money, insurance, and even publishing, farming comes out to terrible labor conditions and abject poverty. It'll be very hard to find workers or to ever get as much money as from rent on the same volume.
(2) There's no space crisis in farming, contrary to the webpage - in fact, many acres have been retired from farming and are being retired today as well.
(3) Did I mention farming really, really, really doesn't pay?
So, wait, the Defense Against Marriage Act and opposition to abortion choice are Libertarian? So, for liberty everywhere except the bedroom?
> Reaction polling by CNN following the Republican debates named R. Paul the clear winner on many metrics;
Wasn't that Internet polling? I, for one, hail our Paulist bot overlords.
Ultimately I disagree with several decisions Chavez has made, but he is hugely popular.
Well, the fact that journalists who disagree with him keep getting hurt might make that a little easier for him to attain.
It isn't up for us to decide, but the people.
So true. Not that one can be terribly certain how the people have decided, since Chavez installed the same kind of completely unverifiable voting machines as most places in the US have right in time for the referendum against him. Very handy for a caudillo.
He is the first president who has done anything for the poor, and they are quite thrilled. The local councils are very intriguing.
Has he? Inflation is up rather alot, and his price controls have vamoosed various kinds of food and other supplies from the shelf. And the brain drain is up. And the globalization he's trying to stop in Venezuela is how you get better jobs for all the people.
people just don't like reading books anymore. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, but he cited a government study showing how from 1992 to 2002, the percentage of the U.S. population that read at least 1 book a day for pleasure went down 10% . . . He hopes that this 'book burning' will start a dialogue in this country about reading... . . . Remember, the only thing worse than burning a book is not reading one.
This all looks pretty good to me. There are, of course, three things he and way too many other people are ignoring in their rush to judge that the world is going to pot:
o That's PRINT books that have declined. I'm currently working on an electronic copy of Xenophon. Plenty of younger people take online books for granted.
o The eyeballs gave partly gone to blogs, which have a rich and much more interactive intellectual life unto themselves. This IS reading.
o Other eyeballs have gone to games, which have also become intellectually rich and interactive (and, did I mention, also involve reading?).
So where's that crisis of reading?
To me, it looks like he's saying, "pay attention to me and give me money because I'm not paying attention to changes in society and don't want to think hard to find homes for my books." 2-3 good suggestions have been made in this thread for what he could've done with them.
Their shitty viewed-12-times videos are subsidized by the zillion+ viewed videos.
And this is different from cable channels how?
A la carte is a horrible idea. All the best channels will fold; thanks for your brilliant idea.
So THAT's why Youtube folded. Nobody can survive in a system where we lowly consumers actually choose what we want to see.
when you consider just how many people are living in that relatively small space, it's per-person impact is so much less.
I keep reading that, but it looks to me like density is more expensive. Yeah, the commute, a small part of the equation, is more efficient, just because the traffic's so bad transit is no worse than car. But the taller an apartment building is, the more expensive / ft^2 it is, and houses are alot less expensive to build than apartment buildings. Lots of resources gone there.
And people in dense places tend to spend more on other things, too (both high supply and demand). The commute savings might be overcome by the import costs of Belgian beer alone.... You tend to spend on a bigger safety net than smaller cities (IMHO good, but it has a cost).
And I never seem to see a link supporting it (not attacking you, personally, it's a dime a dozen).
it might even be justified on power savings alone.
Why do I somehow doubt that something needing superchilling for every wire used for this will save power? And wouldn't it almost certainly be alot cheaper (and more power-efficient) to just conventionally cool a handful of the very worst cables?
I notice no sign of justifying math or studies here indicating it would be anything but a loss for any of the goals given. It might even be a loss for cable capacity, if the cooling equipment is too wide.
that would deal a real blow to the country if they came down
True. But this will only DECREASE security.
It's deeply unclear to me why a grid requiring WORKING ULTRACOOLING CHILLERS
IN ALL SPOTS would be considered to be a security improvement. You need
flowing nitrogen at all spots now.
Not only will this be alot easier to break maliciously, but the superconductor chillers will tend to break down alot. A LOT. This is very complicated and inherently failure-prone equipment. Even in computer rooms and labs. On Manhattan streets, a given line is likely to fail ALOT. They'll have to either accept a very high failure rate or spend a fortune on maintenance crews.
It's estimated to be $50M for one test line. This plan implicitly would take ALOT of those lines to work.
My grumble is that, note, CPA only cared about attacks on Coalition troops, not about attacks on Iraqis, which were steadily increasing the whole time. I mean, generally speaking, the point of an occupation isn't just to have lots of annoying foreign troops arround, but to KEEP THE OCCUPIED PEOPLE SECURE.
And this shows in the document. Lots of speculation and thought about ATTACKS ON THE COALITION. You can't even begin to guess what the security situation for Iraqis on the street is from this document.
The problem is that in real historical content it's obvious that there is that clear rebirth of fascism in Estonia.
Hello, there, brigadnik. I can't say I welcome you, though. Link, please? Please to somewhere other than .fsb.ru?
Isn't this propaganda point rather dated? I mean, it's not like Russia is Communist anymore. Now that Russia is fascist, shouldn't you be talking about the gathering Commie shadow instead?
The problem is that Estonia now behaves EXACTLY like USSR did.
Estonia has occupied Russia? Remarkable. I must pay more attention to the news.
But if you have Gold support, you'll at least be routed to real support personnel within a couple minutes, and you'll have replacement hardware within 4 hours.
Really? Are you quite sure?
About a year ago, working for somebody with gold-level service, I had a laptop motherboard fail. The replacement failed to show up anything like any 4 hours. The rep promised to have something ready by 24 hours. It was actually 33 hours before he showed up.
This was in Austin, Texas. Less than 20mi from Dell HQ.
True, less moolah for service level still might've gotten still worse service. But they weren't delivering on their promises that day.
Now, Michael Dell since has taken control back specifically to get control of this. I suspect it's getting better now.
It's also worth noting that (maybe because of some of these rules?), Japan is effectively a one-party democracy, severely limiting reform rates. I think they could use a few fewer election laws.
Linus deserves a lot of credit, but let's credit him for what he did.
Yes, let's. You clearly don't understand that work on the HURD has been going on for decades. Still no usable OS.
Hmm, maybe Linus' work is a little more special than you're saying.
For that matter, how useful would Linux be without graphics and a browser (vast codebases)? Maybe Stallman isn't the alpha and the omega after all. Maybe it's really an unbelievably huge effort in which there's credit to go around.
Really, every substantial contributor should be mentioned in the name. But credit's always allocated unfairly. Get over it.
There's something I'm missing here. How would this outperform carrying Yet Another Card around in your wallet? 99% of us already have infrastructure to carry our licenses and insurance cards around 99% of the time, so I'm not convinced by the leaving it at home argument.
Of course, you're dreaming in any case- no way am I spending half my life keeping the world up-to-date on whatever medications I'm on at any given moment. Especially if I have to go to my doctor to get my bracelet updated every time my allergies come on.
They have to be hit with a magnetic flux powerful enough to induce a current in their tiny coils powerful enough to transmit a radio signal which can be picked up at a significant distance.
That's why they have these devices called scanners, that exist solely for the purpose of reading them. You may have heard of them. They cost several $100s, and the price is dropping. Range is currently a little short, but clearly growing to where they could become useful for malicious purposes.
Can you easily track a particular person? No. But a scanner in a popular mall or restaurant or, as suggested earlier, near a stoplight, could yield a good information harvest. Do you want your local crooks knowing your medical info?
I still don't understand why you think RFID could outperform encoded bracelets for medical info. You still haven't explained that.
Or why the govt thought RFID would outperform magstrips for passports. Looks to me like fashionableness of new gadgetry, not real improvement.
I'm fairly certain that privacy will become a myth within my lifetime and most people won't even notice its gone.
I'm missing it. By the way, if any political staff are paying any attention (yeah, I know, it's SLASHDOT), know that I DO, in fact, vote on this issue.
Anybody think Ballmer or Gates are living with UAC on? I bet they turned it off years ago. But that won't keep them from trying to sell it as a reasonable security alternative.
> Linux is a trivial and completely replaceable part of a Free *NIX system.
It is, huh? In fact, the FSF has been trying to develop their own kernel for about two decades. Still no luck. Because of their decision to go microkernel, The Hurd remains an expensive failure, run by maybe 10 people. So, no, Linux ISN'T replaceable.
You could go with BSD, but then you're talking - gasp! - that nasty free BSD license. Can't have that!