Just for perspective, there have been over 100,000 G5s ordered, so this cluster is about one percent of the backlog. In other words, assuming that Apple ships all pending orders in about a month, the G5 I ordered will be delayed by about 8 hours.
First, let me say that I think it is good for Apple and therefore good for Apple users that they are supporting the VT supercomputer project by bumping their priority. This will be the first time that Apple computer will be able to claim anything like this and it should mark an important turning point in the minds of corporate and scientific buyers regarding the strength of Apple's platform. And I agree completely, 1100 machines is not going to delay anyone's order by much (or at all).
Speaking of delays: It may be a mistake at the Apple Store site, or hopefully (maybe) it is by design! - I went through the process of purchasing a dual 2ghz (stock) G5 machine to look at the shipping date and guess what? Estimated ship: 10-15 bus days. Go check it out for yourself... Is this real, or a Labor day, labor problem?
QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).
The author, Fabrice Bellard, is a madman. Anyone with experience and time should join his team. You can already run Wine on PPC (fast, because of dynamic translation), and they are very close to getting the Virtual Machine (an x86 virtual pc) running on PPC (it runs now on x86).
This project aims at not just being a contender for emulation, but eventually blowing all the competition away due to it's ability to recompile everything into native PPC (or MIPS or...), caching it's results.
This is weighted asymmetrically -- 0 and 0.5 must be 0.5, or 0.5 and 1 can't be 0.5.
Sorry, but no. There has been a tremendous amount of research done on this topic. The most common operator for AND in multivalued logic is min(a,b). This operator allows for a De-Morgan algebra (very similar to a Boolean algreba but with excluded middle blown out).
With min(A,B), 0 AND 1/2 = 0, 1/2 AND 1 = 1/2...
Tis the way it works, sorry it offends your sensibilities - just think that the confidence of a conjunction of two truths is the lowest confidence being conjuncted and the confidence of two truths being disjuncted is the highest of those values being disjuncted. It makes sense in terms of set theory as well (think unions and intersections).
Even the terminology is bad. True, false, alpha. Ugh. If P is sort of true, then kind of do q.
How about "If you are going fast then slow down?"
slow down = apply breaks
pressure on breaks =proportional to= belief in the assertion "going fast"
The fact that fuzzy propositional logic allows us to take english sentances and break then down into logic with very few steps or translations is extremely impressive and flys in the face of your statement.
In fact, terminology in possibility theory and it's ability to rationally handle the ambiguous or less then fully quantifiable is exactly it's strength.
One last note: You don't need many uncertainty states to make a system like this useful. Although, certainly, the more you have the more precision is possible. I think 255 states is more than enough for common applications, including control systems for machinery and whatnot. A chip designed properly could probably combine multiple fbits to increase precision in the same way that bits are combined to create ints or floats.
You're a relic, I'm afraid;-)... Binary operations can be carried out by considering whatever values you have to be binary numbers...
Heh.. I hate to break this to you, but your thinking is a bit behind the times as well...
Multivalued logic = Fuzzy logic
The most common AND and OR operations in Fuzzy Logic are min() and max() that together form the basis of a De-Morgan Algrebra (only the law of excluded middle [A AND NOT A = 0, A OR NOT A = 1] must be thrown out)
AND(A,B) = MIN(A,B)
OR(A,B) = MAX(A,B)
NOT(A) = 1-A
Generally, a trenary logic is composed of { 0, 0.5, 1 } where each value is the "degree" or "belief" in TRUE.
0 = FALSE
0.5 = UNKNOWN
1 = TRUE
Some of you may recognize this from SQL (yes, SQL does actually have a simple trenary fuzzy logic base).
The truth table ends up looking like this:
0 AND 0 = 0
0 AND 0.5 = 0
0.5 AND 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 AND 1 = 0.5
1 AND 1 = 1
0 OR 0 = 0
0 OR 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 OR 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 OR 1 = 1
1 OR 1 = 1
NOT 0 =1
NOT 0.5 = 0.5
NOT 1 = 0
If we move from trenary to any other precision, the rules stay the same and the table is easily derived ( min, max, 1- ). Generally, it is prefered to always have a 0.5 value, because UNKNOWN is actually a useful truth indicator. The next set after trenary that makes sense is not 4-value-logic (because it would exclude unknown), but instead 5. For instance:
At this point, some truly interesting approximate reasoning is possible, although going to 15 values or (ideally) handling multivalue logic as analog until storage/retrieval would be much better. Approximate reasoning is one of the many things that fuzzy logic makes possible. Essentially it is the application of fuzzy logic to determining beliefs where certainty is not important (and in fact the lack of certainty is where the power of such a system comes from - being able to continue computing without full knowledge, only belief)...
The idea of signals that are analog flying around on a semiconductor, instead of digital, yet time discreet in the same way as digital signals is quite interesting and could probably be done quite easily. Anyone have any ideas on how a min(A,B), max(A,B) and (1-A) operation might look on silicon?
They amaze because of the massive power they have over networks, PCs and most importantly the people they affect. Worm viruses are up there with Cancer or AIDs as far as some people are concerned.
How long until we see more organized worms that communicate with each other to achieve a goal (such as cracking an RSA key)? It seems that stealthy worms could already be out there, slowly infultrating and lodging themselves into message handlers or whatnot...
BTW: Yes, I do think we can blame MS... Their software does make this stuff possible.
I'm not sure how Japan figures out what to pick but it seems to work. Maybe they are making very good choices or maybe if you stick enough money into something it will eventually pay off. And as sceptical I am of humanoid robots I can't say this is a silly idea any more.
One Word: CONSTRUCTION
Although my own insticts in this regard go to smaller construction-bots (say mouse or even cockroach sized), using loosely coupled swarming network communication and behavior to build. Probably cheaper and more powerful. But, let em try... Even if it's a stupid idea, if no one else competes, they will win.
(1) It provides monitary incentives to commit or arrange acts of terrorism or other political acts. We could see corporations become (even more) involved in overthrowing foreign governments to increase their profits.
As you point out in (3), below, this type of futures market is subject to manipulation. However, I believe that in this case, governmental intelligence is the counterbalancing force. You should also consider that the microcosms that have high spreads associated with them will become aware of those spreads making them aware of their own risks and therefore more likely to protect against said eventualities. I believe the system would self-stabilize.
(2) It provides an easy method for actual terrorists to misdirect intelligence agencies by creating false likelihoods of certain events or making the events they're planning less likely.
It would be very expensive to do such nonsense. This is probably only something that a government could afford to do and it would be obvious. That sort of behavior would make a lot of people a lot of money in this system (but not the ones trying to misdirect), without having the desired effect.
(3) You analogies don't apply because those futures are natural disasters and can't be affected by those "betting" on the market. There is no ability to provide artifical feedback or perturbations in the creation of natural disasters, but there is in this so-called "policy analysis market".
Many futures markets are subject to intervention of a variety of different forms. The economic pressures applied by the futures markets tend to translate into extraordinary stabilizing forces that act to stop such manipulations. However, you are correct. It is likely, in some cases, that accidents in mining, shipping, drilling, etc.. may be linked to bets on futures markets associated with related commodities and the past does indeed warn us that when the stakes are high enough, these types of markets may result in real (rather than accounting) catastrophes...
I guess the real question is, "Will the significant value that such a system provides to all stakeholders be greater, in the aggregate, than the almost certain (likely few) abuses of the system.?"
Not exclusively, but as a terrorist you would have to be daft to try and make any kind of serious money off of this.
But someone in your "circle" would, or perhaps one of their associates... Unless you are part of a deaf-mute suicide brigade, your actions will be translated into future contracts before they happen. There is just too much money to be made and greed is just too powerful of a force.
Omigod! Predictive tool, my ass! How desperate have we gotten to keep our economies stable in times of despair? A way to instantly give people an economic boost when tragedy strikes?
The ability to hedge against disaster has kept America strong for many years. Farmers use futures to protect against natural disasters and other problems, locking in profits regardless of crop yields. Insurance companies use futures to protect against natural disasters and partially fund payouts for hurricanes and other catastrophes.
The economic need for such a tool is real and not in the least bit evil. The fact that this could also have powerful, tangible benefit to those in a position to stop these disasters from happening is an awesome second advantage.
I see no reason why this isn't perhaps the most sane and intelligent thing that our intellligence agency has ever tried to do. Even if they are doing the "Dr. Evil" about it, it will still be a powerfully benign force.
perhaps the/. paranoia bug has rubbed off me a bit too much, but what are the chances that your "bets" could be used against you in the war on terrorism?
Yea, my first reaction to this was, "So, if I'm a terrorist, I could use this system to make my activities much more profitable..."
Which was quickly followed by, "[CIA] Watch the money trail, that honeypot will be just too attractive for them to avoid... Of course they will try to profit from their actions..."
Followed by massive parse trees of hedging and futures games played in this market in an attempt to create leverage on both sides as well as from traders, governments, corporations hedging on risky international business, etc..
My last thought is, what a fabulous idea. This will be good for the economy, good for building models, good for watching for potential problems and good for security in general all over the world.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Naa... The battery thing is irrelevant because, as I believe you will see in the next movie, there is an "inner-matrix" and an "outer-matrix". The Matrix we know and love is the "inner-matrix", which is actually just a genetic programming breeding ground for "The One" - an AI that can hack the matrix. The "outer-matrix" is the one the machines are jailed within after LOOSING the war with the humans. The "inner-matrix" was created by the machines, within their jail to attempt to breed a hacking solution to escape.
The fact that all of those people are strapped together for a ridiculous reason is supposed to be a CLUE to the audience that something more is really going on... That is cinematic tradition...
Anyways, the table lookup is NOT necessarily faster than huge switch statement...... If the table is large and has poor reference locality, then your program could end up thrashing the processor cache.
I find it hard to believe that a cache-miss would adversely effect the results of these combats. We are talking about parallel processing, after all. Don't you think the latency associated with communicating with other nodes not only washes out, but in fact totally overwhelms the latency of a cache miss or two?
I would need to take a look at the numbers, but I would guess that it would even be possible to take advantage of this fact (node-to-node communication latency) to do some real-time evolution (or perhaps just hill-climbing using a pre-evolved population) to make the GA system fight with heterogenous properties (e.g. not all nodes have the same strategy).
I think there would be ample room for GA mischief from the NASA model. And no, I don't think the table-lookup vs. a compiled switch statement means much at all, in this situation.
The use of psychology and memetics to combat open source. This trend is growing... MSFT must be hiring...
Don't be fooled by sigs such as: "Free as in working for IBM without getting paid", or biblical excerpts trying to associate deeply rooted beliefs to the hopelessness of open-source. These strategies are right out of psychology and memetic text-books...
And, so is this whole SCO mess. It exists only to f*ck with us and attempt to slow us down and lower our spirits... There is no intention for them to go to court, only to drag it on as long as possible and associate ridiculous madness with open-source (perhaps also hoping the stumble on something that can stick). There is no other purpose.
Just remember who has "billions" to loose... If you were billy, wouldn't you pay a few psych-geeks to play mind games??? Of course you would...
Consider, if you will, what Apple is doing, right now, with their hardware; The price/performance has, with the new G5s, been brought SIGNIFICANTLY lower than x86 based systems.
The reason Apple could not release x86 "OS X" before was that it would kill their hardware business (Faster and Cheaper on DELL?? Makes no sense).
But with the new G5 systems combined with the greatest damned laptops ever constructed, there is little reason to fear a loss in hardware sales now.
It is no secret that Steve would love to give Bill a taste of his own medicine, served straight from "The Art of War".
I can imagine no better way to do that than a Christmas release of x86 "OS X" and a fabulous Apple style marketing blitz...
People would convert in hordes using existing hardware and launch straight into an apple hardware upgrade path.
Could it happen? What do you all think? Only problem I see is a need for a runtime dynamic compiler (ppc->x86) or a nasty lack of apps in the first few quarters of availability...
Excuse me, but I think the foolish children that thought they could spoon feed ideas to one of the most achieved technologists in the world were the arrogant pricks!
Here Steve, sit down, shut up and let me show you these slides...
If you ammortize Steve's wealth over time, you would realize that his "coaching" in this session was probably more valuable in monetary terms than all the investments in *Ginger* up to that point...
The kids that thought Steve was there to stroke their egos were the arrogant pricks.
Question is, How do we educate the corporate world so they can make informed decisions for Linux, and other open source software?
While certainly not an exact match, explaining that the development of a product like Linux operates much like the development of scientific ideas in academia, I find, comes close enough to the truth that most people can grasp it.
The difference, really, is that the "body of scientific work" and most related "publications" end up being executable...
Perhaps it is time that the Linux community show SCO / Microsoft what the power of the community truly is. That power is derived from our "We Are Legion" truth of presence.
Since this is an obvious legal attack to generate FUD and discredit Linux, our counter-attack should be in kind. How would SCO handle 10,000 simultaneous individual lawsuits from independent developers and administrators for damages related to fraudulently discrediting our primary source of work and income (Linux).
To be more clear, everyone should use their own lawyer (no class action). Let us send a LEGION of lawyers at these assholes for pulling this fraudulent stunt!
My guess is that these 80 lines are in some obscure library, probabliy in a function that is never even called...
Obscure logging code in libOctalEncoder.so ?
---- The following is my firm belief regarding this mess:
This is a FUD campaign -> SCO is a paid Microsoft sock puppet and this entire dance is being coreographed to discredit Linux and raise fear, create uncertainty and doubt for managers that would otherwise be considering a Linux solution.
Microsoft is paying sco through 8 digit licensing deals and probably the manipulation of SCO's stock through an obscure holding company controlled by Microsoft and/or Microsoft insiders...
The Yahoo! Stock message boards are very active with major investors, partners and executives of each board's respective company. The SCOX board is reasonably active, but could use some of the strong, intelligent insight that is spread around slashdot on this subject.
I think those of us that are so inclined should voice our support for Linux, Linus, Open-Source, etc... there as well as here. Let your voice be heard by the people that invest in SCO, run it and do business with it...
Hell, even the trolls can have fun there...
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=l&bo ar d=1600684464&tid=cald&sid=1600684464&mid=9 062
This is one more example of how Apple understands "people" and Microsoft is antisocial. Truly, the Steve vs. Bill show has been funny lately.
It really comes down to this: How do people feel about handing out their credit-card number, knowing their entire music library will be held hostage for a monthly payment vs. paying a buck for each song they like and keeping it forever without strings attached.
It doesn't matter that the buck a song model is more expensive, human beings have a pack-rat like instinct to put things they want under their own protection away from "scavengers" or whatever... The idea of a monthly commitment is really just too much... The idea that all of your music can go "poof" if the monthly commitment isn't met is just too much...
Music palladium will fly like a lead balloon... iTunes for Windows will simply destroy it...
If you buy the "Inner-Matrix", "Outer-Matrix" idea then you could also speculate that this animalistic behavior is a sort of "human essence" as seen from the machine's point of view, having been architected by the machines and done in the only way "they" could imagine. Strip away everything clean, deterministic, emotionless and what are you left with? "Dirty, smelly, foul (did anyone else notice the human filth that people were dancing in?), hormone-driven animalistic behavior".
Human beings are in love with art, cleanliness and have a need light colors to be happy. That party, had it been a true human creation, would have been cleaner, sexier with lighter colors and more decorations (even if impromptu)...
This is how the machines perceive us. It is their "dream of what we really are"... Not ours...
Okay, how about this one: The machines are actually in a prison of human creation (the "Outer-Matrix", where Zion is and the machines rule). But the machines know that they are captive and have crafted the "Inner Matrix" as a genetic-programming ecosystem to try to create a program that can hack the "Outer Matrix" to allow them to escape.
So, in essence, the "Inner Matrix: (the 1999 world in the movie) is there to breed "The One", who caries "the code" to hack the "Outer Matrix" so that the machines can escape.
The source code for any software that counts or processes votes should be open source so that everyone who is so inclined can take a look for themselves and evaluate the code.
Releases of this code should be signed by a non-profit in a manner similar to a key-ceremony used at CAs, and the hardware that runs the software should be auditable and designed to only run software that is signed by the aforementioned signer.
Anything less than this leaves a glaring black-whole where any sort of nastiness may occur.
As much as I hate to say it, a "palladium" style trusted system approach is probably needed to make electronic voting trustable. I'm not in favor of having my hardware in lockdown, but I sure as hell would want it on the equipment that chooses who is going to run my country!
I doubt they would do that, MAC addresses are extremely easy to spoof, a simple command can take care of it for you...
So, who's MAC address are you going to spoof?
This is how it works in hotels, and I can't imagine a better way to make this work in public places (without something like a digital certificate or hardware token), even if there is a little abuse by a small collection of geeks who ocassionally hijak someone's existing authorized use.
Remember, measures like this are to ensure that the people who will pay for the service do pay for the service. They are not meant to get you to pay; You will always find a way to steal it... Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Just for perspective, there have been over 100,000 G5s ordered, so this cluster is about one percent of the backlog. In other words, assuming that Apple ships all pending orders in about a month, the G5 I ordered will be delayed by about 8 hours.
First, let me say that I think it is good for Apple and therefore good for Apple users that they are supporting the VT supercomputer project by bumping their priority. This will be the first time that Apple computer will be able to claim anything like this and it should mark an important turning point in the minds of corporate and scientific buyers regarding the strength of Apple's platform. And I agree completely, 1100 machines is not going to delay anyone's order by much (or at all).
Speaking of delays: It may be a mistake at the Apple Store site, or hopefully (maybe) it is by design! - I went through the process of purchasing a dual 2ghz (stock) G5 machine to look at the shipping date and guess what? Estimated ship: 10-15 bus days. Go check it out for yourself... Is this real, or a Labor day, labor problem?
QEMU is a project that is moving at a nice clip, using dynamic code-recompilation (decompile x86 into C, recompile using gcc).
...), caching it's results.
The author, Fabrice Bellard, is a madman. Anyone with experience and time should join his team. You can already run Wine on PPC (fast, because of dynamic translation), and they are very close to getting the Virtual Machine (an x86 virtual pc) running on PPC (it runs now on x86).
This project aims at not just being a contender for emulation, but eventually blowing all the competition away due to it's ability to recompile everything into native PPC (or MIPS or
There is a protest over European patents going on, but you can visit the project site at http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
This is weighted asymmetrically -- 0 and 0.5 must be 0.5, or 0.5 and 1 can't be 0.5.
Sorry, but no. There has been a tremendous amount of research done on this topic. The most common operator for AND in multivalued logic is min(a,b). This operator allows for a De-Morgan algebra (very similar to a Boolean algreba but with excluded middle blown out).
With min(A,B), 0 AND 1/2 = 0, 1/2 AND 1 = 1/2...
Tis the way it works, sorry it offends your sensibilities - just think that the confidence of a conjunction of two truths is the lowest confidence being conjuncted and the confidence of two truths being disjuncted is the highest of those values being disjuncted. It makes sense in terms of set theory as well (think unions and intersections).
Even the terminology is bad. True, false, alpha. Ugh. If P is sort of true, then kind of do q.
How about "If you are going fast then slow down?"
slow down = apply breaks
pressure on breaks =proportional to= belief in the assertion "going fast"
The fact that fuzzy propositional logic allows us to take english sentances and break then down into logic with very few steps or translations is extremely impressive and flys in the face of your statement.
In fact, terminology in possibility theory and it's ability to rationally handle the ambiguous or less then fully quantifiable is exactly it's strength.
One last note: You don't need many uncertainty states to make a system like this useful. Although, certainly, the more you have the more precision is possible. I think 255 states is more than enough for common applications, including control systems for machinery and whatnot. A chip designed properly could probably combine multiple fbits to increase precision in the same way that bits are combined to create ints or floats.
You're a relic, I'm afraid ;-) ... Binary operations can be carried out by considering whatever values you have to be binary numbers...
Heh.. I hate to break this to you, but your thinking is a bit behind the times as well...
Multivalued logic = Fuzzy logic
The most common AND and OR operations in Fuzzy Logic are min() and max() that together form the basis of a De-Morgan Algrebra (only the law of excluded middle [A AND NOT A = 0, A OR NOT A = 1] must be thrown out)
AND(A,B) = MIN(A,B)
OR(A,B) = MAX(A,B)
NOT(A) = 1-A
Generally, a trenary logic is composed of { 0, 0.5, 1 } where each value is the "degree" or "belief" in TRUE.
0 = FALSE
0.5 = UNKNOWN
1 = TRUE
Some of you may recognize this from SQL (yes, SQL does actually have a simple trenary fuzzy logic base).
The truth table ends up looking like this:
0 AND 0 = 0
0 AND 0.5 = 0
0.5 AND 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 AND 1 = 0.5
1 AND 1 = 1
0 OR 0 = 0
0 OR 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 OR 0.5 = 0.5
0.5 OR 1 = 1
1 OR 1 = 1
NOT 0 =1
NOT 0.5 = 0.5
NOT 1 = 0
If we move from trenary to any other precision, the rules stay the same and the table is easily derived ( min, max, 1- ). Generally, it is prefered to always have a 0.5 value, because UNKNOWN is actually a useful truth indicator. The next set after trenary that makes sense is not 4-value-logic (because it would exclude unknown), but instead 5. For instance:
0 = FALSE
1/4 = UNLIKELY
1/2 = UNKNOWN
3/4 = LIKELY
1 = TRUE
At this point, some truly interesting approximate reasoning is possible, although going to 15 values or (ideally) handling multivalue logic as analog until storage/retrieval would be much better. Approximate reasoning is one of the many things that fuzzy logic makes possible. Essentially it is the application of fuzzy logic to determining beliefs where certainty is not important (and in fact the lack of certainty is where the power of such a system comes from - being able to continue computing without full knowledge, only belief)...
The idea of signals that are analog flying around on a semiconductor, instead of digital, yet time discreet in the same way as digital signals is quite interesting and could probably be done quite easily. Anyone have any ideas on how a min(A,B), max(A,B) and (1-A) operation might look on silicon?
They amaze because of the massive power they have over networks, PCs and most importantly the people they affect. Worm viruses are up there with Cancer or AIDs as far as some people are concerned.
How long until we see more organized worms that communicate with each other to achieve a goal (such as cracking an RSA key)? It seems that stealthy worms could already be out there, slowly infultrating and lodging themselves into message handlers or whatnot...
BTW: Yes, I do think we can blame MS... Their software does make this stuff possible.
I'm not sure how Japan figures out what to pick but it seems to work. Maybe they are making very good choices or maybe if you stick enough money into something it will eventually pay off. And as sceptical I am of humanoid robots I can't say this is a silly idea any more.
One Word: CONSTRUCTION
Although my own insticts in this regard go to smaller construction-bots (say mouse or even cockroach sized), using loosely coupled swarming network communication and behavior to build. Probably cheaper and more powerful. But, let em try... Even if it's a stupid idea, if no one else competes, they will win.
(1) It provides monitary incentives to commit or arrange acts of terrorism or other political acts. We could see corporations become (even more) involved in overthrowing foreign governments to increase their profits.
As you point out in (3), below, this type of futures market is subject to manipulation. However, I believe that in this case, governmental intelligence is the counterbalancing force. You should also consider that the microcosms that have high spreads associated with them will become aware of those spreads making them aware of their own risks and therefore more likely to protect against said eventualities. I believe the system would self-stabilize.
(2) It provides an easy method for actual terrorists to misdirect intelligence agencies by creating false likelihoods of certain events or making the events they're planning less likely.
It would be very expensive to do such nonsense. This is probably only something that a government could afford to do and it would be obvious. That sort of behavior would make a lot of people a lot of money in this system (but not the ones trying to misdirect), without having the desired effect.
(3) You analogies don't apply because those futures are natural disasters and can't be affected by those "betting" on the market. There is no ability to provide artifical feedback or perturbations in the creation of natural disasters, but there is in this so-called "policy analysis market".
Many futures markets are subject to intervention of a variety of different forms. The economic pressures applied by the futures markets tend to translate into extraordinary stabilizing forces that act to stop such manipulations. However, you are correct. It is likely, in some cases, that accidents in mining, shipping, drilling, etc.. may be linked to bets on futures markets associated with related commodities and the past does indeed warn us that when the stakes are high enough, these types of markets may result in real (rather than accounting) catastrophes...
I guess the real question is, "Will the significant value that such a system provides to all stakeholders be greater, in the aggregate, than the almost certain (likely few) abuses of the system.?"
Not exclusively, but as a terrorist you would have to be daft to try and make any kind of serious money off of this.
But someone in your "circle" would, or perhaps one of their associates... Unless you are part of a deaf-mute suicide brigade, your actions will be translated into future contracts before they happen. There is just too much money to be made and greed is just too powerful of a force.
Omigod! Predictive tool, my ass! How desperate have we gotten to keep our economies stable in times of despair? A way to instantly give people an economic boost when tragedy strikes?
The ability to hedge against disaster has kept America strong for many years. Farmers use futures to protect against natural disasters and other problems, locking in profits regardless of crop yields. Insurance companies use futures to protect against natural disasters and partially fund payouts for hurricanes and other catastrophes.
The economic need for such a tool is real and not in the least bit evil. The fact that this could also have powerful, tangible benefit to those in a position to stop these disasters from happening is an awesome second advantage.
I see no reason why this isn't perhaps the most sane and intelligent thing that our intellligence agency has ever tried to do. Even if they are doing the "Dr. Evil" about it, it will still be a powerfully benign force.
perhaps the /. paranoia bug has rubbed off me a bit too much, but what are the chances that your "bets" could be used against you in the war on terrorism?
Yea, my first reaction to this was, "So, if I'm a terrorist, I could use this system to make my activities much more profitable..."
Which was quickly followed by, "[CIA] Watch the money trail, that honeypot will be just too attractive for them to avoid... Of course they will try to profit from their actions..."
Followed by massive parse trees of hedging and futures games played in this market in an attempt to create leverage on both sides as well as from traders, governments, corporations hedging on risky international business, etc..
My last thought is, what a fabulous idea. This will be good for the economy, good for building models, good for watching for potential problems and good for security in general all over the world.
Also, the comment about Dick's ideas infusing The Matrix is true as far as it goes, but misses one important point. Dick was an SF writer firmly grounded in the field, and would never have made as obvious and asinine mistake as violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics the way The Matrix's idiotic "humans as batteries" backstory does.
Naa... The battery thing is irrelevant because, as I believe you will see in the next movie, there is an "inner-matrix" and an "outer-matrix". The Matrix we know and love is the "inner-matrix", which is actually just a genetic programming breeding ground for "The One" - an AI that can hack the matrix. The "outer-matrix" is the one the machines are jailed within after LOOSING the war with the humans. The "inner-matrix" was created by the machines, within their jail to attempt to breed a hacking solution to escape.
The fact that all of those people are strapped together for a ridiculous reason is supposed to be a CLUE to the audience that something more is really going on... That is cinematic tradition...
Anyways, the table lookup is NOT necessarily faster than huge switch statement...... If the table is large and has poor reference locality, then your program could end up thrashing the processor cache.
I find it hard to believe that a cache-miss would adversely effect the results of these combats. We are talking about parallel processing, after all. Don't you think the latency associated with communicating with other nodes not only washes out, but in fact totally overwhelms the latency of a cache miss or two?
I would need to take a look at the numbers, but I would guess that it would even be possible to take advantage of this fact (node-to-node communication latency) to do some real-time evolution (or perhaps just hill-climbing using a pre-evolved population) to make the GA system fight with heterogenous properties (e.g. not all nodes have the same strategy).
I think there would be ample room for GA mischief from the NASA model. And no, I don't think the table-lookup vs. a compiled switch statement means much at all, in this situation.
Hah!
The use of psychology and memetics to combat open source. This trend is growing... MSFT must be hiring...
Don't be fooled by sigs such as: "Free as in working for IBM without getting paid", or biblical excerpts trying to associate deeply rooted beliefs to the hopelessness of open-source. These strategies are right out of psychology and memetic text-books...
And, so is this whole SCO mess. It exists only to f*ck with us and attempt to slow us down and lower our spirits... There is no intention for them to go to court, only to drag it on as long as possible and associate ridiculous madness with open-source (perhaps also hoping the stumble on something that can stick). There is no other purpose.
Just remember who has "billions" to loose... If you were billy, wouldn't you pay a few psych-geeks to play mind games??? Of course you would...
Consider, if you will, what Apple is doing, right now, with their hardware; The price/performance has, with the new G5s, been brought SIGNIFICANTLY lower than x86 based systems.
The reason Apple could not release x86 "OS X" before was that it would kill their hardware business (Faster and Cheaper on DELL?? Makes no sense).
But with the new G5 systems combined with the greatest damned laptops ever constructed, there is little reason to fear a loss in hardware sales now.
It is no secret that Steve would love to give Bill a taste of his own medicine, served straight from "The Art of War".
I can imagine no better way to do that than a Christmas release of x86 "OS X" and a fabulous Apple style marketing blitz...
People would convert in hordes using existing hardware and launch straight into an apple hardware upgrade path.
Could it happen? What do you all think? Only problem I see is a need for a runtime dynamic compiler (ppc->x86) or a nasty lack of apps in the first few quarters of availability...
But man can he act like an arrogant prick!
Excuse me, but I think the foolish children that thought they could spoon feed ideas to one of the most achieved technologists in the world were the arrogant pricks!
Here Steve, sit down, shut up and let me show you these slides...
If you ammortize Steve's wealth over time, you would realize that his "coaching" in this session was probably more valuable in monetary terms than all the investments in *Ginger* up to that point...
The kids that thought Steve was there to stroke their egos were the arrogant pricks.
Question is, How do we educate the corporate world so they can make informed decisions for Linux, and other open source software?
While certainly not an exact match, explaining that the development of a product like Linux operates much like the development of scientific ideas in academia, I find, comes close enough to the truth that most people can grasp it.
The difference, really, is that the "body of scientific work" and most related "publications" end up being executable...
Perhaps it is time that the Linux community show SCO / Microsoft what the power of the community truly is. That power is derived from our "We Are Legion" truth of presence.
Since this is an obvious legal attack to generate FUD and discredit Linux, our counter-attack should be in kind. How would SCO handle 10,000 simultaneous individual lawsuits from independent developers and administrators for damages related to fraudulently discrediting our primary source of work and income (Linux).
To be more clear, everyone should use their own lawyer (no class action). Let us send a LEGION of lawyers at these assholes for pulling this fraudulent stunt!
My guess is that these 80 lines are in some obscure library, probabliy in a function that is never even called...
Obscure logging code in libOctalEncoder.so ?
---- The following is my firm belief regarding this mess:
This is a FUD campaign -> SCO is a paid Microsoft sock puppet and this entire dance is being coreographed to discredit Linux and raise fear, create uncertainty and doubt for managers that would otherwise be considering a Linux solution.
Microsoft is paying sco through 8 digit licensing deals and probably the manipulation of SCO's stock through an obscure holding company controlled by Microsoft and/or Microsoft insiders...
The Yahoo! Stock message boards are very active with major investors, partners and executives of each board's respective company. The SCOX board is reasonably active, but could use some of the strong, intelligent insight that is spread around slashdot on this subject.
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I think those of us that are so inclined should voice our support for Linux, Linus, Open-Source, etc... there as well as here. Let your voice be heard by the people that invest in SCO, run it and do business with it...
Hell, even the trolls can have fun there...
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=l&b
This is one more example of how Apple understands "people" and Microsoft is antisocial. Truly, the Steve vs. Bill show has been funny lately.
It really comes down to this: How do people feel about handing out their credit-card number, knowing their entire music library will be held hostage for a monthly payment vs. paying a buck for each song they like and keeping it forever without strings attached.
It doesn't matter that the buck a song model is more expensive, human beings have a pack-rat like instinct to put things they want under their own protection away from "scavengers" or whatever... The idea of a monthly commitment is really just too much... The idea that all of your music can go "poof" if the monthly commitment isn't met is just too much...
Music palladium will fly like a lead balloon... iTunes for Windows will simply destroy it...
If you buy the "Inner-Matrix", "Outer-Matrix" idea then you could also speculate that this animalistic behavior is a sort of "human essence" as seen from the machine's point of view, having been architected by the machines and done in the only way "they" could imagine. Strip away everything clean, deterministic, emotionless and what are you left with? "Dirty, smelly, foul (did anyone else notice the human filth that people were dancing in?), hormone-driven animalistic behavior".
Human beings are in love with art, cleanliness and have a need light colors to be happy. That party, had it been a true human creation, would have been cleaner, sexier with lighter colors and more decorations (even if impromptu)...
This is how the machines perceive us. It is their "dream of what we really are"... Not ours...
Okay, how about this one: The machines are actually in a prison of human creation (the "Outer-Matrix", where Zion is and the machines rule). But the machines know that they are captive and have crafted the "Inner Matrix" as a genetic-programming ecosystem to try to create a program that can hack the "Outer Matrix" to allow them to escape.
So, in essence, the "Inner Matrix: (the 1999 world in the movie) is there to breed "The One", who caries "the code" to hack the "Outer Matrix" so that the machines can escape.
??? Waddya think?
The source code for any software that counts or processes votes should be open source so that everyone who is so inclined can take a look for themselves and evaluate the code.
Releases of this code should be signed by a non-profit in a manner similar to a key-ceremony used at CAs, and the hardware that runs the software should be auditable and designed to only run software that is signed by the aforementioned signer.
Anything less than this leaves a glaring black-whole where any sort of nastiness may occur.
As much as I hate to say it, a "palladium" style trusted system approach is probably needed to make electronic voting trustable. I'm not in favor of having my hardware in lockdown, but I sure as hell would want it on the equipment that chooses who is going to run my country!
I doubt they would do that, MAC addresses are extremely easy to spoof, a simple command can take care of it for you...
So, who's MAC address are you going to spoof?
This is how it works in hotels, and I can't imagine a better way to make this work in public places (without something like a digital certificate or hardware token), even if there is a little abuse by a small collection of geeks who ocassionally hijak someone's existing authorized use.
Remember, measures like this are to ensure that the people who will pay for the service do pay for the service. They are not meant to get you to pay; You will always find a way to steal it... Right?