This book sounds a little like part of Fahrenheit 451.
There is a war in a far away place mentioned in part of the book. But the ppl we are sending to fight don't really die because that is to horrible to think of. It was all to far away for people to think about and to them, not real. I believe Virtual War sounds like it brings out the same principle, instead of hiding the fact the ppl are dying, we send machines we don't have to care about to do the dirty work.
With all the technology we use it is sometimes easy to forget that war is imposing the will of your nation on that of another sovern nation by force, i.e. we kill other ppl to get our way. Until you embrace the fact there are horrible consequences to war, you miss its point and proper application. Because of this I believe it is important to painfully realize the consequenes of pushing that button, your probably going to kill someone, their son, their daughter, or their faimly. If we loose the wisdom that comes with the technology we wield as a weapon, there is the making of a greek tragedy.
I haven't read through all the posts so this may be repetitve buttttt, but I happen to know a little about the Dynamo system ant it is pretty cool. I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by the person who headed the research. Part of the reason they can obtain a speed up of 20% is that they apply really really agressive profiling techniques. Some of these techniques stem from advanced compiler optimization research. In short they find the most commonly executed paths at the machine language level and cache them. The trick of course, is that it is all done at runtime, thats what makes it really cool. They are able to overcome the overhead of processing and collecting the profiling data, and get the %20 performance over the normal execution time.
Why not just have a common boomark file for all those interesed in calling things in a paticular context. I don't see a need to create a standard around this. To some degree what is being described already exists. i.e. If I want a link to a how-to faq doc for emacs I go to an emacs web site and click on the how-to or faq link. By going to the emacs webpage I've placed my self in the context of emacs and when I click on the faq link I should get an emacs faq.
I fear that this standard could eliminate a degree of freedom on the client side. If I use the pharase "emacs how-to" in the new system proposed, I have to rely on the fact that the person that created the database has selected the best emacs how-to source. I don't know that I would trust a stranger's expertise over mine in this area. Lord only knows the commercial abuse that could arise from this. I think sombody mentioned this in a previous post about a rouge ISP.
IMHO It seems at best this new idea eliminates at most one mouse click for those to lazy to do their own research.
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There is a war in a far away place mentioned in part of the book. But the ppl we are sending to fight don't really die because that is to horrible to think of. It was all to far away for people to think about and to them, not real. I believe Virtual War sounds like it brings out the same principle, instead of hiding the fact the ppl are dying, we send machines we don't have to care about to do the dirty work.
With all the technology we use it is sometimes easy to forget that war is imposing the will of your nation on that of another sovern nation by force, i.e. we kill other ppl to get our way. Until you embrace the fact there are horrible consequences to war, you miss its point and proper application. Because of this I believe it is important to painfully realize the consequenes of pushing that button, your probably going to kill someone, their son, their daughter, or their faimly. If we loose the wisdom that comes with the technology we wield as a weapon, there is the making of a greek tragedy.
I haven't read through all the posts so this may be repetitve buttttt, but I happen to know a little about the Dynamo system ant it is pretty cool. I was lucky enough to attend a lecture by the person who headed the research. Part of the reason they can obtain a speed up of 20% is that they apply really really agressive profiling techniques. Some of these techniques stem from advanced compiler optimization research. In short they find the most commonly executed paths at the machine language level and cache them. The trick of course, is that it is all done at runtime, thats what makes it really cool. They are able to overcome the overhead of processing and collecting the profiling data, and get the %20 performance over the normal execution time.
Why not just have a common boomark file for all those interesed in calling things in a paticular context. I don't see a need to create a standard around this. To some degree what is being described already exists. i.e. If I want a link to a how-to faq doc for emacs I go to an emacs web site and click on the how-to or faq link. By going to the emacs webpage I've placed my self in the context of emacs and when I click on the faq link I should get an emacs faq.
I fear that this standard could eliminate a degree of freedom on the client side. If I use the pharase "emacs how-to" in the new system proposed, I have to rely on the fact that the person that created the database has selected the best emacs how-to source. I don't know that I would trust a stranger's expertise over mine in this area. Lord only knows the commercial abuse that could arise from this. I think sombody mentioned this in a previous post about a rouge ISP.
IMHO It seems at best this new idea eliminates at most one mouse click for those to lazy to do their own research.