They brought Venture Capitalists to the picnic
[...]
They say one of the most important things for
a good tech startup is "good chemistry" with your
Venture Capitalist(s). Maybe going camping together helps to find out more about that.
What about the converse, taking a bunch of
campers and lumberjacks into a Monday morning
9 a.m. business meeting?
Software available, but what about the chassis?
on
Sun Opens Cobalt Code
·
· Score: 1
But where can one get a new chassis
in the same blue tone and design?
Were the Cobalt boxes perhaps manufactured by a
subcontractor that might still be willing
to produce them?
It appears there is still a market (but with
new hardware inside!), including a loyal fan community. Who is going grab the business opportunity?
Controlled language is the conscious decision
of an organisation to use only a subset of
what a natural language like English offers
in technical documentation (medical leaflets,
submarine documentation, maintenance manuals,
software documentation) in order to avoid confusion.
(1) Insert the knob behind the lever.
In (1) you could perhaps use a handfull of terms
instead of "knob" -- controlled language enforces
only certain licensed terms, this increasing
overall consistency (same terms for same thing).
This can be checked automatically once a positive
list (or typically a hierarchy called "thesaurus")
has been setup.
(2) He saw the girl on the hill with the telescope.
The second/third case are lexical and structural ambiguity: we want to avoid problems like with
(2), where "saw" could be past of "to see"
or have another (more morbid) interpretation.
Even worse, it is unclear whether the girl is
on the hill, carrying the telescope or whether
"he" is spying on the girl with the telescope.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader how many
combinations (possible interpretations) there are
in a sentence like (2) [Hint: Which verb? Who is where? Who carries the telescope?].
In a Controlled Language scenario e.g. ACE, after some initial investments in thesaurus construction, thesaurus lookup and simple parsing techniques are used to report problematic passages
to a human editor, who has to correct it manually.
This is not programming in natural language. Typically only large companies can
afford the initial investment.
There's always the hours after your 9-to-5 (assuming it's a 9-to-5), and they are yours to spend as you wish.
1. Most often in IT, if you take your job seriously, it's not 9-5.
2. In some countries, the default by law is
that software you develop in your spare time
belongs to your employer, as long as you are under
a full-time contract (so the case in Germany, not sure about the US). Many people have no clue about
this, even those concerned.
I just love my old 5-volume set of HP-UX 9.05
man-pages from the early nineties...:-P
Together with the online man(1) command
and O'Reilly's UNIX Power Tools and Essential System Administration, that's about what you need.
If you don't want to buy read the latter, get your
system administrator to do it, which even saves you loads of time...
Plus, hackers can obtain passwords from the
wireless net that they can try against other
systems if the user has not been educated to
use different passwords for different systems,
which is less of an issue with traditional
nets.
Richard Waters writes:
> Though the company does not disclose financial information, its [Google's] profits are growing rapidly and
> are reckoned to be running at an annual rate of about $150m on revenues of $500m.
Google was founded in 1998 as Google Incorporated, not as Google Corporation; unlike many startups
with plans to go public, that status hasn't been changed since, which indeed means financial
details are (and can legally remain) undisclosed.
On these grounds, it would be interesting what
the author bases his assertion on that Google
is actually profitable. -- I don't deny they
might be, all I am saying is we don't know any
official numbers.
Normally, if you're planning to invest in a
corporation, you can ask for their annual report
to help you make up your mind. With non-corporations, it appears you have to rely on blind trust and gossip. Remember that whatever
the income, they must have huge monthly bills
to pay for the excellent staff they have hired
and the huge commodity hardware clusters they run (electricity, replacements of nodes, operators). Anybody dare to post their xcalc(1) spreadsheet with estimates for
upper and lower bounds of their expenses?
Yes, I would like to buy some Google shares online
for a fixed price, but not in an auction. I suppose if they were to adopt the e-bay way, any clever investor would simply
wait with their stock purchase until the release of Microsoft's forthcoming search engine...
> Sun still has a lot of valuble IP, and they'd probably be an attractive acquisition target
> for someone at the right price. Maybe someone like IBM will eventually snap them up for
> their Java technology.
Scary thought: since Java is no ISO standard (yet?), what if SUN suddenly subscribes to the SCO mindset and starts asking for license fees...?
My Atari ST 520+ has been working without glitches since Easter 1986, even beating my C64 from 1984, one of whose CIA-6522s has passed out
a while ago (any spare CIAs around, anyone??).
Not that I use it nowadays, but I have confirmed
it is in working order recently and when I didn't
have my laptop with me for xmas 1998 (when I had
long moved on to HP-UX, both at home and university) and wanted to try out
something with yacc, all I had was the ST.
Thanks to a ported version of the compiler
generator I had kept on a (dusty) floppy disk.
The keyboard, once beige, now looks as if owned
by a chain-smoker (I don't smoke!), but I guess
Atari's design team never investigated long-term decay of the plastic they used...
One of them being the retarded use of XML on an _internal_ data pipeline.
Thanks for pointing out this obvious design
flaw. If they need to specify a syntax
for internal purposes, why did they
not choose ASN.1 (ISO/IEC 8824-1) instead?
I have been wondering for some time now
whether there are any projects/ideas about
how the Bazaar Model of a Web search engine could
look like?
Surely, we do not want a monopolist (be
it Google or MSN or Yahoo) to collect all our
queries without transparency about what they
do with the data in the long run.
I believe each of us would happily give away
100 MB of disk space to support a distributed
open-source search engine: such an engine
would be robust against attacks (i.e. could
not be shut down), based on P2P technology (no central index; reliance on redundancy).
Whereas I have found several open-source
projects that develop search engine code,
they are all traditional i.e. Cathedral-style
(of course they do distributed crawling, but the index is not shared across billions of users' drives).
Have I just missed something, or is it time to get
the C compilers out?
In fact I consider SICP so well written that
I'd rather people learn Scheme first with SICP
and then set out to learn about the so-called real world and the syntax of (insert-your-mainstream-language-here).
If they remember three percent worth of the
doctrine SICP teaches ("building abstractions, building abstractions, building abstractions,..."), it will have been for the
better.
Funny comparison, TAOCP/SICP to Old/New Testament... I suppose
Don Knuth doesn't transform you into stone if you
can't solve your HM50-rated exercise; neither will SICP raise the dead, although good software design can certainly prevent the loss of many an innocent life... The allusion to the Bible reminds me that here is a link to the thoughts of Knuth on religion (he is a committed Christian), if you are interested.
Jochen
P.S. (warning, joke!):
Q: How does a blind programmer tell whether his colleague is a BASIC loser or a Scheme poet when he uses his terminal?
A: The SHIFT+8/9 keys are worn out...:-)
> The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web...
You can always index your email, for instance
using the MG 1.3 gManaging Gigabytes search engine,
which as a builtin mechanism for indexing
the standard UNIX INBOX-Format. (Re-indexing can
be done manually with a command or automatically as a cron job). [Use only this link, because Google will point you at the outdated version 1.2.1 rather than 1.3g]
It would be nice if PINE / Mozilla etc. had plugins for a search engine, though, to avoid calling the mgquery client on the shell.
Is it considered research now to buy a desktop computer from a shop and abuse it as a server?
Why make so much fuss about buying a bunch of Macs off the shelf? My grandmother could do that
if she wanted. The fact that they want to be
finished "building" it (= connecting the cables)
seems to be simply that they want to make it into the Top-500 list with $$$ rather than new research.
What they will find out is that the G5 was never built to be run as a server, despite its
server-like performance. And 1100 Mac end users
(for whose desktop the machine WAS built) will
perhaps have to wait longer until they can buy
theirs.
Back in the old days any serious computer engineer would refuse to buy off-the-shelf machines and rather build their own -- I believe research should lead the crowd wrt innovation, not follow it! At least they should hack the
Linux PPC kernel or build a new cool software
layer to contribute something rather than just consume.
One point that is worth noting that it is
very hard to teach programming and a language
one the same book! Perhaps the only successful
attempt is Abelson/Sussman's Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs, but
that might be partly due to the orthogonality of Scheme...
"One of the series' rules is that the main body of the book can be no more than 300 pages, so "make your point, make it simple, make it clear" rules the day.
Yes, that's okay with me--but sadly a dinosaur
of a language like C++ can't be fully described
in 300 pages at all, it seems (see Bjarne's book).
Other languages like C, Java or Scheme can be desribed in much less
space and fully understood. I believe a developer
should have full command of the syntax of the
language, but not necessarily of all the libraries. For instance, Java comes with piles
of API functions, but they can be picked up
as the need arises while the core language is
small and clean (if slow--but that's a problem
of the bytecode philosophy, not the language, -- see towerj/gcj).
Furthermore, most "expert" C++ developers don't
have a full command of the core language, but
use only subsets they are confident in and are
thus potentially unable to maintain other developers' code.
If you cant pick the right tools for the right job, then you're a poor craftsman.
But I've never ever encountered a problem that
couldn't be solved with my hammer, really.:-))
"If C is your hammer, the whole world begins
to look like a nail."
I totally agree, what we need is a distributed
search service that operates on a distributed
index.
If you have 10000 nutch-style instance running, they could all be biased in their own ways. There really should be an all-encompassing index of the Web, but in a scenario where the index is spread across millions of machines redundantly so that no set DDOS attacks could ever destroy it. I'd be quite happy to give up 10G of my local disk space
to contribute to society (= for indexing). Many people do this already for FreeNet (but
that serves a different purpose of course).
Very possibly The Next Big Thing(R) indeed...
Jochen Leidner
Slashdot Mirror
Such as?
Does anybody have good/bad experiences with (esp. non-Windows based) alternatives? Which RAID controllers/drives/distros are you using?
They say one of the most important things for a good tech startup is "good chemistry" with your Venture Capitalist(s). Maybe going camping together helps to find out more about that.
What about the converse, taking a bunch of campers and lumberjacks into a Monday morning 9 a.m. business meeting?
Were the Cobalt boxes perhaps manufactured by a subcontractor that might still be willing to produce them?
It appears there is still a market (but with new hardware inside!), including a loyal fan community. Who is going grab the business opportunity?
(1) Insert the knob behind the lever.
In (1) you could perhaps use a handfull of terms instead of "knob" -- controlled language enforces only certain licensed terms, this increasing overall consistency (same terms for same thing). This can be checked automatically once a positive list (or typically a hierarchy called "thesaurus") has been setup.
(2) He saw the girl on the hill with the telescope.
The second/third case are lexical and structural ambiguity: we want to avoid problems like with (2), where "saw" could be past of "to see" or have another (more morbid) interpretation. Even worse, it is unclear whether the girl is on the hill, carrying the telescope or whether "he" is spying on the girl with the telescope. I leave it as an exercise to the reader how many combinations (possible interpretations) there are in a sentence like (2) [Hint: Which verb? Who is where? Who carries the telescope?].
In a Controlled Language scenario e.g. ACE, after some initial investments in thesaurus construction, thesaurus lookup and simple parsing techniques are used to report problematic passages to a human editor, who has to correct it manually.
This is not programming in natural language. Typically only large companies can afford the initial investment.
1. Most often in IT, if you take your job seriously, it's not 9-5.
2. In some countries, the default by law is that software you develop in your spare time belongs to your employer, as long as you are under a full-time contract (so the case in Germany, not sure about the US). Many people have no clue about this, even those concerned.
Together with the online man(1) command and O'Reilly's UNIX Power Tools and Essential System Administration, that's about what you need. If you don't want to buy read the latter, get your system administrator to do it, which even saves you loads of time...
Plus, hackers can obtain passwords from the wireless net that they can try against other systems if the user has not been educated to use different passwords for different systems, which is less of an issue with traditional nets.
> Though the company does not disclose financial information, its [Google's] profits are growing rapidly and
> are reckoned to be running at an annual rate of about $150m on revenues of $500m.
Google was founded in 1998 as Google Incorporated, not as Google Corporation; unlike many startups with plans to go public, that status hasn't been changed since, which indeed means financial details are (and can legally remain) undisclosed.
On these grounds, it would be interesting what the author bases his assertion on that Google is actually profitable. -- I don't deny they might be, all I am saying is we don't know any official numbers. Normally, if you're planning to invest in a corporation, you can ask for their annual report to help you make up your mind. With non-corporations, it appears you have to rely on blind trust and gossip. Remember that whatever the income, they must have huge monthly bills to pay for the excellent staff they have hired and the huge commodity hardware clusters they run (electricity, replacements of nodes, operators). Anybody dare to post their xcalc(1) spreadsheet with estimates for upper and lower bounds of their expenses?
Yes, I would like to buy some Google shares online for a fixed price, but not in an auction. I suppose if they were to adopt the e-bay way, any clever investor would simply wait with their stock purchase until the release of Microsoft's forthcoming search engine...
> for someone at the right price. Maybe someone like IBM will eventually snap them up for
> their Java technology.
Scary thought: since Java is no ISO standard (yet?), what if SUN suddenly subscribes to the SCO mindset and starts asking for license fees...?
Not that I use it nowadays, but I have confirmed it is in working order recently and when I didn't have my laptop with me for xmas 1998 (when I had long moved on to HP-UX, both at home and university) and wanted to try out something with yacc, all I had was the ST. Thanks to a ported version of the compiler generator I had kept on a (dusty) floppy disk. The keyboard, once beige, now looks as if owned by a chain-smoker (I don't smoke!), but I guess Atari's design team never investigated long-term decay of the plastic they used...
One of them being the retarded use of XML on an _internal_ data pipeline.
Thanks for pointing out this obvious design flaw.
If they need to specify a syntax for internal purposes, why did they not choose ASN.1 (ISO/IEC 8824-1) instead?
After careful evaluation of the competitors, I now exclusively use Pilot V Ball Pen 05 (5 mm, black/blue/red).
Hm... I wonder who owns the copyright of the spam that somebody receives. Would it be legal for him or her to sell it? ;-)
Surely, we do not want a monopolist (be it Google or MSN or Yahoo) to collect all our queries without transparency about what they do with the data in the long run.
I believe each of us would happily give away 100 MB of disk space to support a distributed open-source search engine: such an engine would be robust against attacks (i.e. could not be shut down), based on P2P technology (no central index; reliance on redundancy).
Whereas I have found several open-source projects that develop search engine code, they are all traditional i.e. Cathedral-style (of course they do distributed crawling, but the index is not shared across billions of users' drives).
Have I just missed something, or is it time to get the C compilers out?
If they remember three percent worth of the doctrine SICP teaches ("building abstractions, building abstractions, building abstractions,
Funny comparison, TAOCP/SICP to Old/New Testament... I suppose Don Knuth doesn't transform you into stone if you can't solve your HM50-rated exercise; neither will SICP raise the dead, although good software design can certainly prevent the loss of many an innocent life...
The allusion to the Bible reminds me that here is a link to the thoughts of Knuth on religion (he is a committed Christian), if you are interested.
Jochen
P.S. (warning, joke!): :-)
Q: How does a blind programmer tell whether his colleague is a BASIC loser or a Scheme poet when he uses his terminal?
A: The SHIFT+8/9 keys are worn out...
I hope I will live to see a similar report on certain HQs in Redmond, WA... :-))
When the copyright expires, can anyone please put the PDF online? ;)
> The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web...
You can always index your email, for instance using the MG 1.3 g Managing Gigabytes search engine, which as a builtin mechanism for indexing the standard UNIX INBOX-Format. (Re-indexing can be done manually with a command or automatically as a cron job). [Use only this link, because Google will point you at the outdated version 1.2.1 rather than 1.3g]
It would be nice if PINE / Mozilla etc. had plugins for a search engine, though, to avoid calling the mgquery client on the shell.
Why make so much fuss about buying a bunch of Macs off the shelf? My grandmother could do that if she wanted. The fact that they want to be finished "building" it (= connecting the cables) seems to be simply that they want to make it into the Top-500 list with $$$ rather than new research.
What they will find out is that the G5 was never built to be run as a server, despite its server-like performance. And 1100 Mac end users (for whose desktop the machine WAS built) will perhaps have to wait longer until they can buy theirs.
Back in the old days any serious computer engineer would refuse to buy off-the-shelf machines and rather build their own -- I believe research should lead the crowd wrt innovation, not follow it! At least they should hack the Linux PPC kernel or build a new cool software layer to contribute something rather than just consume.
Just my two cents worth...
One point that is worth noting that it is very hard to teach programming and a language one the same book! Perhaps the only successful attempt is Abelson/Sussman's Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, but that might be partly due to the orthogonality of Scheme...
"One of the series' rules is that the main body of the book can be no more than 300 pages, so "make your point, make it simple, make it clear" rules the day.
Yes, that's okay with me--but sadly a dinosaur of a language like C++ can't be fully described in 300 pages at all, it seems (see Bjarne's book). Other languages like C, Java or Scheme can be desribed in much less space and fully understood. I believe a developer should have full command of the syntax of the language, but not necessarily of all the libraries. For instance, Java comes with piles of API functions, but they can be picked up as the need arises while the core language is small and clean (if slow--but that's a problem of the bytecode philosophy, not the language, -- see towerj/gcj).
Furthermore, most "expert" C++ developers don't have a full command of the core language, but use only subsets they are confident in and are thus potentially unable to maintain other developers' code.
If you cant pick the right tools for the right job, then you're a poor craftsman. But I've never ever encountered a problem that couldn't be solved with my hammer, really. :-))
"If C is your hammer, the whole world begins
to look like a nail."
I totally agree, what we need is a distributed search service that operates on a distributed index. If you have 10000 nutch-style instance running, they could all be biased in their own ways. There really should be an all-encompassing index of the Web, but in a scenario where the index is spread across millions of machines redundantly so that no set DDOS attacks could ever destroy it. I'd be quite happy to give up 10G of my local disk space to contribute to society (= for indexing). Many people do this already for FreeNet (but that serves a different purpose of course). Very possibly The Next Big Thing(R) indeed... Jochen Leidner