Thanks for your well-thought out reply. I think it fairly reiterates the strengths of Transmeta in points 1 and 2. I could quibble with #2, but in the end, I basically agree.
The pointer to Metricom is interesting-- unlimited wireless Internet at 28.8 kbps for a flat $29.99/month is better pricing than I expected and suggests that 128kbps and higher services from Metricom will also be priced at consumer levels, sooner or later. Keep in mind though that once users taste high-bandwidth wireline (DSL/cable,) it'll hard to go back to slower wireless until wireless speeds up a fair bit. Not an issue for email, but a big issue for web browsing technology adoption.
The AMD comment was the most speculative of my comments and it is *way* too early for any "serious" talk along these lines. To explain more fully however, its not an issue of fab partnerships; Transmeta's current strategy with IBM fabbing makes perfect sense to me. And Transmeta doesn't *have* to combine with AMD. I mention the AMD combination only because it appears to me to be the most viable exit strategy if Transmeta gets stuck in a niche of low-power x86-compatible CPUs and a bigger player like Intel starts fiercely targeting that market as well. Transmeta can slug it out, but in that case might be better off combined with AMD's greater volumes, brand recognition, leverage across other product lines, and other factors.
Low-power x86 is a healthy sized niche, and Transmeta has a nice technology lead. But I don't see barriers to entry that Intel can't surmount given some time and focus. Intel may be a little sluggish, but they're not stupid. They may not match Transmeta's leading power usage, but if they can cut it down to a modest enough level, Transmeta has very little recourse that I can see. I don't see any other Transmeta lock-in that would inhibit Intel from retaking 50+% of Transmeta's business away in 3 years. Sure, patents will inhibit some avenues of power-reduction technology development for Intel, but it's unlikely it'll block them all.
All this being said, Transmeta has a bright future ahead of them in the short term. Sorry if I get nervous or paranoid about the future; it's part of the skillset I use for companies in real life. Hopefully Transmeta management will be seriously thinking about these sorts of issues and come up with creative, effective solutions.
If Transmeta can keep the competitiveness of the chip up from a speed/computer-power standpoint, then vendors of RISC instruction sets will do a cost analysis of whether its cheaper to design their own processors or to design software to program Transmeta's. Licensing terms and Transmeta's ability to drive volumes would also be pivotal. They do give up some control, true, but this may be preferable to an Intel-only migration, since with Transmeta they can retain their ISA lock-in and binary compatibility.
I learn things through critique. Given all the hype, what is the counter-case? In the interest of eventually reaching a balanced perspective, here's what looks wrong with Transmeta to me:
Power consumption of the chip is lower, but power consumption of the chip is only 20-30% of a notebook, limiting the value of this "revolution."
Further power reductions require either A) giving up a hard disk (aka Linux in ROMs) or B) integrating more than just the CPU and chipset (what about 2D/3D just for starters, not to mention sound, fast ethernet, modem, wireless etc.; note that some of these require analog circuitry not just digital and pinouts start getting complicated)
Sure, Intel's SpeedStep power circuitry is less dynamic, more of a step-function static approach to power management. But is it good enough? If not, will the next generation of their technology in 2-3 years be good enough? Not much of a market window here, in the big scheme of things. Remember, Intel only loses when CPU power is an issue; it can pursue the same no-hard-disk and system-on-a-chip approaches as Transmeta. No patents there.
In terms of integrating 3D, Intel has a huge lead over Transmeta in terms of patent licensing and technology development.
So what about Transmeta in the embedded space, a la cell-phones? This appears to be a backup strategy not articulated yet for one simple reason: the TM processors are still less power-efficient than, say, StrongARM.
Did I mention the difficulties Transmeta would have keeping up with Intel's clock rates and performance? There's not a clear win here today, and this is only going to get worse before it gets better. It's relatively easy to release one innovative product that hits the market sweet spot once; it takes a totally different set of skills to keep up development of an ongoing stream of products that is always competitive with what's in the market. You can see this in the 3D space over the last four years, and AMD also illustrates the ups and downs of playing challenger.
Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.
This is all very innovative, and perhaps Transmeta OEMs will sell a few million units of handheld notebook/palmtops, with Transmeta gaining reasonable market share over the short term, IPO'ing to incredible hype, and three years from now realizing that well, they don't have the market position needed to really compete when Intel puts the squeeze on. Their technology value-add that I've seen is too slim that it can't be embraced and extended by some means. I see enough value add for them to survive, to live well and cash in on some sweet stock options, but I don't see them becoming a big or significant player 5-10 years out. Long term, well after the IPO and honeymoon period are over, they only make sense combined with someone like AMD with a much broader product line and established consumer reputation.
Techweb transcribed the pricing a little more precisely than I:
The 500- and 700-MHz TM5400 versions will list for $119 and $329, respectively. The 333- and 400-MHz TM3120 devices will list for $65 and $89, respectively.
they're putting the Linux OS in ROM for some devices
the form factor of a "vaio-like" device with Crusoe is smaller than previous existing models with comparable compute power; the prototype they show seems to be about 7"x5"x.75", although this is a very rough, rough eyeball.
some talk about using this as a wireless Internet client; per month pricing totally unclear so far
Yah, I'd agree that overall, programmable logic seems a tad unlikely given the fixed native instruction sets described in the patents.
The premise that source code is available and an OS can take advantage of that fact may still be useful for JIT compiling with a VLIW-type processor. I can't figure out how this'd make a substantial improvement over object code; maybe this is an intellectual dead-end. Can you?
As I pointed out, reconfiguration time of the FPGA (or microcoded hardware variant) is much less relevant when you have a single-task device (cell phone, PDA, embedded whatever). You are correct that for a multitasking, multiuser device, reconfiguration time would be too large to make the tradeoffs worth it.
Ask yourself: what is different about the assumptions of hardware computer architecture in an era of open source?
Answer: you can presume that the user has not just the binary code but the source code
Premise: programmable logic can optimally execute algorithms for which source code is available
Impliciations: Rather than using pre-defined, general-purpose execution units, the proper OS could compile open source directly into linked transistors on a programmable chip (e.g. Crusoe) in a JIT-like process when programs are loaded for execution. By more efficiently using transitors, applications would take less power (like Crusoe rumors,) and the one-time-each-runtime compilation burden would make this design most useful in single-task environments (like the embedded tasks in Crusoe rumors.)
Is this interesting enough that I should elaborate further?
--LP
Two remarkable things about the novel
on
Childhood's End
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· Score: 3
The review somehow misses the two things which made Childhood's End a book I regard more highly than the 90+% of pulp sci-fi which I don't remember much of 5-10 years later.
The most satisfying part of the book is reading the "denouement" that comes not at the end, but in the middle of the book when the aliens' physical appearance is revealed after decades of concealment. The reason for the concealment (which I don't want to give away here) is quite clever, thought provoking and original. Like a good mystery, there's growing suspense and anticipation, yet once the secret is revealed, all the previous comments fit into place.
The book is a little unusual for standard sci-fi in its tribute to a previous literary-philosophical strand of thought developed by a popular American author in the 1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The end of the book is not primarily about "paranormal" themes as the reviewer states, its really a sci-fi exploration of trancendentalist themes, the joint-consciousness of the "overmind". Few sci-fi books provide interesting, original depictions of religious concepts, and this is one of them.
While I admire Bill Gates as one of the best businessmen in the world, his failure to properly manage Microsoft's response to the DOJ lawsuit marks significant misjudgement, if not a little immaturity. IMHO. Perhaps its time for someone else with better relational skills to try the CEO role.
Another point that's worth mentioning is the vast, vast differences in the skills of students showing up in the class. My mom is pretty sharp and has substitute taught at many levels from K-12 at all kinds of public and private high schools, both normal kids and autistic/Downs-syndrome kids, and the range of differences in teachability is staggering. To accomodate and optimize computer teaching styles to reach 95% of those kids is a unbelievably big challenge, as if the task weren't already hard enough.
Bright kids who catch on are easy for most teachers to deal with; they excel in their own ways without too much encouragement. But the slow ones who never seem to get anything are agonizingly hard to teach. Teachers who get these "stupid" classes get worn down very easily over a few years, or hardened into people who don't care. And usually the worst teachers get assigned these classes as punishment or encouragement to quit.
Also, keeping a normally restless class under control is another major part of a teachers job that hasn't been mentioned as part of the computer-as-teacher role. Any automated teaching mechanism would have to deal with that too. The psychology and creativity required for that are so huge that I think it'll be well over a decade after the Turing test is first passed that any "computers substituting for teachers" makes any significant sense.
The more I hear my mother talk about her teaching experiences, the subtler and more challenging all the AI problems appear to be. It's not going to happen for a long, long time, IMHO.
Am I the only one who noticed that the "really good lawyers" in question have a webpage promoting the following type of services? In addition, we provide business and entertainment clients with comprehensive Internet monitoring, investigation and legal services in the detection and enforcement of unauthorized use of trademarks, brand names, movie, television and music properties and other intellectual property assets in cyberspace.
We have developed and refined sophisticated software that permits daily search, but unlike many simple monitoring services, Baker & Hostetler is able to respond immediately to identified copyright and trademark infringement-delivering, for example, cease-and-desist letters by e-mail, fax, postal service or by hand, as the client directs.
Pretty ironic, given that/. is getting sued by auto-scanning DeCSS lawyers, isn't it?;-)
I like this idea of putting related threads somewhere else too. So how would this best work from a user perspective?
I think it'd be cool to see something like this:
a checkbox for a user to self-acknowledge an off-topic post; the post stays in the original article forum but is also copied to a separate "area" where all followups to that post are added. This provides a "voluntary" offtopic redirector. While truly offtopic posts should go elsewhere (and will continue to be moderated down), this is useful if the poster wants to recognize that followups are better suited outside the main discussion tree without requiring the system to moderate him down.
add a moderation feature such that if one (or two?) moderators moderate the post as "offtopic", all follups are redirected to a separate area as above. (The post shows up in both places, but the followups only in the second area.) This is a "moderation-based" offtopic redirector. Useful for insuring that offtopic threads don't pollute the forum. Metamoderation prevents abuses.
Well, if a machine didn't have emotion, it couldn't/want/ to have emotion. Organic systems have a goal - survive. That goal gives them will, which translates into wants, desires.
I disagree. The evolutionary value of emotion is as an additional stimulus to act, one not based on the rational processes developed in human brains. When we lack enough data to rationally decide, we fall back on earlier mechanisms: emotion/instinct. Emotion itself is a combination of impulses based on past history not conciously processed, plus biochemical impulses that have been subject to the process of natural selection for thousands if not millions of years. There's an evolutionary value to acting without sufficient data, and a process that mimicked this in computers might be equally useful.
What do you think the odds are that Red Hat is announcing the split at the same time as their earnings to help enthusiasts ignore any possible negative interpretations of revenue growth in favor of the potential upside of the split?
I.e. if hot Internet/Linux companies are supposed to grow at 100%+ year over year in this growth phase, and Linux in the past has grown 212%/year (IDC figures), would this "lowly" 63% annual growth (24%/quarter) signal a downward shift in momentum? And is the split supposed to signal the opposite?
Most people miss this, but Amazon is not really re-inventing the bookstore...
They're reinventing the mall...
Organized religion is NOT a great cause of death
on
Planet Gattaca
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· Score: 2
Hey, nice followup! This is a good start. But your 71 million figure is fundamentally misleading for a simple reason. In any conflict between two peoples, historically, save perhaps the communist examples, both groups will claim that "God" is on their side. Does this self-justification mean that organized religion was responsible for the conflict? Obviously not. And doesn't the party starting the conflict deserve the blame? Unfortunately, this is notoriously difficult to determine.
So we need to define some terms. I propose that "perpetrated in the name of God" (your phrase) implies that the primary purpose of the conflict was religious in nature (not economic or political). You would hopefully agree with this definition since you define the problem group as "organized religions... attacking another group for their convictions." Obviously social, economic, political, and religious issues do get intertwined, hence the emphasis on "primary" purpose. What evidence would satisfy such a claim? One piece of evidence of a primary religious motive would be public cries by a significant fraction of religious leaders for violent action. An even stronger piece of evidence would be the religious leaders organizing to carry out such violent action.
By these hopefully reasonable definitions, I fail to see how the following would be considered "perpetrated in the name of God": - 30 M Native Americans- killed largely by disease and for motives of greed over land and in some cases politics (e.g. the French allied with and paid some Indians to fight British/American interests) There *was* an active effort to peacefully convert the Indians, but I've never run across evidence of violent or evil attempts at forced conversion. - 13 M in WWI- this isn't even remotely a religious conflict; it's almost entirely political fallout from the decline of the Austro-hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs. Warring tribes and nationalism, not warring religions. - 10 M (?!) in the Balkans - As above, this is an issue of warring tribes, not warring religions as far as I can tell. I could be convinced otherwise given evidence under the above definition.
There goes a quick 50 million of your 71 milion "perpetrated in the name of God" deaths, and I have a different set of concerns with your 15 million Crusade deaths.
The big arrow in your quiver IMHO is the Crusades. Based on my admittedly feeble understanding of it, it *would* qualify as "perpetrated in the name of God" by the above definition. We could argue about whether it was solely driven by the Catholic church's drive for power (a common western view) or whether it was a response to the aggressive "holy war" expansion of Muslims up through Turkey, in North Africa, and through sizeable fractions of Spain. But in either case organized religion seemed to be a driving, encouraging factor feeding the conflict. As for the 15 million figure, it seems rather high. At least one nice and well-sourced web source on genocide, a facinating historical view of the topic, seems to indicate that the number across multiple crusades is under 200,000. Perhaps it is omitting something, but for now, I consider the burden of proof to be in your court. I'd be even more willing to agree that the Inquisitions and the Salem Witch trials conform to my definition, although I'd note their relatively small numbers (in the 5-digit range according to the above source.) What are we down to, 6 million? And I'm skipping addressing some of the other "small potatoes" you mentioned.
I'm surprised you omitted the Reformation-era conflicts like the Thirty Years War which were due to an mix of religious and political forces. It's arguable whether such conflicts were primarily religious or primarily political power struggles, but in any case it's a stronger anti-religion case than the three conflicts mentioned above. Tell you what, I'll let you add that one if you let me add Mao alongside Hitler and Stalin. That accounts for another 10-15 million he executed and 30 million he led into man-made starvation.
I don't know whether or not Hitler was a Catholic, but from what I recall reading some of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, religion played little or no role in his upbringing; he was almost completely consumed by political issues. It's also well documented that towards the end of the war, he increasingly became involved in a variety of occult practices, attempting to set up his own state religion based on German myths and the notion of the sanctity of German blood. It's pretty clear (to me at least) that he agreed with Nietsche that God is dead, and let's manipulate whatever religious systems exist to our own ends.
Don't forget, the Hitler extermination figure isn't 6 million; that's the figure referring to the number of Jews exterminated, and doesn't include the blacks, handicapped, homosexuals, Christian opposition, gypsies, Polish people, etc. The overall figure is apparently about double: 12 million.
Now I'd agree with you that there might be various murders throughout the world due to religious and anti-religious individuals. How many murderers or serial killers are religious and how many are areligious or anti-religious? Let's agree that these aren't going to be too countable with our crude methods and keep focused on the bigger social conflicts. I will point out that the systematic allowance of killing of human fetuses, 40 million in America alone over the last 20 years, might be a relevant figure, but I'll try to decline pushing the point once made, in the interest of avoiding another large discussion surrounding definitions of whether fetuses count as human.
So I've added another 16-90 million to your atheist-led tally.
In closing, I think your claim that "taking the whole of history more acts have been attributed to organized religions... than [those committed] solely by atheists" argument, besides being largely unsupported by the facts, also has a severe statistical bias. How is it fair to measure 100-250 years of atheism against 1000+ years of religious behavior?
Look, I'm not trying to exclude religion from culpability; religions *are* culpable for the acts of their followers. "You shall judge a tree by its fruit," as one of them says, urging adherents to carefully screen potential leaders. I'd even agree that religions and religious followers should be held to a higher standard than atheists, since they espouse one. But lets try to look at the evidence without too many preconceptions. What do I make of the evidence? In general, I would say that the nation state is far, far more culpable for mass deaths than religion, which has really only become guilty of great failings when it wrapped its power structures up with those of the state. To the extent that religion encourages restraint on the excercise of state power (due to some moral code,) organized religion can provide a beneficial counterweight in a civilization.
Like you, I'm not trying to offend but attempting to offer a thought-provoking rebuttal. Why does this matter? Besides the issue of "what is true", on a purely pragmatic basis, casting off the moral constraints provided by religion can have significant costs in return for relatively unproven benefits. The "free love" of the '60s didn't come free.
And why put this discussion in the hands of scientists and members of organized religion -- the latter probably responsible for more hatred, bloodshed and cruelty than any other single force in human history?
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Organized atheism, with leaders including Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. have easily outdone any evils perpetrated by organized religion by a hundredfold.
Sorry this is 16 hours after first post and too late to get moderated up... but for those hackers who want "code," or any download scavengers wanting the raw gene sequence data for M. Genitalium, I found it at ftp://ftp.tigr.org/pub/data/m_genitalium/
Note that there's another party that gets "screwed" further by the pre-IPO price raises: the Linux community members granted the option to purchase pre-IPO shares; they benefit less from the IPO and VA Linux benefits more.
I don't blame VA for leaving less money on the table, but I'd be surprised if the IPO jump is as large as others we've been seeing. The smaller the jump, the more tempted people are to flip and lockin their win, which could backfire. We'll see I suppose.
Katz complains that technology is advancing faster than we socially can decide on what is appropriate. I used to have this concern about a number of things. But my perspective is different now.
Ironically he fails to see the self-correcting "Open Thinking" approach to ethics as a solution. When technology is in the early stages, elites control the ethic, for better or worse. As the technology reaches commercialization to broader groups of people, more people think about what is appropriate and the proper ethics and laws can be constructed at that time based on a broader consensus not affected by "founder syndrome" or scare tactics.
I suspect that, as with Linux, good elites facilitate early ethical development (principles = ethics architecture?), and minor holes or re-engineering will fix problems. As Open Source enables improved software stability over time, Open Thinking improves ethical/legal fairness over time.
Cheers,
--LP
P.S. "Open Thinking" has been previously known as "democracy"; that term, like the term "free software" is hereby co-opted.;-)
But it isn't working -- this should be obvious to anyone who follows the computer press. Why has the tide turned, the wind changed? God only knows.
Why has the press turned against Microsoft? I have three hypotheses: 1) (Obvious) The press likes a story with conflict, an underdog, and one matching the latest trends (which they hope to parlay into expertise which can reduce the effort of writing a string of future articles.) The ramifications of Microsoft potentially losing a substantial share of the OS market to Linux are also a strong argument in favor of coverage. 2) (Obvious to/.ers) The press has been cowed by the force of/. anti-FUD forces, making them a little timid to take on Linux directly; some business arguments (e.g. Apache marketshare) have been persuasive, as have some technical arguments (e.g. reliability, suitability as a server.) The anti-trust trial has revealed some rather disturbing emails and courtroom behavior (e.g. the faked video.) 3) (Obvious to me, at least) Before Apple's recent recovery, the press, having used Macs for over a decade, were forcibly converted to PCs by management for compatibility, support, economic reasons. The press has felt the shadowy arm of Microsoft restricting their platform choices. Resentment lingers.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for your well-thought out reply. I think it fairly reiterates the strengths of Transmeta in points 1 and 2. I could quibble with #2, but in
the end, I basically agree.
The pointer to Metricom is interesting-- unlimited wireless Internet at 28.8 kbps for a flat $29.99/month is better pricing than I expected and suggests that 128kbps and higher services from Metricom will also be priced at consumer levels, sooner or later. Keep in mind though that once users taste high-bandwidth wireline (DSL/cable,) it'll hard to go back to slower wireless until wireless speeds up a fair bit. Not an issue for email, but a big issue for web browsing technology adoption.
The AMD comment was the most speculative of my comments and it is *way* too early for any "serious" talk along these lines. To explain more fully however, its not an issue of fab partnerships; Transmeta's current strategy with IBM fabbing makes perfect sense to me. And Transmeta doesn't *have* to combine with AMD. I mention the AMD combination only because it appears to me to be the most viable exit strategy if Transmeta gets stuck in a niche of low-power x86-compatible CPUs and a bigger player like Intel starts fiercely targeting that market as well. Transmeta can slug it out, but in that case might be better off combined with AMD's greater volumes, brand recognition, leverage across other product lines, and other factors.
Low-power x86 is a healthy sized niche, and Transmeta has a nice technology lead. But I don't see barriers to entry that Intel can't surmount given some time and focus. Intel may be a little sluggish, but they're not stupid. They may not match Transmeta's leading power usage, but if they can cut it down to a modest enough level, Transmeta has very little recourse that I can see. I don't see any other Transmeta lock-in that would inhibit Intel from retaking 50+% of Transmeta's business away in 3 years. Sure, patents will inhibit some avenues of power-reduction technology development for Intel, but it's unlikely it'll block them all.
All this being said, Transmeta has a bright future ahead of them in the short term. Sorry if I get nervous or paranoid about the future; it's part of the skillset I use for companies in real life. Hopefully Transmeta management will be seriously thinking about these sorts of issues and come up with creative, effective solutions.
--LinuxParanoid
If Transmeta can keep the competitiveness of the
chip up from a speed/computer-power standpoint, then vendors of RISC instruction sets will do a cost analysis of whether its cheaper to design their own processors or to design software to program Transmeta's. Licensing terms and Transmeta's ability to drive volumes would also be pivotal. They do give up some control, true, but this may be preferable to an Intel-only migration, since with Transmeta they can retain their ISA lock-in and binary compatibility.
--LP
Power consumption of the chip is lower, but power consumption of the chip is only 20-30% of a notebook, limiting the value of this "revolution."
Further power reductions require either A) giving up a hard disk (aka Linux in ROMs) or B) integrating more than just the CPU and chipset (what about 2D/3D just for starters, not to mention sound, fast ethernet, modem, wireless etc.; note that some of these require analog circuitry not just digital and pinouts start getting complicated)
Sure, Intel's SpeedStep power circuitry is less dynamic, more of a step-function static approach to power management. But is it good enough? If not, will the next generation of their technology in 2-3 years be good enough? Not much of a market window here, in the big scheme of things. Remember, Intel only loses when CPU power is an issue; it can pursue the same no-hard-disk and system-on-a-chip approaches as Transmeta. No patents there.
In terms of integrating 3D, Intel has a huge lead over Transmeta in terms of patent licensing and technology development.
So what about Transmeta in the embedded space, a la cell-phones? This appears to be a backup strategy not articulated yet for one simple reason: the TM processors are still less power-efficient than, say, StrongARM.
Did I mention the difficulties Transmeta would have keeping up with Intel's clock rates and performance? There's not a clear win here today, and this is only going to get worse before it gets better. It's relatively easy to release one innovative product that hits the market sweet spot once; it takes a totally different set of skills to keep up development of an ongoing stream of products that is always competitive with what's in the market. You can see this in the 3D space over the last four years, and AMD also illustrates the ups and downs of playing challenger.
Wireless internet is cool, but I find it hard to be optimistic about the per-month pricing over the next 3 years at reasonable bandwidth rates attracting serious (5+ million) consumers. Guys putting up towers and satellites are the bottleneck here, as is the degree of competition.
;-)
This is all very innovative, and perhaps Transmeta OEMs will sell a few million units of handheld notebook/palmtops, with Transmeta gaining reasonable market share over the short term, IPO'ing to incredible hype, and three years from now realizing that well, they don't have the market position needed to really compete when Intel puts the squeeze on. Their technology value-add that I've seen is too slim that it can't be embraced and extended by some means. I see enough value add for them to survive, to live well and cash in on some sweet stock options, but I don't see them becoming a big or significant player 5-10 years out. Long term, well after the IPO and honeymoon period are over, they only make sense combined with someone like AMD with a much broader product line and established consumer reputation.
How's that for thought provoking?
--LP
Techweb transcribed the pricing a little more precisely than I:
The 500- and 700-MHz TM5400 versions will list for $119 and $329, respectively. The 333- and 400-MHz TM3120 devices will list for $65 and $89, respectively.
--LP
one by cnet, pretty thorough, and
one by techweb with more details than the other articles, and
one from Infoworld
--LP
the high-end chip would sell for $1XX- $32X dollars, while the low-end chip would sell in
the $60ish to mid-hundreds range.
mobile crusoe PCs expected to sell around $1200-2500
wireless internet PCs pricing expected to work somewhat like cellphones, with business models TBD.
--LP
Dave just said that they expect to IPO at some point but haven't begun the planning process involved for that.
--LP
they're putting the Linux OS in ROM for some devices
the form factor of a "vaio-like" device with Crusoe is smaller than previous existing models with comparable compute power; the prototype they show seems to be about 7"x5"x.75", although this is a very rough, rough eyeball.
some talk about using this as a wireless Internet client; per month pricing totally unclear so far
--LP
Yah, I'd agree that overall, programmable logic seems a tad unlikely given the fixed native instruction sets described in the patents.
The premise that source code is available and an OS can take advantage of that fact may still be useful for JIT compiling with a VLIW-type processor. I can't figure out how this'd make a substantial improvement over object code; maybe this is an intellectual dead-end. Can you?
--LP
As I pointed out, reconfiguration time of the FPGA (or microcoded hardware variant) is much less relevant when you have a single-task device (cell phone, PDA, embedded whatever). You are correct that for a multitasking, multiuser device, reconfiguration time would be too large to make the tradeoffs worth it.
--LP
Ask yourself: what is different about the assumptions of hardware computer architecture in an era of open source?
Answer: you can presume that the user has not just the binary code but the source code
Premise: programmable logic can optimally execute algorithms for which source code is available
Impliciations: Rather than using pre-defined, general-purpose execution units, the proper OS could compile open source directly into linked transistors on a programmable chip (e.g. Crusoe) in a JIT-like process when programs are loaded for execution. By more efficiently using transitors, applications would take less power (like Crusoe rumors,) and the one-time-each-runtime compilation burden would make this design most useful in single-task environments (like the embedded tasks in Crusoe rumors.)
Is this interesting enough that I should elaborate further?
--LP
The most satisfying part of the book is reading the "denouement" that comes not at the end, but in the middle of the book when the aliens' physical appearance is revealed after decades of concealment. The reason for the concealment (which I don't want to give away here) is quite clever, thought provoking and original. Like a good mystery, there's growing suspense and anticipation, yet once the secret is revealed, all the previous comments fit into
place.
The book is a little unusual for standard sci-fi in its tribute to a previous literary-philosophical strand of thought developed by a popular American author in the 1800s, Ralph Waldo Emerson. The end of the book is not primarily about "paranormal" themes as the reviewer states, its really a sci-fi exploration of trancendentalist themes, the joint-consciousness of the "overmind". Few sci-fi books provide interesting, original depictions of religious concepts, and this is one of them.
--LP
While I admire Bill Gates as one of the best businessmen in the world, his failure to properly manage Microsoft's response to the DOJ lawsuit marks significant misjudgement, if not a little immaturity. IMHO. Perhaps its time for someone else with better relational skills to try the CEO role.
--LP
Another point that's worth mentioning is the vast, vast differences in the skills of students showing up in the class. My mom is pretty sharp and has substitute taught at many levels from K-12 at all kinds of public and private high schools, both normal kids and autistic/Downs-syndrome kids, and the range of differences in teachability is staggering. To accomodate and optimize computer teaching styles to reach 95% of those kids is a unbelievably big challenge, as if the task weren't already hard enough.
Bright kids who catch on are easy for most teachers to deal with; they excel in their own ways without too much encouragement. But the slow ones who never seem to get anything are agonizingly hard to teach. Teachers who get these "stupid" classes get worn down very easily over a few years, or hardened into people who don't care. And usually the worst teachers get assigned these classes as punishment or encouragement to quit.
Also, keeping a normally restless class under control is another major part of a teachers job that hasn't been mentioned as part of the computer-as-teacher role. Any automated teaching mechanism would have to deal with that too. The psychology and creativity required for that are so huge that I think it'll be well over a decade after the Turing test is first passed that any "computers substituting for teachers" makes any significant sense.
The more I hear my mother talk about her teaching experiences, the subtler and more challenging all the AI problems appear to be. It's not going to happen for a long, long time, IMHO.
--LP
Am I the only one who noticed that the "really good lawyers" in question have a webpage promoting the following type of services?
/. is getting sued by auto-scanning DeCSS lawyers, isn't it? ;-)
In addition, we provide business and entertainment clients with comprehensive Internet monitoring, investigation and legal services in the detection and enforcement of unauthorized use of trademarks, brand names, movie, television and music properties and other intellectual property assets in cyberspace.
We have developed and refined sophisticated software that permits daily search, but unlike many simple monitoring services, Baker & Hostetler is able to respond immediately to identified copyright and trademark infringement-delivering, for example, cease-and-desist letters by e-mail, fax, postal service or by hand, as the client directs.
Pretty ironic, given that
--LP
I think it'd be cool to see something like this:
a checkbox for a user to self-acknowledge an off-topic post; the post stays in the original article forum but is also copied to a separate "area" where all followups to that post are added. This provides a "voluntary" offtopic redirector. While truly offtopic posts should go elsewhere (and will continue to be moderated down), this is useful if the poster wants to recognize that followups are better suited outside the main discussion tree without requiring the system to moderate him down.
add a moderation feature such that if one (or two?) moderators moderate the post as "offtopic", all follups are redirected to a separate area as above. (The post shows up in both places, but the followups only in the second area.) This is a "moderation-based" offtopic redirector. Useful for insuring that offtopic threads don't pollute the forum. Metamoderation prevents abuses.
Interesting?
--LP
Well, if a machine didn't have emotion, it couldn't /want/ to have emotion. Organic systems have a goal - survive. That goal gives them will, which translates into wants, desires.
I disagree. The evolutionary value of emotion is as an additional stimulus to act, one not based on the rational processes developed in human brains. When we lack enough data to rationally decide, we fall back on earlier mechanisms: emotion/instinct. Emotion itself is a combination of impulses based on past history not conciously processed, plus biochemical impulses that have been subject to the process of natural selection for thousands if not millions of years. There's an evolutionary value to acting without sufficient data, and a process that mimicked this in computers might be equally useful.
That's my theory at least.
--LP
I.e. if hot Internet/Linux companies are supposed to grow at 100%+ year over year in this growth phase, and Linux in the past has grown 212%/year (IDC figures), would this "lowly" 63% annual growth (24%/quarter) signal a downward shift in momentum? And is the split supposed to signal the opposite?
Your friendly paranoid,
LinuxParanoid
Most people miss this, but Amazon is not really re-inventing the bookstore...
They're reinventing the mall...
Hey, nice followup! This is a good start. But your 71 million figure is fundamentally misleading for a simple reason. In any conflict between two peoples, historically, save perhaps the communist examples, both groups will claim that "God" is on their side. Does this self-justification mean that organized religion was responsible for the conflict? Obviously not. And doesn't the party starting the conflict deserve the blame? Unfortunately, this is notoriously difficult to determine.
... attacking another group for their convictions." Obviously social, economic, political, and religious issues do get intertwined, hence the emphasis on "primary" purpose. What evidence would satisfy such a claim? One piece of evidence of a primary religious motive would be public cries by a significant fraction of religious leaders for violent action. An even stronger piece of evidence would be the religious leaders organizing to carry out such violent action.
So we need to define some terms. I propose that "perpetrated in the name of God" (your phrase) implies that the primary purpose of the conflict was religious in nature (not economic or political). You would hopefully agree with this definition since you define the problem group as "organized religions
By these hopefully reasonable definitions, I fail to see how the following would be considered "perpetrated in the name of God":
- 30 M Native Americans- killed largely by disease and for motives of greed over land and in some cases politics (e.g. the French allied with and paid some Indians to fight British/American interests) There *was* an active effort to peacefully convert the Indians, but I've never run across evidence of violent or evil attempts at forced conversion.
- 13 M in WWI- this isn't even remotely a religious conflict; it's almost entirely political fallout from the decline of the Austro-hungarian empire of the Hapsburgs. Warring tribes and nationalism, not warring religions.
- 10 M (?!) in the Balkans - As above, this is an issue of warring tribes, not warring religions as far as I can tell. I could be convinced otherwise given evidence under the above definition.
There goes a quick 50 million of your 71 milion "perpetrated in the name of God" deaths, and I have a different set of concerns with your 15 million Crusade deaths.
The big arrow in your quiver IMHO is the Crusades. Based on my admittedly feeble understanding of it, it *would* qualify as "perpetrated in the name of God" by the above definition. We could argue about whether it was solely driven by the Catholic church's drive for power (a common western view) or whether it was a response to the aggressive "holy war" expansion of Muslims up through Turkey, in North Africa, and through sizeable fractions of Spain. But in either case organized religion seemed to be a driving, encouraging factor feeding the conflict. As for the 15 million figure, it seems rather high. At least one nice and well-sourced web source on genocide, a facinating historical view of the topic, seems to indicate that the number across multiple crusades is under 200,000. Perhaps it is omitting something, but for now, I consider the burden of proof to be in your court. I'd be even more willing to agree that the Inquisitions and the Salem Witch trials conform to my definition, although I'd note their relatively small numbers (in the 5-digit range according to the above source.) What are we down to, 6 million? And I'm skipping addressing some of the other "small potatoes" you mentioned.
I'm surprised you omitted the Reformation-era conflicts like the Thirty Years War which were due to an mix of religious and political forces. It's arguable whether such conflicts were primarily religious or primarily political power struggles, but in any case it's a stronger anti-religion case than the three conflicts mentioned above. Tell you what, I'll let you add that one if you let me add Mao alongside Hitler and Stalin. That accounts for another 10-15 million he executed and 30 million he led into man-made starvation.
I don't know whether or not Hitler was a Catholic, but from what I recall reading some of his autobiography, Mein Kampf, religion played little or no role in his upbringing; he was almost completely consumed by political issues. It's also well documented that towards the end of the war, he increasingly became involved in a variety of occult practices, attempting to set up his own state religion based on German myths and the notion of the sanctity of German blood. It's pretty clear (to me at least) that he agreed with Nietsche that God is dead, and let's manipulate whatever religious systems exist to our own ends.
Don't forget, the Hitler extermination figure isn't 6 million; that's the figure referring to the number of Jews exterminated, and doesn't include the blacks, handicapped, homosexuals, Christian opposition, gypsies, Polish people, etc. The overall figure is apparently about double: 12 million.
Now I'd agree with you that there might be various murders throughout the world due to religious and anti-religious individuals. How many murderers or serial killers are religious and how many are areligious or anti-religious? Let's agree that these aren't going to be too countable with our crude methods and keep focused on the bigger social conflicts. I will point out that the systematic allowance of killing of human fetuses, 40 million in America alone over the last 20 years, might be a relevant figure, but I'll try to decline pushing the point once made, in the interest of avoiding another large discussion surrounding definitions of whether fetuses count as human.
So I've added another 16-90 million to your atheist-led tally.
In closing, I think your claim that "taking the whole of history more acts have been attributed to organized religions... than [those committed] solely by atheists" argument, besides being largely unsupported by the facts, also has a severe statistical bias. How is it fair to measure 100-250 years of atheism against 1000+ years of religious behavior?
Look, I'm not trying to exclude religion from culpability; religions *are* culpable for the acts of their followers. "You shall judge a tree by its fruit," as one of them says, urging adherents to carefully screen potential leaders. I'd even agree that religions and religious followers should be held to a higher standard than atheists, since they espouse one. But lets try to look at the evidence without too many preconceptions. What do I make of the evidence? In general, I would say that the nation state is far, far more culpable for mass deaths than religion, which has really only become guilty of great failings when it wrapped its power structures up with those of the state. To the extent that religion encourages restraint on the excercise of state power (due to some moral code,) organized religion can provide a beneficial counterweight in a civilization.
Like you, I'm not trying to offend but attempting to offer a thought-provoking rebuttal. Why does this matter? Besides the issue of "what is true", on a purely pragmatic basis, casting off the moral constraints provided by religion can have significant costs in return for relatively unproven benefits. The "free love" of the '60s didn't come free.
--LP
And why put this discussion in the hands of scientists and members of organized religion -- the latter probably responsible for more hatred, bloodshed and cruelty than any other single force in human history?
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Organized atheism, with leaders including Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. have easily outdone any evils perpetrated by organized religion by a hundredfold.
--LP
Sorry this is 16 hours after first post and too late to get moderated up... but for those hackers who want "code," or any download scavengers wanting the raw gene sequence data for M. Genitalium, I found it at ftp://ftp.tigr.org/pub/data/m_genitalium/
Note that there's another party that gets "screwed" further by the pre-IPO price raises: the Linux community members granted the option to purchase pre-IPO shares; they benefit less from the IPO and VA Linux benefits more.
I don't blame VA for leaving less money on the table, but I'd be surprised if the IPO jump is as large as others we've been seeing. The smaller the jump, the more tempted people are to flip and lockin their win, which could backfire. We'll see I suppose.
--LP
Ironically he fails to see the self-correcting "Open Thinking" approach to ethics as a solution. When technology is in the early stages, elites control the ethic, for better or worse. As the technology reaches commercialization to broader groups of people, more people think about what is appropriate and the proper ethics and laws can be constructed at that time based on a broader consensus not affected by "founder syndrome" or scare tactics.
I suspect that, as with Linux, good elites facilitate early ethical development (principles = ethics architecture?), and minor holes or re-engineering will fix problems. As Open Source enables improved software stability over time, Open Thinking improves ethical/legal fairness over time.
Cheers,
--LP
P.S. "Open Thinking" has been previously known as "democracy"; that term, like the term "free software" is hereby co-opted. ;-)
But it isn't working -- this should be obvious to anyone who follows the computer press. Why has the tide turned, the wind changed? God only knows.
/.ers) The press has been cowed by the force of /. anti-FUD forces, making them a little timid to take on Linux directly; some business arguments (e.g. Apache marketshare) have been persuasive, as have some technical arguments (e.g. reliability, suitability as a server.) The anti-trust trial has revealed some rather disturbing emails and courtroom behavior (e.g. the faked video.)
Why has the press turned against Microsoft? I have three hypotheses:
1) (Obvious) The press likes a story with conflict, an underdog, and one matching the latest trends (which they hope to parlay into expertise which can reduce the effort of writing a string of future articles.) The ramifications of Microsoft potentially losing a substantial share of the OS market to Linux are also a strong argument in favor of coverage.
2) (Obvious to
3) (Obvious to me, at least) Before Apple's recent recovery, the press, having used Macs for over a decade, were forcibly converted to PCs by management for compatibility, support, economic reasons. The press has felt the shadowy arm of Microsoft restricting their platform choices. Resentment lingers.
Which one makes most sense to you? All three?
--LP