If you're sitting all alone in your home you are free to use whatever applications you want to do whatever you want. That's not the question. The real issue is how do you get something like this deployed in suit-world and how do you support it? The problem we stumble over again and again is support & commonality. You have to deploy something that won't break very easily or is easy to fix if it does and like it or not you have to protect folks from their own ability to break or change something. How would we recover from the people who routinely power off the machine while it's running just because that's what they do and they're never going to change. Next - we're still in the dancing bear stage. It's not how well, it's that it dances at all. Now folks have all sorts of expectations about what their desktop @ work should do: instant messaging, multimedia, hot swap.... that you can't take away from them just because Linux can't support it yet . Yes these are great strides but the first time some PHB can't read somebody else's Powerpoint presentation with embedded audio and OLE objects then you just look like an idiot who overpromised something.
If I'm not mistaken Apple at one point gave away Macs to their employees only to pull them out later under a hail of complaints from the employee's loved ones. It seems that the employees were are work more or less 24x7.
Yah - Linux runs on a few PPC RS/6000's but not on an SP since the real complexity is getting the interprocessor switch backplane to work. Remember that an SP is not a single system image machine. It is a group of processor complexes and for every processor complex you have another instance of AIX. Each SP is rack made up of processor complexes each one of which is analogous to an indivdual SMP RS/6000 and the switch backplane is what holds the whole shebang together. Each complex is called a node and can hold 2-12 (or even more possibly) PPC CPU's. A rack holds a bunch of nodes so if you have 12 CPU's in each node a 768 processor machine is made up of 64 nodes mounted in 8 racks or so depending on the packaging.
Please read The Human Use of Human Beings. I'm pretty sure this is all covered there if you read closely.
There are mechanical problems that are hard to do. They're called "Hard Problems" - one way or nearly one way algorithms that plausibly could be solved given enough time.
There are math problems that don't lend themselves to discrete mathematics. I'm not sure a computer would have help Georg Cantor develop set theory. Also there are certain problems that lend themselves well to approximation but not an exact solution. If I dust off my solid analytic geometry books I'm sure I can find a few. That or real time celestial navigation problems using polar calculus.
Then there are all of those problems that don't lend themselves to computation at all. Knowledge and insight come from the synthesis of new ideas out of different, multiple sources. So for example the sharpest mining bit in the universe doesn't by itself help you to understand the chemistry of the Earth's crust.
To borrow a page from the right; we all seemingly agree that the problem with public schools is to circumvent them and get the heretofore BigBrother Gummint' to pay us to build private, er... Charter schools that pander to our own race/religion/status....
So why not do the same thing with libraries? Get the Gummint to give us vouchers to build and maintain our own libaries and that way we could hang all the censorship on them that we wanted. Hell we could stock them with whatever we wanted. We would all be fat dumb and happy.
You understand that, yes? - great news for the Mac community though that's had to suffer with less than ok software to connect their Macs to their Palms
I'd much rather see Sony get with the program - those guys can build solid reliable stuff!
So then what is bandwidth?
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 2
That's the Regulon. Bandwidth is ultimately the gating factor that limits the propagation of information. Bandwidth is neither infinite nor free and that information that makes best and efficient use of bandwidth survives.
Ok so the analogy is strained. But for the sake of abstract philosphical purity I guess we sometimes have to climb those mountains.
You continue to miss the point. Consider it a loss leader. Consider it an incentive to buy. Consider that if I sample an mp3 I'm not bloody likely to listen to it in my car. No, to do that I have go buy a CD which would have never occured had I been unable to know what I was buying. This is not a complex abstract philosophical construct. It's a simple fact. Napster allows me to preview. Preview. Get it? W/o a preview my buying behavior is much more risk adverse. W/o a preview I simply buy less. LESS.
W/O Napster I simply buy less. LESS. LESS. Not more. LESS.
Now for the sake of purity you may wish to only benefit from FEWER pure dollars in lieu of a greater number of somehow corrupt tainted dollars but that's a matter between YOU and YOUR values.
The Underground Railroad for example. Ok by the letter of the law which says "if you do this, this and that then you are stealing" then you are stealing.
But the structure of the industry which does not pay artists trumps that. The fact that the mechanism that distributes the product to the consumer this way or that way and costs less, marginally less or is free will not alter that one fact. If CD's were say $40 each would artists all be wealthy?
Napster is the greastest thing to happen to the music industry (and it is an industry not an art form) since recorded music. Since Napster I have purchased at least 2x as much product than before for the simple reason that I can now sample it and I now know WTF I'm getting for 17 bucks. Whereas before I probably wouldn't have purchased something word of mouth now I can pull a few tracks and decide.
All this money-to-the-artist bullshit is a smoke screen. Artists don't get paid now and changing the distribtion scheme isn't going to change that fact.
Does this apply for every currency in every country or are you 'better off' copying say French Francs in Japan or Dinar in Djbouti? Obviously though its a rare thief who's going to walk into the neighborhood copyshop with a fresh, wet Ben Franklin and ask for, oh, a thousand copies of it. Or maybe you think they would do the whole thing there - whip out a hundred, ask them to copy it and print a few more - say - 'take one for youself while yer at it!'
And you're going into business for yourself I'm equally sure there is some way to lock yourself in the basement with your printer/copier to disable the tracking mechanism.
All the more reason to do away with paper currency aqnd rely instead on encrypted authenticated electronic transactions.
For an excellent analysis of the types of failures experienced by loosely and tightly coupled dynamic systems read "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. This was orginally an analysis of the TMI failure and then was expanded to discuss the types of complex systems failures that are a result of that very systems complex fault resilience. It is not a scary gloom and doom book but a thoughtful concise readable description of why dynamic systems break down and how failures are handled. For example - in a nukeplant does the status indicator light for the backup cold water pump system normally show 'green' or 'red'. If it's 'red' it may indicate that it's not working - a bad thing. But if it's 'green' it may indicate that it's running - a worse thing.
Walt would have been very happy with the way EPCOT turned out...an imaginary small town run by corporate uber-bosses who know better than the rest of us.. The plain simplicity of Walt's small town ersatz 19th century view of the community was only intended to be a feel-good think small don't make waves world view for the lumpentroliat.
No no, Walt was a self professed facist and anti Semite who at his core believed that EPCOT was for the majority of acceptably-raced people who needed to be taken care of while the undesirables toiled in the underground tunnels maintaining the whole thing.
Well it depends on what you want to do. It sounds like all you want is a small form factor high powered laptop. There are on the other hand some partial solutions to most of your questions eg. there is a Yahoo IM client of sorts for the Palm and wireless modem solutions can be made to work today by connecting the Palm to certain cell phones. The Visor/TRG models purport to allow for direct attachment of devices like this either through the Springboard or the PCFlash but there is little if anything that is real today. Conside though that if you do kludge toether a feature set for the Palm that does what you want is not handheld anymore - it's more of a collection of devices you have to carry around in a bag. On the other hand all of those features exist today on practically any laptop. The question is, how low can you go? If you go to www.dynamism.com you will see a slew of very small laptop/palmtop machines. Add to this the IBM Thinkpad240 and you have a pretty good collection of machines that answer your specs. Whether you have any other requirements like the ability to run Unix or whatnot, you'd have to explore that with each unit seperately. On the whole laptops are built to run on Win9, some do ok with NT, most do not. Linux is a gamble with most machines; trying to get all of the peripheral devices, pccards, modems, video, sound, cdroms, etc. to work is usually at least partially successful but is not generally simple to do.
Make the shell out of some degradable material and offer cash refunds for dropping off the old units at some recycling center. Tear off the shell, replace and recycle the batteries, reprogram the phone for the next customer and wrap a new shell on it. C'mon stop being hysterical! This would pollute less than all of the batteries from Palm pilots that people chuck out today. Hell, make it w/o a battery altogether, put the contacts on the outside and sell a keywound generator that attaches to the unit. Return the phone keep the power supply.
Only a matter of time if not already that some clever engineer will build an ISA bridge adapter for a PCI slot. Plug the bridge into the PCI slot plug the ISA card into the bridge. I'd put the electronics at a right angle to the PCI connector and make the shim height as small as possible. Or if one was really clever make an ISA expansion bus that uses one PCI slot, an external cable to an ISA backplane in a seperate cabinet with its own power. Plug all your ISA cards into the board in the cabinet and run from there.
Maybe the platform is white too - so could it be that cell phones only cause retinal rod cell damage or some degradation in the ability to distinguish contrast?
B through D model AS/400's would typically take 15-30 minutes normally even if nothing was wrong. Moreover because of the SLS architecture of the machine eg, the entire machine is a flat address space where every file, device and everything else is a memory address in an underlying database, an OS upgrade would take up to 17 hours.
I've got a garage full of stuff like this that no school, charity or other organization is willing to take off my hands for free. To them it's just too old.
...but if you subsitute 'postal worker' or 'boy scout troop leader' for 'student' and then make it a condition of employment or participation I imagine far fewer people would object. This is after all the era of 'protect me from everything and make my life risk and hassle free as long as everyone else but me is inconvenienced'. The first thing I'd do is create a course like the SAT prep course that teaches students how to fudge the at-risk test. Better yet pressure your local school board to offer something similar in the school itself under the banner of 'being a better citizen - 101': kids get one fewer real class to worry about and the school gets to hire another resource specialist. Heck they could even tie at-risk students to State and Federal funding for special education for learning disabled and physically challenged children. I can see it now, administering drug tests to children taking the at-risk exam to ensure that they're not too mediocre to falsely pass and then forcing them into taking Ritalin to ensure that they don't act out in class after flunking the exam. Better yet since you could defend the use of nothing but vague value judgments anyway, each locality could sprinkle their own version of the test with all sorts of religious, ethnic, language and cultural questions to marginalize whomever they want at will.
In the commercial world the value, if any, of thin client is reduced deskside support, reduced helpdesk calls, reduced client rebuilds, reduced complexity. Since the real TCO is about 70% people costs and 15% software and 15% hardware the value of any thin client is directly related to the amount of people-time you save by not having to fix, manintain and manage your clients the same old expensive way. So for example you could use a diskless client that gets its boot code from the network and then whatever applications it needs. Or, you could burn the boot code and basic functions into nonvolatile storage and load the applications into the device on demand. Or you could go the Citrix way, boot the device from wherever and run the applications from a server. The client device could be essentially anything - even a full blown desktop that is in some way locked-down from being altered in any way except from central admin. The real value in any circumstance is the freedom to trash the client code, if any, rebuild it on the fly and/or snatch up the desktop device, throw it in the trash and replace it with another cheap device quickly and easily. Since PC's cost so little there is no value in worrying about the cost of the device vs. a thin client. Instead focus on the amount of time keeping the client device config'd and running correctly. The downside to all of this is that if your central admin encounters a problem or a piece of client code that doesn't work then many clients are effected at the same time. On the other hand fixing it once is x times the number of clients cheaper to recover from.
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If you're sitting all alone in your home you are free to use whatever applications you want to do whatever you want. That's not the question. The real issue is how do you get something like this deployed in suit-world and how do you support it? The problem we stumble over again and again is support & commonality. You have to deploy something that won't break very easily or is easy to fix if it does and like it or not you have to protect folks from their own ability to break or change something. How would we recover from the people who routinely power off the machine while it's running just because that's what they do and they're never going to change. Next - we're still in the dancing bear stage. It's not how well, it's that it dances at all. Now folks have all sorts of expectations about what their desktop @ work should do: instant messaging, multimedia, hot swap.... that you can't take away from them just because Linux can't support it yet . Yes these are great strides but the first time some PHB can't read somebody else's Powerpoint presentation with embedded audio and OLE objects then you just look like an idiot who overpromised something.
If I'm not mistaken Apple at one point gave away Macs to their employees only to pull them out later under a hail of complaints from the employee's loved ones. It seems that the employees were are work more or less 24x7.
Yah - Linux runs on a few PPC RS/6000's but not on an SP since the real complexity is getting the interprocessor switch backplane to work. Remember that an SP is not a single system image machine. It is a group of processor complexes and for every processor complex you have another instance of AIX. Each SP is rack made up of processor complexes each one of which is analogous to an indivdual SMP RS/6000 and the switch backplane is what holds the whole shebang together. Each complex is called a node and can hold 2-12 (or even more possibly) PPC CPU's. A rack holds a bunch of nodes so if you have 12 CPU's in each node a 768 processor machine is made up of 64 nodes mounted in 8 racks or so depending on the packaging.
Please read The Human Use of Human Beings. I'm pretty sure this is all covered there if you read closely.
There are mechanical problems that are hard to do. They're called "Hard Problems" - one way or nearly one way algorithms that plausibly could be solved given enough time.
There are math problems that don't lend themselves to discrete mathematics. I'm not sure a computer would have help Georg Cantor develop set theory. Also there are certain problems that lend themselves well to approximation but not an exact solution. If I dust off my solid analytic geometry books I'm sure I can find a few. That or real time celestial navigation problems using polar calculus.
Then there are all of those problems that don't lend themselves to computation at all. Knowledge and insight come from the synthesis of new ideas out of different, multiple sources. So for example the sharpest mining bit in the universe doesn't by itself help you to understand the chemistry of the Earth's crust.
To borrow a page from the right; we all seemingly agree that the problem with public schools is to circumvent them and get the heretofore BigBrother Gummint' to pay us to build private, er... Charter schools that pander to our own race/religion/status....
So why not do the same thing with libraries? Get the Gummint to give us vouchers to build and maintain our own libaries and that way we could hang all the censorship on them that we wanted. Hell we could stock them with whatever we wanted. We would all be fat dumb and happy.
You understand that, yes? - great news for the Mac community though that's had to suffer with less than ok software to connect their Macs to their Palms
I'd much rather see Sony get with the program - those guys can build solid reliable stuff!
That's the Regulon. Bandwidth is ultimately the gating factor that limits the propagation of information. Bandwidth is neither infinite nor free and that information that makes best and efficient use of bandwidth survives.
Ok so the analogy is strained. But for the sake of abstract philosphical purity I guess we sometimes have to climb those mountains.
You continue to miss the point. Consider it a loss leader. Consider it an incentive to buy. Consider that if I sample an mp3 I'm not bloody likely to listen to it in my car. No, to do that I have go buy a CD which would have never occured had I been unable to know what I was buying. This is not a complex abstract philosophical construct. It's a simple fact. Napster allows me to preview. Preview. Get it? W/o a preview my buying behavior is much more risk adverse. W/o a preview I simply buy less. LESS.
W/O Napster I simply buy less. LESS. LESS. Not more. LESS.
Now for the sake of purity you may wish to only benefit from FEWER pure dollars in lieu of a greater number of somehow corrupt tainted dollars but that's a matter between YOU and YOUR values.
The Underground Railroad for example. Ok by the letter of the law which says "if you do this, this and that then you are stealing" then you are stealing.
But the structure of the industry which does not pay artists trumps that. The fact that the mechanism that distributes the product to the consumer this way or that way and costs less, marginally less or is free will not alter that one fact. If CD's were say $40 each would artists all be wealthy?
Even the movies show coming attractions.
Napster is the greastest thing to happen to the music industry (and it is an industry not an art form) since recorded music. Since Napster I have purchased at least 2x as much product than before for the simple reason that I can now sample it and I now know WTF I'm getting for 17 bucks. Whereas before I probably wouldn't have purchased something word of mouth now I can pull a few tracks and decide.
All this money-to-the-artist bullshit is a smoke screen. Artists don't get paid now and changing the distribtion scheme isn't going to change that fact.
Does this apply for every currency in every country or are you 'better off' copying say French Francs in Japan or Dinar in Djbouti? Obviously though its a rare thief who's going to walk into the neighborhood copyshop with a fresh, wet Ben Franklin and ask for, oh, a thousand copies of it. Or maybe you think they would do the whole thing there - whip out a hundred, ask them to copy it and print a few more - say - 'take one for youself while yer at it!'
And you're going into business for yourself I'm equally sure there is some way to lock yourself in the basement with your printer/copier to disable the tracking mechanism.
All the more reason to do away with paper currency aqnd rely instead on encrypted authenticated electronic transactions.
For an excellent analysis of the types of failures experienced by loosely and tightly coupled dynamic systems read "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. This was orginally an analysis of the TMI failure and then was expanded to discuss the types of complex systems failures that are a result of that very systems complex fault resilience. It is not a scary gloom and doom book but a thoughtful concise readable description of why dynamic systems break down and how failures are handled. For example - in a nukeplant does the status indicator light for the backup cold water pump system normally show 'green' or 'red'. If it's 'red' it may indicate that it's not working - a bad thing. But if it's 'green' it may indicate that it's running - a worse thing.
Walt would have been very happy with the way EPCOT turned out...an imaginary small town run by corporate uber-bosses who know better than the rest of us.. The plain simplicity of Walt's small town ersatz 19th century view of the community was only intended to be a feel-good think small don't make waves world view for the lumpentroliat.
No no, Walt was a self professed facist and anti Semite who at his core believed that EPCOT was for the majority of acceptably-raced people who needed to be taken care of while the undesirables toiled in the underground tunnels maintaining the whole thing.
Nah I'll just install RACF for security.
Well it depends on what you want to do. It sounds like all you want is a small form factor high powered laptop. There are on the other hand some partial solutions to most of your questions eg. there is a Yahoo IM client of sorts for the Palm and wireless modem solutions can be made to work today by connecting the Palm to certain cell phones. The Visor/TRG models purport to allow for direct attachment of devices like this either through the Springboard or the PCFlash but there is little if anything that is real today. Conside though that if you do kludge toether a feature set for the Palm that does what you want is not handheld anymore - it's more of a collection of devices you have to carry around in a bag. On the other hand all of those features exist today on practically any laptop. The question is, how low can you go? If you go to www.dynamism.com you will see a slew of very small laptop/palmtop machines. Add to this the IBM Thinkpad240 and you have a pretty good collection of machines that answer your specs. Whether you have any other requirements like the ability to run Unix or whatnot, you'd have to explore that with each unit seperately. On the whole laptops are built to run on Win9, some do ok with NT, most do not. Linux is a gamble with most machines; trying to get all of the peripheral devices, pccards, modems, video, sound, cdroms, etc. to work is usually at least partially successful but is not generally simple to do.
String a bunch of them together and build a Beowulf cluster on Palms? When someone ports OS/390 MVS to my wristwatch then I'll be impressed.
Make the shell out of some degradable material and offer cash refunds for dropping off the old units at some recycling center. Tear off the shell, replace and recycle the batteries, reprogram the phone for the next customer and wrap a new shell on it. C'mon stop being hysterical! This would pollute less than all of the batteries from Palm pilots that people chuck out today. Hell, make it w/o a battery altogether, put the contacts on the outside and sell a keywound generator that attaches to the unit. Return the phone keep the power supply.
Only a matter of time if not already that some clever engineer will build an ISA bridge adapter for a PCI slot. Plug the bridge into the PCI slot plug the ISA card into the bridge. I'd put the electronics at a right angle to the PCI connector and make the shim height as small as possible. Or if one was really clever make an ISA expansion bus that uses one PCI slot, an external cable to an ISA backplane in a seperate cabinet with its own power. Plug all your ISA cards into the board in the cabinet and run from there.
Probably better than my GoType, which was just ripped off. But c'mon, a hundred dollars for a keyboard? That sounds just plain crazy.
Maybe the platform is white too - so could it be that cell phones only cause retinal rod cell damage or some degradation in the ability to distinguish contrast?
True, Screamers didn't recycle their targets into fuel but they were fission powered I believe.
B through D model AS/400's would typically take 15-30 minutes normally even if nothing was wrong. Moreover because of the SLS architecture of the machine eg, the entire machine is a flat address space where every file, device and everything else is a memory address in an underlying database, an OS upgrade would take up to 17 hours.
I've got a garage full of stuff like this that no school, charity or other organization is willing to take off my hands for free. To them it's just too old.
...but if you subsitute 'postal worker' or 'boy scout troop leader' for 'student' and then make it a condition of employment or participation I imagine far fewer people would object. This is after all the era of 'protect me from everything and make my life risk and hassle free as long as everyone else but me is inconvenienced'. The first thing I'd do is create a course like the SAT prep course that teaches students how to fudge the at-risk test. Better yet pressure your local school board to offer something similar in the school itself under the banner of 'being a better citizen - 101': kids get one fewer real class to worry about and the school gets to hire another resource specialist. Heck they could even tie at-risk students to State and Federal funding for special education for learning disabled and physically challenged children. I can see it now, administering drug tests to children taking the at-risk exam to ensure that they're not too mediocre to falsely pass and then forcing them into taking Ritalin to ensure that they don't act out in class after flunking the exam. Better yet since you could defend the use of nothing but vague value judgments anyway, each locality could sprinkle their own version of the test with all sorts of religious, ethnic, language and cultural questions to marginalize whomever they want at will.
'Let a hundred flowers blossom' - Mao Tse Tung
In the commercial world the value, if any, of thin client is reduced deskside support, reduced helpdesk calls, reduced client rebuilds, reduced complexity. Since the real TCO is about 70% people costs and 15% software and 15% hardware the value of any thin client is directly related to the amount of people-time you save by not having to fix, manintain and manage your clients the same old expensive way. So for example you could use a diskless client that gets its boot code from the network and then whatever applications it needs. Or, you could burn the boot code and basic functions into nonvolatile storage and load the applications into the device on demand. Or you could go the Citrix way, boot the device from wherever and run the applications from a server. The client device could be essentially anything - even a full blown desktop that is in some way locked-down from being altered in any way except from central admin. The real value in any circumstance is the freedom to trash the client code, if any, rebuild it on the fly and/or snatch up the desktop device, throw it in the trash and replace it with another cheap device quickly and easily. Since PC's cost so little there is no value in worrying about the cost of the device vs. a thin client. Instead focus on the amount of time keeping the client device config'd and running correctly. The downside to all of this is that if your central admin encounters a problem or a piece of client code that doesn't work then many clients are effected at the same time. On the other hand fixing it once is x times the number of clients cheaper to recover from.