I don't quite know where to begin with this strategic suggestion for Microsoft from an armchair CEO.
Microsoft is a successful vendor of OS software. Partly this is due to their products' quality, but largely it's due to inertia, already having market dominance, having some rather aggressive, predatory business practices, and generally operating in an ethical gray area.
It's rather sloppy thinking to believe there's only one kind of corporate success, IE if Microsoft is a Big Company, and it takes a Big Company to make and sell a product like a cell phone, then Microsoft ought to be successful at making and selling cell phones.
Thinking like that ignores a lot of major differences between Microsoft and eg. Nokia. Differences that include knowledge of the cell market, good relationships with cell phone network companies, a service and support organization that would have a much larger customer base than Microsoft's software support apparatus, higher costs for manufacturing the product, larger exposure to risk from having more physical inventory vs. just having CDs and manuals, lack of design expertise in the area of phones and lack of management talent for running such an organization.
Also, the cell phone manufacturer space is crowded. If they're manufacturing physical phones they're competing with national and overseas companies that are much better at making phones than they are (initially and for the near term). They'd start at a disadvantage, something they're historically not good at.
Saying that since Microsoft wants to dominate cell phones with Windows 7 so they should start making phones is like saying Goodyear wants to dominate the car tire market so they should start making cars. You're suggesting a company that is good at something car related should automatically be good enough at making cars to dominate the market.
Finally, I believe Microsoft has a history of making MS hardware devices with few successes. The MS mouse and keyboard are exceptions. The Xbox could be considered a failure except as a loss leader for selling software (games). In some quarters their hardware produces a profit, but it's tiny compared to the profits from software. Certainly not enough to gain market dominance like the article suggests should be possible for phones. How many people do you know that own Zunes?
"The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, if researchers there can persuade lab management to keep the machine going instead of shutting it down in 2011 as currently planned."
Try to wrap your head around this: this is not an "us vs. them" situation. It's not a competition. If you're cheering for one "team" or the other you're performing a psychological trick to fool yourself into feeling good.
If either group of scientists successfully discovers new knowledge that improves our understanding of the world, everyone gains. Sure, any scientist wants to be the first to discover something important, but most scientists know that if they've made a contribution to the whole effort, they're as responsible for progress as the man who has the "eureka!" moment.
If you're hoping the American site does it before CERN because you're American, and then you get to feel good for your team "winning", why are you doing that? Why don't you try feeling good or bad about your own life, instead of identifying yourself with national or international physics projects so you can cheer them on like they were a sports team or political party?
Other than a few test or aborted development efforts and some niche markets, "cloud" computing has yet to become anything more than something for pundits to write articles about.
I predict there will be a few showpiece successes for the technologies labeled "cloud computing" before everyone realizes it's just another marketing label for the same "let's run our programs on someone else's computer" tech that's been around forever.
That'll happen about the same time that consumers/users/business owners realize they really want local control of their data, their computing power, and their applications, and start another cycle of decentralization of apps and systems.
No, just take a few deep breaths and it'll go away.
"Cloud computing" is the current buzzword express. Like "thin clients" or Ubiquitous Java or AJAX or any number of technological trends before it, it's a way for non technical executive types to "lead" by grasping hold of something they don't understand. It's a handle for managers to move large concepts around with. It doesn't matter that it's not a significant advance in technology, science, or cybernetics. Its purpose is to pick an arbitrary spot for the industry to orbit around for a while.
Most importantly, it's a way for technical types to manipulate executives, managers, and marketers. Want to sell an idea or concept to a manager? Ride the buzzword express. Even if it's a no-brainer idea that should be done to keep the company afloat, and the managers are smart enough to realize that, the easiest way to sell it is to use buzzwords. This lets the executives know you're listening to them, gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of being in control, and distracts the marketing people.
The Buzzword Express even labels for you those technical wanna-bes and young idealistic programmer types who have plenty of enthusiasm and not much real world experience. Just listen for the buzzwords...anyone taking them seriously can't be worth too much face time. It helps you weed out the riff-raff.
The only cost is that you sometimes are forced to listen to announcements about it. Just keep breathing...
Too big to be effective, too expensive...
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 4, Insightful
They're kind of like the TSA... the "war on terrorism" provided an excuse for a grandstanding president with little intelligence to look like a "great statesman" by creating more, bigger government agencies that will have limited usefulness and will never shrink on their own. After all, their creation was an opportunity for elected officials to both appear to be "doing something" about terrorism and to spend a lot of money on their constituents, helping ensure their re-election.
It's a natural human impulse to think "more is better" or "bigger is better"... I'm starting to think it's biologically rooted. At any rate, combining all the intelligence agencies into one big organization only works if all the people involved are egoless, if they all are willing to work together, and if they all don't care if they have a job tomorrow. Most people can't do this, and the folks in charge at these agencies are the ones least likely to be able to do so, especially since many of them are government appointed or union.
The worst part is that many of the people involved with these efforts truly believe that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are the best defense against "another 9/11" and that they must be allowed to continue regardless of whether the US has the money or whether our existing laws stand in their way.
Submitted for your consideration: Which was worse for our country... the 9/11 attack and the aftermath, or the wars, restrictions, loss of freedoms, and problems created by our own government in response to it?
I never believed that 9/11 was anything but a horrible crime. No less than that, but certainly no more than that...
PS: Taco, this beta release of the comments editing software needs finishing...
That's why it has to be done under the radar, so to speak. Like a viral philosophy movement or maybe even a "club" sort of thing... use the impulse to belong against itself.
If we could "immunize" people against their own behavior by popularizing this sort of thinking, it might make it easier to change the system as a whole long term, so eventually things like this would be taught in schools. But the transition, getting it accepted and popularly used, is the tricky part.
Do you know of any system or philosophy that can teach these principles in an accessible fashion, without a lot of cruft? I'm thinking that creating a self analysis and critical thinking website won't work, it has to be presented as more of a "cool, smart and geeky thinking system"...something we'd see announced on slashdot when the editors were having a good day...
I couldn't agree more. The question is, how can the average person be encouraged to become aware of their own motives? They take any criticism of their affiliated group, their ideas, or thought processes as an expected (and in some cases welcomed) attack on their intellectual and emotional self, is there a way to circumvent these defenses?
A major problem in the US legal system is illustrated here. Even though the activity the programmer is engaging in is both legal and ethical, the software company is attempting to quash competition by threats and implied means. Despite the fact that both parties know who will win and lose in court (either that or they have delusional lawyers, and the former is more likely) the software company will get its way most likely because the cost of mounting a defense is too high to even attempt it.
The problem is, this sort of bullying is borderline legal for US companies (see Abuse of Process) or similar entries on vexatious litigation. It doesn't usually trigger any kind of statutory protection unless it's repeated and obvious.
Similarly to the MPAA and RIAA lawsuits for file sharing, the larger corporate entity involved is relying on the fact that legal defense against them will cost substantially more than complying with their demands, whether the target of the legal action is guilty or innocent.
It's easy to see "simple" solutions to this problem - hire smarter patent examiners, for example or outlaw software patents. These don't fix the real issue, however, which is the excessive level of influence corporations have in the US courts and legislature, and the corresponding changes they have made to the original copyright and patent systems. Originally these systems struck a balance between public interest in a new invention or work, and the right of its creator to profit from it. Nowadays, the systems have been warped into near monopolies enforced by criminal and civil law that benefit certain limited entities. Not the public, and not even the original creator of the work, receive the bulk of the benefit. It is largely the corporations, legal entities created specifically to shield individuals from accountability for their corporate actions, that win here.
Long term, fixing the root of these problems will be very hard. It can be argued that the US Government is too firmly under corporate control for the people of the US to ever take it back. If that's the case, then the US is on a long downward spiral, and someday US citizens will think of these times as a golden age of justice and fairness.
Right now, the only way to have power to affect laws and systems like these is to become a large corporation. Money talks. It's interesting that Google seems to be working toward this end.
Personally, I believe the downward spiral in the US government will end the way such things always have... when the government officials who hold power die of old age, permitting younger officials with different values to lead. There are certain aspects of the system that have become immortal, like the two party lock on government and the spoils system that will be harder to change, but a limited human lifespan is still the saving grace of the US government.
Sounds anecdotal. But you echo what I've said above.. if you really care about time you won't use NTP or any other time sync protocol based on a variable latency network.
Nearly no one does that. Two or three servers per site (depending on redundancy needs) is fine for all the sites I've seen.. use ntp to sync over local lan to those time servers.
Or if you really care about time that much, do go ahead and put a receiver in each server. Share antennas if needed. It's not impossible for those few applications that *really* need accurate time and who aren't for some odd reason interconnected using a common clock pulse over a dedicated network.
If you really want to know, check out the rationale of the folks building Linux clusters with Myrinet instead of Ethernet. Here's a link to a paper discussing one implementation from 2001:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.31.9270
Simply put, when working with high performance computing tasks using parallel toolkits like MPI or on problems that require inter node communication of intermediate results, latency really matters to performance. Minimum latency of Myrinet or similar communications frameworks is a small fraction of what ethernet's latency is.
So to answer your implied assertion, ethernet does not work perfectly well unless you consider "well" to cover the case where running a program takes 10x longer than it otherwise would for certain problems, IE the above mentioned timing-critical ones....
It's not that it's not linked to the real world, it's that it's not news for anyone.
NTP works fine without central servers, by the way. You just sync between machines on your site, which solves 99% of the problems you wanted time sync for in the first place.
This is the sort of story item that I would expect to see in one of the little side news boxes... like announcement of a new release on freshmeat including the new algorithm, or maybe a summary of news from the ntp world on a network time dedicated site.
Most people replying to my post have missed the point, that I'm not trying to say this isn't interesting or worthwhile work... I'm actually not saying anything about the article subject at all.
I'm saying that Slashdot has become less and less focused over time, more and more dumbed down, and less useful.
Of course, I don't pay for it or anything, so I'm not outraged or upset, I'm just lamenting the fact, and hoping that by pointing it out in a semi-sarcastic fashion that someone will take notice and perhaps improve things somewhat.
If I didn't care at all I wouldn't say anything... after all, honest criticism is an attempt to help improve things, right?
So let me get this straight... you're stating that the reason this should be a Slashdot story is because A) The US government may sabotage GPS, and in such a situation our first concern would be accurate time on our computers and B) When we go to mars and/or have problems with time dilation due to near lightspeed travel, we'll need the ability to sync local time over a variable latency network because atomic clocks will still be too expensive?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is not a big deal.
Any IT organization still buying its own atomic clocks is probably a government operation. Seriously, GPS based local NTP servers have been out for years.
To answer your implication about time variation between nodes, even a basic ntp server to which your local network nodes sync will keep them in at the same wall clock time, even more so if you follow the protocol and use multiple servers, even if the time source is the servers' quartz clocks. If you have more than a few milliseconds skew after that, you've installed NTP wrong.
If you need more than fractional second timing for syncing a process or physical events, you don't try to coordinate timing over a communications medium without guaranteed latency (like ethernet). This can be seen in certain types of linux superclusters that abandon ethernet and its descendents in favor of synchronous communications.
It's great that these guys are developing a better way to estimate the correct time. I value this sort of thinking, if nothing else.
This sort of breakthrough deserves a web site announcement, or a scientific paper.
If I have to sort through the BS, sponsored articles, and overblown hype to find the useful info on Slashdot, why not skip the middleman and just browse the web itself?
GPS is fine because the reason to have time synced at different sites is to correlate events at those sites. As long as they're in sync, it doesn't generally matter if they are exactly correct with respect to the wall clock. If you need to compare event time to wall clock time, you do the math for the time period in question.
If you have some pathological need to have the exact wall clock time down to the microsecond (an amount of time no human can distinguish) correct and identical at multiple discrete locations, then it's true that GPS won't help you. But few things will.
RTTs to under a microsecond! Whoa! That'll make.... absolutely no difference at all to me. As mentioned, if I care about exact time, I use a GPS receiver (two for redundancy).
If I don't care about exact time, then something accurate to within a second or so is just fine... ntp_time fits the bill. If I'm not comparing time sensitive records across sites, I don't even care if the clocks on a site are correct, only that they're in sync.
Yes, this is development of a new system for time. Good for them. It deserves an "attaboy" in an email message, not a story on slashdot.
Nah.
Apart from the last two, all these items are addressed by the GPS receivers. Companies with dire needs for accurate time can use two, they never go down when the network is down, they can work in a mobile environment, multiple corporate sites can be assured of having synced time regardless of network delays....
I'm all for the development of new algorithms and code, but this is about as interesting as an update to the Windows clock program.
So, someone's invented ntp_time? That's only been around collecting time from time servers, many of which are atomic clock connected, since about 1985.
I'm also pretty sure there are desktop clocks based on microcontrollers that implement ntp, so they display an accurate time without a computer.
Most data centers that really care about time nowadays install a commonly available GPS unit on site, which syncs clock time with all the atomic clocks in the flying GPS constellation.
Seriously, could the editor that greenlighted this have done a google search or something? It's getting embarrassing to read slashdot these days.
I remember sitting in our college computer lab watching one of my fellow students (who was a bit more advanced than me) start up the first version of Linux that would boot off of floppies... boot and root disk, no installer, no hard disk device driver either. It had a serial terminal emulation and some basic network capabilities, so we connected a telnet session from it to a 300 bps decwriter terminal nearby and chatted back and forth for a bit. For those not familiar with the Decwriter, it was a slowish bidirectional dot matrix printer connected to a tty keyboard... one of those terminals for which the early line based editors were state of the art, because they could print a line at a time.
This article is pretty much pointless... I suppose all it does is underscore how skills that used to be mainstream (every computer person knew how to connect a terminal, or they didn't connect) are now "special"... I wonder if the guy who did this is one of the kids whose parents always told him he was a winner and gave him a trophy even if he lost?
If you want to really impress me, find a way to create/modify a netbook so it has a real, usable keyboard that others can build. Improve the product, don't just connect old hard to find hardware to it for the sake of nostalgia.
At $99, I can buy one with low expectations and play with it... much better than the ZL-5000 or the other 20-ish handhelds I've had over the years, but never used regularly. I'm just a sucker for gadgets like this.
I think I'll use it to control the rotary table on my mill until I get CNC set up...
Erik
I've faced the same problems with developing for any Apple product since the original Macintosh computers were released.
Apple's policy is that they control their products. Originally that meant you couldn't get hardware level programming information for your Mac because they didn't want anyone to write an application (or heaven forbid another OS) for the platform. They wanted to be able to change their underlying hardware (and the implementation of the API) at will without breaking legacy code. Sounds good on the face of it, but that also meant that if the API had a bug, or didn't do what you needed, or was otherwise unacceptable, you were screwed. You usually found this out after you were knee deep in your project and it was too late to change platforms.
You couldn't find out details on hardware you owned from the people who made it... outrageous. At that time I made the decision that even though the Apple platforms were just about the best functioning user interface around (and their graphics were state of the art compared to the PC platform), their corporate policies made it impossible for me to justify buying their products. It hurt to not have the shiny.
Apple's expanded their control to new levels with the App store, but it's the same reasoning. You will use their products in their way or else.
A example conversation about objections to Apple's policies to illustrate the "problem":
Apple: "Since it's our store we can choose who will sell items there or not be allowed. The fact that there's no other store competing with us isn't our fault, even though we didn't provide any way for anyone else to sell software for our devices. We're doing things the right way and we'll enforce that as we feel like it. We're also going to charge you through the nose for the privilege. Now bend over and take it, or else be uncool."
Mac Hacker 1: "Cool product, but I can't live with that." He scratches his head, walks away, and goes off to write open source Arduino code)
Mac Hacker 2: "This product is too cool to live with those rules" Reverse-engineers the iPhone to allow third party software to be loaded and publishes the info. Is sued by Apple, loses entire bank account plus cost of iPhone.
Third Party retail software developer: "But, but, but..... the iPad is sooooo cooooooool... and we could make soooooo much money writing software for it, and I have a reeeally cool idea, and I don't wanna follow your rules, and it hurts, and my iPhone is too cooool to stop using it... can't you guys at Apple just approve our application for the store? Pretty please? "
Then he runs off and posts to a blog to complain that Apple isn't being fair, because after all they made their products too cool for us to not use them, and we can't possibly be responsible enough to NOT BUY PRODUCTS FROM THEM.
I love the iPhone interface... it's fun and good looking. Too bad it's an Apple product, or I'd buy a couple.
I expected reading this article to call this hype... there are many new discoveries reported here on Slashdot, especially with regard to optical technologies like solar cells and LCD displays, that are interesting and potentially useful... if they were at all practical or near market ready.
This looked like another one, except upon reading what there is of the article and web page it just looks like the company building these has no PR or web staff, and seems completely focused on technology. Their web page looks like it was made by an intern, and they don't seem to have supplied much in the way of exciting facts or sound bites to the reporter, leaving them to provide some basic facts and fill in some boilerplate hyperbole: "Could Provide Low-Cost Solar for Developing Nations".
From the looks of the technology, the basic principles were discovered prior to 2007 and a patent filed about then. Likely the patent was just granted. The company that is researching this stuff formed then, got a round of funding, and started delivering prototypes and test types.
As of now they seem to be creating and testing whole assemblies, IE solar panels you can put outside and use for electricity.
This is interesting because it means this isn't a lab curiosity.. they haven't demonstrated an effect in the lab, they've actually managed to develop it into a form that is nearing mass production capability.
So why is this interesting for those of us not in the third world? Well, that bit about "developing nations" is an attempt to get people to relate to what the tech is good for.... possibly because wide implementation of solar power needs more than just good cells to work, it requires a massive change in infrastructure to distribute power or a major change on a per home basis to store and use the power in your own house. That's not as much of a problem in third world countries which have no reliable power anyway, and where people would be happy to have solar during the day.
Third world comments aside, if the efficiency curve they're measuring is correct, these cells are a disruptive technology for the solar cell business. They're cheap to produce, relatively environmentally friendly, flexible, light... basically an excellent solar cell technology that everyone can use everywhere it's sunny.
If these work out and get into mass production (the technology company making them is partnered with a couple manufacturing firms already) then you'll see a lot of them around everywhere, because they'll remove a couple major barriers to wider solar cell use... cost and the fragility of existing cells.
Of course, odds are this is another cool announcement that won't go anywhere, but at least there are indications of some substance here and there...
Those of you who think that a laser annihilating a fuel pellet to make a "mini-star" is news should probably do a little reading about the National Ignition Facility.
They've been doing this for literally years... they produce a lot of good, difficult to gather scientific data because they can achieve higher energy levels than most fusion research projects.
This article disguises what would be a great article for an internal newsletter at the NIF by changing terms and neglecting the fact that this is a continuation of older, ongoing research, in an attempt to publicize the research and possibly publicize the "problems" with the government run facility. The hint of scandal and potential for "changing everything" are meant to attract attention to this old news article.
Included are the usual bright sunny statements about solving the energy issues of the world, plus the usual over the top implications about unknown scientific territory, to make people uneasy, which also encourages interest.
There's no chance of a catastrophe happening from this... if it was going to happen, it would have done so in the 1980s or earlier.
This article should have been titled "National Ignition Facility gets new laser to continue years long research project"... but then it's not worth posting here, right?
It's interesting how many people here are discussing whether this is a good law(ordinance, ruling) or not based on whether the food in question is healthy or not, or whether such a choice should be left to parents.
No one seems to notice that the really scary thing happening here is that the government is using its power to control free choice under cover of doing something "for the good of all" based on one small group of people's views on things they have no expertise in.. nutrition, child behavior, or even parenting skills.
Few people would disagree with the general statement that "McDonalds' food is unhealthy", vague as it is. A better statement would be that "McDonalds food contains large amounts of undesirable food substances, and consumption should be limited to benefit health" or maybe even "Don't feed your kids Big Macs every day, they'll get too much fat and cholesterol".
The problem here is that the government is essentially accepting as fact that A) McDonalds food should not be eaten by children B) That inclusion of toys in happy meals encourages children to eat there, even though their parents make the ultimate decision, and C) That it's the government's responsibility to protect those children from their parents' choices.
The government here is supporting one corporation (McDonalds) less than another (all other restaurants without toys). If this doesn't tick you off as much as Halliburton getting no-bid contracts, it should.
It doesn't matter if the idea behind the ruling was a good or bad one... actually, it wouldn't matter if McDonalds was serving carcinogenic hamburgers. The government, any government at any level, needs to abandon the idea that it "knows better" and keep its hands off its citizens... the people it's supposed to be serving, not herding. If the experts within the government (FDA) decide that food is harmful, they have the authority to stop its sale, explicitly granted them by the people of this country. If a state, county, or town representative disagrees, tough luck. It's none of their business, and they have no more right to try to control those things than any other citizen.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite know where to begin with this strategic suggestion for Microsoft from an armchair CEO.
Microsoft is a successful vendor of OS software. Partly this is due to their products' quality, but largely it's due to inertia, already having market dominance, having some rather aggressive, predatory business practices, and generally operating in an ethical gray area.
It's rather sloppy thinking to believe there's only one kind of corporate success, IE if Microsoft is a Big Company, and it takes a Big Company to make and sell a product like a cell phone, then Microsoft ought to be successful at making and selling cell phones.
Thinking like that ignores a lot of major differences between Microsoft and eg. Nokia. Differences that include knowledge of the cell market, good relationships with cell phone network companies, a service and support organization that would have a much larger customer base than Microsoft's software support apparatus, higher costs for manufacturing the product, larger exposure to risk from having more physical inventory vs. just having CDs and manuals, lack of design expertise in the area of phones and lack of management talent for running such an organization.
Also, the cell phone manufacturer space is crowded. If they're manufacturing physical phones they're competing with national and overseas companies that are much better at making phones than they are (initially and for the near term). They'd start at a disadvantage, something they're historically not good at.
Saying that since Microsoft wants to dominate cell phones with Windows 7 so they should start making phones is like saying Goodyear wants to dominate the car tire market so they should start making cars. You're suggesting a company that is good at something car related should automatically be good enough at making cars to dominate the market.
Finally, I believe Microsoft has a history of making MS hardware devices with few successes. The MS mouse and keyboard are exceptions. The Xbox could be considered a failure except as a loss leader for selling software (games). In some quarters their hardware produces a profit, but it's tiny compared to the profits from software. Certainly not enough to gain market dominance like the article suggests should be possible for phones. How many people do you know that own Zunes?
"The longer shutdown could be a chance for US scientists working on the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, if researchers there can persuade lab management to keep the machine going instead of shutting it down in 2011 as currently planned."
Try to wrap your head around this: this is not an "us vs. them" situation. It's not a competition. If you're cheering for one "team" or the other you're performing a psychological trick to fool yourself into feeling good.
If either group of scientists successfully discovers new knowledge that improves our understanding of the world, everyone gains. Sure, any scientist wants to be the first to discover something important, but most scientists know that if they've made a contribution to the whole effort, they're as responsible for progress as the man who has the "eureka!" moment.
If you're hoping the American site does it before CERN because you're American, and then you get to feel good for your team "winning", why are you doing that? Why don't you try feeling good or bad about your own life, instead of identifying yourself with national or international physics projects so you can cheer them on like they were a sports team or political party?
But... new != noteworthy.
Can is also not the same as "will".
Other than a few test or aborted development efforts and some niche markets, "cloud" computing has yet to become anything more than something for pundits to write articles about.
I predict there will be a few showpiece successes for the technologies labeled "cloud computing" before everyone realizes it's just another marketing label for the same "let's run our programs on someone else's computer" tech that's been around forever.
That'll happen about the same time that consumers/users/business owners realize they really want local control of their data, their computing power, and their applications, and start another cycle of decentralization of apps and systems.
The wheel of time turns...
No, just take a few deep breaths and it'll go away.
"Cloud computing" is the current buzzword express. Like "thin clients" or Ubiquitous Java or AJAX or any number of technological trends before it, it's a way for non technical executive types to "lead" by grasping hold of something they don't understand. It's a handle for managers to move large concepts around with. It doesn't matter that it's not a significant advance in technology, science, or cybernetics. Its purpose is to pick an arbitrary spot for the industry to orbit around for a while.
Most importantly, it's a way for technical types to manipulate executives, managers, and marketers. Want to sell an idea or concept to a manager? Ride the buzzword express. Even if it's a no-brainer idea that should be done to keep the company afloat, and the managers are smart enough to realize that, the easiest way to sell it is to use buzzwords. This lets the executives know you're listening to them, gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of being in control, and distracts the marketing people.
The Buzzword Express even labels for you those technical wanna-bes and young idealistic programmer types who have plenty of enthusiasm and not much real world experience. Just listen for the buzzwords...anyone taking them seriously can't be worth too much face time. It helps you weed out the riff-raff.
The only cost is that you sometimes are forced to listen to announcements about it. Just keep breathing...
They're kind of like the TSA... the "war on terrorism" provided an excuse for a grandstanding president with little intelligence to look like a "great statesman" by creating more, bigger government agencies that will have limited usefulness and will never shrink on their own. After all, their creation was an opportunity for elected officials to both appear to be "doing something" about terrorism and to spend a lot of money on their constituents, helping ensure their re-election.
It's a natural human impulse to think "more is better" or "bigger is better"... I'm starting to think it's biologically rooted. At any rate, combining all the intelligence agencies into one big organization only works if all the people involved are egoless, if they all are willing to work together, and if they all don't care if they have a job tomorrow. Most people can't do this, and the folks in charge at these agencies are the ones least likely to be able to do so, especially since many of them are government appointed or union.
The worst part is that many of the people involved with these efforts truly believe that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are the best defense against "another 9/11" and that they must be allowed to continue regardless of whether the US has the money or whether our existing laws stand in their way.
Submitted for your consideration: Which was worse for our country... the 9/11 attack and the aftermath, or the wars, restrictions, loss of freedoms, and problems created by our own government in response to it?
I never believed that 9/11 was anything but a horrible crime. No less than that, but certainly no more than that...
PS: Taco, this beta release of the comments editing software needs finishing...
No software patents, beautiful country, and I've heard the scuba diving and beer are good. Time to move....
That's why it has to be done under the radar, so to speak. Like a viral philosophy movement or maybe even a "club" sort of thing... use the impulse to belong against itself.
If we could "immunize" people against their own behavior by popularizing this sort of thinking, it might make it easier to change the system as a whole long term, so eventually things like this would be taught in schools. But the transition, getting it accepted and popularly used, is the tricky part.
Do you know of any system or philosophy that can teach these principles in an accessible fashion, without a lot of cruft? I'm thinking that creating a self analysis and critical thinking website won't work, it has to be presented as more of a "cool, smart and geeky thinking system"...something we'd see announced on slashdot when the editors were having a good day...
I couldn't agree more. The question is, how can the average person be encouraged to become aware of their own motives? They take any criticism of their affiliated group, their ideas, or thought processes as an expected (and in some cases welcomed) attack on their intellectual and emotional self, is there a way to circumvent these defenses?
The problem is, this sort of bullying is borderline legal for US companies (see Abuse of Process) or similar entries on vexatious litigation. It doesn't usually trigger any kind of statutory protection unless it's repeated and obvious.
Similarly to the MPAA and RIAA lawsuits for file sharing, the larger corporate entity involved is relying on the fact that legal defense against them will cost substantially more than complying with their demands, whether the target of the legal action is guilty or innocent.
It's easy to see "simple" solutions to this problem - hire smarter patent examiners, for example or outlaw software patents. These don't fix the real issue, however, which is the excessive level of influence corporations have in the US courts and legislature, and the corresponding changes they have made to the original copyright and patent systems. Originally these systems struck a balance between public interest in a new invention or work, and the right of its creator to profit from it. Nowadays, the systems have been warped into near monopolies enforced by criminal and civil law that benefit certain limited entities. Not the public, and not even the original creator of the work, receive the bulk of the benefit. It is largely the corporations, legal entities created specifically to shield individuals from accountability for their corporate actions, that win here.
Long term, fixing the root of these problems will be very hard. It can be argued that the US Government is too firmly under corporate control for the people of the US to ever take it back. If that's the case, then the US is on a long downward spiral, and someday US citizens will think of these times as a golden age of justice and fairness.
Right now, the only way to have power to affect laws and systems like these is to become a large corporation. Money talks. It's interesting that Google seems to be working toward this end.
Personally, I believe the downward spiral in the US government will end the way such things always have... when the government officials who hold power die of old age, permitting younger officials with different values to lead. There are certain aspects of the system that have become immortal, like the two party lock on government and the spoils system that will be harder to change, but a limited human lifespan is still the saving grace of the US government.
Sounds anecdotal. But you echo what I've said above.. if you really care about time you won't use NTP or any other time sync protocol based on a variable latency network.
Nearly no one does that. Two or three servers per site (depending on redundancy needs) is fine for all the sites I've seen.. use ntp to sync over local lan to those time servers.
Or if you really care about time that much, do go ahead and put a receiver in each server. Share antennas if needed. It's not impossible for those few applications that *really* need accurate time and who aren't for some odd reason interconnected using a common clock pulse over a dedicated network.
If you really want to know, check out the rationale of the folks building Linux clusters with Myrinet instead of Ethernet. Here's a link to a paper discussing one implementation from 2001: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.31.9270
Simply put, when working with high performance computing tasks using parallel toolkits like MPI or on problems that require inter node communication of intermediate results, latency really matters to performance. Minimum latency of Myrinet or similar communications frameworks is a small fraction of what ethernet's latency is.
So to answer your implied assertion, ethernet does not work perfectly well unless you consider "well" to cover the case where running a program takes 10x longer than it otherwise would for certain problems, IE the above mentioned timing-critical ones....
NTP works fine without central servers, by the way. You just sync between machines on your site, which solves 99% of the problems you wanted time sync for in the first place.
This is the sort of story item that I would expect to see in one of the little side news boxes... like announcement of a new release on freshmeat including the new algorithm, or maybe a summary of news from the ntp world on a network time dedicated site.
Most people replying to my post have missed the point, that I'm not trying to say this isn't interesting or worthwhile work... I'm actually not saying anything about the article subject at all.
I'm saying that Slashdot has become less and less focused over time, more and more dumbed down, and less useful.
Of course, I don't pay for it or anything, so I'm not outraged or upset, I'm just lamenting the fact, and hoping that by pointing it out in a semi-sarcastic fashion that someone will take notice and perhaps improve things somewhat.
If I didn't care at all I wouldn't say anything... after all, honest criticism is an attempt to help improve things, right?
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is not a big deal.
To answer your implication about time variation between nodes, even a basic ntp server to which your local network nodes sync will keep them in at the same wall clock time, even more so if you follow the protocol and use multiple servers, even if the time source is the servers' quartz clocks. If you have more than a few milliseconds skew after that, you've installed NTP wrong.
If you need more than fractional second timing for syncing a process or physical events, you don't try to coordinate timing over a communications medium without guaranteed latency (like ethernet). This can be seen in certain types of linux superclusters that abandon ethernet and its descendents in favor of synchronous communications.
It's great that these guys are developing a better way to estimate the correct time. I value this sort of thinking, if nothing else.
This sort of breakthrough deserves a web site announcement, or a scientific paper.
If I have to sort through the BS, sponsored articles, and overblown hype to find the useful info on Slashdot, why not skip the middleman and just browse the web itself?
If you have some pathological need to have the exact wall clock time down to the microsecond (an amount of time no human can distinguish) correct and identical at multiple discrete locations, then it's true that GPS won't help you. But few things will.
RTTs to under a microsecond! Whoa! That'll make.... absolutely no difference at all to me. As mentioned, if I care about exact time, I use a GPS receiver (two for redundancy).
If I don't care about exact time, then something accurate to within a second or so is just fine... ntp_time fits the bill. If I'm not comparing time sensitive records across sites, I don't even care if the clocks on a site are correct, only that they're in sync.
Yes, this is development of a new system for time. Good for them. It deserves an "attaboy" in an email message, not a story on slashdot.
Nah. Apart from the last two, all these items are addressed by the GPS receivers. Companies with dire needs for accurate time can use two, they never go down when the network is down, they can work in a mobile environment, multiple corporate sites can be assured of having synced time regardless of network delays.... I'm all for the development of new algorithms and code, but this is about as interesting as an update to the Windows clock program.
I'm also pretty sure there are desktop clocks based on microcontrollers that implement ntp, so they display an accurate time without a computer.
Most data centers that really care about time nowadays install a commonly available GPS unit on site, which syncs clock time with all the atomic clocks in the flying GPS constellation.
Seriously, could the editor that greenlighted this have done a google search or something? It's getting embarrassing to read slashdot these days.
I remember sitting in our college computer lab watching one of my fellow students (who was a bit more advanced than me) start up the first version of Linux that would boot off of floppies... boot and root disk, no installer, no hard disk device driver either. It had a serial terminal emulation and some basic network capabilities, so we connected a telnet session from it to a 300 bps decwriter terminal nearby and chatted back and forth for a bit. For those not familiar with the Decwriter, it was a slowish bidirectional dot matrix printer connected to a tty keyboard... one of those terminals for which the early line based editors were state of the art, because they could print a line at a time.
This article is pretty much pointless... I suppose all it does is underscore how skills that used to be mainstream (every computer person knew how to connect a terminal, or they didn't connect) are now "special"... I wonder if the guy who did this is one of the kids whose parents always told him he was a winner and gave him a trophy even if he lost?
If you want to really impress me, find a way to create/modify a netbook so it has a real, usable keyboard that others can build. Improve the product, don't just connect old hard to find hardware to it for the sake of nostalgia.
At $99, I can buy one with low expectations and play with it... much better than the ZL-5000 or the other 20-ish handhelds I've had over the years, but never used regularly. I'm just a sucker for gadgets like this. I think I'll use it to control the rotary table on my mill until I get CNC set up... Erik
Apple's policy is that they control their products. Originally that meant you couldn't get hardware level programming information for your Mac because they didn't want anyone to write an application (or heaven forbid another OS) for the platform. They wanted to be able to change their underlying hardware (and the implementation of the API) at will without breaking legacy code. Sounds good on the face of it, but that also meant that if the API had a bug, or didn't do what you needed, or was otherwise unacceptable, you were screwed. You usually found this out after you were knee deep in your project and it was too late to change platforms.
You couldn't find out details on hardware you owned from the people who made it... outrageous. At that time I made the decision that even though the Apple platforms were just about the best functioning user interface around (and their graphics were state of the art compared to the PC platform), their corporate policies made it impossible for me to justify buying their products. It hurt to not have the shiny.
Apple's expanded their control to new levels with the App store, but it's the same reasoning. You will use their products in their way or else.
A example conversation about objections to Apple's policies to illustrate the "problem":
Apple: "Since it's our store we can choose who will sell items there or not be allowed. The fact that there's no other store competing with us isn't our fault, even though we didn't provide any way for anyone else to sell software for our devices. We're doing things the right way and we'll enforce that as we feel like it. We're also going to charge you through the nose for the privilege. Now bend over and take it, or else be uncool."
Mac Hacker 1: "Cool product, but I can't live with that." He scratches his head, walks away, and goes off to write open source Arduino code)
Mac Hacker 2: "This product is too cool to live with those rules" Reverse-engineers the iPhone to allow third party software to be loaded and publishes the info. Is sued by Apple, loses entire bank account plus cost of iPhone.
Third Party retail software developer: "But, but, but..... the iPad is sooooo cooooooool... and we could make soooooo much money writing software for it, and I have a reeeally cool idea, and I don't wanna follow your rules, and it hurts, and my iPhone is too cooool to stop using it... can't you guys at Apple just approve our application for the store? Pretty please? "
Then he runs off and posts to a blog to complain that Apple isn't being fair, because after all they made their products too cool for us to not use them, and we can't possibly be responsible enough to NOT BUY PRODUCTS FROM THEM.
I love the iPhone interface... it's fun and good looking. Too bad it's an Apple product, or I'd buy a couple.
Erik
I expected reading this article to call this hype... there are many new discoveries reported here on Slashdot, especially with regard to optical technologies like solar cells and LCD displays, that are interesting and potentially useful... if they were at all practical or near market ready.
This looked like another one, except upon reading what there is of the article and web page it just looks like the company building these has no PR or web staff, and seems completely focused on technology. Their web page looks like it was made by an intern, and they don't seem to have supplied much in the way of exciting facts or sound bites to the reporter, leaving them to provide some basic facts and fill in some boilerplate hyperbole: "Could Provide Low-Cost Solar for Developing Nations".
From the looks of the technology, the basic principles were discovered prior to 2007 and a patent filed about then. Likely the patent was just granted. The company that is researching this stuff formed then, got a round of funding, and started delivering prototypes and test types.
As of now they seem to be creating and testing whole assemblies, IE solar panels you can put outside and use for electricity.
This is interesting because it means this isn't a lab curiosity.. they haven't demonstrated an effect in the lab, they've actually managed to develop it into a form that is nearing mass production capability.
So why is this interesting for those of us not in the third world? Well, that bit about "developing nations" is an attempt to get people to relate to what the tech is good for.... possibly because wide implementation of solar power needs more than just good cells to work, it requires a massive change in infrastructure to distribute power or a major change on a per home basis to store and use the power in your own house. That's not as much of a problem in third world countries which have no reliable power anyway, and where people would be happy to have solar during the day.
Third world comments aside, if the efficiency curve they're measuring is correct, these cells are a disruptive technology for the solar cell business. They're cheap to produce, relatively environmentally friendly, flexible, light... basically an excellent solar cell technology that everyone can use everywhere it's sunny.
If these work out and get into mass production (the technology company making them is partnered with a couple manufacturing firms already) then you'll see a lot of them around everywhere, because they'll remove a couple major barriers to wider solar cell use... cost and the fragility of existing cells.
Of course, odds are this is another cool announcement that won't go anywhere, but at least there are indications of some substance here and there...
Erik
Those of you who think that a laser annihilating a fuel pellet to make a "mini-star" is news should probably do a little reading about the National Ignition Facility.
They've been doing this for literally years... they produce a lot of good, difficult to gather scientific data because they can achieve higher energy levels than most fusion research projects.
This article disguises what would be a great article for an internal newsletter at the NIF by changing terms and neglecting the fact that this is a continuation of older, ongoing research, in an attempt to publicize the research and possibly publicize the "problems" with the government run facility. The hint of scandal and potential for "changing everything" are meant to attract attention to this old news article.
Included are the usual bright sunny statements about solving the energy issues of the world, plus the usual over the top implications about unknown scientific territory, to make people uneasy, which also encourages interest.
There's no chance of a catastrophe happening from this... if it was going to happen, it would have done so in the 1980s or earlier.
This article should have been titled "National Ignition Facility gets new laser to continue years long research project"... but then it's not worth posting here, right?
Erik
It's interesting how many people here are discussing whether this is a good law(ordinance, ruling) or not based on whether the food in question is healthy or not, or whether such a choice should be left to parents.
No one seems to notice that the really scary thing happening here is that the government is using its power to control free choice under cover of doing something "for the good of all" based on one small group of people's views on things they have no expertise in.. nutrition, child behavior, or even parenting skills.
Few people would disagree with the general statement that "McDonalds' food is unhealthy", vague as it is. A better statement would be that "McDonalds food contains large amounts of undesirable food substances, and consumption should be limited to benefit health" or maybe even "Don't feed your kids Big Macs every day, they'll get too much fat and cholesterol".
The problem here is that the government is essentially accepting as fact that A) McDonalds food should not be eaten by children B) That inclusion of toys in happy meals encourages children to eat there, even though their parents make the ultimate decision, and C) That it's the government's responsibility to protect those children from their parents' choices.
The government here is supporting one corporation (McDonalds) less than another (all other restaurants without toys). If this doesn't tick you off as much as Halliburton getting no-bid contracts, it should.
It doesn't matter if the idea behind the ruling was a good or bad one... actually, it wouldn't matter if McDonalds was serving carcinogenic hamburgers. The government, any government at any level, needs to abandon the idea that it "knows better" and keep its hands off its citizens... the people it's supposed to be serving, not herding. If the experts within the government (FDA) decide that food is harmful, they have the authority to stop its sale, explicitly granted them by the people of this country. If a state, county, or town representative disagrees, tough luck. It's none of their business, and they have no more right to try to control those things than any other citizen.
Erik