so what's the problem? Dude, don't take yourself so seriously!:-)
when I'm out running along a well used path in my town, there is no fucking way I can live with a woman running infront of me. At times this put me close to a heart-attack. But I have all the more fun because this kind of stuff. Same thing, when I try to overtake someone who is barely slower than me. heh.
Man, this is oart of the fun of life! As long as you realize, that your life does not depend on being cooler/stronger/faster/whatever I consider it good-natured fun. After all, where would be in technology without some good ol' testosterone-driven competition?
plus, women have some fun --uhm, let's call them characteristics to laugh about
well, doh. "Really smart scientists have discovered that living organisms perform the computation of a massively linked network of cells to optimize the (hard) problems of survival and reproduction. Within these cells, hugely complicated molecular mechanisms ensure I/O of signals and transmitters to other linked cells."
That doesn't occur to me to be a particularly deep insight, given the current knowledge about biology and evolution. Not wanting to take the magic out of microbiology or anything, but could some enlightened person in that field describe, why this is profoundly cool, worthy of a publication in Nature?
as somebody living in this beautiful country called Germany I can honestly say: Yes, they are completely dumb.
Kinda falls into the same category as plastering the country with wind-generators, literally pumping billions of taxmoney in there only to then decide that too many ruin the country-side view and stop (hail ecology). The same people who decide to phase out nuclear energy (bc. it's oh so dangerous and what not) only to then sell the production plants to China (hurray for credibility). The same people who again pump billions in subsidies into super expensive local coal only to buy the cheap nuclear energy from France. Ah, did I mention the 5-fold public trash bins (paper, bio-degradable, rest, glas, "green point"), only to feed the first three TOGETHER to burn it?
At least I think they're idealistic, in a kind of very naive way... As you can see, they're not my favorites...:-)
they point out is IMO that politicians have so much faith in the flakey technology, that they totally disregard the warnings from security experts.
This of course, next to waisting huge amounts of money, can create a false sense of security or even lower security as in the example they cite: on an airport, if every 10000th passenger is screened for second testing, the odds are high that guards will not be very optimistic about the system and make mistakes, diss the system, etc.
in the mean time, terrorists travel by sea, land, etc. Even most of 9/11 went by their real names....
exactly what I was thinking. And if you're trying to kill corporate espionage in your company, you also need to take care of the wildly available digital cameras (for ~$50 you get a usable one too nowadays).
Does that remotely-switch-off-cellphone-camera-thing also decapitate your regular digital camera? I'd be very surprised (and impressed). Seems like more security snake-oil to me.
As much as i can see the reasoning (pres. safety, remotely controlled bombs, etc...), it still leaves a bad taste of "some are more equal than others" in your mouth. Security (even presidential) & military should abide the law just as anybody else. Change that stupid law, if necessary.
IMHO such a law is not logical anyway: since when does some cell-phone operator "own" the airwaves of e.g. my living room, or more to the point, my restaurant / movie theatre. What exact difference does active / passive jamming make w.r.t the law (if it's on my very own property)? How do they justify the (il)legality of one or the other...
what the position here in Germany is, I dunno... Does anybody else, I'm curious.
1.) Here in Germany, higher education comes mostly for free, including attending University. This is paid for by state taxes, mostly.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states (Laender), of which Berlin is one, due to prolonged blissful ignorance of reality (tax revenue down) in crazy public spending. Berlin is one of the worst candidates with huge debt, kind of like CA in the US, even suing federal gvt. to bail them out and unfortunately winning.
3.) Berlin has three full universities plus N colleges and such, sucking up money.
4.) what's an avg. politician to do? Slash university funding big style, amongst other things, potentially closing one of them down for good
5.) what's a university student to do? go on strike (IMO not very creative either, but I digress....) and generally raise awareness that higher education is worth its money.
6.) what's a prof to do? help students out (after all they're in the same boat), by e.g. holding a 3 day continuous physics lecture in the middle of Berlin, for everybody to attend.
That's why they're doing it. If you or I agree with it, is another question...:-)
From where I come from, we do something called "lattice gauge theory", which basically simulates QCD, the force that e.g. binds quarks into protons and neutrons. This is an amazingly hard problem, which is not solvable or even tracktable with pencil and paper (theorists' favorite tool).
Now, Ken Wilson (=cool Nobelprize guy) who basically started this field, gave a famous estimate in a talk at a conference some time back, stating that to do a serious project in lattice QCD, one would need some (listen up now...) PetaFlopYears. Yes, imagine a computer being able to 1 PetaFlop/s running for one whole year nonstop. Another guy, Karl Janssen, said last year at the same annual conference, "yup, still true". So there is the requirement. Now, where is the machine?
From what I know, BlueGene is a direct decendant (sp?) of QCDSP (QCD on a DSP), a special purpose beast, built with IBM at Columbia Univ. to tackle, guess what, QCD. Its successor, soon to be rolled out, is QCDOC (= QCD on a chip), again together with IBM which is very close to the BG design. So all around cool IBM is using this know how and putting it to use for other research fields. If you're really interested, just google for QCDSP, QCDOC, lattice QCD, etc.
I don't know anything about protein folding or weather, but I can imagine, those guys are just as anxious to get some serious CPU in form of these monsters as the lattice guys.
As was pointed out above, "smaller" just means, you can cram more in one room and therefore have more CPU.
PS: not only do I think IBM is geeky-cool, I'm starting to admire their strategy: do worthwhile research with Academia, use know how, make into money, cf. Grid aka. IT as utility, BlueGene aka. Supercomputer in a box. awesome.
I guess I had a rather blank look of incomprehension on my face 2 months ago, when the whole fucking appartment went dark because..... I connected audio-out of my computer to my stereo. yup. nothing more to add. And no I didn't learn (I guess I didn't want to believe), I tried it again, and there went my cordless phone. Must be some totally unbelievable random short somwhere.
Plus, why do megacorps always have to be the bad guys?
Just imagine another one of those corps seeing all their 20+ samba servers disappear, because they upgraded to the new whiz-bang TC-enabled CISCO-routers. Imagine the pleasant surprise of the CTO when their ISP tells him, their web site is gone, since they switched over to TC. and so on.
That's supply and zero (I would even say negative) demand right there. What's more, Linux is a real force in the enterprise market now and will be more so by the time TC is rolled out, since MS is plainly running out of creativity (cf. Longhorn, will be ready real soon now, no really, believe us, blah,...). MS will have to have some real good arguments for annoying so many people with that stuff, esp. the people that are so important for their cash flow (ie. corporate market). If they don't, which is what I suspect, then TC will be as successful as their mobile phone software.
bad reading of what i wrote, IMO. see the rest of comment.
re: your example: what if you made money with that book (by whatever means), that violates the original author's IP? would the original author be entitled to make you stop or sue you for damages, etc.? My guess (again IANAL) is yes.
more realistically, what if i sold you the rights to a patent i didn't own, and you build a successful company around it? would the rightful owner of the patent have no right at all wrt. to you unrightfully using a patent?
the legal position here (Germ.) at least is, that a contract is based on unlawful circumstances (ie. IP-violation) is plain void. I'd be surprised if it were completely different in the US.
more on topic: what that means for code partially (assuming it's true) by IP-violations, I dunno, but my guess is, as stated before, that the original owner of that IP still has some rights.
Dude,
I would very much think so. At least here (in Deutschland), if you buy e.g. stolen goods of someone, its your bad (and the dealer's) and you are liable in that you have to give them back.
Now, before the whole world and their mother screams IP-violation =/= theft, I realize, there is a difference. But how about you make money with the leaked Half-Life (or whatever game that was) source code, even if you are not the thief or not even know the code belongs to somebody else? Or you make money with derivative products in the same manner? Surely the company owning the rights to the code could sue you for damages or at least for a cut of the profits. So, I imagine, from that perspective, there must be some sort of legal strategy that is not bs. on SCO's part (in total contrast of course to the quality of the basis of their claims).
OTOH, IANAL.:-)
Re:Do you value your organs?
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 1
Then the correct question should be:
does your pancreas give you a strategic advantage over everybody else (who has one too)?
that is what the article is discussing at least.
actually, he's correct
on
Does IT Matter?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What he says is, that the whole of IT is becoming a commodity, just like electricity. Having it is essential, but it doesn't give you a strategic advantage in business, since others have (to have) it also.
I actually think he's right. IBM e.g. effectively commoditisized (if that's a word) PCs by opening up the their standards years ago, MS having the complentary product "OS/Office" that made them superrich. Consider this: Having Win+MSOffice (please no religious zealotry...:) ) might have given you an advantage 10 yrs ago, if you were one of few and could reorganize your business processes to be much more efficient using it. Nowadays, everybody has it and needs it, you loose that advantage.
This guy Carr just generalizes that to the whole of IT, including the "new" stuff like the net. Beats me, why IBM is crying foul, since they are running this huge PR campaign of "IT as a utility" which is exactly that.
not only for the plain reasons illustrated in the above threads about the mere numbers of hits.
if anybody would "crush/cannibalise/castrate" google, the next good==popular search engine is only but a few geeks and good ideas away. There are quite a number of contestants lined up and waiting and the barrier to entry for the search engine market is still very low. Google's main asset IMHO is its brand name.
So, I don't really get google's attractiveness to buyers. They're fine and dandy but still only a search engine with a good advertising business. The moment big companies (Yahoo, MSFT, whoever) make a real push into Google's market (aka. high quality search results with the combined cash revenue from adverts), and they will, I would like to see what inherent benefits Google can offer to those from the advertisers perspective.
Yeah, I think Google is excellent (and cool) too, but then I'm not an investor.
So what exactly would magically change, if their shares were publicly traded as opposed to being held privately by quite a bunch of VC's ???
Personally, I don't buy all this hipocrisy outside money supposedly destroying the company. Google would probably be long overtaken by some other company had it not gotten outside capital to fund growth and we would not have one of the coolest web-services around.
And although the dot.com-boom is over, the fundemental paradigm of web-services still exists: practically no barrier to entry. So if google dies (which I don't expect), another better search engine will take its place. That is the cherrished capitalism for you.:-)
OTOH, if they can use the money to expand their business (and reap some rewards for their cool work), I'm all for it. In the end it's and always has been a business decision.
Applying my "grep -i $anything_interesting $daily_sco_story" yields:
Facts from the story: Montavista writes software under GPL. Lineo uses said software but removes copyright notices. Montavista sues Lineo over that (copyrights must be retained under the GPL)! Montavista wins (settlement).
How cool is that. And here we have people bitching that something as the GPL won't hold up to any major court challenge.
Smile, people. This is really cool considering that numerous people believe the GPL won't stand a chance in court.
some authors however do choose to put political stuff in their licenses. From mbrola (free speech synthesizer):
Permission is granted to use this Program for non-commercial, non-military purposes,...
(emphasis mine). Not exactly what's discussed here, but same direction. GNU could also choose to include something similar in the GPL if they (we?) wanted to (that would at least make the scenario you described illegal, for what it's worth), but they don't. IMHO that's the relevant choice.
giving nukes to Osama or Saddam would mean breaking existing law (unfortunately for the argument) though. But:
was there nothing wrong with foreign companies supplying Adolf Hitler (at least in part) with the necessary technology to industrialise murder? Would it have been ok, if there had been a bidding on contracts to build concentration camps (then or more recently in Serbia)?
so business is really void of morality and ethics?
no isos, but ftp. that's the only install method I ever use. Set up, start, get lunch, come back, do the final set up, viola. Most other distros work similarly, I guess (or hope).
ditto for SuSE (for ages, at least for 1-2 yrs now), which is not that surprising, as they are major money-givers to the ALSA-guys.
using yast2 for the last few (3?) releases, you don't even have to do anything yourself. you just say 'ok' to "Detected soundcard X". On all the different machines I installed (~20-30) the detection was correct.
... although his latest focus is on two next-generation technologies:
grid computing and autonomic systems...
This is the main point. Grid computing is in the works to be able to handle (store+analyze) the shitloads of data that will be coming out of the next gen particle accelerators such as LHC at CERN.
It's about creating an architecture for moving the data around and assigning cpu, all transparently, at various participating research facilities. Check e.g. here .
so Palmisano (and this guy Berger) figure, they can leverage that and make it commercial, make it available to your average company (banks etc.).
IMHO this is big (in physics too). As usual, really cool stuff comes from high energy physics (www anyone?). Guess which field I am in grad school in.
Slashdot Mirror
when I'm out running along a well used path in my town, there is no fucking way I can live with a woman running infront of me. At times this put me close to a heart-attack. But I have all the more fun because this kind of stuff. Same thing, when I try to overtake someone who is barely slower than me. heh.
Man, this is oart of the fun of life! As long as you realize, that your life does not depend on being cooler/stronger/faster/whatever I consider it good-natured fun. After all, where would be in technology without some good ol' testosterone-driven competition?
plus, women have some fun --uhm, let's call them characteristics to laugh about
well, doh. "Really smart scientists have discovered that living organisms perform the computation of a massively linked network of cells to optimize the (hard) problems of survival and reproduction. Within these cells, hugely complicated molecular mechanisms ensure I/O of signals and transmitters to other linked cells."
That doesn't occur to me to be a particularly deep insight, given the current knowledge about biology and evolution. Not wanting to take the magic out of microbiology or anything, but could some enlightened person in that field describe, why this is profoundly cool, worthy of a publication in Nature?
Thanks!
Kinda falls into the same category as plastering the country with wind-generators, literally pumping billions of taxmoney in there only to then decide that too many ruin the country-side view and stop (hail ecology). The same people who decide to phase out nuclear energy (bc. it's oh so dangerous and what not) only to then sell the production plants to China (hurray for credibility). The same people who again pump billions in subsidies into super expensive local coal only to buy the cheap nuclear energy from France. Ah, did I mention the 5-fold public trash bins (paper, bio-degradable, rest, glas, "green point"), only to feed the first three TOGETHER to burn it?
At least I think they're idealistic, in a kind of very naive way... As you can see, they're not my favorites... :-)
This of course, next to waisting huge amounts of money, can create a false sense of security or even lower security as in the example they cite: on an airport, if every 10000th passenger is screened for second testing, the odds are high that guards will not be very optimistic about the system and make mistakes, diss the system, etc.
in the mean time, terrorists travel by sea, land, etc. Even most of 9/11 went by their real names....
Does that remotely-switch-off-cellphone-camera-thing also decapitate your regular digital camera? I'd be very surprised (and impressed). Seems like more security snake-oil to me.
As much as i can see the reasoning (pres. safety, remotely controlled bombs, etc...), it still leaves a bad taste of "some are more equal than others" in your mouth. Security (even presidential) & military should abide the law just as anybody else. Change that stupid law, if necessary.
IMHO such a law is not logical anyway: since when does some cell-phone operator "own" the airwaves of e.g. my living room, or more to the point, my restaurant / movie theatre. What exact difference does active / passive jamming make w.r.t the law (if it's on my very own property)? How do they justify the (il)legality of one or the other...
what the position here in Germany is, I dunno... Does anybody else, I'm curious.
1.) Here in Germany, higher education comes mostly for free, including attending University. This is paid for by state taxes, mostly.
2.) There is a huge financial crunch in local communities and the states (Laender), of which Berlin is one, due to prolonged blissful ignorance of reality (tax revenue down) in crazy public spending. Berlin is one of the worst candidates with huge debt, kind of like CA in the US, even suing federal gvt. to bail them out and unfortunately winning.
3.) Berlin has three full universities plus N colleges and such, sucking up money.
4.) what's an avg. politician to do? Slash university funding big style, amongst other things, potentially closing one of them down for good
5.) what's a university student to do? go on strike (IMO not very creative either, but I digress....) and generally raise awareness that higher education is worth its money.
6.) what's a prof to do? help students out (after all they're in the same boat), by e.g. holding a 3 day continuous physics lecture in the middle of Berlin, for everybody to attend.
That's why they're doing it. If you or I agree with it, is another question...
Now, Ken Wilson (=cool Nobelprize guy) who basically started this field, gave a famous estimate in a talk at a conference some time back, stating that to do a serious project in lattice QCD, one would need some (listen up now...) PetaFlopYears. Yes, imagine a computer being able to 1 PetaFlop/s running for one whole year nonstop. Another guy, Karl Janssen, said last year at the same annual conference, "yup, still true". So there is the requirement. Now, where is the machine?
From what I know, BlueGene is a direct decendant (sp?) of QCDSP (QCD on a DSP), a special purpose beast, built with IBM at Columbia Univ. to tackle, guess what, QCD. Its successor, soon to be rolled out, is QCDOC (= QCD on a chip), again together with IBM which is very close to the BG design. So all around cool IBM is using this know how and putting it to use for other research fields. If you're really interested, just google for QCDSP, QCDOC, lattice QCD, etc.
I don't know anything about protein folding or weather, but I can imagine, those guys are just as anxious to get some serious CPU in form of these monsters as the lattice guys.
As was pointed out above, "smaller" just means, you can cram more in one room and therefore have more CPU.
PS: not only do I think IBM is geeky-cool, I'm starting to admire their strategy: do worthwhile research with Academia, use know how, make into money, cf. Grid aka. IT as utility, BlueGene aka. Supercomputer in a box. awesome.
I guess I had a rather blank look of incomprehension on my face 2 months ago, when the whole fucking appartment went dark because ..... I connected audio-out of my computer to my stereo. yup. nothing more to add. And no I didn't learn (I guess I didn't want to believe), I tried it again, and there went my cordless phone. Must be some totally unbelievable random short somwhere.
God bless German specs...
Just imagine another one of those corps seeing all their 20+ samba servers disappear, because they upgraded to the new whiz-bang TC-enabled CISCO-routers. Imagine the pleasant surprise of the CTO when their ISP tells him, their web site is gone, since they switched over to TC. and so on.
That's supply and zero (I would even say negative) demand right there. What's more, Linux is a real force in the enterprise market now and will be more so by the time TC is rolled out, since MS is plainly running out of creativity (cf. Longhorn, will be ready real soon now, no really, believe us, blah,...). MS will have to have some real good arguments for annoying so many people with that stuff, esp. the people that are so important for their cash flow (ie. corporate market). If they don't, which is what I suspect, then TC will be as successful as their mobile phone software.
re: your example: what if you made money with that book (by whatever means), that violates the original author's IP? would the original author be entitled to make you stop or sue you for damages, etc.? My guess (again IANAL) is yes.
more realistically, what if i sold you the rights to a patent i didn't own, and you build a successful company around it? would the rightful owner of the patent have no right at all wrt. to you unrightfully using a patent?
the legal position here (Germ.) at least is, that a contract is based on unlawful circumstances (ie. IP-violation) is plain void. I'd be surprised if it were completely different in the US.
more on topic: what that means for code partially (assuming it's true) by IP-violations, I dunno, but my guess is, as stated before, that the original owner of that IP still has some rights.
Now, before the whole world and their mother screams IP-violation =/= theft, I realize, there is a difference. But how about you make money with the leaked Half-Life (or whatever game that was) source code, even if you are not the thief or not even know the code belongs to somebody else? Or you make money with derivative products in the same manner? Surely the company owning the rights to the code could sue you for damages or at least for a cut of the profits. So, I imagine, from that perspective, there must be some sort of legal strategy that is not bs. on SCO's part (in total contrast of course to the quality of the basis of their claims).
OTOH, IANAL. :-)
does your pancreas give you a strategic advantage over everybody else (who has one too)?
that is what the article is discussing at least.
I actually think he's right. IBM e.g. effectively commoditisized (if that's a word) PCs by opening up the their standards years ago, MS having the complentary product "OS/Office" that made them superrich. Consider this: Having Win+MSOffice (please no religious zealotry...:) ) might have given you an advantage 10 yrs ago, if you were one of few and could reorganize your business processes to be much more efficient using it. Nowadays, everybody has it and needs it, you loose that advantage.
This guy Carr just generalizes that to the whole of IT, including the "new" stuff like the net. Beats me, why IBM is crying foul, since they are running this huge PR campaign of "IT as a utility" which is exactly that.
just my 2 cents
if anybody would "crush/cannibalise/castrate" google, the next good==popular search engine is only but a few geeks and good ideas away. There are quite a number of contestants lined up and waiting and the barrier to entry for the search engine market is still very low. Google's main asset IMHO is its brand name.
So, I don't really get google's attractiveness to buyers. They're fine and dandy but still only a search engine with a good advertising business. The moment big companies (Yahoo, MSFT, whoever) make a real push into Google's market (aka. high quality search results with the combined cash revenue from adverts), and they will, I would like to see what inherent benefits Google can offer to those from the advertisers perspective.
Yeah, I think Google is excellent (and cool) too, but then I'm not an investor.
Personally, I don't buy all this hipocrisy outside money supposedly destroying the company. Google would probably be long overtaken by some other company had it not gotten outside capital to fund growth and we would not have one of the coolest web-services around.
And although the dot.com-boom is over, the fundemental paradigm of web-services still exists: practically no barrier to entry. So if google dies (which I don't expect), another better search engine will take its place. That is the cherrished capitalism for you. :-)
OTOH, if they can use the money to expand their business (and reap some rewards for their cool work), I'm all for it. In the end it's and always has been a business decision.
cheers,
Roland
Facts from the story: Montavista writes software under GPL. Lineo uses said software but removes copyright notices. Montavista sues Lineo over that (copyrights must be retained under the GPL)! Montavista wins (settlement).
How cool is that. And here we have people bitching that something as the GPL won't hold up to any major court challenge.
Smile, people. This is really cool considering that numerous people believe the GPL won't stand a chance in court.
roland
keep in mind to check the facts:
S. Korea : 98,190 sq km
New Jersey : 20,295 sq km.
so by my math: S.Korea is roughly 5 times bigger than NJ, more like Indiana.
Oops.
For me, fou4s has been a real blessing. It's basically a bash script and drop-in replacement for the yast update tool.
Works beautifully (also on older versions and different hardware than x86), is easy to configure and can be dropped into cron.daily nicely.
If you are not planning on upgrading soon (such as myself, waiting for it to show up on the ftp servers), you might want to check it out.
cheers, Roland
um, I would really have liked to see my phd thesis materialize by this christmas. But it will be done real soon. honestly. promise.
vaporware, I guess.
(emphasis mine). Not exactly what's discussed here, but same direction. GNU could also choose to include something similar in the GPL if they (we?) wanted to (that would at least make the scenario you described illegal, for what it's worth), but they don't. IMHO that's the relevant choice.
was there nothing wrong with foreign companies supplying Adolf Hitler (at least in part) with the necessary technology to industrialise murder? Would it have been ok, if there had been a bidding on contracts to build concentration camps (then or more recently in Serbia)?
so business is really void of morality and ethics?
mod the parent up.
say what?
no isos, but ftp. that's the only install method I ever use. Set up, start, get lunch, come back, do the final set up, viola. Most other distros work similarly, I guess (or hope).
using yast2 for the last few (3?) releases, you don't even have to do anything yourself. you just say 'ok' to "Detected soundcard X". On all the different machines I installed (~20-30) the detection was correct.
It's about creating an architecture for moving the data around and assigning cpu, all transparently, at various participating research facilities. Check e.g. here .
so Palmisano (and this guy Berger) figure, they can leverage that and make it commercial, make it available to your average company (banks etc.).
IMHO this is big (in physics too). As usual, really cool stuff comes from high energy physics (www anyone?). Guess which field I am in grad school in.