Antimatter is the most efficient energy storage possible. 'E = mc^2' tells us that annihalating it with an equal mass of matter produces 9*10e16 joules of energy for every kilogram of mass thus reacted.
That's the instantaneous production of 90,000 terajoules - on the order of the amount of energy expended by all the world's industry in a day. Impressive? Certainly.
However... to accelerate a mass to the near-light speed necessary to take advantage or relativity (very useful in an interstellar voyage if you want to get there in a reasonable fraction of a human lifetime), you need... E = mc^2!
That means that to get to near-light speed with a 100%-efficient antimatter engine, you need to have almost as much matter/antimatter fuel as the 'dry weight' of the vessel, including storage tanks. The dry weight of the Space Shuttle orbiter is about 80 tons... so to get a shuttle to those kinds of speeds would take 40 tons of antimatter and 40 tons of ordinary matter.
AND... you have to slow down again at the other end. So you have to take the 160 tons of your decel mass, and get THAT up to light speed with another 160 tons of fuel (again, half matter, half antimatter). So the launch breakdown on your itty bitty 80-ton eight-person spacecraft is: 80 tons spacecraft, 120 tons matter, 120 tons antimatter - 320 tons!
It's just like rockets and gravity. Most of your launch mass is wasted on fuel. And we can't beat these numbers with our current physics.
None of this would be a problem if we could make a LOT of antimatter... like a ton a day. But that has its own problems. Like, where to put it.
Let's assume that breakthroughs in nanotech and fusion physics allow us to build reactors that are one millimeter across and turn hydrogen into antiprotons at the rate of 1 particle per microsecond. To produce just 120 tons of antimatter per year, the factory would form a cube 200 meters on a side (Borg, Anybody?). I don't know what such a thing would be made of, but an equivalent volume of water would weigh 8 million tons.
The 4H2 -> He2 fusion reaction releases approximately 1/140th the mass-energy of the original hydrogen as a side-affect of the fusion reaction (go ahead, look up the relative masses of H and He on your periodic table and plug it into E = MC^2, you'll see what I mean). That means that a 100% efficient 'factory' would burn 140 times the mass of hydrogen to produce one unit of antimatter... or 16,800 tons of hydrogen per year.
So is it impossible?
No.
IF we had the fusion physics and the nanotech, we could put a self-assembling factory into orbit in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. Feed it a large iron asteroid for raw materials, and allow it to grow slowly, adding a 1mm layer of fuel reactors at a time. The size of the thing would grow at cubic rates (since it grows in three dimensions) and even though the initial fuel output of the thing would be trivial, it would quickly grow to a size where it was producing tons of fuel a year.
And THEN we can start sending people to the stars on a regular basis. First a dozen, then hundreds, then thousands, at a rate that grows as fast as we can produce the fuel.
Like JFK said... We choose to do these things 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard.'
There's no real need for a desktop RAM disk because the Linux kernel is very good about caching pages from filesystems in memory, and adjusting between processes and disk cache. As long as you don't go overboard on processes, your most-commonly-accessed files will remain in memory anyway.
I could see doing this on an embedded application where all you want is the critical files and (with the exception of/var and/tmp) everything is read-only, so that you don't need a hard disk, just a floppy or boot ROM.
I'm not sure if Linux is smart enough to NOT cache pages from a read-only RAMdisk, because that would be silly... the same data could end up stored identically in memory twice! But that's for kernel-hacking types to deal with.
Sorry, I posted that before they updated the story with the real message. I've gotten less sleep than Rob lately.
But the point stands. I install Windows to get something I want, no matter how much it galls me. If someone buys Linux, even if it's only to run this one particular program, it's no different. It may not apply in this case; I guess it depends on how the licenses for the VGS to shake out.
I still pay the Microsoft Tax so I can play the games I like that are not now nor are they every likely to be available under Linux by any other means. I don't like it, but it's faster than finishing off WINE to the point where it works for me.
Is this the wrong reason to use Windows? BillyG still gets my $$. I'm still counted as a 'Windows Customer'. With that in mind, is getting to play the games you want CHEAPLY AND LEGALLY the 'wrong reason' to install Linux?
In addition to the nine continents you listed, you forget three real important ones:
.mil .edu .gov
Remeber what the Internet was originally built for. You're probably right with the other nine, but a lot of people get government information (especially IRS forms and the like) from the 'net. The Military is still there, although not as big as it once was, and so are the universities, and all their researchers, and all the companies (like the one I work for) that support those researchers.
I think it's telling that the Internet has so turned from what people thought it was in the 80's and before (for those who knew about it at all) to what people think it is today, to the point where 'pr0n' is a bigger division than the military!
This time, Bob Metcalfe does have a point. Why isn't Crusoe opening up the chip design and the code morphing software?
I'm not saying it's an important question, but at least it's not another blatant FUD storm, as the Slashdot title implies. It's a question that deserves to be answered.
For the most part, I don't care if TransMeta opens up the code morphing sources or not. Hardware benefits less from the open-source development cycle because most people don't have a chip foundry in their backyard, so I do not benefit strongly, nor will the design of the Crusoe chip benefit strongly, from the release of the 'source code' to Crusoe (the chip etching masks, I guess).
Sooner or later all chips are going to work this way. Maybe an 'open source code-morphing FPGA image' that you can load into an Altera gate array will develop, maybe not. But releasing the source for Crusoe's code morphing probably isn't going to make that happen faster.
The CIA, NSA, and the entire alphabet soup of intelligence agencies ARE for the most part people paid to absorb and review information each day, and to produce digests, handed to people over them who produce more digests, until it either gets to the President or gets dumped in a filing cabinet.
The skullduggery (asassinations and sabotage) are actually a secondary mission and not that common, especially in these post cold-war days.
I don't recall where this was, but in some US court, it had already been decided that converting a CD track to an MP3 was simple 'space shifting' music you already own and perfectly legal.
Remember that this is the Canadian RIA, an organization which successfully lobbied for a $2 tax PAYABLE TO THEM for every CDR sold in the Great White North. Trying to screw DJ's over music they already own doesn't surprise me...
OK, so how about a DJ who sets up a 200 CD changer at home, and encrypts and transmits all of his tracks on the fly to his site in the field? Does he have to pay for that? What if he pre-buffers the encoded track on his hard disk before transmission? Does he pay for that?
It's total BS. I have as much faith left in the laws that govern the recording industry as I do in the guys who grant software patents... which is to say, none whatsoever.
Apparently the notion of 'space shifting' hasn't made it into Canada yet. Either that, or the CRIA is even more evil than the RIAA.
I read 'The Gernsback Continuum', too, and I know what you are talking about. The future could've been worse than it was - it could've been perfect.
I also remember going to EPCOT as a little geek and seeing all the shiny cool rides and toys... sometimes it's nice just to have a place to forget about the world for a while. I fear that modern cynicism is draining the joy out of things - I fear that my own cynicism will drain the joy out of my own life.
One must take solace, and perhaps hope, in the notion that in every way that matters, the future is a thing we make. We are subject to the currents of history but free to steer as we will. We get the future we build, whether we realize it or not, and whether we want to or not.
In the 50's they saw people in the 90's using flying cars, space hotels, and voice-activated toasters. And in the 'real' 90's we got the Internet. That's not a bad thing, but it's the thing we made. The vision of the future is always colored by the present.
My point is this, then: We must not let the cynicism of today darkly color our vision of tomorrow. So many people fought to give us the right to [try to] be everything we want, but these days it seems trendy claim the right to be nothing. This is not the way to build a bright future.
The space hotels and flying cars and warp drive may get here yet. Or maybe the super-PDAs or the bionic implants or even a dark future of famine, plague, and war. Realize that which one we get depends largely on which one we choose to put our efforts into... if we don't put our efforts anywhere, we're not going to get what we want.
Anything that I'd have to special-order from Radio Shack, I'd rather buy from JDR Microdevices, Digikey, or Mouser Electronics.
Anything that I'd buy at Radio Shack, I'd rather buy somewhere else. I only shop there if (for some reason) I need to buy inkjet cartridges and I don't feel like going all the way to the local computer store.
I'm not a lawyer either, but you know that one way or another this is going before the supreme court anyway. It's relatively cheap for large organizations to push a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, and this basically cuts to the chase. MS will appeal any unfavorable decision So will the DoJ. I imagine that the rationale behind the Antitrust Expediting Act was that the legislature realized this would happen and wrote the law to avoid wasting the public's time and money, and to make sure that justice obtained IS relevant to the current day. The Expediting Act is not a disruption of Due Process, one of the things nearest and dearest to my heart. It just cuts out all of the irrelevant appeals and gets to the only one that CAN matter, in the end.
Violations of civil rights and strange standards of evidence are nothing new at universities. A lot of them have the attitude that the student is there for an education, and the 'free' computing facilities are there for educational purposes, not downloading pr0n or warez or whatever.
What disturbs me is that the RIAA can strongarm (or even weakarm) any institution into 'busting' people - and that the university would be proud of this?? The RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency. They do NOT entitled to enforce the law or 'order' inspections of anything. If the RIAA shows up at my doorstep, I'll sue them for trespassing. I answer to the Law - that means cops following due process - not a bunch of industry extortionists.
Maybe if the RIAA gave money back to the artists instead of keeping it for the music monopolies, I might be less inclined to use the flamethrower here. But they aren't, and this is just plain wrong.
I've been making my living with Perl and CGI for almost three years. That's an eternity in Web-time, so I guess I'm qualified to comment on a few things.
First, the question of 'Perl vs. C' isn't as simple as picking your favorite language. Remember that software engineering is as much a resource juggling act as anything else. The resources in this case are most often CPU time, your time, and your customer's time.
Ways Perl saves your (programming) time: 1) The huge library of utterly standard software on CPAN. If you feel you are re-inventing the wheel, sifting through CPAN for an hour or so will usually turn up a well-supported module that solves the problem. CGI.pm started life this way; now it ships with every new version of Perl since 5.003.
2) Programs are/much/ shorter. If Fred Brooks is right (the number of lines of code a programmer can produce in a year is approximately constant, regardless of language), this is a big one. Things that might take thousands of lines in C are only a few hundred lines of Perl.
3) It will likely run anywhere, on NT or Linux or OS/2 or whatever. Perl has come much closer to the ideal of platform independance than Java just because it's out there in use and solves the problem one disaster at a time, not with over-designing and hard sells.
4) It's nice to have taint-checking built in. This is not something I have ever observed in C. I almost never use eval, but this can save you a lot of security breaks. Perl itself also does not rely on static buffer lengths for user code, and so you don't get those nasty buffer overruns. Oh, sure, you can write C so that it doesn't have buffer overruns - but in Perl this power is automatic.
Ways Perl can save your customer and CPU time: 5) Perl (and also PHP3, and even ASP) all have the advantage of super-fast support inside the web server via an extension module. This avoids the problem of forking off a new CGI program, loading Perl, loading the Perl program, interpreting, etc. Let me tell you from personal experience - the difference is night and day. For anything that gets more than a few hits a day, DON'T use straight CGI. Use mod_perl, FastCGI, or whatever. This also saves you server bloat, because that interpreter and program are shared by ALL CGI calls on the server.
6) For the things that Perl is good at (string handling), it's not going to be slower than C. Think of Perl as the 'glue logic' and the C libraries under Perl as the things that actually do the processing. Fortunately for you, a large part of every WWW app is string handling - even just reading the parameters from the user's Post or Get. You'd end up implementing half of Perl's string handling functions anyway just to do this part in C.
7) For the things where Perl is legitimately slower than straight C, it is possible to extend Perl in C. This lets you use C for your math-heavy library, a new fundamental data type (like matrices or complex numbers), or want to call a system library like Motif, Tk, or libcrypt.
8) Shorter programs are easier to change when the customer decides that they want to do something else. Since it is almost impossible to get a good spec out of a customer, it is much better to have a short prototyping cycle. The prototyping circle in Perl is much shorter than C, so you can get more feedback from the customer in less time. This increases the probability the customer will like the finished product. You can still do it in C for the final step if you feel you must.
And now the bad news.
Perl's power of expression is also its problem. There are so many different ways to do things, and many of them are very, very ugly. Badly written Perl is the worst thing in the world to maintain - OK, maybe not quite as bad as badly-written TCL, but pretty bad.
Perl will tolerate sloppiness. It takes some time to get competent enough with Perl that you don't need the sloppiness to make things happen. Experienced Perl people should be able to read each other's code; it's the bloody amateurs (eg almost everybody) that you have to watch out for.
As a result, it's very easy to have 'write-only' Perl code. If it becomes necessary to maintain it... well, time to start over.
This is really the only bad news, however. So it's basically 'pick your poison'. Do you want to get bit in maintainence, or in any of the half-dozen other ways that Perl saves you time? No language is going to be perfect, and this is the trade-off you make in Perl.
Therefore, Perl is much more suitable for me because it lets me get the project finished to the customer's satisfaction in less time. You can easily document it all (and minimize the maintainence hit) while the site is up and making money - as opposed to having the customer on the phone screaming at you that the project is late.
In the end, you have to choose for yourself. Decide if you have the time to get good at unravelling spaghetti Perl, or if you'd rather spend your time debugging spaghetti C.
MS isn't the only one who has superfast extensions to their web server. Apache has had loadable modules for a long time, and these modules are within the Apache program proper, meaning there is no forking hit for using them.
In addition, one of these modules is mod_perl which, as several other people have already pointed out, is a superfast way of implementing applications on a web server - no fork hit, no exec hit, etc.
What most supporters of the GPL have a problem with is bogus SOFTWARE patents. Software and hardware patents are not the same thing. Most technological countries (besides the USA) do not even grant software patents.
The problem with (bogus) software patents is that the people who try to get them haven't worked hard enough to get them, haven't contributed anything new, etc. The patent office just doesn't understand that these are trivial non-inventions.
Now, some supporters of the GPL will also fight hardware patents, but they are probably doing it on a general sense that intellectual property is evil.
There. A rational explanation and distinction, without flamebait or polemic. You can almost always find one if you take the time to look;)
Usually what people are slamming is software patents. Some people will also slam hardware patents, but most people here have a libertarian attitude towards Intellectual Property - you only deserve it if you work hard at it, and mix enough of your labor with the device. The software patents we slam are total BS in this respect.
Also, hardware is more tangible - you can't pirate hardware just by looking at it.
Is Earthlink still in the hands of the Co$, or have they removed that taint from their hands? I don't want my data going anywhere near a machine that's owned by the RonBots.
Gee, it sounds like someone has been there. Either that, or someone who's remarkably prescient. Somehow, I get the feeling that there are other people out there who might feel like saying the same thing as Benedict. Or maybe not.
We don't exactly have millions or even thousands of dollars to be throwing around to cook books, forge benchmarks, and buy off reporters.
We react so violently to Mindcraft, not because we think Linux will always beat NT, but because the tests were so obviously rigged to produce marketing data as opposed to objective decision-support data. We are concerned that some people might believe this tripe because MS has a bigger marketing machine than we do.
We are justified in our wrath because we know MS has tried to do this before, with their disastorous Astroturf campaign, and their all-but-outright-fake demonstrations in the antitrust courtroom. And, as in a trial, if you throw enough money and time at a problem, you can prove (or disprove!) any criminal charge.
To say that the Linux community spreads FUD the way that Microsoft does is baloney. We spread polemic, yes. We p*ss of reporters when they p*ss on our OS, yes. We don't lie to people and try to mislead the gullible.
It doesn't matter that NT might be better in one contrived set of circumstances, because we can as easily contrive a test where Linux does better - why don't we repeat the Mindcraft test on a couple of 486/66's from the PC graveyard, and see what happens?
Mindcraft's credibility is gone in any case, because the press has very neatly seen to it that they shall always be perceived as a cog in MS's marketing machine. Whether this is correct or incorrect, it is a likely scenario, knowing the prevailing winds in Redmond, and that is why we righteously rant. Take it or leave it.
Dude, a bunch of people are dead. A bunch of other people are getting harrassed by cops and shrinks. I don't think they bought the priveledge at Wal-Mart.
Normally I'd agree with you, but the issue here is that for some people youth is hell because they don't fit in, and further making these people scapegoats for school violence is bullsh*t. Katz has performed a valuable service because he's provided a conduit for the other side of the story to make it back to the mainstream media and out to the 'sheep' of the world. Sheep who vote, bucko.
On the one hand, we are all responsible for the world we live - we made it, and we have to live with it.
But your last comment - that outcasts do it to themselves - is exactly the fascist attitude that breeds paranoia and violence. It is backwards logic to assume that people who are maladjusted made it that way on purpose. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
The shooters in Littleton made their choice. The rest of the wierd world should not be made to suffer for it.
I agree with you insofar as I suspect that this is exactly what Bill&Co are thinking right now. MS will never do anything with Linux unless they think it will make it look bad; they have far too much False Hubris.
However, it could backfire. If people install Linux anticipating Office, and then MS never delivers, they will probably buy Corel or Star or something, because it is more of a pain to install an OS than an office suite. MS has pulled the vaporware trick too many times for people to put up with it when they don't have to, and if Linux is their platform, then they don't have to.
I predicted this months ago, BTW... watch for Microsoft Linux Distribution, 1.0, coming Real Soon Now, based on MEPM, the Microsoft Enhanced Package Management system! Exactly like RPM, but incompatible for 'integration reasons'.
Feh.
Are you a troll, or do you really believe that?
on
Microsoft's COOL
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· Score: 1
Microsoft? Innovate? You are kidding, right? Methinks you'd been reading too much of the Seattle Times, monsieur.
You know, in car sales this is called 'bait and switch'. Get people hooked with one offer (J++) and then yank the rug out from under them and make them buy something more expensive... car dealers can go to jail for that. Why not M$?
They will do the same to Microsoft Linux. It's coming. Believe it.
This reminds me of the time that some state legislature tried to set the official value of Pi to 3 at the insistence of some bible-banger. But it's possible to override the ethernet ID on an ethernet card (and fairly easy, too), and it's also possible to do it on the PIII. What they want to restrict is non-overridable numbers... but not even then. There are products from security companys (smart cards, smart rings, etc) with cryptographic identifiers in them that people really do buy because they are a pain to forge. All of a sudden it's impossible to use key-card doorlocks based on this technology! Big Brother wants you to have less security in your home and business! Someone should point this out to the legislature.
Slashdot Mirror
Antimatter is the most efficient energy storage possible. 'E = mc^2' tells us that annihalating it with an equal mass of matter produces 9*10e16 joules of energy for every kilogram of mass thus reacted.
That's the instantaneous production of 90,000 terajoules - on the order of the amount of energy expended by all the world's industry in a day. Impressive? Certainly.
However... to accelerate a mass to the near-light speed necessary to take advantage or relativity (very useful in an interstellar voyage if you want to get there in a reasonable fraction of a human lifetime), you need... E = mc^2!
That means that to get to near-light speed with a 100%-efficient antimatter engine, you need to have almost as much matter/antimatter fuel as the 'dry weight' of the vessel, including storage tanks. The dry weight of the Space Shuttle orbiter is about 80 tons... so to get a shuttle to those kinds of speeds would take 40 tons of antimatter and 40 tons of ordinary matter.
AND... you have to slow down again at the other end. So you have to take the 160 tons of your decel mass, and get THAT up to light speed with another 160 tons of fuel (again, half matter, half antimatter). So the launch breakdown on your itty bitty 80-ton eight-person spacecraft is: 80 tons spacecraft, 120 tons matter, 120 tons antimatter - 320 tons!
It's just like rockets and gravity. Most of your launch mass is wasted on fuel. And we can't beat these numbers with our current physics.
None of this would be a problem if we could make a LOT of antimatter... like a ton a day. But that has its own problems. Like, where to put it.
Let's assume that breakthroughs in nanotech and fusion physics allow us to build reactors that are one millimeter across and turn hydrogen into antiprotons at the rate of 1 particle per microsecond. To produce just 120 tons of antimatter per year, the factory would form a cube 200 meters on a side (Borg, Anybody?). I don't know what such a thing would be made of, but an equivalent volume of water would weigh 8 million tons.
The 4H2 -> He2 fusion reaction releases approximately 1/140th the mass-energy of the original hydrogen as a side-affect of the fusion reaction (go ahead, look up the relative masses of H and He on your periodic table and plug it into E = MC^2, you'll see what I mean). That means that a 100% efficient 'factory' would burn 140 times the mass of hydrogen to produce one unit of antimatter... or 16,800 tons of hydrogen per year.
So is it impossible?
No.
IF we had the fusion physics and the nanotech, we could put a self-assembling factory into orbit in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant. Feed it a large iron asteroid for raw materials, and allow it to grow slowly, adding a 1mm layer of fuel reactors at a time. The size of the thing would grow at cubic rates (since it grows in three dimensions) and even though the initial fuel output of the thing would be trivial, it would quickly grow to a size where it was producing tons of fuel a year.
And THEN we can start sending people to the stars on a regular basis. First a dozen, then hundreds, then thousands, at a rate that grows as fast as we can produce the fuel.
Like JFK said... We choose to do these things 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard.'
There's no real need for a desktop RAM disk because the Linux kernel is very good about caching pages from filesystems in memory, and adjusting between processes and disk cache. As long as you don't go overboard on processes, your most-commonly-accessed files will remain in memory anyway.
/var and /tmp) everything is read-only, so that you don't need a hard disk, just a floppy or boot ROM.
I could see doing this on an embedded application where all you want is the critical files and (with the exception of
I'm not sure if Linux is smart enough to NOT cache pages from a read-only RAMdisk, because that would be silly... the same data could end up stored identically in memory twice! But that's for kernel-hacking types to deal with.
Sorry, I posted that before they updated the story with the real message. I've gotten less sleep than Rob lately.
But the point stands. I install Windows to get something I want, no matter how much it galls me. If someone buys Linux, even if it's only to run this one particular program, it's no different. It may not apply in this case; I guess it depends on how the licenses for the VGS to shake out.
I still pay the Microsoft Tax so I can play the games I like that are not now nor are they every likely to be available under Linux by any other means. I don't like it, but it's faster than finishing off WINE to the point where it works for me.
Is this the wrong reason to use Windows? BillyG still gets my $$. I'm still counted as a 'Windows Customer'. With that in mind, is getting to play the games you want CHEAPLY AND LEGALLY the 'wrong reason' to install Linux?
Don't think so.
In addition to the nine continents you listed, you forget three real important ones:
.mil
.edu
.gov
Remeber what the Internet was originally built for. You're probably right with the other nine, but a lot of people get government information (especially IRS forms and the like) from the 'net. The Military is still there, although not as big as it once was, and so are the universities, and all their researchers, and all the companies (like the one I work for) that support those researchers.
I think it's telling that the Internet has so turned from what people thought it was in the 80's and before (for those who knew about it at all) to what people think it is today, to the point where 'pr0n' is a bigger division than the military!
Anyway, good article. Keep it up.
This time, Bob Metcalfe does have a point. Why isn't Crusoe opening up the chip design and the code morphing software?
I'm not saying it's an important question, but at least it's not another blatant FUD storm, as the Slashdot title implies. It's a question that deserves to be answered.
For the most part, I don't care if TransMeta opens up the code morphing sources or not. Hardware benefits less from the open-source development cycle because most people don't have a chip foundry in their backyard, so I do not benefit strongly, nor will the design of the Crusoe chip benefit strongly, from the release of the 'source code' to Crusoe (the chip etching masks, I guess).
Sooner or later all chips are going to work this way. Maybe an 'open source code-morphing FPGA image' that you can load into an Altera gate array will develop, maybe not. But releasing the source for Crusoe's code morphing probably isn't going to make that happen faster.
The CIA, NSA, and the entire alphabet soup of intelligence agencies ARE for the most part people paid to absorb and review information each day, and to produce digests, handed to people over them who produce more digests, until it either gets to the President or gets dumped in a filing cabinet.
The skullduggery (asassinations and sabotage) are actually a secondary mission and not that common, especially in these post cold-war days.
I don't recall where this was, but in some US court, it had already been decided that converting a CD track to an MP3 was simple 'space shifting' music you already own and perfectly legal.
Remember that this is the Canadian RIA, an organization which successfully lobbied for a $2 tax PAYABLE TO THEM for every CDR sold in the Great White North. Trying to screw DJ's over music they already own doesn't surprise me...
OK, so how about a DJ who sets up a 200 CD changer at home, and encrypts and transmits all of his tracks on the fly to his site in the field? Does he have to pay for that? What if he pre-buffers the encoded track on his hard disk before transmission? Does he pay for that?
It's total BS. I have as much faith left in the laws that govern the recording industry as I do in the guys who grant software patents... which is to say, none whatsoever.
Apparently the notion of 'space shifting' hasn't made it into Canada yet. Either that, or the CRIA is even more evil than the RIAA.
I read 'The Gernsback Continuum', too, and I know what you are talking about. The future could've been worse than it was - it could've been perfect.
I also remember going to EPCOT as a little geek and seeing all the shiny cool rides and toys... sometimes it's nice just to have a place to forget about the world for a while. I fear that modern cynicism is draining the joy out of things - I fear that my own cynicism will drain the joy out of my own life.
One must take solace, and perhaps hope, in the notion that in every way that matters, the future is a thing we make. We are subject to the currents of history but free to steer as we will. We get the future we build, whether we realize it or not, and whether we want to or not.
In the 50's they saw people in the 90's using flying cars, space hotels, and voice-activated toasters. And in the 'real' 90's we got the Internet. That's not a bad thing, but it's the thing we made. The vision of the future is always colored by the present.
My point is this, then: We must not let the cynicism of today darkly color our vision of tomorrow. So many people fought to give us the right to [try to] be everything we want, but these days it seems trendy claim the right to be nothing. This is not the way to build a bright future.
The space hotels and flying cars and warp drive may get here yet. Or maybe the super-PDAs or the bionic implants or even a dark future of famine, plague, and war. Realize that which one we get depends largely on which one we choose to put our efforts into... if we don't put our efforts anywhere, we're not going to get what we want.
Anything that I'd have to special-order from Radio Shack, I'd rather buy from JDR Microdevices, Digikey, or Mouser Electronics.
Anything that I'd buy at Radio Shack, I'd rather buy somewhere else. I only shop there if (for some reason) I need to buy inkjet cartridges and I don't feel like going all the way to the local computer store.
I'm not a lawyer either, but you know that one way or another this is going before the supreme court anyway. It's relatively cheap for large organizations to push a lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court, and this basically cuts to the chase.
MS will appeal any unfavorable decision So will the DoJ. I imagine that the rationale behind the Antitrust Expediting Act was that the legislature realized this would happen and wrote the law to avoid wasting the public's time and money, and to make sure that justice obtained IS relevant to the current day.
The Expediting Act is not a disruption of Due Process, one of the things nearest and dearest to my heart. It just cuts out all of the irrelevant appeals and gets to the only one that CAN matter, in the end.
Violations of civil rights and strange standards of evidence are nothing new at universities. A lot of them have the attitude that the student is there for an education, and the 'free' computing facilities are there for educational purposes, not downloading pr0n or warez or whatever.
What disturbs me is that the RIAA can strongarm (or even weakarm) any institution into 'busting' people - and that the university would be proud of this?? The RIAA is NOT a law enforcement agency. They do NOT entitled to enforce the law or 'order' inspections of anything. If the RIAA shows up at my doorstep, I'll sue them for trespassing. I answer to the Law - that means cops following due process - not a bunch of industry extortionists.
Maybe if the RIAA gave money back to the artists instead of keeping it for the music monopolies, I might be less inclined to use the flamethrower here. But they aren't, and this is just plain wrong.
I've been making my living with Perl and CGI for almost three years. That's an eternity in Web-time, so I guess I'm qualified to comment on a few things.
/much/ shorter. If Fred Brooks is right (the number of lines of code a programmer can produce in a year is approximately constant, regardless of language), this is a big one. Things that might take thousands of lines in C are only a few hundred lines of Perl.
First, the question of 'Perl vs. C' isn't as simple as picking your favorite language. Remember that software engineering is as much a resource juggling act as anything else. The resources in this case are most often CPU time, your time, and your customer's time.
Ways Perl saves your (programming) time:
1) The huge library of utterly standard software on CPAN. If you feel you are re-inventing the wheel, sifting through CPAN for an hour or so will usually turn up a well-supported module that solves the problem. CGI.pm started life this way; now it ships with every new version of Perl since 5.003.
2) Programs are
3) It will likely run anywhere, on NT or Linux or OS/2 or whatever. Perl has come much closer to the ideal of platform independance than Java just because it's out there in use and solves the problem one disaster at a time, not with over-designing and hard sells.
4) It's nice to have taint-checking built in. This is not something I have ever observed in C. I almost never use eval, but this can save you a lot of security breaks. Perl itself also does not rely on static buffer lengths for user code, and so you don't get those nasty buffer overruns. Oh, sure, you can write C so that it doesn't have buffer overruns - but in Perl this power is automatic.
Ways Perl can save your customer and CPU time:
5) Perl (and also PHP3, and even ASP) all have the advantage of super-fast support inside the web server via an extension module. This avoids the problem of forking off a new CGI program, loading Perl, loading the Perl program, interpreting, etc. Let me tell you from personal experience - the difference is night and day. For anything that gets more than a few hits a day, DON'T use straight CGI. Use mod_perl, FastCGI, or whatever. This also saves you server bloat, because that interpreter and program are shared by ALL CGI calls on the server.
6) For the things that Perl is good at (string handling), it's not going to be slower than C. Think of Perl as the 'glue logic' and the C libraries under Perl as the things that actually do the processing. Fortunately for you, a large part of every WWW app is string handling - even just reading the parameters from the user's Post or Get. You'd end up implementing half of Perl's string handling functions anyway just to do this part in C.
7) For the things where Perl is legitimately slower than straight C, it is possible to extend Perl in C. This lets you use C for your math-heavy library, a new fundamental data type (like matrices or complex numbers), or want to call a system library like Motif, Tk, or libcrypt.
8) Shorter programs are easier to change when the customer decides that they want to do something else. Since it is almost impossible to get a good spec out of a customer, it is much better to have a short prototyping cycle. The prototyping circle in Perl is much shorter than C, so you can get more feedback from the customer in less time. This increases the probability the customer will like the finished product. You can still do it in C for the final step if you feel you must.
And now the bad news.
Perl's power of expression is also its problem. There are so many different ways to do things, and many of them are very, very ugly. Badly written Perl is the worst thing in the world to maintain - OK, maybe not quite as bad as badly-written TCL, but pretty bad.
Perl will tolerate sloppiness. It takes some time to get competent enough with Perl that you don't need the sloppiness to make things happen. Experienced Perl people should be able to read each other's code; it's the bloody amateurs (eg almost everybody) that you have to watch out for.
As a result, it's very easy to have 'write-only' Perl code. If it becomes necessary to maintain it... well, time to start over.
This is really the only bad news, however. So it's basically 'pick your poison'. Do you want to get bit in maintainence, or in any of the half-dozen other ways that Perl saves you time? No language is going to be perfect, and this is the trade-off you make in Perl.
Therefore, Perl is much more suitable for me because it lets me get the project finished to the customer's satisfaction in less time. You can easily document it all (and minimize the maintainence hit) while the site is up and making money - as opposed to having the customer on the phone screaming at you that the project is late.
In the end, you have to choose for yourself. Decide if you have the time to get good at unravelling spaghetti Perl, or if you'd rather spend your time debugging spaghetti C.
MS isn't the only one who has superfast extensions to their web server. Apache has had loadable modules for a long time, and these modules are within the Apache program proper, meaning there is no forking hit for using them.
In addition, one of these modules is mod_perl which, as several other people have already pointed out, is a superfast way of implementing applications on a web server - no fork hit, no exec hit, etc.
What most supporters of the GPL have a problem with is bogus SOFTWARE patents. Software and hardware patents are not the same thing. Most technological countries (besides the USA) do not even grant software patents.
;)
The problem with (bogus) software patents is that the people who try to get them haven't worked hard enough to get them, haven't contributed anything new, etc. The patent office just doesn't understand that these are trivial non-inventions.
Now, some supporters of the GPL will also fight hardware patents, but they are probably doing it on a general sense that intellectual property is evil.
There. A rational explanation and distinction, without flamebait or polemic. You can almost always find one if you take the time to look
Usually what people are slamming is software patents. Some people will also slam hardware patents, but most people here have a libertarian attitude towards Intellectual Property - you only deserve it if you work hard at it, and mix enough of your labor with the device. The software patents we slam are total BS in this respect.
Also, hardware is more tangible - you can't pirate hardware just by looking at it.
Is Earthlink still in the hands of the Co$, or have they removed that taint from their hands? I don't want my data going anywhere near a machine that's owned by the RonBots.
Gee, it sounds like someone has been there.
Either that, or someone who's remarkably prescient.
Somehow, I get the feeling that there are other people out there who might feel like saying the same thing as Benedict. Or maybe not.
We don't exactly have millions or even thousands of dollars to be throwing around to cook books, forge benchmarks, and buy off reporters.
We react so violently to Mindcraft, not because we think Linux will always beat NT, but because the tests were so obviously rigged to produce marketing data as opposed to objective decision-support data. We are concerned that some people might believe this tripe because MS has a bigger marketing machine than we do.
We are justified in our wrath because we know MS has tried to do this before, with their disastorous Astroturf campaign, and their all-but-outright-fake demonstrations in the antitrust courtroom. And, as in a trial, if you throw enough money and time at a problem, you can prove (or disprove!) any criminal charge.
To say that the Linux community spreads FUD the way that Microsoft does is baloney. We spread polemic, yes. We p*ss of reporters when they p*ss on our OS, yes. We don't lie to people and try to mislead the gullible.
It doesn't matter that NT might be better in one contrived set of circumstances, because we can as easily contrive a test where Linux does better - why don't we repeat the Mindcraft test on a couple of 486/66's from the PC graveyard, and see what happens?
Mindcraft's credibility is gone in any case, because the press has very neatly seen to it that they shall always be perceived as a cog in MS's marketing machine. Whether this is correct or incorrect, it is a likely scenario, knowing the prevailing winds in Redmond, and that is why we righteously rant. Take it or leave it.
Dude, a bunch of people are dead. A bunch of other people are getting harrassed by cops and shrinks. I don't think they bought the priveledge at Wal-Mart.
Normally I'd agree with you, but the issue here is that for some people youth is hell because they don't fit in, and further making these people scapegoats for school violence is bullsh*t. Katz has performed a valuable service because he's provided a conduit for the other side of the story to make it back to the mainstream media and out to the 'sheep' of the world. Sheep who vote, bucko.
On the one hand, we are all responsible for the world we live - we made it, and we have to live with it.
But your last comment - that outcasts do it to themselves - is exactly the fascist attitude that breeds paranoia and violence. It is backwards logic to assume that people who are maladjusted made it that way on purpose. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
The shooters in Littleton made their choice. The rest of the wierd world should not be made to suffer for it.
I agree with you insofar as I suspect that this is exactly what Bill&Co are thinking right now. MS will never do anything with Linux unless they think it will make it look bad; they have far too much False Hubris.
However, it could backfire. If people install Linux anticipating Office, and then MS never delivers, they will probably buy Corel or Star or something, because it is more of a pain to install an OS than an office suite. MS has pulled the vaporware trick too many times for people to put up with it when they don't have to, and if Linux is their platform, then they don't have to.
I predicted this months ago, BTW... watch for Microsoft Linux Distribution, 1.0, coming Real Soon Now, based on MEPM, the Microsoft Enhanced Package Management system! Exactly like RPM, but incompatible for 'integration reasons'.
Feh.
Microsoft? Innovate? You are kidding, right?
Methinks you'd been reading too much of the Seattle Times, monsieur.
You know, in car sales this is called 'bait and switch'. Get people hooked with one offer (J++) and then yank the rug out from under them and make them buy something more expensive... car dealers can go to jail for that. Why not M$?
They will do the same to Microsoft Linux. It's coming. Believe it.
This reminds me of the time that some state legislature tried to set the official value of Pi to 3 at the insistence of some bible-banger.
But it's possible to override the ethernet ID on an ethernet card (and fairly easy, too), and it's also possible to do it on the PIII. What they want to restrict is non-overridable numbers... but not even then. There are products from security companys (smart cards, smart rings, etc) with cryptographic identifiers in them that people really do buy because they are a pain to forge.
All of a sudden it's impossible to use key-card doorlocks based on this technology! Big Brother wants you to have less security in your home and business! Someone should point this out to the legislature.