In particular, the things you synchronize on are first-class. Also you can speculatively send/receive things. Normal "select" is only for reading. You don't have to manage your memory either.
There are other concurrent languages, but CML is nice in that it has a formal semantics, so unlike typical languages like "C", "C++", Erlang or Java, a program has a meaning other than "whatever the program does when I run it."
You can implement the primitives of CML in your favorite higher-order language, so you don't have to be limited by ML. That's what's in Reppy's book.
A proper implementation can achieve speeds that are about 30x faster than pthreads for typical tests like "ping/pong".
I've often thought that the medical ethics community was a bunch of smart, Talmudic guys somehow looking for relevancy and importance through their arguing skills. E.g. if a man dies in a car wreck and there's no next of kin, is it OK to harvest his organs? OK, fine -- you are in the middle of harvesting the guys liver, and the intended donor is there cut open -- just when you are about to transfer the liver, the next of kin appear, declare that if you take the liver out of their family member, he won't have one in the afterlife. But if you don't do the transfer the intended recipient will probably die earlier due to having been cut open -- blah blah blah blah.
Is it OK to harvest fetal material from abortions. When is it OK to pull the plug on a brain-dead person? When is it OK to euthanize somebody?
This is comical: in early medicine, you had doctors robbing bodies out of graves so they could figure out how the bodies worked. Sometimes they'd get lynched for this, so doctors established a network, so that doctors from town-a would tell doctors from town-b, "we got a body in cemetary-a". Town-b doctors would rob it, and when they had a body in cemetary-b, they'd tell the doctors from town-a. That's the origin of modern medicine.
I wonder what the medical ethicists would have said.
I think we'd all be better off if we didn't have medical ethicists, and instead just asked ourselves, "what is legal?"
So is Ballmer crapping in his pants now? Or is he trying to pick out a nice, new chair to throw at someone?
It would be really neat to see Apple take on MicroSoft in a big way, then have Gates come "out of retirement" to take over. That is, Gates would tell Ballmer, "step aside, big boy. I'm back!"
The gloves would come off and Bill would try to deliver the biggest asswhipping to Steve, ever. And we'd get to see who's Kung Fu is truly the best.
I can't help but think that if Bill really, really wanted to, he could take out either Google or Apple, but not both.
When Microsoft decides to kick ass in an area, here's what they do, in a nutshell (according to Charles Ferguson):
In all of Microsoft's successful battles, it has used the same strategies. It undercuts its competitors in pricing, unifies previously separate markets, provides open but proprietary APIs, and bundles new functions into platforms it already dominates. Once it has acquired control over an industry standard, it invades neighboring markets.
Charles Ferguson created the company that produced FrontPage. He sold out to MicroSoft when he realized that Netscape would lose, due to their own faults. He wrote a great book on his story dealing with VCs and selling out to MicroSoft.
In the book, he describes how MicroSoft slept through the early 'net, until the Netscape Wunderkind (can't remember his name) said Windows would be reduced to a bunch of buggy device drivers by the web. Then Bill woke up. He writes about it like Sauron has been up in Redmond, sleeping away, until the Netscape guy wakes him up. And then Bill wakes up, like a big pissed off Sauron, turns Ballmer loose so he can get medieval on Netscape and so on.
Charles Ferguson also happens to have a PhD, and has done a lot on high tech competition. Here's something he's written on the topic of Microsoft fighting Google -- for real.
"... But if Microsoft gets serious about search--and there is every reason to believe that it will--Google will need brilliant strategy and flawless execution simply to survive..."
Yes, it is very regimented in Germany. I got hired as a consultant by a guy who needed to get some work done. He pulled some strings and made it happen.
But he wasn't ethnic German, and he didn't care about rules; he cared about making money.
I got the feeling, from working in Germany, that if you really were the guy to hire (due to having needed, specialized skills --- e.g. kernel hacking), you got hired. And, by the way, the Kreisvervaltungsreferat was really easy about the work visa. I never had any problems with them. They just seemed to be going through the motions.
If you go with Open Source, you have the option to spend time/money to fix things. If you really need to fix things, that's what you do.
If you go with MicroSoft or other closed source products, when you are up shit creek, you are relying on them to give you a patch. Maybe you don't really matter to them (or whatever vendor sold you the stuff) -- in which case, you can go jump in a lake.
Sometimes the problem isn't that there's a bug in the closed source stuff, but that your stuff is interacting with it in a way that makes it misbehave. Perhaps the system is documented, in which case you need to read a thousand pages in the reference manual, hoping to find the requirement that you've failed to meet -- thereby causing the failure.
Or you call the vendor:
You: "it's broke."
Vendor: "Why? What are you doing? Nobody else has this problem"
You:"Well, I don't really know."
Vendor: "Thanks for calling. Please get back to us when you have more info."
On the other hand, if it is open source, you can fire up the debugger, find the problem, and work aroudn it or fix it -- all of that is perhaps faster than going through the support process. If you do a big project, the odds of you encountering a roadblock like this approach 100% percent. If you are pessimistic about the vendor and believe you can fix things, you pick open source.
Zombies attack my machine (and everybody else's) on a daily basis. If those things get fried, by whatever means, I'll be very happy. They have it coming to them.
If it was Linux or OpenBSD zombies, I'd want them to get fried too.
"A worm that is so destructive wouldn't propagate very easily, now would it?"
Destructiveness doesn't limit propogation.
Look at AIDS -- quite destructive. It just kills you after you've spread it to your buddies.
Propogation is helped by animals/computers being able to share things like fluids/data with each other. So WWI was good for breeding a nasty flu, because the hosts were all crammed next to each other. Same for fish ponds: fish diseases/parasites do very well.
A computer network where so many computers have fast internet connections is like a fish pond.
Imagine a payload that kills a mobo after the mobo has spread (and confirmed, as best as it can) the payload to 10 other machines is making progress.
That thing will sweep through the vulnerable population, as did the Witty Worm, very quickly.
I want waves and waves of Witty Worms, destroying insecure Windows installations.
If there are the right incentives, the zombie problem will go away.
E.g. if the user somehow feels it is necessary, he'll take care of his machine.
I know of people who know full well their computer will get infected with malware. They do it anyway, because they figure it won't cost them anything. Their ISP won't bug them, nor the phone company, nor anyone they DDOS, etc. They simply don't care.
That's why I want multiple waves of hardware-destroying worms. Worms that ruin your mobo month after month, until people wake up and see that proper administration is good for them too.
Another possible incentive would be to fine ISPs for allowing machines on their netblock to send out spam or do other anti-social things -- but that's going to be less effective, because an ISP can't fix the problem on a user's machine. All it can do is disconnect it, and that just leads to support calsl and whining from the (l)user. Which is why it isn't done (duh!)
Germans love to complain about things -- it is part of their culture.
I saw this in Germany, when I worked their for years as an expat.
The fact that they had to put it in the contract, rather than just a management directive, is typically German too: it has to be in the contract, so that they can have something to point to when they need to discipline someone.
As should be clear from their inflexible style, and their lack of focus on the needs of the customer, German customer service is pretty bad. It has gotten a lot better in the last decade though.
OK, so it is a dupe. But did anyone notice that this time it is Scuttle Monkey who dupes Zonk? Normally it is the other way around -- Zonk typically does the duping.
This is an interesting and unexpected turn of events.
Furthermore, does anyone think that the duped articles (like this one) are the more interesting ones? It seems that genuinely neat stuff tends to get duped a lot more than marginal stuff.
The guy ran bots -- he took control of thousands of PCs, and used them for purposes like sending spam.
Taking control of thousands of PCs, is unauthorized use of someone's computer, which is illegal.
That's much worse than Talmudically tricking folks into loading up some Adware (e.g. if you want to run the P2P, you are also agreeing to run our adware bot).
That tonearm sells for something like $2,500. It features a captive air bearing -- there's no "ball bearing" in there. I think it has an airpump so that the thing rides on a cushion of air, like an air hockey puck.
Here's a system that is similar (in some ways) but works with water as the fluid: http://www.kugel.com/
Yeah -- that's the first thing I thought when I saw those machines sitting in the salt water. The turbines, rotors and so on will get bathed in warm salty vapor all the time -- how long will those things work under that abuse? 5-10 years?
Boats require legendary maintenance in order to survive such exposure. I can't believe those things will last. And they don't have precise moving parts, like this thing.
If it were made of plastic/composite it might have a chance -- but Oy Weh -- so much money.
Indeed, Disney has been around a long time, and managed to get big by making produts that folks wanted. I genuinely like the stuff from when Disney ran the show. The people who took over after him (Eisner and his posse) have ruined Disney.
Eisner and his boys ruined a bunch of earlier Disney films; they went back and, in true Commie/Stalin fashion, modified some films frame-by-frame to support their political agenda. This disgusts me.
I won't give Disney money; it just goes into the pockets of the likes of Eisner.
Slashdot Mirror
For concurrent applications, it is hard to beat Reppy's CML.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=113470
In particular, the things you synchronize on are first-class. Also you can speculatively send/receive things. Normal "select" is only for reading. You don't have to manage your memory either.
There are other concurrent languages, but CML is nice in that it has a formal semantics, so unlike typical languages like "C", "C++", Erlang or Java, a program has a meaning other than "whatever the program does when I run it."
You can implement the primitives of CML in your favorite higher-order language, so you don't have to be limited by ML. That's what's in Reppy's book.
A proper implementation can achieve speeds that are about 30x faster than pthreads for typical tests like "ping/pong".
I've often thought that the medical ethics community was a bunch of smart, Talmudic guys somehow looking for relevancy and importance through their arguing skills. E.g. if a man dies in a car wreck and there's no next of kin, is it OK to harvest his organs? OK, fine -- you are in the middle of harvesting the guys liver, and the intended donor is there cut open -- just when you are about to transfer the liver, the next of kin appear, declare that if you take the liver out of their family member, he won't have one in the afterlife. But if you don't do the transfer the intended recipient will probably die earlier due to having been cut open -- blah blah blah blah.
Is it OK to harvest fetal material from abortions. When is it OK to pull the plug on a brain-dead person? When is it OK to euthanize somebody?
This is comical: in early medicine, you had doctors robbing bodies out of graves so they could figure out how the bodies worked. Sometimes they'd get lynched for this, so doctors established a network, so that doctors from town-a would tell doctors from town-b, "we got a body in cemetary-a". Town-b doctors would rob it, and when they had a body in cemetary-b, they'd tell the doctors from town-a. That's the origin of modern medicine.
I wonder what the medical ethicists would have said.
I think we'd all be better off if we didn't have medical ethicists, and instead just asked ourselves, "what is legal?"
So is Ballmer crapping in his pants now? Or is he trying to pick out a nice, new chair to throw at someone?
It would be really neat to see Apple take on MicroSoft in a big way, then have Gates come "out of retirement" to take over. That is, Gates would tell Ballmer, "step aside, big boy. I'm back!"
The gloves would come off and Bill would try to deliver the biggest asswhipping to Steve, ever. And we'd get to see who's Kung Fu is truly the best.
I can't help but think that if Bill really, really wanted to, he could take out either Google or Apple, but not both.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa040497 .htm
The history of it is interesting. It seems multiple folks developed similar items around the same time.
http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-5940667.html?part =rss&tag=5940667&subj=news
Looks like they are giving away search appliances for free.
Shades of Netscape?
http://www.hypercamp.org/2005/11/09#a43
When Microsoft decides to kick ass in an area, here's what they do, in a nutshell (according to Charles Ferguson):
In all of Microsoft's successful battles, it has used the same strategies. It undercuts its competitors in pricing, unifies previously separate markets, provides open but proprietary APIs, and bundles new functions into platforms it already dominates. Once it has acquired control over an industry standard, it invades neighboring markets.
Charles Ferguson created the company that produced FrontPage. He sold out to MicroSoft when he realized that Netscape would lose, due to their own faults. He wrote a great book on his story dealing with VCs and selling out to MicroSoft.
5 ,308,p1.html
In the book, he describes how MicroSoft slept through the early 'net, until the Netscape Wunderkind (can't remember his name) said Windows would be reduced to a bunch of buggy device drivers by the web. Then Bill woke up. He writes about it like Sauron has been up in Redmond, sleeping away, until the Netscape guy wakes him up. And then Bill wakes up, like a big pissed off Sauron, turns Ballmer loose so he can get medieval on Netscape and so on.
Charles Ferguson also happens to have a PhD, and has done a lot on high tech competition. Here's something he's written on the topic of Microsoft fighting Google -- for real.
"... But if Microsoft gets serious about search--and there is every reason to believe that it will--Google will need brilliant strategy and flawless execution simply to survive..."
Which is an amazing think to consider.
Here's the article where discusses this:
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_1406
Is it just me, or are "backronyms" a sign that the marketroids are running the show.
I hate them. They turn my stomach. They just make the people who push that crap sound idiotic.
And in this case, they are missing the 'e' in "phaser". So they are backronym creators who can't even spell.
So I guess you won't be lining up to invest in this great new design?!
[Just kidding. Thanks a lot for your thoughts on the new approach. It looks like you think it is more dubious than "Cold Fusion".
Well, I'm only saying what my experience was.
Yes, it is very regimented in Germany. I got hired as a consultant by a guy who needed to get some work done. He pulled some strings and made it happen.
But he wasn't ethnic German, and he didn't care about rules; he cared about making money.
I got the feeling, from working in Germany, that if you really were the guy to hire (due to having needed, specialized skills --- e.g. kernel hacking), you got hired. And, by the way, the Kreisvervaltungsreferat was really easy about the work visa. I never had any problems with them. They just seemed to be going through the motions.
If you go with Open Source, you have the option to spend time/money to fix things. If you really need to fix things, that's what you do.
If you go with MicroSoft or other closed source products, when you are up shit creek, you are relying on them to give you a patch. Maybe you don't really matter to them (or whatever vendor sold you the stuff) -- in which case, you can go jump in a lake.
Sometimes the problem isn't that there's a bug in the closed source stuff, but that your stuff is interacting with it in a way that makes it misbehave. Perhaps the system is documented, in which case you need to read a thousand pages in the reference manual, hoping to find the requirement that you've failed to meet -- thereby causing the failure.
Or you call the vendor:
You: "it's broke."
Vendor: "Why? What are you doing? Nobody else has this problem"
You:"Well, I don't really know."
Vendor: "Thanks for calling. Please get back to us when you have more info."
On the other hand, if it is open source, you can fire up the debugger, find the problem, and work aroudn it or fix it -- all of that is perhaps faster than going through the support process. If you do a big project, the odds of you encountering a roadblock like this approach 100% percent. If you are pessimistic about the vendor and believe you can fix things, you pick open source.
The article says "BitTorrent" is a service.
Is this true? I thought it was a file transfer protocol.
Zombies attack my machine (and everybody else's) on a daily basis. If those things get fried, by whatever means, I'll be very happy. They have it coming to them.
If it was Linux or OpenBSD zombies, I'd want them to get fried too.
"A worm that is so destructive wouldn't propagate very easily, now would it?"
Destructiveness doesn't limit propogation.
Look at AIDS -- quite destructive. It just kills you after you've spread it to your buddies.
Propogation is helped by animals/computers being able to share things like fluids/data with each other. So WWI was good for breeding a nasty flu, because the hosts were all crammed next to each other. Same for fish ponds: fish diseases/parasites do very well.
A computer network where so many computers have fast internet connections is like a fish pond.
Imagine a payload that kills a mobo after the mobo has spread (and confirmed, as best as it can) the payload to 10 other machines is making progress.
That thing will sweep through the vulnerable population, as did the Witty Worm, very quickly.
I want waves and waves of Witty Worms, destroying insecure Windows installations.
If there are the right incentives, the zombie problem will go away.
E.g. if the user somehow feels it is necessary, he'll take care of his machine.
I know of people who know full well their computer will get infected with malware. They do it anyway, because they figure it won't cost them anything. Their ISP won't bug them, nor the phone company, nor anyone they DDOS, etc. They simply don't care.
That's why I want multiple waves of hardware-destroying worms. Worms that ruin your mobo month after month, until people wake up and see that proper administration is good for them too.
Another possible incentive would be to fine ISPs for allowing machines on their netblock to send out spam or do other anti-social things -- but that's going to be less effective, because an ISP can't fix the problem on a user's machine. All it can do is disconnect it, and that just leads to support calsl and whining from the (l)user. Which is why it isn't done (duh!)
There is a EULA, and it looks pretty irritating.
I will leave it to the EULA vultures to pick over this thing -- but it is a doozy.
I think you just need to be skilled at what you do. If they need the work to get done, someone will hire you to do it.
It is not magic.
Germans love to complain about things -- it is part of their culture.
I saw this in Germany, when I worked their for years as an expat.
The fact that they had to put it in the contract, rather than just a management directive, is typically German too: it has to be in the contract, so that they can have something to point to when they need to discipline someone.
As should be clear from their inflexible style, and their lack of focus on the needs of the customer, German customer service is pretty bad. It has gotten a lot better in the last decade though.
OK, so it is a dupe. But did anyone notice that this time it is Scuttle Monkey who dupes Zonk? Normally it is the other way around -- Zonk typically does the duping.
This is an interesting and unexpected turn of events.
Furthermore, does anyone think that the duped articles (like this one) are the more interesting ones? It seems that genuinely neat stuff tends to get duped a lot more than marginal stuff.
The guy ran bots -- he took control of thousands of PCs, and used them for purposes like sending spam.
Taking control of thousands of PCs, is unauthorized use of someone's computer, which is illegal.
That's much worse than Talmudically tricking folks into loading up some Adware (e.g. if you want to run the P2P, you are also agreeing to run our adware bot).
Well I guess RiscOS and OpenBSD users will just have to wait then, won't they?
check out this: http://www.eminent-tech.com/tonearm.html
That tonearm sells for something like $2,500. It features a captive air bearing -- there's no "ball bearing" in there. I think it has an airpump so that the thing rides on a cushion of air, like an air hockey puck.
Here's a system that is similar (in some ways) but works with water as the fluid: http://www.kugel.com/
Yeah -- that's the first thing I thought when I saw those machines sitting in the salt water. The turbines, rotors and so on will get bathed in warm salty vapor all the time -- how long will those things work under that abuse? 5-10 years?
Boats require legendary maintenance in order to survive such exposure. I can't believe those things will last. And they don't have precise moving parts, like this thing.
If it were made of plastic/composite it might have a chance -- but Oy Weh -- so much money.
I mean, "sucked in my lifetime."
Indeed, Disney has been around a long time, and managed to get big by making produts that folks wanted. I genuinely like the stuff from when Disney ran the show. The people who took over after him (Eisner and his posse) have ruined Disney.
Eisner and his boys ruined a bunch of earlier Disney films; they went back and, in true Commie/Stalin fashion, modified some films frame-by-frame to support their political agenda. This disgusts me.
I won't give Disney money; it just goes into the pockets of the likes of Eisner.