Before you get too excited about this, first price a mainframe. You first have to rewire your building for three-phase power, since they don't run on wall current. Then you've consolidated all your servers to one box, so you'd better have 24x7 uninterruptible power, and your current UPS generator likely doesn't supply 3-phase power. You also have to have adequate cooling, even with air-cooled z9 models. Then you have to buy a z9 (their entry level) and software, which is pretty expensive. Then you have to buy disk space. You will probably buy a x86 solution like the FlexES CUB, unless you can afford mainframe channel-attached DASD. Then you'll have to hire someone to care for this new beast, and good luck because no one learns about mainframes in college anymore. (Or, start on page 1 of the ABCs of Systems Programming five-volume set IBM publishes.... You won't be productive any time soon.) After that, you can start porting your programs to the zSeries instruction set, since you can't run x86 binaries. The only good news is you can run your Java programs as-is in the OMVS POSIX shell. Then you can start licensing the software every year.
I said this all along: The OLPC might be okay as a giveaway in third-world countries who don't have any choice and will accept anything that might be useful technology. But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart. Just look at how Wal-Mart has found someone to make them a cheap, under $200 PC -- and remember Wal-Mart is making cheaper PCs all the time while the OLPC ones get more expensive -- that run a real version of Linux, not a strange non-standard operating system. What OLPC ought to do is just call off their project for a year, and then go talk to the same suppliers Wal-Mart is using and buy from them. Free enterprise has won this battle, while Negroponte is going around telling people that companies are "pissing on" him and trying to run Windows on the OLPC. I know people like to dis Wal-Mart, but this is one case where they have done something positive, getting cheap PCs into the hands of people who otherwise couldn't afford them.
Here's another reason vinyl may sound -- or seem to sound -- better than CDs. Many albums have been remastered and re-remastered so many times that they're not the same album that was on vinyl. The original tracks for the different instruments have been remixed in the stereo, and the sound envelope of the dynamic range has been changed to be more modern. So the vinyl album is the old mix, and the CD is a new interpretation of the album. The CD is NOT the original album at all, but the vinyl is. Sometimes the new remasters are good: I thought that the original mix and the first remaster of Yes' Relayer sounded like crap, and the second remaster was the first listenable version of that album ever made. But they'll pry my original-remaster Genesis CDs out of my cold, dead hands before I buy/listen to the new ones because the Genesis remasters preserve the delicate dynamic range of the originals.
It appears in Shelby Foote's Civil War history (in the second volume -- it's much easier to find in The Beleaguered City in Ch 1), and seems to be a Mississippi/Louisiana dialect word. I can't find it -- there are a LOT of words to skim through! -- immediately, but it's there someplace.
At least Schildt has name recognition, something that can't be said of the other celebrities on the list at least by people who don't keep up with celebrities or know who they are. (Zappa was the only name I recognized.) Schildt is one of the rare people who has become a household name after leaving a showbiz career -- is there a remaindered book table in America that doesn't have one of his books on it? That can hardly be said of Starcastle albums, which are considered pretty decent prog rock among those in the know, although I haven't heard any.
Don't forget Herb Schildt was in the progressive rock band Starcastle before turning to the word processor and churning out an almost infinite stream of books on MS-DOS and C, and later C++. I think he may still be around today, but he was big in the 90s as sort of the paragon/punching-bag of bad technical writing.
In November 1986, a young 9th grade Junior High student read Discover Magazine's cover article about String Theory, in the school library, and his horizons were expanded by the possibilities and such an impression was made on him that he never forgot it and has since been curious about science. But he did not understand it.
Twenty years later, remembering String Theory from his youth, he read Brian Greene's book on String Theory, thinking that now, after having been college educated and taking science classes and learning a little bit about math, he might understand it. But he did not understand it.
So he went from Brian Greene to David Grene...
No video has been filmed. The library isn't there anymore, because the school has been reconfigured, so we'd have to build a set based on the student's shaky memories, and there's no budget for that.
SCO's UnixWare and Xenix were a staple of the VAR world, but I would not touch SCO's assets if I was a paper-pushing business person. People are abandoning UnixWare for Linux. Example: IBM had a program to sell mainframe emulators that ran on UnixWare and Linux. The program was wildly successful, many orders of magnitude beyond what IBM thought it would be, and the revenue boost to SCO was huge (back when it started, Linux wasn't as robust and accepted as it is now). So it's ironic that one of SCO's big profit centers the past 5-7 years has been an IBM program! But (1) people use Red Hat, not SCO, for this; and (2) IBM and the emulator company had a bitter falling out and IBM suspended this program. This is the way the VAR world is going. You're not going to have VAR operating systems like UnixWare and Xenix anymore -- VARs are going to use Linux. The only way I would buy SCO's assets would be for pennies on the dollar to re-Caldera them and release them as open source, perhaps if I was a VAR who had UnixWare experience and wanted to offer support contracts. (My first job was supporting Medical Manager on Xenix, so it's sad to see what has happened to this once great platform. Medical Manager is still around, but I don't know what it runs on now. Probably Linux!)
So the MPAA thinks being rich and powerful is worth $15k? I don't blame the guy for sour grapes -- he needs to write a book, and maybe they can make his story into a movie so he can really cash in -- of course, he probably won't make a dime because the movie will be pirates! But the article is really funny because it shows just who the MPAA really are. They promised everything and delivered nothing!
Genetic algorithms are designed and implemented by intelligent programmers who intend to apply them to a given problem, and then allowed to compete. The name is misleading since they do not evolve using the mechanism of evolution (random mutation), although once they are viable and working they compete with natural selection.
Definitely not intended as flame bait -- just an observation of how evolution doesn't seem to work when applied to computers. Even "genetic algorithms" are not evolution in the strict Darwinian sense, because people intentionally design algorithms and then let them compete. For this to be truly genetic, the algorithms themselves would have to evolve.
It's not easy to understand how random mutations are not more detrimental over the long haul than they are beneficial. Changing bits at random in computer programs -- which are much more simple than DNA (something Darwin didn't know about) -- is rarely going to evolve a good feature like a spell checker. Even if it did, changing things at random in the spell checker would more likely destroy it than it would evolve support for new words. Evolution also doesn't seem to take into account layered subsystems. The subsystems are introduced to meet a need, but must exist completely before they meet the need (like a complete disk I/O interface in the kernel). It's not that easy to understand how evolution could move back and forth from low-level subsystems to high-level ones across boundaries. For example, the Structured Interpretation of Computer Programs videos have a strong emphasis on this layering -- why don't they teach evolution, where there are no clear boundaries? There is a lot of design labor expended to create even the simplest implementation of CAR and CDR.
If Darwin's theory of evolution was correct, which says that meaningful information emerges from randomness, we would turn on our computers, fill the memory with random bytes, and watch programs emerge by changing bytes at random. That's the main reason I don't believe in the theory of evolution through mutation and natural selection, because our universe doesn't work that way. (There are other modifications of Darwin's theory, of course.) We have to expend tremendous labor to get even the simplest computer program designed and working. If evolution could happen the way Darwin said, we wouldn't have to bother.
"...it's hard to believe that many internet users will fall for such an amateurish presentation..." Surely not, which leads to the real question of why spammers are doing it. No one who retains their services could be dumb enough to believe this would work. (In fact, the WSJ once built a portfolio of penny stocks that were spam targets, and they didn't even see a "pump" in value, just a decline.) This is an area where I'd like to see some investigative reporting done by a tech savvy reporter who could find out who these spammers are and who bought their services. To waste bandwidth? To distract us from other spam that's smaller but more accurately targeted? Defamation of a company by rivals? Getting into the spam underworld would be risky (one spammer died in a spam turf battle recently) but it would be interesting to know who buys the services of these spammers for these PDF, MP3, image, etc spams and why they're doing it.
One thing I haven't seen in this thread is to read primary sources by brilliant people which will get you more excited about math than the average pre-calc book. Read Bertrand Russel, A.N. Whitehead, Feynman's chapter on vectors (in 6 not-so-easy pieces), Quine's small introductory book on logic, Aristotle, Euclid, etc. These books are more engaging than some watered down committee-produced math book. Not that there's anything wrong with math books, of course. But I think the primary sources by the minds which created math in the first place are motivating.
What I want is the option to buy an MP3 player that will indemnify me ("legal exemption from liability for damages") from any repercussions from MP3 downloads. If I buy this player, I have purchased the right to play whatever MP3 files I find online from RIAA member labels.
Or not even purchase the player, but just a certificate or something. Why don't they offer this so people who want to be honest can be? Your only real option is to buy music on CD to have a legal copy of it. Why isn't there a web site where you can register an MP3 you downloaded somewhere and pay $0.99 for it or whatever?
This would make more sense than these crazy DRM schemes and crippled players and non-standard audio formats that get cracked before they are in the wild.
If your computer isn't booted, then how do you access the data off of this not-booted hard drive? Another computer? Your MP3 player? Is it a NAS device, which would require a lot of not-booted services like Wi-Fi access to the network.
I've been reading Love's new book on systems programming and it talks about Linux read-ahead strategies. If this RAM disk was faster than RAM, wouldn't your performance get killed by Linux caching your data read from the faster video RAM (if it is faster) into regular RAM? Would you ever hit the RAM disk for frequently used data (and if it wasn't frequently used why bother)?
I went back and read the question again, but don't see any indication of what is going to be stored on the RAM disk. What it seems like Linux would do is keep anything you use often enough to put on a RAM disk in its memory disk buffers anyway. They'd be accessed so often they'd never get old enough to be deleted from memory. (Obviously this would be read-only. You wouldn't store anything volatile on this RAM disk!)
Might be a neat hack, but it doesn't seem to have much practical value. Most video card memories are sort of small, a few MB, and anything you would put in that RAM disk would fit into the disk cache anyway, so if you put something frequently used onto the RAM disk, that data would be read from the cache. I'd bump your system memory to 2GB and let Linux's caching do its thing. I don't think I've swapped a memory page all year.
I think people have figured out that Wikipedia has too many users looking for any excuse at all to delete content contributed by normal people. The people who roam Wikipedia deleting stuff have a set of reasons for nuking almost anything you type in. If you wrote it, it's original research and deleted; if you didn't write it, you're copying copyrighted material and it's deleted; sometimes someone will come along and erase a page for no particular reason; etc. I got so disgusted with the deletions that I quit contributing anything. I mean, deleting a 20 year old promotional photograph for a recording artist released by a record company that no longer exists?
Compensate for what? If this forces the issue, I will be glad. MS needs to spell out exactly what infringes. I want to know exactly what has allegedly been infringed. After all, MS has repeatedly used UNIX-like operating systems to create their products. BSD TCP. Xenix directories. And so on. I have been reading Love's kernel hacking book recently and I sure don't see any NT or VMS similarities! Let's get this out in the open.
Well, the government in America requires all Medicare patients who want to access their web site to purchase Windows, since it's an IE and Windows only web site. Linux users can drop dead. I tried contacting them and got stonewalled, and had to install IE on my mother's computer.
So, why not go a step farther and mandate that all US citizens buy a copy of Windows? It could be an amendment to the constitution. We could use our progressive tax system to fund purchases for low-income people. It doesn't really matter if they have computers or not, just that every person buys a copy of Windows.
Yeah, I'm a little bitter about it. America was once the land of the free, and now the government both declares Microsoft an illegal monopoly, and creates web sites that require a purchase of Windows to use.
Believe it or not - the NY Times business section last Sunday had a puff piece writeup where a music executive SAID HE GOT STARTED MAKING MIX TAPES AND --PLAYING THEM FOR HIS FRIENDS-- this is in print, get the business section. My copy is already recycled. Someone find this. I didn't see it online. It ought to be an exhibit in this trial -- a music executive said publicly that copying and DISSEMINATING MUSIC IN PUBLIC was OK.
What about all the CDs which are out of print, that the record companies will not sell any longer? How do you buy a copy of a CD that is not for sale? I thought that was the whole point of fair use, to have a way to preserve media that isn't being sold anymore.
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Before you get too excited about this, first price a mainframe. You first have to rewire your building for three-phase power, since they don't run on wall current. Then you've consolidated all your servers to one box, so you'd better have 24x7 uninterruptible power, and your current UPS generator likely doesn't supply 3-phase power. You also have to have adequate cooling, even with air-cooled z9 models. Then you have to buy a z9 (their entry level) and software, which is pretty expensive. Then you have to buy disk space. You will probably buy a x86 solution like the FlexES CUB, unless you can afford mainframe channel-attached DASD. Then you'll have to hire someone to care for this new beast, and good luck because no one learns about mainframes in college anymore. (Or, start on page 1 of the ABCs of Systems Programming five-volume set IBM publishes.... You won't be productive any time soon.) After that, you can start porting your programs to the zSeries instruction set, since you can't run x86 binaries. The only good news is you can run your Java programs as-is in the OMVS POSIX shell. Then you can start licensing the software every year.
I said this all along: The OLPC might be okay as a giveaway in third-world countries who don't have any choice and will accept anything that might be useful technology. But OLPC is STUPID to compete in America with the low-end power of Wal-Mart. Just look at how Wal-Mart has found someone to make them a cheap, under $200 PC -- and remember Wal-Mart is making cheaper PCs all the time while the OLPC ones get more expensive -- that run a real version of Linux, not a strange non-standard operating system. What OLPC ought to do is just call off their project for a year, and then go talk to the same suppliers Wal-Mart is using and buy from them. Free enterprise has won this battle, while Negroponte is going around telling people that companies are "pissing on" him and trying to run Windows on the OLPC. I know people like to dis Wal-Mart, but this is one case where they have done something positive, getting cheap PCs into the hands of people who otherwise couldn't afford them.
Here's another reason vinyl may sound -- or seem to sound -- better than CDs. Many albums have been remastered and re-remastered so many times that they're not the same album that was on vinyl. The original tracks for the different instruments have been remixed in the stereo, and the sound envelope of the dynamic range has been changed to be more modern. So the vinyl album is the old mix, and the CD is a new interpretation of the album. The CD is NOT the original album at all, but the vinyl is. Sometimes the new remasters are good: I thought that the original mix and the first remaster of Yes' Relayer sounded like crap, and the second remaster was the first listenable version of that album ever made. But they'll pry my original-remaster Genesis CDs out of my cold, dead hands before I buy/listen to the new ones because the Genesis remasters preserve the delicate dynamic range of the originals.
It appears in Shelby Foote's Civil War history (in the second volume -- it's much easier to find in The Beleaguered City in Ch 1), and seems to be a Mississippi/Louisiana dialect word. I can't find it -- there are a LOT of words to skim through! -- immediately, but it's there someplace.
At least Schildt has name recognition, something that can't be said of the other celebrities on the list at least by people who don't keep up with celebrities or know who they are. (Zappa was the only name I recognized.) Schildt is one of the rare people who has become a household name after leaving a showbiz career -- is there a remaindered book table in America that doesn't have one of his books on it? That can hardly be said of Starcastle albums, which are considered pretty decent prog rock among those in the know, although I haven't heard any.
Don't forget Herb Schildt was in the progressive rock band Starcastle before turning to the word processor and churning out an almost infinite stream of books on MS-DOS and C, and later C++. I think he may still be around today, but he was big in the 90s as sort of the paragon/punching-bag of bad technical writing.
In November 1986, a young 9th grade Junior High student read Discover Magazine's cover article about String Theory, in the school library, and his horizons were expanded by the possibilities and such an impression was made on him that he never forgot it and has since been curious about science. But he did not understand it.
Twenty years later, remembering String Theory from his youth, he read Brian Greene's book on String Theory, thinking that now, after having been college educated and taking science classes and learning a little bit about math, he might understand it. But he did not understand it.
So he went from Brian Greene to David Grene ...
No video has been filmed. The library isn't there anymore, because the school has been reconfigured, so we'd have to build a set based on the student's shaky memories, and there's no budget for that.
SCO's UnixWare and Xenix were a staple of the VAR world, but I would not touch SCO's assets if I was a paper-pushing business person. People are abandoning UnixWare for Linux. Example: IBM had a program to sell mainframe emulators that ran on UnixWare and Linux. The program was wildly successful, many orders of magnitude beyond what IBM thought it would be, and the revenue boost to SCO was huge (back when it started, Linux wasn't as robust and accepted as it is now). So it's ironic that one of SCO's big profit centers the past 5-7 years has been an IBM program! But (1) people use Red Hat, not SCO, for this; and (2) IBM and the emulator company had a bitter falling out and IBM suspended this program. This is the way the VAR world is going. You're not going to have VAR operating systems like UnixWare and Xenix anymore -- VARs are going to use Linux. The only way I would buy SCO's assets would be for pennies on the dollar to re-Caldera them and release them as open source, perhaps if I was a VAR who had UnixWare experience and wanted to offer support contracts. (My first job was supporting Medical Manager on Xenix, so it's sad to see what has happened to this once great platform. Medical Manager is still around, but I don't know what it runs on now. Probably Linux!)
So the MPAA thinks being rich and powerful is worth $15k? I don't blame the guy for sour grapes -- he needs to write a book, and maybe they can make his story into a movie so he can really cash in -- of course, he probably won't make a dime because the movie will be pirates! But the article is really funny because it shows just who the MPAA really are. They promised everything and delivered nothing!
Genetic algorithms are designed and implemented by intelligent programmers who intend to apply them to a given problem, and then allowed to compete. The name is misleading since they do not evolve using the mechanism of evolution (random mutation), although once they are viable and working they compete with natural selection.
This is simply begging the question, since the theory of evolution says that "living things" come from non-living, inorganic matter.
Definitely not intended as flame bait -- just an observation of how evolution doesn't seem to work when applied to computers. Even "genetic algorithms" are not evolution in the strict Darwinian sense, because people intentionally design algorithms and then let them compete. For this to be truly genetic, the algorithms themselves would have to evolve.
It's not easy to understand how random mutations are not more detrimental over the long haul than they are beneficial. Changing bits at random in computer programs -- which are much more simple than DNA (something Darwin didn't know about) -- is rarely going to evolve a good feature like a spell checker. Even if it did, changing things at random in the spell checker would more likely destroy it than it would evolve support for new words. Evolution also doesn't seem to take into account layered subsystems. The subsystems are introduced to meet a need, but must exist completely before they meet the need (like a complete disk I/O interface in the kernel). It's not that easy to understand how evolution could move back and forth from low-level subsystems to high-level ones across boundaries. For example, the Structured Interpretation of Computer Programs videos have a strong emphasis on this layering -- why don't they teach evolution, where there are no clear boundaries? There is a lot of design labor expended to create even the simplest implementation of CAR and CDR.
If Darwin's theory of evolution was correct, which says that meaningful information emerges from randomness, we would turn on our computers, fill the memory with random bytes, and watch programs emerge by changing bytes at random. That's the main reason I don't believe in the theory of evolution through mutation and natural selection, because our universe doesn't work that way. (There are other modifications of Darwin's theory, of course.) We have to expend tremendous labor to get even the simplest computer program designed and working. If evolution could happen the way Darwin said, we wouldn't have to bother.
"...it's hard to believe that many internet users will fall for such an amateurish presentation..." Surely not, which leads to the real question of why spammers are doing it. No one who retains their services could be dumb enough to believe this would work. (In fact, the WSJ once built a portfolio of penny stocks that were spam targets, and they didn't even see a "pump" in value, just a decline.) This is an area where I'd like to see some investigative reporting done by a tech savvy reporter who could find out who these spammers are and who bought their services. To waste bandwidth? To distract us from other spam that's smaller but more accurately targeted? Defamation of a company by rivals? Getting into the spam underworld would be risky (one spammer died in a spam turf battle recently) but it would be interesting to know who buys the services of these spammers for these PDF, MP3, image, etc spams and why they're doing it.
One thing I haven't seen in this thread is to read primary sources by brilliant people which will get you more excited about math than the average pre-calc book. Read Bertrand Russel, A.N. Whitehead, Feynman's chapter on vectors (in 6 not-so-easy pieces), Quine's small introductory book on logic, Aristotle, Euclid, etc. These books are more engaging than some watered down committee-produced math book. Not that there's anything wrong with math books, of course. But I think the primary sources by the minds which created math in the first place are motivating.
What I want is the option to buy an MP3 player that will indemnify me ("legal exemption from liability for damages") from any repercussions from MP3 downloads. If I buy this player, I have purchased the right to play whatever MP3 files I find online from RIAA member labels.
Or not even purchase the player, but just a certificate or something. Why don't they offer this so people who want to be honest can be? Your only real option is to buy music on CD to have a legal copy of it. Why isn't there a web site where you can register an MP3 you downloaded somewhere and pay $0.99 for it or whatever?
This would make more sense than these crazy DRM schemes and crippled players and non-standard audio formats that get cracked before they are in the wild.
If your computer isn't booted, then how do you access the data off of this not-booted hard drive? Another computer? Your MP3 player? Is it a NAS device, which would require a lot of not-booted services like Wi-Fi access to the network.
I've been reading Love's new book on systems programming and it talks about Linux read-ahead strategies. If this RAM disk was faster than RAM, wouldn't your performance get killed by Linux caching your data read from the faster video RAM (if it is faster) into regular RAM? Would you ever hit the RAM disk for frequently used data (and if it wasn't frequently used why bother)? I went back and read the question again, but don't see any indication of what is going to be stored on the RAM disk. What it seems like Linux would do is keep anything you use often enough to put on a RAM disk in its memory disk buffers anyway. They'd be accessed so often they'd never get old enough to be deleted from memory. (Obviously this would be read-only. You wouldn't store anything volatile on this RAM disk!) Might be a neat hack, but it doesn't seem to have much practical value. Most video card memories are sort of small, a few MB, and anything you would put in that RAM disk would fit into the disk cache anyway, so if you put something frequently used onto the RAM disk, that data would be read from the cache. I'd bump your system memory to 2GB and let Linux's caching do its thing. I don't think I've swapped a memory page all year.
I think people have figured out that Wikipedia has too many users looking for any excuse at all to delete content contributed by normal people. The people who roam Wikipedia deleting stuff have a set of reasons for nuking almost anything you type in. If you wrote it, it's original research and deleted; if you didn't write it, you're copying copyrighted material and it's deleted; sometimes someone will come along and erase a page for no particular reason; etc. I got so disgusted with the deletions that I quit contributing anything. I mean, deleting a 20 year old promotional photograph for a recording artist released by a record company that no longer exists?
Compensate for what? If this forces the issue, I will be glad. MS needs to spell out exactly what infringes. I want to know exactly what has allegedly been infringed. After all, MS has repeatedly used UNIX-like operating systems to create their products. BSD TCP. Xenix directories. And so on. I have been reading Love's kernel hacking book recently and I sure don't see any NT or VMS similarities! Let's get this out in the open.
Well, the government in America requires all Medicare patients who want to access their web site to purchase Windows, since it's an IE and Windows only web site. Linux users can drop dead. I tried contacting them and got stonewalled, and had to install IE on my mother's computer.
So, why not go a step farther and mandate that all US citizens buy a copy of Windows? It could be an amendment to the constitution. We could use our progressive tax system to fund purchases for low-income people. It doesn't really matter if they have computers or not, just that every person buys a copy of Windows.
Yeah, I'm a little bitter about it. America was once the land of the free, and now the government both declares Microsoft an illegal monopoly, and creates web sites that require a purchase of Windows to use.
Believe it or not - the NY Times business section last Sunday had a puff piece writeup where a music executive SAID HE GOT STARTED MAKING MIX TAPES AND --PLAYING THEM FOR HIS FRIENDS-- this is in print, get the business section. My copy is already recycled. Someone find this. I didn't see it online. It ought to be an exhibit in this trial -- a music executive said publicly that copying and DISSEMINATING MUSIC IN PUBLIC was OK.
What about all the CDs which are out of print, that the record companies will not sell any longer? How do you buy a copy of a CD that is not for sale? I thought that was the whole point of fair use, to have a way to preserve media that isn't being sold anymore.
Another online poll for people to report their own behaviors.