If you're trying to run 1024 cases with different starting conditions, then a 1024-processor cluster lets you run them all at once. A supercomputer with the same price as the cluster probably has only 1/10th the raw GFLOPS as the cluster, because supercomputer designs are much more complex and commodity cluster hardware is dirt cheap.
So if each cluster CPU can run a single instance the problem efficiently, it's 10 times as cost-effective to use the cluster.
On the other hand, if a single instance of the problem doesn't really fit in a cluster CPU, it might be 1/10th as efficient as the supercomputer CPU, because you're spending more time doing swapping or communications to get the numbers to crunch than you are crunching them, in which case it's a tie with the supercomputer.
But on yet another tentacle, if it's 1/100th as efficient to use the cluster CPU as the supercomputer CPU, because you have to spend a LOT more time swapping, then the supercomputer is a big win, 10 times as cost-effective as the cluster.
Back in the mid-80s, my department had a huge VAX 780 with 4 MB of RAM (16KB chips, I think), and we were working on a network simulation system that needed 12-14 MB RAM to run. I spent a while playing with different versions of 4.1BSD and Unix System VR2, but fundamentally the machine spent all its time swapping data in and out of disk, and the main performance with was helping the physics jocks who wrote the application get better algorithms and better localization and good checkpointing because the computer didn't always stay running for the full week it took to finish a simulation run. A year or two later, we got the budget to buy another 4MB of RAM (in 64KB chips, about $50K IIRC), which helped a bit, and a year or two after that, we got enough budget to buy another 8MB of RAM (maybe 256KB chips? not sure. Also about $50K), and suddenly the application could complete in under an hour instead of a week, because RAM really is a couple orders of magnitude faster than disk drives with a couple more orders of magnitude less latency, so our problem changed from being disk-bound to being CPU-bound.
That speedup not only improved the utilization of the equipment, it made a qualitative difference in the kinds of problems we could address because of the way we could interact with it. That's why people buy supercomputers if they need them - it really can be orders of magnitude faster for some problems. The first year or so, we really had all the RAM that could fit in the double-refrigerator-sized VAX cabinet. Once the denser RAM chips became available, we probably should have spent a bit more manager time beating up on the accounting department, because an extra $50K for hardware could have more than doubled the efficiency of 3-4 physicists, but of course the accounting droids don't think in terms of efficient use of physicists unless it lets you buy half as many of them, which was _not_ the objective here...
A popular PC cluster architecture the last couple of years has been blade servers - boxes of N blades, each with some RAM and a laptop disk, interconnected by GigE or equivalent. They're fun things to run in your own data center, but they're really annoying to put into conventional internet colocation data centers, because they use a lot more electricity per square foo of floorspace than the "rack full of 3-U PCs and Cisco routers" that most of them designed for, or the "rack full of 1U PCs" that we all scrambled to support when those came out.
There are some blade servers that use low-power CPUs like Transmeta to get the tradeoff of more MIPS per watt. E.g. 50 watts per processor gives you 10KW, as opposed to 300 watts-> 60KW. At 10 cents per KWH, a 10KW cluster is about $1/hour, which is cheaper than the grad student you've got managing the thing. (In practice, you often need to double or triple the power costs, because you also need cooling to get rid of all the heat from the CPUs.)
Obviously a supercomputer is a bit different, because you don't need all the disk drives, but CPU and RAM are using an increasing amount of power compared to disk drives. (So does high-end video, which obviously you don't need unless you're playing games like using the video processor for number-crunching instead of the main CPU.) But the power problems are still just as annoying. If you're doing anything custom-built for supercomputing, you'd obviously build boards with multiple CPUs and faster interconnects and skip all or most of the disk drive stuff, so that lets you fit more CPU per 1U or 3-4U of rack space. And you might build a system with lots of DSPs instead of general-purpose CPUs, which would probably get you more MIPS per watt.
Database supercomputers, on the other hand, look surprisingly like blade servers. The old Teradata machines had something like 488 CPU+disk units connected by a fancy back-end switched network, plus a front-end set of CPUs for managing work and communicating to the outside, with algorithms designed to split up queries intelligently across the processors. And of course there were the same kinds of arguments about database machine clusters vs. big iron mainframes vs. loosely-coupled clusters.
An n-dimensional hypercube has 2**n vertices (x1, x2, x3,... xn) where xi is 0 or 1. Your familiar 3-dimensional cube has (x1,x2,x3). Each vertex is adjacent to n other vertices - each one of them has one bit different from your starting vertex. Each vertex is at most n hops away from each other vertex. (Looking at it from the other side,
In a hypercube computer architecture, your put a node at each vertex, and a communication channel to each of the n adjacent vertices. That way, you don't need a huge number of communication channels per processor, i.e. log2(number of processors), at a cost of sometimes having to pass data N hops.
There are other popular architectures out there. Simple 2-D grids match a lot of applications, and require 4 comm channels per processor no matter how many processors you have. The old Transputers were built specifically for this. A minor extension to the 2-D grid is the torus, which you make by connecting the top and bottom of your grid together and the left and right ends together. (It basically doesn't cost any extra, since you had the spare channels at the processors at the edge, plus you get to say "ooohhh, donuts!"). And there are a bunch of applications with dense clusters of processors (for instance, N-way shared-memory nodes) with the clusters connected in hypercubes. Butterfly networks are another shape that was popular for a while - they look sort of FFT-like, and they basically keep the log-n number of communication channels while reducing the bottlenecks.
One-handed keyboards sell for $99 to $350, but here's one that can be had for $25 at a well-known net merchant, and a little more at the CompUSA. Of course, it's intended for gamers, but can easily be made into a one-handed chording keyboard to nurture your inner cyborg, if you just...
design an appropriate keying pattern and learn it, and write a little software. This is just crying out for an Open Source project. You can help handicapped people, perhaps even influence a new generation of low-budget cyborgs!
The Belkin Nostromo n52 Speedpad has 14 typewriter-style keys that chord (meaning they can all be read individually), LEDs, a dial, and a game controller with firing button. That's easily enough to make a chording keyboard. You can use the game controller as four shift keys (your thumb rests upon it).
To make the job easier, here's C code to read the device on Linux. To finish the job, you'll also have to push key events back into the Linux console or X Windows. Code to do that is already available on the net, it's been written for use with other USB devices.
/* Copyright 2003 Bruce Perens.
You may use this software under
the BSD license without the
advertising clause. */ #include
REST OF CODE DELETED FROM THIS COPY BECAUSE SLASHDOT THINKS THE LINES ARE TOO SHORT - SEE ORIGINAL WEBSITE FOR THE REAL CODE.
The Matias HalfKeyboard is basically the QWERTY left half of a keyboard with a thumbshift key to let you type the right half. Unlike all the other chordboards I've seen, it's extremely obvious how to type with it, and the only thing to memorize is the QWERTY layout that most of use already know. Their main market is a Palm Pilot keyboard - much smaller and more solid than most of the competitors, and it lets you use the keyboard in your left hand and stylus in your right hand - you could use one of these on a real computer and mouse right-handed. I'd rather have a right-handed half-keyboard and mouse left-handed, but whatever.
They also market to the handicapped market, though their products for them tend to be overpriced - all you really need to implement it is a different driver for a standard keyboard that lets you flipflop both sides. They've got demoware that lets you try it out. And unfortunately, they've patented what they've done, and would probably get annoyed if somebody released a freeware driver...
Another interesting design is the FITALY keyboard, which is designed for one-finger use, or one-stylus use on a palm touchscreen. Like DVORAK, it's designed for low-travel efficient movement.
Lots of people had "contact" with militias, but McVeigh wasn't part of them - the (Michigan, I think?) militia rejected him as a member because they thought he was a loon. The dangerous military group that he _had_ been part of was the U.S. Army.
However, the KKK certainly were organized right-wing violence.
"Open Source" bundles together several different concepts, some of which are critical for election software, some of which may be bad, and some of which are more neutral.
Transparency - letting everybody read the code - is really the critical need here. You want the public to be able to find bugs and examine features and notice when somebody installs the "Change the Vote To Republican if Nobody's Watching" option. This isn't just a licensing issue - it's a user interface issue, so the voters can tell what version they're running.
Another feature of generic Open Source is the committment to accept code changes from the public. For voting machine software, that's mostly Bad. Yes, it's nice to accept bug fixes, but the organization maintaining the voting machines in the field needs to be responsible for strict configuration control and only deploy correct voting software, rather than letting everybody add features for fun.
Then there's the FREE GNU/Stallman-completeness issue. It's a mixed blessing here - any private company that makes the voting machines and maintains the voting machine software wants to make a profit, but an electronic voting machine should really be just a commodity PC with a printer and some extra curtains around it (plus a commodity optical scanner on another commodity PC to read it), and since the main beneficiary of the software is the public, there's a lot to be said for the government hiring the maintainers of the code to provide it as a public service to _anybody_ who wants it (or at least any US city/state/tribe/Fed organization, optionally making money by selling it commercially to foreigners.) There's still customization work that needs to be done by individual election commissions - putting in the names of candidates or the text of ballot propositions, handling different voting mechanisms such as at-large best N-of-M districts vs. single-candidate elections, any proportional representation features, multiple languages, etc. But that should all be _data_ for a consistent application software platform, and shouldn't require customizing the software if it has a reasonable set of features. (Note that I'm a rabid Libertarian rabidly in favor of privatization, but I'm still recommending a socialist solution here. And it's certainly cheaper and higher quality than the pseudo-privatization version of single-source contracting jobs out to politically connected cronies that's happened under the "Help America Vote Republican Act".)
If you're trying to do full-scale computing, yeah, you probably want a laptop, and if you're trying to watch DVDs, you probably want a laptop or a player with battery life of 3 hours or more (so that when it gets older and the battery starts to dog out, you'll still get a whole movie.)
But if what you're trying to do is write text, get a PDA and a keyboard and a good sync program, and you'll get days of life out of it. My old Psion 3A was unbeatable - adequate built-in keyboard (great for 2-finger typing or two-thumb standup typing), gorgeous 480x160 monochrome screen, and 2-4 week battery life. Psion had a hybrid mini-notebook at Linuxworld today - 800x600 screen (looked like 9-10inch, reasonably full-sized keyboard, ~1-week battery.
One-time password systems make some sense here. One-time pads are operationally awkward and total overkill for the cryptographic needs of this application.
The city has 12000 people. That's half the population of Ithaca NY, so 6 square miles sounds realistic for the whole city (that's roughly 2.5 miles square) - it's certainly bigger than just downtown business area.
But yeah, I couldn't tell if it was free for the residents, or cheap for the residents, and if it was free for visitors (implied by the "several hotels sponsoring it" part) what were they charging residents for - faster connections?
And if it's free, what happens when visitors (or residents, but they're easier to track) start spamming?
Does it just mean they're using WEP to protect connections? Can anybody send your wireless device an unsolicited ping or not? Is that different for traffic from the outside world vs. other wireless nodes? If your computer's not secure, then either your wireless network isn't "secure", or else your wireless network is actively blocking traffic from the outside world using a firewall and also blocking user-to-user traffic that doesn't go through the firewall.
MS-DOS was perfectly secure, because its security model was that there was only one User in the universe, who's allowed to do whatever she wants, but other security models may be a bit more interesting or useful.
Back around 1990 my company bid on a number of NASA jobs, and teamed with companies like Lockheed and Martin. At one of them, when we had a new team of N people working on their site, the IT department showed up with a stack of N Macintoshes, old data wiped out and cleanly reinstalled with the current software. It was extremely productive, because everybody could simply write their stuff, it would all integrate together into whatever final documents we were producing, you didn't need a manual (well, almost never) because Mac software Just Works (even back then), and it was really clean except when you needed to exchange data with people who had different MS Word versions (converting between Mac and PC versions of Word would usually trash tables because one version was always newer than another.)
I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I didn't want to buy one of them, but they make chairs with subwoofers built into them for the Gamerz market. They don't care whether they're on Linux or Windows or probably even Macintosh as long as they've got a 5.1 speaker feed.
The cost of MS-Office problems is usually huge amounts of wasted productivity and forced upgrades and documents that just don't look the way you want them to. Outlook has lots of hosery to it, Cutting and Pasting between Word / Powerpoint / Excel is supposed to "Just Work", but MSOffice isn't a Macintosh app so stuff _doesn't_ Just Work. (Yes, I know you can run MSOFfice versions on Macs, but it's the same suboptimal stuff a couple versions older.) You can get training for it, while there's less training available, and there are people who are wizards at the stuff, but at a company the size of Lockheed they're probably not real handy.
Peopleware by DeMarco & Lister, was a fairly good book on software and development organization productivity (and I assume the second edition is still good...) One of their points is that offices are really important, because programming involves a lot of deep focus, and in a cubicle environment, it's much harder to tune out interruptions and stay focussed. Sometimes you need to talk to other people, but when you need to concentrate, you need to concentrate. Two-person offices are usually an ok compromise - you get some social contact, and you get a bit more interaction with other people and projects, but you can still ignore your officemate except if he's having a speakerphone conversation. And of course, if you're into Extreme Programming, two people is probably the perfect number...
Not all jobs are that way - sometimes overhearing what the other people around you are talking about is more useful to overall productivity. And some people can concentrate even with lots of background noise. But for a lot of people, offices would have been more productive than cubicles.
FR3D MB0G0 says "Linux? Not! Can't preserve Three Laws if anybody can modload a new kernel driver into their heads. You need something really secure like OpenBSD! Just look at this videocam mounted on PDP1 K3n0b3, who's running Linux 2.2 and wuFTPd. You can clearly see the shadow of the chainsaw on the back of your head there... That'd never happen if he were running OpenBSD."
Scaling commodity technology is one way to fundamentally advance the science of computing - much of the science is learning about how different things scale and what ideas work or don't. While not all of the lessons we've learned in the last 25 years of computer development are present in the typical high-end graphics PC, Beowulf cluster, or Nintendo gamer box, many of them are. Even if you could afford a Cray 1, you probably wouldn't want something that slow and lame - a 1990 Cray 3 was about 4.5 GFLOPS, so that's still a bit bigger than what you can put on your desktop for 0.01% of the price, but not by much, and that Pentium-4 is all yours, as is the nVidia graphics processor on it which is really a lot faster for some tasks.
One big paradigm shift is that computers that used to cost enough money that they'd take dozens of people to manage and hundreds to feed them data and years to design database applications for are now commodities that sit in your pocket or on your desktop and can be used for problems that you'd never have applied that level of resource to back in the 80s or the 60s. That means we need to relearn how to interact with users so they can take advantage of the speed, and we're only starting to crack into applications that can use some of the CPU speed, like video processing.
Another big paradigm shift is the connectivity of the Internet - you've got more data bandwidth on that cheap cable modem than the first N years of the Arpanet, and basic communication is basically free. That links the world together, for good and bad - it creates opportunities for Nigerians to sit in cybercafes near their homes and scame untold wealth from suckers around the world, and lets people have freedom of speech in ways that their governments have serious difficulty controlling or preventing.
Oh, and yes, I'm a Linux fanboy, but I was also reading comp.arch (remember Usenet?) back in the days when the Attack of The Killer Micros was starting to kill the minicomputer and mainframe industry ("careful with that Vax, Eugene!") and RISC vs. CISC was still a design issue, so I do have some perspective on the game.
The Ford guy wants the Feds to cough up $200M in tax money to develop machines that solve problems that Ford and a couple of other people have, instead of either Ford spending the money themselves or the Feds spending money getting the industry to develop computers or software that solve problems that far more people have which could be much more benefit to industry as a whole. I'm not convinced that the Feds should be doing that either, but since the Weather Service and Nuclear Weapons Designers seem happy with big clusters, the opportunity cost of spending my money designing a computer for building better SUVs vs. a computer for better medical research or whatever seems an obvious bad choice.
In particular, he wants a 2000s-version of an 1980s architecture running a 1960s language. For $1M, he could train his technology guys to use newer programming techniques. Yes, I realize that Fortran 90 is newer than Fortran 77 which is newer than Fortran IV which is newer than Fortran 1, and that the biggest CPU job these guys do is usually crunching big matrices of floating point numbers. That's a job for a subroutine you write once and feed with data and user interfaces that are written in languages that are more efficient for prototyping and user interface design.
Sure, the Cray-1s were cool. But their CPU power was about the same as a Pentium-133. They did more I/O, but it was only about 100 MIPS. I forget how fast the Cray-2 and the X-MP and Y-MP were, but your basic this-year's graphics CPU from NVidia or their competitors has a fairly similar amount of CPU and memory bandwidth - the RAM's usually smaller, and most of the calculations are 32-bit rather than 64-bit or 80-bit, but the horsepower's pretty similar and you can think of the 3 GHz Pentium-4 as a channel processor fetching stuff from RAM and disk drives if you'd like.
The Cray-something (2? YMP?) I visited at Livermore Labs back in the late 80s was really cool, for a now 17-year-old machine. It had a ~$2000 AT&T 80286 PC on top as a console controller, and the terabyte of data storage was an 8-foot cube tape robot from StorageTek. Today you could put the $2000 PC on top as the main CPU, including a terabyte of disk drive.
There were lots of problems with Nachi. The biggest practical problem was that it was too noisy and aggressive, so it clogged up networks worse than the worms it was trying to prevent, between pings to find host machines, specific-port probes to find which hosts were susceptible, and the overall high speed of propagation.
That's the kind of misbehaviour you expect from worms, while it would have been no more work to release a scanner/cleaner that network admininstrators could have run in a controlled fashion with one set of hosts scanning any given subnet instead of multiple worms at random. And of course it _was_ a virus, so you also expect it to accidentally stomp on various machine configurations while it's trying to do the propagation job, and make various errors trying to "clean up" things that weren't actually broken (or at least weren't broken in the specific manner that it expected), and clog host resources, etc.
That could explain life travelling between planets/asteroids/moons/etc. within a given solar system, though the probability of multiple planets being able to support the same kinds of life may be quite low. But interstellar travel is much less likely - there's not a lot of that happening, because there are very few events that can cause planetary material to get kicked out of a solar system. Occasionally stars may get close enough to each other to steal materials, but it's much rarer than planetary evolution.
Also, while the Drake Equation numbers are, as you say, highly uncertain, there's no reason to assume the probability of life appearing is 1.0 - it could be 0.0000000001 and we just got lucky. There wouldn't be a Drake Equation if it hadn't happened:-)
I do technical consulting, which includes having conversations with customers and doing Powerpoint slide presentations, which means hauling around a laptop and plugging it into video projectors (we used to also haul around projectors, but most of my customers have them these days.)
When the MS WinCE machines came out, with pocket-format Powerpoint on them, it sounded like they'd be great - I could carry something much smaller and lighter than my laptop and use it. BUT NO, because they only had LCD screens, no video jacks. They're just bloated Palm Pilots (and I'd gotten a real Palm III after my better-but-clunkier Psion 3a died.) This machine could do that job, and I wouldn't have to schlep my PC out to customers.
But it's missed part of its market, because USB memory sticks can do most of the job. 128MB is enough to haul a bunch of presentations to customer sites, and most customers that have video projectors mounted in their meeting rooms also have PCs new enough to support USB drives. And in practice, I'm supporting different customers these days, and do most of my work by phone.
The article said that the author used it with a standard 17" LCD monitor, so unlike the typical PDA, it has a video jack. It also has USB, so with modern operating systems it should be able to work just fine with a USB keyboard. That means that you can just take it with you , use it as as desktop computer with real screen and keyboard when you're at a desk, and use the dinky screen and keyboard when you're not, and it's quasi-pocketsized. Sounds like a real win to me, except for the price, which is only about 50% high for a laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the mid-80s, my department had a huge VAX 780 with 4 MB of RAM (16KB chips, I think), and we were working on a network simulation system that needed 12-14 MB RAM to run. I spent a while playing with different versions of 4.1BSD and Unix System VR2, but fundamentally the machine spent all its time swapping data in and out of disk, and the main performance with was helping the physics jocks who wrote the application get better algorithms and better localization and good checkpointing because the computer didn't always stay running for the full week it took to finish a simulation run. A year or two later, we got the budget to buy another 4MB of RAM (in 64KB chips, about $50K IIRC), which helped a bit, and a year or two after that, we got enough budget to buy another 8MB of RAM (maybe 256KB chips? not sure. Also about $50K), and suddenly the application could complete in under an hour instead of a week, because RAM really is a couple orders of magnitude faster than disk drives with a couple more orders of magnitude less latency, so our problem changed from being disk-bound to being CPU-bound.
That speedup not only improved the utilization of the equipment, it made a qualitative difference in the kinds of problems we could address because of the way we could interact with it. That's why people buy supercomputers if they need them - it really can be orders of magnitude faster for some problems. The first year or so, we really had all the RAM that could fit in the double-refrigerator-sized VAX cabinet. Once the denser RAM chips became available, we probably should have spent a bit more manager time beating up on the accounting department, because an extra $50K for hardware could have more than doubled the efficiency of 3-4 physicists, but of course the accounting droids don't think in terms of efficient use of physicists unless it lets you buy half as many of them, which was _not_ the objective here...
There are some blade servers that use low-power CPUs like Transmeta to get the tradeoff of more MIPS per watt. E.g. 50 watts per processor gives you 10KW, as opposed to 300 watts-> 60KW. At 10 cents per KWH, a 10KW cluster is about $1/hour, which is cheaper than the grad student you've got managing the thing. (In practice, you often need to double or triple the power costs, because you also need cooling to get rid of all the heat from the CPUs.)
Obviously a supercomputer is a bit different, because you don't need all the disk drives, but CPU and RAM are using an increasing amount of power compared to disk drives. (So does high-end video, which obviously you don't need unless you're playing games like using the video processor for number-crunching instead of the main CPU.) But the power problems are still just as annoying. If you're doing anything custom-built for supercomputing, you'd obviously build boards with multiple CPUs and faster interconnects and skip all or most of the disk drive stuff, so that lets you fit more CPU per 1U or 3-4U of rack space. And you might build a system with lots of DSPs instead of general-purpose CPUs, which would probably get you more MIPS per watt.
Database supercomputers, on the other hand, look surprisingly like blade servers. The old Teradata machines had something like 488 CPU+disk units connected by a fancy back-end switched network, plus a front-end set of CPUs for managing work and communicating to the outside, with algorithms designed to split up queries intelligently across the processors. And of course there were the same kinds of arguments about database machine clusters vs. big iron mainframes vs. loosely-coupled clusters.
In a hypercube computer architecture, your put a node at each vertex, and a communication channel to each of the n adjacent vertices. That way, you don't need a huge number of communication channels per processor, i.e. log2(number of processors), at a cost of sometimes having to pass data N hops.
There are other popular architectures out there. Simple 2-D grids match a lot of applications, and require 4 comm channels per processor no matter how many processors you have. The old Transputers were built specifically for this. A minor extension to the 2-D grid is the torus, which you make by connecting the top and bottom of your grid together and the left and right ends together. (It basically doesn't cost any extra, since you had the spare channels at the processors at the edge, plus you get to say "ooohhh, donuts!"). And there are a bunch of applications with dense clusters of processors (for instance, N-way shared-memory nodes) with the clusters connected in hypercubes. Butterfly networks are another shape that was popular for a while - they look sort of FFT-like, and they basically keep the log-n number of communication channels while reducing the bottlenecks.
Picture
One-handed keyboards sell for $99 to $350, but here's one that can be had for $25 at a well-known net merchant, and a little more at the CompUSA. Of course, it's intended for gamers, but can easily be made into a one-handed chording keyboard to nurture your inner cyborg, if you just...
design an appropriate keying pattern and learn it, and write a little software. This is just crying out for an Open Source project. You can help handicapped people, perhaps even influence a new generation of low-budget cyborgs!
The Belkin Nostromo n52 Speedpad has 14 typewriter-style keys that chord (meaning they can all be read individually), LEDs, a dial, and a game controller with firing button. That's easily enough to make a chording keyboard. You can use the game controller as four shift keys (your thumb rests upon it).
To make the job easier, here's C code to read the device on Linux. To finish the job, you'll also have to push key events back into the Linux console or X Windows. Code to do that is already available on the net, it's been written for use with other USB devices.
REST OF CODE DELETED FROM THIS COPY BECAUSE SLASHDOT THINKS THE LINES ARE TOO SHORT - SEE ORIGINAL WEBSITE FOR THE REAL CODE.
There was a story in the news recently about a Carjacker who couldn't drive a stick shift and got caught quickly.
They also market to the handicapped market, though their products for them tend to be overpriced - all you really need to implement it is a different driver for a standard keyboard that lets you flipflop both sides. They've got demoware that lets you try it out. And unfortunately, they've patented what they've done, and would probably get annoyed if somebody released a freeware driver...
Another interesting design is the FITALY keyboard, which is designed for one-finger use, or one-stylus use on a palm touchscreen. Like DVORAK, it's designed for low-travel efficient movement.
However, the KKK certainly were organized right-wing violence.
But if what you're trying to do is write text, get a PDA and a keyboard and a good sync program, and you'll get days of life out of it. My old Psion 3A was unbeatable - adequate built-in keyboard (great for 2-finger typing or two-thumb standup typing), gorgeous 480x160 monochrome screen, and 2-4 week battery life. Psion had a hybrid mini-notebook at Linuxworld today - 800x600 screen (looked like 9-10inch, reasonably full-sized keyboard, ~1-week battery.
One-time password systems make some sense here. One-time pads are operationally awkward and total overkill for the cryptographic needs of this application.
But yeah, I couldn't tell if it was free for the residents, or cheap for the residents, and if it was free for visitors (implied by the "several hotels sponsoring it" part) what were they charging residents for - faster connections?
And if it's free, what happens when visitors (or residents, but they're easier to track) start spamming?
Can anybody send your wireless device an unsolicited ping or not?
Is that different for traffic from the outside world vs. other wireless nodes?
If your computer's not secure, then either your wireless network isn't "secure", or else your wireless network is actively blocking traffic from the outside world using a firewall and also blocking user-to-user traffic that doesn't go through the firewall.
MS-DOS was perfectly secure, because its security model was that there was only one User in the universe, who's allowed to do whatever she wants, but other security models may be a bit more interesting or useful.
Back around 1990 my company bid on a number of NASA jobs, and teamed with companies like Lockheed and Martin. At one of them, when we had a new team of N people working on their site, the IT department showed up with a stack of N Macintoshes, old data wiped out and cleanly reinstalled with the current software. It was extremely productive, because everybody could simply write their stuff, it would all integrate together into whatever final documents we were producing, you didn't need a manual (well, almost never) because Mac software Just Works (even back then), and it was really clean except when you needed to exchange data with people who had different MS Word versions (converting between Mac and PC versions of Word would usually trash tables because one version was always newer than another.)
I'm not a hardcore gamer, so I didn't want to buy one of them, but they make chairs with subwoofers built into them for the Gamerz market. They don't care whether they're on Linux or Windows or probably even Macintosh as long as they've got a 5.1 speaker feed.
The cost of MS-Office problems is usually huge amounts of wasted productivity and forced upgrades and documents that just don't look the way you want them to. Outlook has lots of hosery to it, Cutting and Pasting between Word / Powerpoint / Excel is supposed to "Just Work", but MSOffice isn't a Macintosh app so stuff _doesn't_ Just Work. (Yes, I know you can run MSOFfice versions on Macs, but it's the same suboptimal stuff a couple versions older.) You can get training for it, while there's less training available, and there are people who are wizards at the stuff, but at a company the size of Lockheed they're probably not real handy.
Not all jobs are that way - sometimes overhearing what the other people around you are talking about is more useful to overall productivity. And some people can concentrate even with lots of background noise. But for a lot of people, offices would have been more productive than cubicles.
FR3D MB0G0 says "Linux? Not! Can't preserve Three Laws if anybody can modload a new kernel driver into their heads. You need something really secure like OpenBSD! Just look at this videocam mounted on PDP1 K3n0b3, who's running Linux 2.2 and wuFTPd. You can clearly see the shadow of the chainsaw on the back of your head there... That'd never happen if he were running OpenBSD."
One big paradigm shift is that computers that used to cost enough money that they'd take dozens of people to manage and hundreds to feed them data and years to design database applications for are now commodities that sit in your pocket or on your desktop and can be used for problems that you'd never have applied that level of resource to back in the 80s or the 60s. That means we need to relearn how to interact with users so they can take advantage of the speed, and we're only starting to crack into applications that can use some of the CPU speed, like video processing.
Another big paradigm shift is the connectivity of the Internet - you've got more data bandwidth on that cheap cable modem than the first N years of the Arpanet, and basic communication is basically free. That links the world together, for good and bad - it creates opportunities for Nigerians to sit in cybercafes near their homes and scame untold wealth from suckers around the world, and lets people have freedom of speech in ways that their governments have serious difficulty controlling or preventing.
Oh, and yes, I'm a Linux fanboy, but I was also reading comp.arch (remember Usenet?) back in the days when the Attack of The Killer Micros was starting to kill the minicomputer and mainframe industry ("careful with that Vax, Eugene!") and RISC vs. CISC was still a design issue, so I do have some perspective on the game.
In particular, he wants a 2000s-version of an 1980s architecture running a 1960s language. For $1M, he could train his technology guys to use newer programming techniques. Yes, I realize that Fortran 90 is newer than Fortran 77 which is newer than Fortran IV which is newer than Fortran 1, and that the biggest CPU job these guys do is usually crunching big matrices of floating point numbers. That's a job for a subroutine you write once and feed with data and user interfaces that are written in languages that are more efficient for prototyping and user interface design.
The Cray-something (2? YMP?) I visited at Livermore Labs back in the late 80s was really cool, for a now 17-year-old machine. It had a ~$2000 AT&T 80286 PC on top as a console controller, and the terabyte of data storage was an 8-foot cube tape robot from StorageTek. Today you could put the $2000 PC on top as the main CPU, including a terabyte of disk drive.
That's the kind of misbehaviour you expect from worms, while it would have been no more work to release a scanner/cleaner that network admininstrators could have run in a controlled fashion with one set of hosts scanning any given subnet instead of multiple worms at random. And of course it _was_ a virus, so you also expect it to accidentally stomp on various machine configurations while it's trying to do the propagation job, and make various errors trying to "clean up" things that weren't actually broken (or at least weren't broken in the specific manner that it expected), and clog host resources, etc.
Also, while the Drake Equation numbers are, as you say, highly uncertain, there's no reason to assume the probability of life appearing is 1.0 - it could be 0.0000000001 and we just got lucky. There wouldn't be a Drake Equation if it hadn't happened
When the MS WinCE machines came out, with pocket-format Powerpoint on them, it sounded like they'd be great - I could carry something much smaller and lighter than my laptop and use it. BUT NO, because they only had LCD screens, no video jacks. They're just bloated Palm Pilots (and I'd gotten a real Palm III after my better-but-clunkier Psion 3a died.) This machine could do that job, and I wouldn't have to schlep my PC out to customers.
But it's missed part of its market, because USB memory sticks can do most of the job. 128MB is enough to haul a bunch of presentations to customer sites, and most customers that have video projectors mounted in their meeting rooms also have PCs new enough to support USB drives. And in practice, I'm supporting different customers these days, and do most of my work by phone.
The article said that the author used it with a standard 17" LCD monitor, so unlike the typical PDA, it has a video jack. It also has USB, so with modern operating systems it should be able to work just fine with a USB keyboard. That means that you can just take it with you , use it as as desktop computer with real screen and keyboard when you're at a desk, and use the dinky screen and keyboard when you're not, and it's quasi-pocketsized. Sounds like a real win to me, except for the price, which is only about 50% high for a laptop.