One of the most disturbing trends that I see in web design these days is the trend toward trying to control layout at the pixel level. As HTML (Hypertext Markup) was not intended to be a graphics language, what is your comment on this?
As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use <font size=1> to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font. Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.
As another example, many pages use the <table>, and <layer> to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.
What are standards groups doing to fix this? Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement <table width=30ch> to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?
For the record, I would give half my salary, my first born child, my left testicle, and all the beer in germany for an open source symbolic math package that has similar functionality to Maple or Mathematica.
Mathematica's absurd licensing means (among other things) that on my Linux/Alpha system, I must buy the Tru64 version for $3000.00, and cannot get this under a student license.
Boycott Wolfram Research. Their Draconian licensing policies and you-can-only-afford-this-with-a-government-researc h-grant pricing schemes have put them on my boycott list along with Microsoft, Intel, Ameritech, Blockbuster, and a few others.
Also for the record, I would contribute heavily to any open source project that shows promise of approaching Maple/Mathematica. Here's some thoughts:
<IDEA>
I want the ability to take an expression and manipulate it by selectively applying identities, exactly the way you do on paper. For example, the ability to select a term in an expression, and apply a trig identity to it, select two terms and combine them with a common denominator, etc.
It should have input/output compatible with LaTeX so that results can be easily incorporated into a paper.
Let's face it: Alphas are simply not as generally available as x86 stuff. Please prove me wrong.
Agreed. Sad state of affairs that one vendor (Intel) dominates so completely. I dream of the day I can walk into a computer store and see Alphas next to PPC's next to AMD's next to MIPS', all running the same apps on Linux, and be able to evaluate them for myself.
I don't really care what the benchmark is, Apache, SPEC, Seti were just examples. I realize all benchmarks are bunk, but a jello yardstick is better than no yardstick at all. Game benchmarks are VERY heavily biased by the graphics card and use of 3DNow/MMX instructions. I want numbers I can use to compare Alpha/PPC/MIPS/HP/AMD/Intel. I simply can't get a quake benchmark for an alpha. Part of the reason that people keep buying shitty x86 hardware is the inability to compare performance between x86 and anything else, and misconceptions about the price of non-x86 hardware. (Ask anyone -- they'll tell you alphas are expensive, but no one actually knows how much one costs)
As the linux crowd is growing daily, how about benchmarks common to linux users?
kernel compiles (for developers)
Apache (for webmasters/ISPs)
mp3 encoding/playing (for, well...everyone)
SETI@Home (for anyone who wants bragging rights...but this is also a decent test of FPU performance)
The point is that I can run linux on anything from an alpha to a palmpilot, but I have no idea of the relative performance of each platform! And no one is addressing this issue.
You would think that the most respected source for this sort of tests on the Internet could get it right for once.
I agree. I have read Tom's on and off for a while, and am continually annoyed at their seeming lack of concern for anything but games. It is a fact that people do things with computers besides play games.
I do not consider Quake, Descent, and the like a reasonable test of much of anything. Those benchmarks do not tell me how fast it can do number crunching, or how fast it can serve up html. I do not and will not use windows, so I don't care how many business WinStone(d)'s it does.
How about useful measurements of the system, like measured I/O throughput, Apache benchmarks, standard SPEC benchmarks, hell, even Seti@Home would be more useful.
Because of the benchmarks Tom's chooses, their evaluations are useless in comparing their hardware to non-Intel stuff. I'd like to stop supporting the Microtel duopoly as soon as possible, and I suspect other people would too. Doing so requires knowing just how good other hardware is.
I have e-mailed Tom's several times asking them to use more standard benchmarks, each with no response or acknowledgement. Does anyone know of another, better benchmark site? One that compares heterogenous hardware, on unices, with more reasonable benchmarks? Anyone want to start a sitle like Tom's for Linux users? I mean, hardware vendors will often send you free "evaluation" hardware to play with. That could be a pretty good incentive.;)
If question 11 made you feel guilty, go read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It is subtitled "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" and is about exactly this topic (among other things). Technology, and especially access to information and communication really can help a person in the shits. The device he describes being dropped from the plane is very similar in nature to the Primer in The Diamond Age. Has such a thing ever been developed? I mean, a device intended to give access to information and communication to a person who potentially has never used an electronic device before? (Attempts to market certain operating systems to my grandmother not withstanding)
Imagine how quickly a digital democracy could pop up in such a situation.
I just got served this page from this link. Think a MS server is responsible? I LOVE MICROSOFT!!! So that's how they beat linux on some web benchmarks. They serve a busy page for all requests.
For the humor impaired: everything in bold is sarcasm
All you can do with the key system is verify that a person that sent you a message twice has the same private key. As you say, you cannot verify the physical identity of a person without going through some central agency (government or not), which opens a hole for abuses.
In order to implement a digital signature system without a central agency would require a shift in what we think of as a "signature". A secure digital signature could not verify that I am anyone in particular, but only that I am the person (or entity) that opened the account. Of course, this could easily subvert income tracking for individuals and corporations, and could be easily used to subvert tax laws. But then, this will probably happen eventually anyway, as soon as overseas tax-haven banks get a clue and start allowing anonymous accounts accessable electronically.
Correction: FreeCiv does have an AI. Check out the commands easy, normal, hard, ai from the server console. I think the palm screen would be cumbersome to play any of the Civ/SimBlah games on because it's so small.
The physics community has been doing something like this for quite some time, though those damned expensive paper journals still exist too. After all, this is what the web was invented for. Check them out if you're interested:
Folks, this is patently ridiculous. Strange quarks have been produced in accelerators since the fifties. The notion that strange quarks could start a chain reaction converting things into strange matter is absolutely absurd. For the curious, I direct you to the Particle Adventure, and the RHIC Homepage which will hopefully be more enlightening than the drivel that the Sunday Times spouts.
Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.
I would argue that the Internet is not going to be _that_ big of a societal change until it becomes as accessible to the average room-temperature-IQ public as automobiles were when their invention changed society.
I would argue that many (most?) aspects of net culture will never be available to those with "room-temperature-IQ's." I fear an impending societal division that will reshape class structures: net users and non-net users. The difference will be that the division will be along intelligence lines.
Access to information as readily available as on the net also increases ability to learn and hopefully perceived intelligence too, so this new net class will grow. But it will never grow to encompass all.
The reason Mozilla is failing is that it's a MONSTER! Have you tried to compile it? It's got the full code for libgif, libjpeg, and tens of other libraries included as PART OF IT! And then the true mozilla code itself is huge, poorly documented, and not commented worth a crap. It's no wonder no one wanted to jump in and fix their bugs. I looked it at and figured it'd take me two weeks just to get up to speed on what the hell it was doing, so I could fix any trivial bug.
Open Source is based on the premise that any person can take a WORKING piece of software, add a small piece or bug fix, and end up with a WORKING piece of software. If the source isn't working, or is too complicated to add a feature quickly, most hackers will toss it aside.
Word to OSS projects -- always make sure your "current" developers release runs, and keep an arcitecture that is simple and easy to understand and pick up. Unfortunately, none of the ambitious web browser projects (Mnemonic and Mozilla) have followed either of these. Thus, they are failing.
The use of these "farms" is a little unusual compared to other "supercomputers". The ratio of computation to communication is large. Basically each computer is given one proton-proton collision and all its associated data to play with. It crunches this for a few seconds, and sends the results back for storage on tape. Nodes do not communicate with each other, so a massive network structure is not needed. Still, I know it's not going to be straight ethernet.;)
BTW, I saw another poster mention 1 Tb of data a second. Realize that there are 3 levels of "triggers" designed to isolate interesting events (1 event = 1 proton-antiproton collision). All 1 Tb doesn't reach the computing cluster (The 2000 nodes are probably the Level 3 trigger system and/or batch reconstruction). From my brief perusal of Fermilab's Farms page it seems that they will use several I/O PC's connected via fast or gigabit ethernet to a gigabit ethernet switch, which will be connected to the farm. The switch will also be connected to the cental mass storage system.
Enough of this cold fusion crap. There are very good physical reasons why cold fusion is IMPOSSIBLE. In order to fuse, you have to get nuclei close enough together so that they feel the strong force. The energy involved in getting them together is so high (~5 million K) that it CANNOT BE DONE AT ROOM TEMPERATURE! Sheesh.
High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.
Are you on crack? Storing mp3's on a tape drive would be a BAD idea. It'd take 5 minutes just to fast forward to the right part of the tape to find your song. And tape drives have lots of notorious problems (tapes STRETCH). Oh and BTW, they're advertising 30gig, which assumes 2:1 compression, so they're only 15gig and 25gig tapes.
Anyway, cheap 15 gig IDE drives are cheap enough for me.;)
There are many possible frameworks for charging, most of which have also been tried by the closed-source software companies. For example:
Per-copy charges. A fee is charged for each computer with a copy of the software installed.
Seat charges. A fee is charged for each user authorised to run the software.
Concurrent user charges. The software can be used by anyone anywhere, but may only be used by a limited number of people at any one time.
Per-invocation charges. A fee is charged for each time the software is used.
I will never use any software that nickles and dimes me. I do not want any company or person knowing what software I use when. Also, as you mention, the value of a piece of software is different for each person. There are 400 individual software packages included in RedHat's distribution. What is the value to me of a single invocation of perl? Small. Very small.
Also, in the course of writing a perl script I will execute perl tens, hundreds, even thousands of times in testing it. What is the value of a single one of those perl executions? Zero. But much good may be derived from it if I develop a useful script. Development tools must not be charged for.
In implementation, your charging scheme looks like taxation. There are lots of good reasons that people hate taxation.
A contributor may refuse the points offered. The project is then unable to incorporate the contribution. Because this is open source software the contributor can also offer customers an enhanced version of the "official" package and demand payment for the enhancement. In such a situation the users would have to pay twice, once for the main package and once to the person offering the enhancement. This would obviously be inefficient and a very unusual situation. However it gives contributors a lever when bargaining for points.
Open Source Software already has a problem with fragmentation. Human politics leads to disagreements, which leads to software splits (Net/Open)BSD, egcs/gcc, emacs/xemacs/lucid emacs, etc. By making it economically favorable for a contributor to grab the source and run, you make it favorable for the contributor to fragment the project. This is not a Good Thing(tm) IMHO.
In summary, it looks like an interesting idea, but totally unimplementable. You would have to create a central authority to handle "points", and this is wide open to fraud. I think one of the major strengths of Open Source is that it is economically free (beer). You would massively reduce the number of potential contributors to a project if now you must pay to hack it. "Many eyeballs" depends on a minimization of the effort involved in looking at the code. Once money is involved, you place a large stubling block in front of any potential set of eyeballs.
Should Monsanto (and other Agri business and genetic engineering firms) be allowed to own genes as intellectual property? Monsanto calls saving seed from Roundup Ready(tm) crops and replanting in the next season "Seed Piracy."(*) Do you want a corporate monoploy controlling our food supply?
And the government monopoly currently controlling our food supply is any better? Are you arguing against monopoly (which doesn't make sense -- government) or corporate food production (which also doesn't make sense...unless you want to live in a communist state).
People will still be people, regardless of what operating system they use. They will still make stupid generalizations, and propeganda will still take the same form.
If I see one more sci-fi movie that manages to sneak in some moral statement about bigotry edgewise, I'm going to vomit. Pilgrims my ass. It's about time the industry moved on to any topic that hasn't been beaten to death.
And throw scientific realism out the window. We can now fly around gravitational singularities, and plot courses through hyperspace with our brains. Anyone with a brain would program a computer to do it. A computer can do it faster.
Now, this could be funny. We could really bring M$ to their knees by mailing them the core file everytime Office dumped one. And you know Office would dump lots of them.
Oh, and one other thing. I will never use software that has a "wizard". Any software that needs a "wizard" to be usable is entirely too complex for its own good. Unix has a history of well organized tools that are terse and can do complex things. It would be a shame to loose all this to Visual Basic and macro viruses.
Bah. Lyx does everything I need. But then, I'm a physicist, not an Office drone. (pun intended)
Bullcrap. Alphas have a PCI BUS, use ATX power supplies, and can use generic PC hardware. Other than the motherboard, the cost of an alpha system and an intel system (with the same components) is the same. Becase, well...they're the same components.
Slashdot Mirror
As an example of this, many sites (including yours) use <font size=1> to acheive a font that is fairly uniform in pixel size across browsers. Anyone with a high-resolution screen will tell you that this is highly annoying, since it results in an almost unreadable font. Forcing netscape to use a larger font size often destroys the layout of the page. What's worse, some pages use dynamic fonts and other features to force this on the user.
As another example, many pages use the <table>, and <layer> to specify the exact size in pixels of portions of the page, and then put a little notice at the bottom ("This site best viewed at 800x600") or some such.
What are standards groups doing to fix this? Will I be looking at pages designed for 800x600 (or worse, 640x480) with my 1920x1440 screen forever? Will persons with laptops at 640x480 be unable to read the web soon? Will standards bodies ever require percentage-of-screen width and height specifiers, or even better, implement <table width=30ch> to specify sizes in relation to the current font size?
--Bob
Everyone go out and try an ad filtering proxy today! It makes your browsing experience so much more tolerable!
--Bob
For the record, I would give half my salary, my first born child, my left testicle, and all the beer in germany for an open source symbolic math package that has similar functionality to Maple or Mathematica.
Mathematica's absurd licensing means (among other things) that on my Linux/Alpha system, I must buy the Tru64 version for $3000.00, and cannot get this under a student license.
Boycott Wolfram Research. Their Draconian licensing policies and you-can-only-afford-this-with-a-government-researc h-grant pricing schemes have put them on my boycott list along with Microsoft, Intel, Ameritech, Blockbuster, and a few others.
Also for the record, I would contribute heavily to any open source project that shows promise of approaching Maple/Mathematica. Here's some thoughts:
<IDEA>
</IDEA>
--Bob
Agreed. Sad state of affairs that one vendor (Intel) dominates so completely. I dream of the day I can walk into a computer store and see Alphas next to PPC's next to AMD's next to MIPS', all running the same apps on Linux, and be able to evaluate them for myself.
--Bob
As the linux crowd is growing daily, how about benchmarks common to linux users?
The point is that I can run linux on anything from an alpha to a palmpilot, but I have no idea of the relative performance of each platform! And no one is addressing this issue.
--Bob, proud Alpha owner. ;)
You would think that the most respected source for this sort of tests on the Internet could get it right for once.
I agree. I have read Tom's on and off for a while, and am continually annoyed at their seeming lack of concern for anything but games. It is a fact that people do things with computers besides play games.
I have e-mailed Tom's several times asking them to use more standard benchmarks, each with no response or acknowledgement. Does anyone know of another, better benchmark site? One that compares heterogenous hardware, on unices, with more reasonable benchmarks? Anyone want to start a sitle like Tom's for Linux users? I mean, hardware vendors will often send you free "evaluation" hardware to play with. That could be a pretty good incentive. ;)
--Bob
Imagine how quickly a digital democracy could pop up in such a situation.
--Bob
For the humor impaired: everything in bold is sarcasm
--Bob
All you can do with the key system is verify that a person that sent you a message twice has the same private key. As you say, you cannot verify the physical identity of a person without going through some central agency (government or not), which opens a hole for abuses.
In order to implement a digital signature system without a central agency would require a shift in what we think of as a "signature". A secure digital signature could not verify that I am anyone in particular, but only that I am the person (or entity) that opened the account. Of course, this could easily subvert income tracking for individuals and corporations, and could be easily used to subvert tax laws. But then, this will probably happen eventually anyway, as soon as overseas tax-haven banks get a clue and start allowing anonymous accounts accessable electronically.
--Bob
--Bob
xxx.lanl.gov preprint archive
Astrophysics Data System
Each major lab (SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, etc) usually also has a method of accessing articles, but I'll let you find those on your own. ;) -- Bob
Just to make things clear, I'm a grad student in physics, working on the BaBar experiment (at SLAC in SanFran). My analysis involves kaons, which are bound states of strange quarks and up/down quarks. And yes, physics has produced many, many kaons over the years. So I think I know what I'm talking about.
--Bob
I would argue that many (most?) aspects of net culture will never be available to those with "room-temperature-IQ's." I fear an impending societal division that will reshape class structures: net users and non-net users. The difference will be that the division will be along intelligence lines.
Access to information as readily available as on the net also increases ability to learn and hopefully perceived intelligence too, so this new net class will grow. But it will never grow to encompass all.
--Bob
--Bob
Open Source is based on the premise that any person can take a WORKING piece of software, add a small piece or bug fix, and end up with a WORKING piece of software. If the source isn't working, or is too complicated to add a feature quickly, most hackers will toss it aside.
Word to OSS projects -- always make sure your "current" developers release runs, and keep an arcitecture that is simple and easy to understand and pick up. Unfortunately, none of the ambitious web browser projects (Mnemonic and Mozilla) have followed either of these. Thus, they are failing.
-- Bob
BTW, I saw another poster mention 1 Tb of data a second. Realize that there are 3 levels of "triggers" designed to isolate interesting events (1 event = 1 proton-antiproton collision). All 1 Tb doesn't reach the computing cluster (The 2000 nodes are probably the Level 3 trigger system and/or batch reconstruction). From my brief perusal of Fermilab's Farms page it seems that they will use several I/O PC's connected via fast or gigabit ethernet to a gigabit ethernet switch, which will be connected to the farm. The switch will also be connected to the cental mass storage system.
-- Bob
High-temperature fusion has basically turned into a game of controlling turbulence. Nobody can contain the plasmas. As a physicist, I think the cutting of funding in the field is a good idea until the turbulence is better understood. There was a plan to build ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). The thing was huge -- like 4 stories, and would have cost several billion. Needless to say it was cancelled. It might have contained the plasmas by brute force, but at ~billions per reactor, this is hardly an improvement over fission.
Here are some links for the curious:
Madison Symmetric Torus
A dynamo experiment
National Energy Science web site
MEDUSA experiment (a low aspect ratio tokamak)
Pegasus Tokamak
The Stellarator
No, but I've got a reverse field pinch torus about 50 feet away. (Another type of fusion research device -- like a tokamak)
Are you on crack? Storing mp3's on a tape drive would be a BAD idea. It'd take 5 minutes just to fast forward to the right part of the tape to find your song. And tape drives have lots of notorious problems (tapes STRETCH). Oh and BTW, they're advertising 30gig, which assumes 2:1 compression, so they're only 15gig and 25gig tapes.
Anyway, cheap 15 gig IDE drives are cheap enough for me. ;)
--Bob
There are many possible frameworks for charging, most of which have also been tried by the closed-source software companies. For example:
I will never use any software that nickles and dimes me. I do not want any company or person knowing what software I use when. Also, as you mention, the value of a piece of software is different for each person. There are 400 individual software packages included in RedHat's distribution. What is the value to me of a single invocation of perl? Small. Very small.
Also, in the course of writing a perl script I will execute perl tens, hundreds, even thousands of times in testing it. What is the value of a single one of those perl executions? Zero. But much good may be derived from it if I develop a useful script. Development tools must not be charged for.
In implementation, your charging scheme looks like taxation. There are lots of good reasons that people hate taxation.
Open Source Software already has a problem with fragmentation. Human politics leads to disagreements, which leads to software splits (Net/Open)BSD, egcs/gcc, emacs/xemacs/lucid emacs, etc. By making it economically favorable for a contributor to grab the source and run, you make it favorable for the contributor to fragment the project. This is not a Good Thing(tm) IMHO.
In summary, it looks like an interesting idea, but totally unimplementable. You would have to create a central authority to handle "points", and this is wide open to fraud. I think one of the major strengths of Open Source is that it is economically free (beer). You would massively reduce the number of potential contributors to a project if now you must pay to hack it. "Many eyeballs" depends on a minimization of the effort involved in looking at the code. Once money is involved, you place a large stubling block in front of any potential set of eyeballs.
-- Bob
And the government monopoly currently controlling our food supply is any better? Are you arguing against monopoly (which doesn't make sense -- government) or corporate food production (which also doesn't make sense...unless you want to live in a communist state).
People will still be people, regardless of what operating system they use. They will still make stupid generalizations, and propeganda will still take the same form.
If I see one more sci-fi movie that manages to sneak in some moral statement about bigotry edgewise, I'm going to vomit. Pilgrims my ass. It's about time the industry moved on to any topic that hasn't been beaten to death.
And throw scientific realism out the window. We can now fly around gravitational singularities, and plot courses through hyperspace with our brains. Anyone with a brain would program a computer to do it. A computer can do it faster.
*sigh* But the special effects were good.
Now, this could be funny. We could really bring M$ to their knees by mailing them the core file everytime Office dumped one. And you know Office would dump lots of them.
Oh, and one other thing. I will never use software that has a "wizard". Any software that needs a "wizard" to be usable is entirely too complex for its own good. Unix has a history of well organized tools that are terse and can do complex things. It would be a shame to loose all this to Visual Basic and macro viruses.
Bah. Lyx does everything I need. But then, I'm a physicist, not an Office drone. (pun intended)
Bullcrap. Alphas have a PCI BUS, use ATX power supplies, and can use generic PC hardware. Other than the motherboard, the cost of an alpha system and an intel system (with the same components) is the same. Becase, well...they're the same components.