take the blame for the mistake. If you are the programmer and it was a programming error, the fault clearly lies with the QA people who didn't catch it. If you are the sysadmin or the QA guy, whatever happened was clearly a problem with management settting unrealistic timelines or expectations. If you are a middle manager the problem is definitely your inadequate budget.
The fact that a single Linux image has been attached to hundreds of processors is no indication of scalability. A certain program may scale well, or not.
Well are you skeptical about Linux, or just skeptical about an SSI that large? I mean, you voice skepticism about Linux, but your objections are general enough to cover any large SSI system.
I mean, is there any reason to think Linux will perform significantly worse than IRIX in this regard? (I say "significantly" because of course IRIX should perform a bit better just by virtue of being more mature, I would think. But who knows.)
Solaris scales to hundreds of processors out-of-the-box. Until the vanilla Linux kernel accepts these changes and scale, Solaris still has a big edge in this area.
Lame analogy: many people have demonstrated that they can hack their Honda Civic to outperform a Corvette, however I can walk into a dealership and purchase the latter which performs quite well without mods.
Call it a hunch, but I bet the people buying supercomputers are willing to pay for the "modded" Linux they need in order to run these machines. Maybe it's a stretch but I bet they might even be willing to pay for support!
You can't possibly be talking about a sales edge, since Sun's sales in HPC are totally anemic.
You don't pick sun for just "lots of cpus", you pick it for a very scalable OS and amazing hardware that allows for a very, very solid datacenter.
The UNIX made by SGI (the company making the machine referenced in the article) is more scalable than Solaris. Remember, IRIX was the first OS to scale a single Unix OS image across 512 CPUs. And now they've eclipsed that, with Linux.
Sun hardware has additional, wonderful resiliency features like - allowing cpu's to "fail-over" to other cpus in case of failure.
None of that is unique to Sun.
Finally, since Sun has been doing the "lots of cpus" thing for many years, their process management and scalability tends to be much better.
Better than what? And says who? They've never decisively convinced the market that they're beter at this than HP, SGI, IBM or Compaq.
If downtime costs a lot (ie. you lose a lot of money for being down), you should have Sun and/or IBM zseries hardware. Unfortunately those features cost a lot and most times you can use Linux clustering instead for a fraction of the cost and a high percentage of the availability.
In addition to ignoring the other good Unix architectures out there in a dumb way with this comparison, you're also totally missing the point of the article. Linux supercomputing isn't just about cheap clusters anymore. Expensive UNIX machines on one side and cheap Linux clusters on the other is a false dichotomy.
So, how is watching a television show being creative? Creativity implies creating things. As bad as many TV shows are, I can accept that those who make them are being creative but when I am watching them, that is not creativity.
The reading or watching of television, theatre, or film would be entirely passive and therefore uncreative if they happened in isolation. Art is a participatory process, however: people talk to one another about what they've experienced when they read or view some work of art and share the experience. The interaction between people when they experience a work is also a creative process, I think.
I realize that I appear to be sticking up for John Grisham and Survivor and those who partake of them and it hurts me more than you can know.:) I think it's basically true though, the artist isn't the only one engaged in a creative process when a work of art is unleased on the world, everyone who experiences it is involved and being "creative." And if this is true then it's even true if the work involved is subjectively crappy, since it's the same process. The people I work with who are constantly sharing their experience of reality TV when they ought to be doing something worthwhile are being creative, in a way. (better them than me!)
I haven't given it much thought but if this is true it perhaps follows that the quality of the work being experienced isn't the measure of how "creative" someone is, but rather the amount of participation in the creative process. This is intuitive since it makes the artist the most "creative" one in the process.
Being creative is hard work, while doing it by the numbers (being passive) is much less so. I would say it is a safe assumption then that most people are not creative most of the time.
I agree that being passive is in opposition to being creative, obviously. Looking at it, I define passivity a little differently I suppose, and I also don't think there's necessarily any moral value attached to being more or less creative, and perhaps that's the cause of our disagreement.
Oh, well then. You've convinced me with that persuasive argument!
He's focused on connecting people to people, not people to organizations or corporations.
Yes, but organizations and corporatoins [sic] are just clusters of peopl- oh, what's the point...
Do you sincerely believe the same techniques and tools which are effective in connecting an individual with IBM or the NRA or Amazon or are likely to be equally effective in connecting people to each other one on one in the more private portion of their lives? That the tools ought to always be the same, regardless of the context in which they're used?
You can complain about this all you want, but it's true. Most people are not creative. If you believe otherwise, you're obviously hanging around a group of people who are not representative of the general population, which would rather spend their time watching Survivor than doing anything creative.
From your comments the only reason I can gleam for your claim that "people are not creative" is that they aren't interested in pursuits similar to yours. This is fantastically egotistical.
If there's an objective measure of this, please share. One reason why I think it's a big mistake to pass judgements like this is that it is a rather subjective thing, and I can assure you there are plenty of people who don't find YOUR pursuits the least bit "creative" either.
I've heard this before, and I don't think I believe it. It certainly isn't true in my office; there are printers of course, but compared to the actual work done, not that much stuff is printed out. The only place I can think of that is probably using a lot more paper than in previous years is law offices, but that's because the law field is so horribly stuck in the dark ages anyway (they still use faxes, instead of just emailing documents for $deity's sake!). For most businesses, if they're generating more paper than 20 years ago, it's probably because they're a lot more productive now than they were then.
Possibly, but I think that even if the statistics regarding paper use are skewed in some way, the point still stands: we haven't made the best use of computer technology in offices at all. They've helped - it's hard NOT to be helped by some things, like email or the spreadsheet - but the potential of the technology is not being met, not by a long shot. I really think that the point of Kay's statements, in this article and whenever he goes off in public.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth.
This is bullshit. In addition to being bullshit, it's an attitude someone who is concerned with teaching children and improving education generally, like Alan Kay, can simply not take.
The sad truth is that the state of personal computing is exatly what the market (i.e. the consumers) wanted.
This is also bullshit. People bitch constantly about the lack of options they have, the quality of the options, and so on, when trying to make use of their computers. Companies are constantly making lame, half-assed trial-and-error attempts to meet these customer demands, while consumers are forced to ride the constant upgrade treadmill. You're undoubtedly too much of a solitary genius to have noticed all this.
For him, "the primary task of the Internet is to connect every person to every other person."
When people say stuff like this, they are only really thinking about his friends and family, or maybe some small collection of online pals.
You really want to be connected with atrocities like stompthejews.org or purty-yung-thangs-only-mildy-related-to-yoo.xxx or microsoft.com?
Honestly, what is all this infinite connectivity going to brings us over what we have now?
He's focused on connecting people to people, not people to organizations or corporations. Currently the ways we have of connecting people to people are clunky and limiting, as anyone who tries to show a new computer how to use email, IM, file sharing or to create web pages knows. Improving on this state of affairs is "going to brings" us an awful lot.
There's some small businesses out there able to automate things that would have required a lot of tedious drudgework in past decades thanks to those "uncreative" business applications.
More crap. Kay and his colleagues invented prototype tools to create a paperless office well over 20 years ago but modern software, and modern business, hasn't done anything to move forward to reduce waste (more paper is used now in the average office than ever before), and efficiency improvements have totally been hit-and-miss. Things should be improving much faster and much more significantly. Why wouldn't Kay be upset by this state of affairs?
Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare.
Yes, not having a package system is a really clever solution to package dependency problems. I wonder why every other distro hasn't thought of that.
I think the point about realism here is that it's not realistic to assume that a printed encyclopedia will be exact because knowledge isn't static, objective and free from change
I suppose if you're talking about some of the fruitier Liberal Arts, you're probably right. And opinions about some of the other arts certainly change over time (not that opinion is hugely important in an encyclopedia). But there are whole fields, such as mathematics, where very little that was considered true yesterday is likely to suddenly become false tomorrow. In a case like that the rate of change of the encyclopedia need only be fast enough to accomodate additions.
The point is that, when done well, encyclopedia articles don't require frequent change. The ability to add new information frequently is a great benefit, but that's a separate subject.
very few things can be stated as absolute fact
Pure nonsense.
You might be better off trusting a source that is constantly edited
That depends radically on what subject is being discussed.
and where you have complete access to the discussions and every single revision so you can see how and why it has changed over time, and get a better picture of what should be questioned.
Seems like a waste of my time, honestly.
Note that I don't approve of the whole credentialism prejudice thing, and I think the users of wikipedia are in many cases every bit as knowledgeable as a professional writer. It's just that I also think professional editors and authorities can sometimes add an awful lot. I tend to refer to wikipedia before anything else, but even so, it's important to recognize the value of something like Britannica and their methods.
I wasn't attacking you or your post. I was clearly making the point that your post attributes something positive to Newt Gingrich.
There's nothing positive about allowing people to write off a donation to a non-profit for far more than it is worth. The whole idea behind this is sound but the 100% value is preposterous.
Of course I'm sure there are details of the legislation that are unmentioned, and I'd like to believe that it actually makes more sense than this.:/
This may degrade the accuracy of the content in some ways, but it also gives the content an eternally organic quality that is perhaps more realistic than traditional encyclopedia.
The "realism" of the process used to produce a reference work is completely unimportant to the reader, whereas accuracy is a top priority. I'm not slamming wikipedia, which I love, I just think your defense here is poorly thought out. (and perhaps based on a false dichotomy)
In a way it is superior to having a peer-reviewed final product that says what the encyclopedia referees decide the truth is -- instead you have an eternally in-process project at discovering the truth in an ongoing manner (and continuing to re-discover it).
This works a lot better in some subjects than others, I'm finding. In some fields the entry will gradually get more accurate, in others they will maintain a pretty low level of accuracy, though they may change. In some subjects having a few highly qualified people make some editorial decisions might work a lot better.
It's a much more accurate depiction of "knowledge" than a normal (closed) encyclopedia, which pretends that the accumulation of knowledge is a completed project.
I suspect that you know from your quotes that you're abusing the word "knowledge" a little bit.:) Still, I have to stick up for the traditional encyclopedias and say that some of them don't strike this pose with all their articles. The newer, online versions of these encyclopedias probably do this less, too, since there is a lot of pressure to bring in new material regarding topics that cannot credibly be considered "closed."
Of course if they give money, they have some kind of right to say what to write there
Actually, they generally don't, although they might try anyway.
You'd be surprised how little say government sometimes has. Cases involving the National Endowment of the Arts are the classic example of this. The controversy usually works like this:
1. They give a grant to an artist, a grant that (contrary to popular belief) does not and can not specify much of anything about the work to be produced 2. The artist produces something that's just shocking, shocking! 3. Politicians try to tighten the screws and specify what can and can't be produced with these grants, since people are using the money to product things that are just shocking, shocking! 4. Courts tell the lawmakers that they can't specify precisely what is to be done with NEA grant money for the arts, since it's an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech
Even the surpreme court has done this. It is counterintuitive at first, since you think of the government as having a lot of say about this sort of thing.
Microsoft reps sometimes point to Linux distributions and ask why they can get away with shipping stacks and stacks of applications without getting in trouble. The answer to that one, of course, is blah blah blah a lot of facile nonsense
The simple truth is that it's only because Microsoft is so successful at what they do. So successful that they fall into the (rather arbitrary) legal category of being a monopoly. That's the only reason Linux distributors aren't "getting in trouble."
As far as the shift to non-toxics goes, in addition to the shuttle OMS thrusters there are plenty of US spacecraft that use either bi-proplleant N2O4/hydrazine, or mono-propellant hydrazine. Hydrazine is pretty much the standard for liquid propellants when it comes to on-orbit thrusters (for transfers, station-keeping, and momentum dumping
From what I remember of an anecdote from the book Dragonfly, the fuel used by the shuttle's thrusters can be an operational problem even in space. On approach to the Mir one time I guess they discovered that a chunk of ice was keeping one of the thrusters open minutely and a tiny stream of the corrosive fuel was leaking out. Nothing serious except that it could cause some real problems with some of the optics on the station, or perhaps it was the solar panels. The shuttle was denied permission to approach the station until the thruster was cleared somehow (fuzzy on details right now).
That's the great thing about oxygen and hydrogen, they're relatively safe and easy to work with. I don't have any idea if you can use them in something smaller like those thrusters, though. Seems more like a candidate for peroxide or something.
Uh, hate to break it to you, but plenty of US satellites (and probably launch vehicles as well) use those exact same chemicals.
No, not the launch vehicles. US environmental regulations make it prohibitively expensive to use these chemicals for much of anything here on earth (if launching here in the US, that is). In Russia they are apparently happy to use LOX/Kerosene for most things, presumably because it's so much safer to deal with operationally, and has such a great success record for them. Seems to be less of a concern with the military boosters, go figure.
There's been a push lately to move to so-called 'non-toxic storable propellants', such as high-concetration hydrogen peroxide.
That might be but they sure aren't moving from nitrogen tetroxide, which isn't used for much here in the US. Control thrusters on the shuttle and.... what? I think it's actually used more by the Europeans in their boosters, oddly enough. I'd want to check about that though, not sure.
The experts who know what the heck the relational model is and is not argue that the language we use to query a specific type of relational-like database, that they call the SQL databases, the SQL language, has unsufficient representation power to represent the whole model, and hence can't be used to get the whole power of the model.
Much of what he, Celko, and Date complained about were actually responses by vendors to adapt to the real world.
Even a cursory reading of the second article indicates that lumping all these guys together is probably a mistake:
Best-selling author Joe Celko, who says he "built a career on disagreeing with Chris Date," admits there are some things about SQL that could use improving.
For instance, Celko said he wishes the wild card symbol were not an underscore, now that laser printers are so prevalent. But overall, he said, SQL is logical, and as for NULLs, he sees no way around their use.
That's a lot less radical than some of the other positions taken by Date or Pascal. Sorry to nitpick but Celko's work has always seemed pretty "real world" to me, what little I've read of it.
Red Hat GFS is tuned to work with Oracle's 9i RAC, database software that can spread across multiple clustered machines, and work with Red Hat's cluster software for ensuring services remain available despite computer problems.
Which makes it a direct competitor to Oracle's own GPLed Linux clustered filesystem, OCFS. Interesting.
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take the blame for the mistake. If you are the programmer and it was a programming error, the fault clearly lies with the QA people who didn't catch it. If you are the sysadmin or the QA guy, whatever happened was clearly a problem with management settting unrealistic timelines or expectations. If you are a middle manager the problem is definitely your inadequate budget.
Well are you skeptical about Linux, or just skeptical about an SSI that large? I mean, you voice skepticism about Linux, but your objections are general enough to cover any large SSI system.
I mean, is there any reason to think Linux will perform significantly worse than IRIX in this regard? (I say "significantly" because of course IRIX should perform a bit better just by virtue of being more mature, I would think. But who knows.)
Call it a hunch, but I bet the people buying supercomputers are willing to pay for the "modded" Linux they need in order to run these machines. Maybe it's a stretch but I bet they might even be willing to pay for support!
You can't possibly be talking about a sales edge, since Sun's sales in HPC are totally anemic.
The UNIX made by SGI (the company making the machine referenced in the article) is more scalable than Solaris. Remember, IRIX was the first OS to scale a single Unix OS image across 512 CPUs. And now they've eclipsed that, with Linux.
None of that is unique to Sun.
Better than what? And says who? They've never decisively convinced the market that they're beter at this than HP, SGI, IBM or Compaq.
In addition to ignoring the other good Unix architectures out there in a dumb way with this comparison, you're also totally missing the point of the article. Linux supercomputing isn't just about cheap clusters anymore. Expensive UNIX machines on one side and cheap Linux clusters on the other is a false dichotomy.
Solaris is not a leader in supercomputing, never has been.
http://top500.org/list/2004/06/
There's no "stronghold" for Sun to lose.
The reading or watching of television, theatre, or film would be entirely passive and therefore uncreative if they happened in isolation. Art is a participatory process, however: people talk to one another about what they've experienced when they read or view some work of art and share the experience. The interaction between people when they experience a work is also a creative process, I think.
I realize that I appear to be sticking up for John Grisham and Survivor and those who partake of them and it hurts me more than you can know.
I haven't given it much thought but if this is true it perhaps follows that the quality of the work being experienced isn't the measure of how "creative" someone is, but rather the amount of participation in the creative process. This is intuitive since it makes the artist the most "creative" one in the process.
I agree that being passive is in opposition to being creative, obviously. Looking at it, I define passivity a little differently I suppose, and I also don't think there's necessarily any moral value attached to being more or less creative, and perhaps that's the cause of our disagreement.
It's worthy of more thought I guess.
Oh, well then. You've convinced me with that persuasive argument!
Do you sincerely believe the same techniques and tools which are effective in connecting an individual with IBM or the NRA or Amazon or are likely to be equally effective in connecting people to each other one on one in the more private portion of their lives? That the tools ought to always be the same, regardless of the context in which they're used?
That's dumb.
From your comments the only reason I can gleam for your claim that "people are not creative" is that they aren't interested in pursuits similar to yours. This is fantastically egotistical.
If there's an objective measure of this, please share. One reason why I think it's a big mistake to pass judgements like this is that it is a rather subjective thing, and I can assure you there are plenty of people who don't find YOUR pursuits the least bit "creative" either.
Possibly, but I think that even if the statistics regarding paper use are skewed in some way, the point still stands: we haven't made the best use of computer technology in offices at all. They've helped - it's hard NOT to be helped by some things, like email or the spreadsheet - but the potential of the technology is not being met, not by a long shot. I really think that the point of Kay's statements, in this article and whenever he goes off in public.
This is bullshit. In addition to being bullshit, it's an attitude someone who is concerned with teaching children and improving education generally, like Alan Kay, can simply not take.
This is also bullshit. People bitch constantly about the lack of options they have, the quality of the options, and so on, when trying to make use of their computers. Companies are constantly making lame, half-assed trial-and-error attempts to meet these customer demands, while consumers are forced to ride the constant upgrade treadmill. You're undoubtedly too much of a solitary genius to have noticed all this.
He's focused on connecting people to people, not people to organizations or corporations. Currently the ways we have of connecting people to people are clunky and limiting, as anyone who tries to show a new computer how to use email, IM, file sharing or to create web pages knows. Improving on this state of affairs is "going to brings" us an awful lot.
More crap. Kay and his colleagues invented prototype tools to create a paperless office well over 20 years ago but modern software, and modern business, hasn't done anything to move forward to reduce waste (more paper is used now in the average office than ever before), and efficiency improvements have totally been hit-and-miss. Things should be improving much faster and much more significantly. Why wouldn't Kay be upset by this state of affairs?
Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare.
Yes, not having a package system is a really clever solution to package dependency problems. I wonder why every other distro hasn't thought of that.
Not necessarily. Turning a hobby into a profession can end up just ruining a good hobby, depending on the circumstances.
I suppose if you're talking about some of the fruitier Liberal Arts, you're probably right. And opinions about some of the other arts certainly change over time (not that opinion is hugely important in an encyclopedia). But there are whole fields, such as mathematics, where very little that was considered true yesterday is likely to suddenly become false tomorrow. In a case like that the rate of change of the encyclopedia need only be fast enough to accomodate additions.
The point is that, when done well, encyclopedia articles don't require frequent change. The ability to add new information frequently is a great benefit, but that's a separate subject.
Pure nonsense.
That depends radically on what subject is being discussed.
Seems like a waste of my time, honestly.
Note that I don't approve of the whole credentialism prejudice thing, and I think the users of wikipedia are in many cases every bit as knowledgeable as a professional writer. It's just that I also think professional editors and authorities can sometimes add an awful lot. I tend to refer to wikipedia before anything else, but even so, it's important to recognize the value of something like Britannica and their methods.
There's nothing positive about allowing people to write off a donation to a non-profit for far more than it is worth. The whole idea behind this is sound but the 100% value is preposterous.
Of course I'm sure there are details of the legislation that are unmentioned, and I'd like to believe that it actually makes more sense than this.
The "realism" of the process used to produce a reference work is completely unimportant to the reader, whereas accuracy is a top priority. I'm not slamming wikipedia, which I love, I just think your defense here is poorly thought out. (and perhaps based on a false dichotomy)
This works a lot better in some subjects than others, I'm finding. In some fields the entry will gradually get more accurate, in others they will maintain a pretty low level of accuracy, though they may change. In some subjects having a few highly qualified people make some editorial decisions might work a lot better.
I suspect that you know from your quotes that you're abusing the word "knowledge" a little bit.
Actually, they generally don't, although they might try anyway.
You'd be surprised how little say government sometimes has. Cases involving the National Endowment of the Arts are the classic example of this. The controversy usually works like this:
1. They give a grant to an artist, a grant that (contrary to popular belief) does not and can not specify much of anything about the work to be produced
2. The artist produces something that's just shocking, shocking!
3. Politicians try to tighten the screws and specify what can and can't be produced with these grants, since people are using the money to product things that are just shocking, shocking!
4. Courts tell the lawmakers that they can't specify precisely what is to be done with NEA grant money for the arts, since it's an infringement of the constitutional right to free speech
Even the surpreme court has done this. It is counterintuitive at first, since you think of the government as having a lot of say about this sort of thing.
No mystery there. That particular warning is plastered all over the Debian web page.
The simple truth is that it's only because Microsoft is so successful at what they do. So successful that they fall into the (rather arbitrary) legal category of being a monopoly. That's the only reason Linux distributors aren't "getting in trouble."
"It works on my machine."
From what I remember of an anecdote from the book Dragonfly, the fuel used by the shuttle's thrusters can be an operational problem even in space. On approach to the Mir one time I guess they discovered that a chunk of ice was keeping one of the thrusters open minutely and a tiny stream of the corrosive fuel was leaking out. Nothing serious except that it could cause some real problems with some of the optics on the station, or perhaps it was the solar panels. The shuttle was denied permission to approach the station until the thruster was cleared somehow (fuzzy on details right now).
That's the great thing about oxygen and hydrogen, they're relatively safe and easy to work with. I don't have any idea if you can use them in something smaller like those thrusters, though. Seems more like a candidate for peroxide or something.
No, not the launch vehicles. US environmental regulations make it prohibitively expensive to use these chemicals for much of anything here on earth (if launching here in the US, that is). In Russia they are apparently happy to use LOX/Kerosene for most things, presumably because it's so much safer to deal with operationally, and has such a great success record for them. Seems to be less of a concern with the military boosters, go figure.
That might be but they sure aren't moving from nitrogen tetroxide, which isn't used for much here in the US. Control thrusters on the shuttle and.... what? I think it's actually used more by the Europeans in their boosters, oddly enough. I'd want to check about that though, not sure.
Is present in Visual C++, and has been for a while.
A few of them do.
Even a cursory reading of the second article indicates that lumping all these guys together is probably a mistake:
Best-selling author Joe Celko, who says he "built a career on disagreeing with Chris Date," admits there are some things about SQL that could use improving.
For instance, Celko said he wishes the wild card symbol were not an underscore, now that laser printers are so prevalent. But overall, he said, SQL is logical, and as for NULLs, he sees no way around their use.
That's a lot less radical than some of the other positions taken by Date or Pascal. Sorry to nitpick but Celko's work has always seemed pretty "real world" to me, what little I've read of it.
Which makes it a direct competitor to Oracle's own GPLed Linux clustered filesystem, OCFS. Interesting.
A p690 is MUCH fancier than a beowulf cluster, and more technologically advanced in just about every way.