This acquisition may in fact be in the best interest of Yahoo! shareholders, given the premium. But I'm pretty sure it's not in the long-term interest of consumers at large. They will be given a more monolithic, more complex, more buggy platform which fewer and fewer innovators will be able to compete with.
Regulators may think that Microsoft does not dominate in search and on-line advertising, but this would simply bolster the Windows monopoly. By the time regulators figure out that something is amiss, it will take years and many more decimated corporate entities to get it fixed.
Cooling for 10,000 servers near the polar ice cap means sinking Google headquarters just a little sooner. Google HQ, situated next to the San Francisco bay, must be about 10 feet above sea level.
Getting to the core of this story is definitely a real challenge, and we may not get it until Aviation Week http://www.aviationweek.com/ reports on it. However, connecting the dots together, this may be the first test flight of the HiFire project, a joint USAF/NASA/Australian effort.
AvWeek ran an article on March 18 this year entitled "The HiFire Flight Tests Will Help Integrate Aeronautics and Space Technologies". (URL was really long, possibly session dependent.) From that article: The HiFire payloads will dive into the atmosphere at Mach 4-8 to obtain data directly applicable to new hypersonic flight vehicles. The tests are to begin in the outback of southern Australia.
The AvWeek article further explains that HiFire will "directly support technology needs for the X-15" and that the X-51 is "the jewel in the crown of hypersonics".
A long time ago, like around 1998, I recall someone dual-booting Linux and Windows. He was bold enough to put his finger on the heat sink while the machine was turned on. Even though he was not running any user tasks, when the machine ran Windows, the CPU was really hot. But when he ran Linux, with no user tasks running, it was cold. The difference was whether idle time went to a spin loop (Windows) or to a halt instruction (Linux). Now, as I said, that was 1998. I haven't seen it studied or reported since. Does anyone know?
Hilf may be sincere about bridging the gap between Microsoft and open source. But at the end of the day, what Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates say will count the most. If they aren't convinced that Microsoft should co-exist and even build lasting alliances with open source, then nothing else that any other Microsoft evangelist says matters.
Why wasn't this a stock reusable code module in Lockheed Martin's labs?!?
I wonder what language the reusable code is written in. Ada?
Some years ago, DOD finally removed the requirement to write mission critical code in Ada.
It could now be C++.
If the point is for businesses and governments to adopt a standard, then at some point, a credible third party (standards body, government agency) needs to produce a conformance suite, and vendors need to show that they pass with flying colors.
Given the 6000 pages for OOXML and 700 for ODF, it will be interested to see if either will be done. Just imagine the test cases and the explanation of what they do.
I start to understand why Håkon Lie doesn't much care for either.
Actually, it would be interesting to see how long the iPod lasts in the radiation environment of space. Imagine a space tourist going to the moon, and having his or her iPod suddenly drop dead from a solar flare.
Coincidentally, a few days ago, I went to the exhibits of the Space 2006 conference in San Jose.
I had a discussion with some exhibitors of rad-hard equipment for space.
They suggested that the iPod might last a day or a week.
I suspect the ISS is sufficiently shielded for it to last more than a week...
But definitely not the years that space avionics are shielded to last for.
Naw... I have to be dreaming. The U.S. owes an apology to the "father of Chinese rocketry," who was a key contributor to rocketry in the U.S. before he was deported.
The reason China was able to rapidly build a missile program and later a space program is because the United States deported a JPL founder in the mid-1950s as a result of the McCarthy era. Tsien Hsue-Shen was one of the key developers of missile technology for the U.S. Army, and was sent to Germany on behalf of the Army to interview von Braun and others to assess the state of their weapons technology. He even made the cover of Time magazine for his technical achivements. He was, in effect, right hand man to famed CalTech aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman. Then he was accused of being a Communist spy, his security clearance revoked, and he was kept in a state of professional limbo for five years before being deported to China (or rather traded for American pilots shot down in North Korea). When he arrived in China, he was welcomed with open arms, and started the Chinese missile program, developing it completely from scratch. He later went on to put the first Chinese satellite in orbit. Today, Tsien is still a hero in China. All this courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Tsien is apparantly still alive, close to 100 years old, but confined to bed. He has never received an apology from the U.S. government and has therefore refused to receive government officials. But he has received non-government visitors from the U.S., particularly from his alma mater, CalTech, which gave rise to JPL. He taught there, did research there, helped form JPL with von Karman and others. The CalTech community never believed he was a spy, and fought to prove him innocent.
If someone representing the U.S. government were to deliver an apology, it really would be nice if it were the head of the U.S. space program. Mike Griffin is, like Tsien was, an aerospace engineer pressed into government service. I'm sure Griffin knew about Tsien long before this trip, and probably has been briefed on his current condition.
I think MS has a lot more in-roads to technical computing that slashdotters realize.
While working at NASA Ames, I found a lot of technical work on Windows by people who are mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineers. Applications included: structural/mechanical CAD for fabrication, programs to drive test and measurement equipment, MATLAB to derive simulation models, VxWorks embedded RTOS development.
The universal applications that I saw every engineer use were MS Word and PowerPoint. (LaTeX and troff are largely a lost art; even FrameMaker if used by engineers was running on Windows.) This meant that virtually every serious engineer had a Windows box, and possibly a UNIX box for specialized work as well. Most of these guys understand Laplace transforms, but not regular expressions. They were far more likely to use MATLAB than Perl.
There are, of course, serious software developers there who don't know Laplace transforms, and understand UNIX tools and open source. But this is a different crowd from engineers doing analytical work. (NASA Ames also has a serious supercomputing operation, e.g., the Columbia cluster of 10,240 Linux nodes built by SGI. When you have flow models like protrusions between thermal tiles, this is where you go.)
With budgets really tight and reductions in headcount, they stretch dollars as far as they will go; which means, if it will run on Windows, it's hard to justify another box. Furthermore, system support is outsourced to a department whose sole purpose is to keep computing alive, which means a very limited number of Windows and Mac OS configurations.
Having interacted with engineers involved in aerospace in other parts of the United States, the stuff I saw at NASA Ames seems pretty typical. (When I mentioned this to a Hubble astronomer, he was completely stunned.)
Now I don't expect Windows Compute Clusters in NASA anytime soon. But some engineering software vendor is going to decide that they can extend their product line by bringing compute power to the individual engineer through this mechanism. At that point, a hybrid solution of Windows desktop and Linux compute servers is going to be hard to justify, particularly if it requires additional department resource to make it work.
"...but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively."
I know many people take exception to that remark. But not everyone knows how to build Beowulf clusters.Some of us thought it was insane when, in the 90s, Microsoft said they were going to enter the server market. Yet here they are. And who in their right minds would run their web services out of IIS? (Then again, Apache now runs on Windows.)
The point is, just because the idea is absurd doesn't mean it won't happen. If corporate consolidations put support for technical computing under the IT department, and support for Linux is considered toodifficult for the IT folks, it's only a matter of time before the decree to port technical computing applications to Windows.
The fact is, M$ has access to software vendors, hardware vendors, and large customers in ways that Linux companies do not. They can create markets where they shouldn't be justified (unless you think all operating systems really require anti-virus software).
I'd love to be wrong about this. But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening.
As you head out into the solar system and attempt to settle elsewhere, one of the problems is that you won't be able to google a query back to Earth and get a lightning fast response. (Well, uh, perhaps as fast as lightning, but that could be seconds, minutes, or hours....) You no longer can present every problem to Mission Control and wait for an answer. And you probably will not have trained for every scenario.
Survival of a small colony of smart people on the Moon or Mars could partly depend on taking large portions of your planetary knowledge base with you and looking for solutions that others have figured out but you haven't. (It also is a form of taking your culture with you.)
The trick is to do it without rooms of massive power-hungry clusters, but for a smaller group of users. I can imagine Google working with NASA to pull some of these technologies together.
Things like nanotechnology, one of the focal points of work at Ames, will be key to making it happen.
The NASA Advance Supercomputing (NAS) Division is, in fact, located at Ames. One of its principal assets is the Columbia supercomputer, a 10,240-node SGI Altix supercluster of Itanium 2 processors. In fact, it does do amazing simulations which would make the Google folks salivate. Google has the computing power and computer science background; NASA has massive finite element physics simulation background and an intelligent systems group at Ames. This is one of those rare amazing cases where one could actually complement the other.
Yes, they are extremely bright. I went to a seminar at Stanford about a year ago, where Burt Rutan spoke. He mentioned being in some forum of famous people with the Google founders and others. After the meeting, one of the Google founders approached him and asked some very insightful questions about the commercial space technology. Rutan's reaction was: these guys have really done their homework, they know what they're talking about, don't be surprised if some portion of their billions is invested in that direction.
Perhaps these guys have a focus on space as do Elon Musk (PayPal, but a physicist by training) and John Carmack (Doom, Armadillo Aerospace, brilliant computer scientist), both of whom have been building launch hardware.
A lot of folks here cite Tom Wolfe's book or the
NASA website. The best book I've read giving an
internal perspective on the X-15 program is
At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program
by Milton O. Thompson, who was one of the pilots
and a close friend of Bill Dana.
It talks about how they prepared for a flight,
the types of things that went wrong, life around
Edwards and the Flight Research Center, etc.
It is in many ways comparable to Yeager's
autobiography, but set in the timeframe of the
X-15 and lifting bodies.
Slashdot Mirror
This acquisition may in fact be in the best interest of Yahoo! shareholders, given the premium. But I'm pretty sure it's not in the long-term interest of consumers at large. They will be given a more monolithic, more complex, more buggy platform which fewer and fewer innovators will be able to compete with.
Regulators may think that Microsoft does not dominate in search and on-line advertising, but this would simply bolster the Windows monopoly. By the time regulators figure out that something is amiss, it will take years and many more decimated corporate entities to get it fixed.
Cooling for 10,000 servers near the polar ice cap means sinking Google headquarters just a little sooner. Google HQ, situated next to the San Francisco bay, must be about 10 feet above sea level.
Getting to the core of this story is definitely a real challenge, and we may not get it until Aviation Week http://www.aviationweek.com/ reports on it. However, connecting the dots together, this may be the first test flight of the HiFire project, a joint USAF/NASA/Australian effort.
AvWeek ran an article on March 18 this year entitled "The HiFire Flight Tests Will Help Integrate Aeronautics and Space Technologies". (URL was really long, possibly session dependent.) From that article: The HiFire payloads will dive into the atmosphere at Mach 4-8 to obtain data directly applicable to new hypersonic flight vehicles. The tests are to begin in the outback of southern Australia.
The AvWeek article further explains that HiFire will "directly support technology needs for the X-15" and that the X-51 is "the jewel in the crown of hypersonics".
A long time ago, like around 1998, I recall someone dual-booting Linux and Windows. He was bold enough to put his finger on the heat sink while the machine was turned on. Even though he was not running any user tasks, when the machine ran Windows, the CPU was really hot. But when he ran Linux, with no user tasks running, it was cold. The difference was whether idle time went to a spin loop (Windows) or to a halt instruction (Linux). Now, as I said, that was 1998. I haven't seen it studied or reported since. Does anyone know?
Hilf may be sincere about bridging the gap between Microsoft and open source. But at the end of the day, what Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates say will count the most. If they aren't convinced that Microsoft should co-exist and even build lasting alliances with open source, then nothing else that any other Microsoft evangelist says matters.
Why wasn't this a stock reusable code module in Lockheed Martin's labs?!?
I wonder what language the reusable code is written in. Ada? Some years ago, DOD finally removed the requirement to write mission critical code in Ada. It could now be C++.If the point is for businesses and governments to adopt a standard, then at some point, a credible third party (standards body, government agency) needs to produce a conformance suite, and vendors need to show that they pass with flying colors.
Given the 6000 pages for OOXML and 700 for ODF, it will be interested to see if either will be done. Just imagine the test cases and the explanation of what they do.
I start to understand why Håkon Lie doesn't much care for either.
Actually, it would be interesting to see how long the iPod lasts in the radiation environment of space. Imagine a space tourist going to the moon, and having his or her iPod suddenly drop dead from a solar flare.
Coincidentally, a few days ago, I went to the exhibits of the Space 2006 conference in San Jose. I had a discussion with some exhibitors of rad-hard equipment for space. They suggested that the iPod might last a day or a week. I suspect the ISS is sufficiently shielded for it to last more than a week... But definitely not the years that space avionics are shielded to last for.
Naw... I have to be dreaming. The U.S. owes an apology to the "father of Chinese rocketry," who was a key contributor to rocketry in the U.S. before he was deported.
The reason China was able to rapidly build a missile program and later a space program is because the United States deported a JPL founder in the mid-1950s as a result of the McCarthy era. Tsien Hsue-Shen was one of the key developers of missile technology for the U.S. Army, and was sent to Germany on behalf of the Army to interview von Braun and others to assess the state of their weapons technology. He even made the cover of Time magazine for his technical achivements. He was, in effect, right hand man to famed CalTech aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman. Then he was accused of being a Communist spy, his security clearance revoked, and he was kept in a state of professional limbo for five years before being deported to China (or rather traded for American pilots shot down in North Korea). When he arrived in China, he was welcomed with open arms, and started the Chinese missile program, developing it completely from scratch. He later went on to put the first Chinese satellite in orbit. Today, Tsien is still a hero in China. All this courtesy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Tsien is apparantly still alive, close to 100 years old, but confined to bed. He has never received an apology from the U.S. government and has therefore refused to receive government officials. But he has received non-government visitors from the U.S., particularly from his alma mater, CalTech, which gave rise to JPL. He taught there, did research there, helped form JPL with von Karman and others. The CalTech community never believed he was a spy, and fought to prove him innocent.
If someone representing the U.S. government were to deliver an apology, it really would be nice if it were the head of the U.S. space program. Mike Griffin is, like Tsien was, an aerospace engineer pressed into government service. I'm sure Griffin knew about Tsien long before this trip, and probably has been briefed on his current condition.
I think MS has a lot more in-roads to technical computing that slashdotters realize.
While working at NASA Ames, I found a lot of technical work on Windows by people who are mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineers. Applications included: structural/mechanical CAD for fabrication, programs to drive test and measurement equipment, MATLAB to derive simulation models, VxWorks embedded RTOS development.
The universal applications that I saw every engineer use were MS Word and PowerPoint. (LaTeX and troff are largely a lost art; even FrameMaker if used by engineers was running on Windows.) This meant that virtually every serious engineer had a Windows box, and possibly a UNIX box for specialized work as well. Most of these guys understand Laplace transforms, but not regular expressions. They were far more likely to use MATLAB than Perl.
There are, of course, serious software developers there who don't know Laplace transforms, and understand UNIX tools and open source. But this is a different crowd from engineers doing analytical work. (NASA Ames also has a serious supercomputing operation, e.g., the Columbia cluster of 10,240 Linux nodes built by SGI. When you have flow models like protrusions between thermal tiles, this is where you go.)
With budgets really tight and reductions in headcount, they stretch dollars as far as they will go; which means, if it will run on Windows, it's hard to justify another box. Furthermore, system support is outsourced to a department whose sole purpose is to keep computing alive, which means a very limited number of Windows and Mac OS configurations.
Having interacted with engineers involved in aerospace in other parts of the United States, the stuff I saw at NASA Ames seems pretty typical. (When I mentioned this to a Hubble astronomer, he was completely stunned.)
Now I don't expect Windows Compute Clusters in NASA anytime soon. But some engineering software vendor is going to decide that they can extend their product line by bringing compute power to the individual engineer through this mechanism. At that point, a hybrid solution of Windows desktop and Linux compute servers is going to be hard to justify, particularly if it requires additional department resource to make it work.
"...but until now it has been too expensive and too difficult for many people to use effectively."
I know many people take exception to that remark. But not everyone knows how to build Beowulf clusters.Some of us thought it was insane when, in the 90s, Microsoft said they were going to enter the server market. Yet here they are. And who in their right minds would run their web services out of IIS? (Then again, Apache now runs on Windows.)
The point is, just because the idea is absurd doesn't mean it won't happen. If corporate consolidations put support for technical computing under the IT department, and support for Linux is considered toodifficult for the IT folks, it's only a matter of time before the decree to port technical computing applications to Windows.
The fact is, M$ has access to software vendors, hardware vendors, and large customers in ways that Linux companies do not. They can create markets where they shouldn't be justified (unless you think all operating systems really require anti-virus software).
I'd love to be wrong about this. But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening.
As you head out into the solar system and attempt to settle elsewhere, one of the problems is that you won't be able to google a query back to Earth and get a lightning fast response. (Well, uh, perhaps as fast as lightning, but that could be seconds, minutes, or hours....) You no longer can present every problem to Mission Control and wait for an answer. And you probably will not have trained for every scenario.
Survival of a small colony of smart people on the Moon or Mars could partly depend on taking large portions of your planetary knowledge base with you and looking for solutions that others have figured out but you haven't. (It also is a form of taking your culture with you.) The trick is to do it without rooms of massive power-hungry clusters, but for a smaller group of users. I can imagine Google working with NASA to pull some of these technologies together. Things like nanotechnology, one of the focal points of work at Ames, will be key to making it happen.
The NASA Advance Supercomputing (NAS) Division is, in fact, located at Ames. One of its principal assets is the Columbia supercomputer, a 10,240-node SGI Altix supercluster of Itanium 2 processors. In fact, it does do amazing simulations which would make the Google folks salivate. Google has the computing power and computer science background; NASA has massive finite element physics simulation background and an intelligent systems group at Ames. This is one of those rare amazing cases where one could actually complement the other.
Yes, they are extremely bright. I went to a seminar at Stanford
about a year ago, where Burt Rutan spoke. He mentioned being in some forum of famous people with the Google founders and others. After the meeting, one of the Google founders approached him and asked some very insightful questions about the commercial space technology. Rutan's reaction was: these guys have really done their homework, they know what they're talking about, don't be surprised if some portion of their billions is invested in that direction.
Perhaps these guys have a focus on space as do Elon Musk (PayPal, but a physicist by training) and John Carmack (Doom, Armadillo Aerospace, brilliant computer scientist), both of whom have been building launch hardware.
A lot of folks here cite Tom Wolfe's book or the NASA website. The best book I've read giving an internal perspective on the X-15 program is At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program by Milton O. Thompson, who was one of the pilots and a close friend of Bill Dana. It talks about how they prepared for a flight, the types of things that went wrong, life around Edwards and the Flight Research Center, etc. It is in many ways comparable to Yeager's autobiography, but set in the timeframe of the X-15 and lifting bodies.