Sounds like any server that would be RMS compliant would need to craft an Interface Control Document, and provide it along with their downloadable client app. "Here are all the behaviors I expect from the current version, all the data to be passed on each event, and all the fallbacks to previous versions we still support. A working version is provided for your convienience."
From a purely Open perspective it is great. But as a practical matter this would be hell. A good code maintainer should be doing this anyway (building an ICD), internally to the maintenance/development organization. But to actually open up to the world and be ready for anything that might come through the door is going to increase costs.
It is almost like a Full Employment for Coders initiative.
Exceptions and lockouts for security, timeliness, reliability, etc. can always be made. The general solution is for general purpose computing AND special case applications.
2. I recode for a cluster. Why stop at a multi-core computer? If I can get a 2:1 to 10:1 speed up by writing better code, then why stop at a dual or quad core? The application might require a 100:1 speed up, and that means more computers. If I have a really nasty problem, chances are that 100 cores are required, not just 2 or 8. Multi-core processors are nice, because they reduce cluster size and cost, but a cluster will likely be required.
I think I agree with you, BUT... don't fall into the old trap: If ten machines can do the job in 1 month, 1 machine can do the job in 10 months. But it doesn't necessarily follow that if one machine can do the job in 10 months, 10 machines can do the job in 1 month.
Also, the problem with runtime interpreters is not that they don't generate assembly code. The problem is that it is harder to get at the underlying code that is really executing. That code could be optimized if you could see it. But seeing it is just more difficult.
If the processing required can be characterized successfully, numeric, memory operation, shift registers, etc. then a compiler might be able to tag them such that the OS can assign as much "power" for that kind of operation as it has available at any given moment.
No more idle processing units if there is any work anywhere that can use them.
Finally, training from work actually means something in the real world.
Take a look at the concepts of Theory of Constraints (TOC) specifically the areas of Manufacturing and Program Management. They deal with the problems of Bottlenecks in production. How to optimize a process flow to maximize throughput when one or more resources are both critical and limited. There is a concept in there called Critical Chain. It looks a lot like Critical Path, except it tries to account for the load on the critical resource, not necessarily just time.
In the case of CPUs and compilers, just as in manufacturing process flows and projects, first you decide what all the tasks and sequence links need to be. Then you work out what resources are actually available to you. If you only have one of everything, you space out the tasks so that one worker/processor can move from task to task easily and efficiently. If you have more than one worker/processor, you can arrange the tasks to be more parallel and everything gets accomplished in shorter time.
The key lesson is that the basic tasks and links do not need to change. You only change your paradigm of how you assign processing power to each of them as they need to be done. Just like a work manager in a shop might assign one, two, ten, or more mechanics to a job based on priority, the OS in a computer would need fined grained understanding of each work unit in every job in execution, as well as control of every processing unit, and a way to switch them in and out. You don't assign more than would be useful, but you do assign enough to get the job done quickly AND to keep available processing power from going idle.
That would be a big change, but the efficiency and total throughput gained would be huge.
My Amiga 1000 (512KB, with 68881 co-processor!) has been sitting in the bottom of the old coat closet, waiting for this development so it would be useful once again. They should call it "anti Obsolescence gel"
Now he's done it. Kicked off the alpabetical arms race. He himself averted it once by the Operator Gambit of + and ++. The crisis was defused.
It was stumped again this decade by what came to be called the Jungle of Earthly Delights Diversions (Python, Ruby, et al). But now he's broken the dam to the last redoubt, the alphabet. There are only so many letters! It is a limited supply! We've feared this since the mid-nineties. Who will save us now?
How would you really KNOW how large a service is when you sign up? The simplest indicator is a slick interface, but really that only tells you the difference between a newbie and someone with the smarts to download a better one. After that, you only have indirect indicators like response speed, and apparent reliability. Anything else could all just be a Massive Hoax.
How do we know kdawson, samzenpus, soulskill, and the others aren't just Cowboy Neal's alternate personalities?
If you don't teach them to read, write, or use a telephone, they can't really complain effectively, can they? And anything they say on visiting day is monitored by Big Brother. No problem.
I agree, the punitive damages should not necessarily go to the plaintiff. Certainly not straight to their pocket. Maybe to a pool for all the people ever damaged by the defendant in that way, like a proto-class action payout.
In any case, punitives are very rarely ordered. the behavior would have to be very outrageous and repeated.
Actual permanent damage done to the kid as a result of being wrongfully jailed. Not just being chipped, but maybe subsequent assaults, or injuries picked up in the jail, or medical situations that arose there.
These judges need to be burned three different ways.
No damages are a civil tool to compensate one person when another has injured them (or their assets) in some way. No one goes to jail over damages. Unless they fail to pay them, in which case that person has insulted the court, which would be criminal contempt.
Damages, on the other hand, is an excellent excuse to see Glenn Close and Rose Byrne in action. Legally flimsy, but cute nonetheless.
No, something out of the Eisenhower Administration. Yes Ike, the guy that lead the Allied Forces to victory over the Nazis.
Back when he was President, the Office of Management and Budget first cam up with Circular A-76. It describes what is, and is not, an "inherently governmental activity". If it is inherently governmental, then an actual government employee must do it. Things like signing contracts, signing checks or handing out money, formally making arrests, sentencing convicts. But other than those kinds of things, a contractor can be used, since the work is essentially just administrative and not decision making. It is a bit of a slippery scale, and politics jumps in there too, but that is the basis for it.
Usually A-76 is just used to decide if a US government agency should be closed, downsized and contracted out. But the flip side of it is that if an agency wants to expend, they can use it for justifying hiring a contractor to do the extra work. Ever since Reagan this has been the preferred way to do any sort of new work in the US government. The Iraq War took it to new levels, with paid contractors being deployed to do as much work as soldiers, marines, and airmen.
Not such a joke. Look up DIADS, Digital integrated Air Defense (amazingly, not in Wikipedia!). This guy has just hacked the rudiments of Fire Control system. Which is approximately half of a DIADS. The other half being the radar and sensor integration. Which is handled by the many Open projects on sonar and video camera applications. Put them all together, and Our Sandbox Conquering Overlords will have all the tools they need to take them to Playground Domination.
John Galt is a guy with the arrogance to believe he has the secret understanding to run other people's world better than they do themselves, and who live and die by their own mistakes. I avoid him.
The US Military courts have a similar view to things. The truth of a statement should be the full defense, but if the statement is such that it causes harm to the morale and discipline of the troops, it might not be.
Most civil courts have the view that a truthful accusation that damages a falsely maintained (good) reputation is not an actual harm. But military courts are to some degree willing to go along with maintaining a false front, if it would further the general efforts of the unit. For example, claiming your unit commander is a drunk could get you thrown in jail, even if you could prove it, since that would tend to lower the respect the commander (and the commander's orders) are due. Which might in turn decrease the unit's effectiveness. --
And what happens if I slander someone, and someone else writes it down? Am I guilty of libel now that my statements have been committed to paper?
You might be found to be responsible for the original slander, but you haven't libeled anyone becasue you didn't write anything.
On the other hand, the person that DID write down your words may or may not be responsible for defamation, depending on how they did it and how it was propagated. The second person is, to some degree, taking responsibility for accurately reporting you words. And then reporting that it was you that said them, and for NOT implying anything about the degree of truth behind the words.
Think about how most news reporters are careful to talk about "accused murderers", even when the person has confessed, but has not been convicted. The accusation would be a slander, if untrue. Spreading it around like it was true would be defamation and/or slander as well. But the reporter is simply repeating, relatively faithfully, what a Prosecutor has said, without implying it is actually true. If done right, it isn't a problem.
I've been through it too. Not OSS, but pretty much any tech upgrade or refresh has this issue. The owners don't like the idea of vendor lock-in in principle, but they LOVE the idea of a single point of contact fix-it or else solution. They want it cheap and simple, and flexible and competitive, but also easy to understand.
As long as your vendor is reasonable and wants to work with you, this can work out fine. Which is generally true in most small towns. But if a certain party decides they have Market Power and Virtual Monopoly working for them when they cut the contract, you might be on the wrong end of the whipsaw.
Cost does matter. Both in real money spent, and in the time of training and ease of use. Don't make them regret any kind of transition. If they have any sense at all, it will be a phased transition, and they will be ready to back out at teh first bump in the road.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like any server that would be RMS compliant would need to craft an Interface Control Document, and provide it along with their downloadable client app. "Here are all the behaviors I expect from the current version, all the data to be passed on each event, and all the fallbacks to previous versions we still support. A working version is provided for your convienience."
From a purely Open perspective it is great. But as a practical matter this would be hell. A good code maintainer should be doing this anyway (building an ICD), internally to the maintenance/development organization. But to actually open up to the world and be ready for anything that might come through the door is going to increase costs.
It is almost like a Full Employment for Coders initiative.
Exceptions and lockouts for security, timeliness, reliability, etc. can always be made. The general solution is for general purpose computing AND special case applications.
I think I agree with you, BUT... don't fall into the old trap: If ten machines can do the job in 1 month, 1 machine can do the job in 10 months. But it doesn't necessarily follow that if one machine can do the job in 10 months, 10 machines can do the job in 1 month.
Also, the problem with runtime interpreters is not that they don't generate assembly code. The problem is that it is harder to get at the underlying code that is really executing. That code could be optimized if you could see it. But seeing it is just more difficult.
If the processing required can be characterized successfully, numeric, memory operation, shift registers, etc. then a compiler might be able to tag them such that the OS can assign as much "power" for that kind of operation as it has available at any given moment.
No more idle processing units if there is any work anywhere that can use them.
Finally, training from work actually means something in the real world.
Take a look at the concepts of Theory of Constraints (TOC) specifically the areas of Manufacturing and Program Management. They deal with the problems of Bottlenecks in production. How to optimize a process flow to maximize throughput when one or more resources are both critical and limited. There is a concept in there called Critical Chain. It looks a lot like Critical Path, except it tries to account for the load on the critical resource, not necessarily just time.
In the case of CPUs and compilers, just as in manufacturing process flows and projects, first you decide what all the tasks and sequence links need to be. Then you work out what resources are actually available to you. If you only have one of everything, you space out the tasks so that one worker/processor can move from task to task easily and efficiently. If you have more than one worker/processor, you can arrange the tasks to be more parallel and everything gets accomplished in shorter time.
The key lesson is that the basic tasks and links do not need to change. You only change your paradigm of how you assign processing power to each of them as they need to be done. Just like a work manager in a shop might assign one, two, ten, or more mechanics to a job based on priority, the OS in a computer would need fined grained understanding of each work unit in every job in execution, as well as control of every processing unit, and a way to switch them in and out. You don't assign more than would be useful, but you do assign enough to get the job done quickly AND to keep available processing power from going idle.
That would be a big change, but the efficiency and total throughput gained would be huge.
"...director of National Intelligence, who thinks cyber security should be the NSA's job to begin with."
Geezus, the would be like putting the thieves in charge of the banks! Uhhh, wait...
No, the box came with 256K, and I expanded it up to 512K and co-processor with the Sidecar.
My Amiga 1000 (512KB, with 68881 co-processor!) has been sitting in the bottom of the old coat closet, waiting for this development so it would be useful once again. They should call it "anti Obsolescence gel"
No, fewer lines means tighter code. If the logic is good, fine. Else, it means worse bugs to figure out and debug/expand. end
Now he's done it. Kicked off the alpabetical arms race. He himself averted it once by the Operator Gambit of + and ++. The crisis was defused.
It was stumped again this decade by what came to be called the Jungle of Earthly Delights Diversions (Python, Ruby, et al). But now he's broken the dam to the last redoubt, the alphabet. There are only so many letters! It is a limited supply! We've feared this since the mid-nineties. Who will save us now?
How would you really KNOW how large a service is when you sign up? The simplest indicator is a slick interface, but really that only tells you the difference between a newbie and someone with the smarts to download a better one. After that, you only have indirect indicators like response speed, and apparent reliability. Anything else could all just be a Massive Hoax.
How do we know kdawson, samzenpus, soulskill, and the others aren't just Cowboy Neal's alternate personalities?
If you don't teach them to read, write, or use a telephone, they can't really complain effectively, can they? And anything they say on visiting day is monitored by Big Brother. No problem.
I agree, the punitive damages should not necessarily go to the plaintiff. Certainly not straight to their pocket. Maybe to a pool for all the people ever damaged by the defendant in that way, like a proto-class action payout.
In any case, punitives are very rarely ordered. the behavior would have to be very outrageous and repeated.
What if it was a chip IN their shoulder?
Actual permanent damage done to the kid as a result of being wrongfully jailed. Not just being chipped, but maybe subsequent assaults, or injuries picked up in the jail, or medical situations that arose there.
These judges need to be burned three different ways.
Damages, on the other hand, is an excellent excuse to see Glenn Close and Rose Byrne in action. Legally flimsy, but cute nonetheless.
Back when he was President, the Office of Management and Budget first cam up with Circular A-76. It describes what is, and is not, an "inherently governmental activity". If it is inherently governmental, then an actual government employee must do it. Things like signing contracts, signing checks or handing out money, formally making arrests, sentencing convicts. But other than those kinds of things, a contractor can be used, since the work is essentially just administrative and not decision making. It is a bit of a slippery scale, and politics jumps in there too, but that is the basis for it.
Usually A-76 is just used to decide if a US government agency should be closed, downsized and contracted out. But the flip side of it is that if an agency wants to expend, they can use it for justifying hiring a contractor to do the extra work. Ever since Reagan this has been the preferred way to do any sort of new work in the US government. The Iraq War took it to new levels, with paid contractors being deployed to do as much work as soldiers, marines, and airmen.
I got the gadgets and the drinking problem, but the girls are Betty and Veronica, and I'm trying to keep them off each other!
Oh shit, how'd you know??
sudo passwd 9876
Not such a joke. Look up DIADS, Digital integrated Air Defense (amazingly, not in Wikipedia!). This guy has just hacked the rudiments of Fire Control system. Which is approximately half of a DIADS. The other half being the radar and sensor integration. Which is handled by the many Open projects on sonar and video camera applications. Put them all together, and Our Sandbox Conquering Overlords will have all the tools they need to take them to Playground Domination.
John Galt is a guy with the arrogance to believe he has the secret understanding to run other people's world better than they do themselves, and who live and die by their own mistakes. I avoid him.
Beyond that, I don't care who John Galt is.
No, call it Red Beret. Finally that picture of Che can be put somewhere that makes sense.
The US Military courts have a similar view to things. The truth of a statement should be the full defense, but if the statement is such that it causes harm to the morale and discipline of the troops, it might not be.
Most civil courts have the view that a truthful accusation that damages a falsely maintained (good) reputation is not an actual harm. But military courts are to some degree willing to go along with maintaining a false front, if it would further the general efforts of the unit. For example, claiming your unit commander is a drunk could get you thrown in jail, even if you could prove it, since that would tend to lower the respect the commander (and the commander's orders) are due. Which might in turn decrease the unit's effectiveness.
--
And what happens if I slander someone, and someone else writes it down? Am I guilty of libel now that my statements have been committed to paper?
You might be found to be responsible for the original slander, but you haven't libeled anyone becasue you didn't write anything.
On the other hand, the person that DID write down your words may or may not be responsible for defamation, depending on how they did it and how it was propagated. The second person is, to some degree, taking responsibility for accurately reporting you words. And then reporting that it was you that said them, and for NOT implying anything about the degree of truth behind the words.
Think about how most news reporters are careful to talk about "accused murderers", even when the person has confessed, but has not been convicted. The accusation would be a slander, if untrue. Spreading it around like it was true would be defamation and/or slander as well. But the reporter is simply repeating, relatively faithfully, what a Prosecutor has said, without implying it is actually true. If done right, it isn't a problem.
That is essentially what I suspected.
I've been through it too. Not OSS, but pretty much any tech upgrade or refresh has this issue. The owners don't like the idea of vendor lock-in in principle, but they LOVE the idea of a single point of contact fix-it or else solution. They want it cheap and simple, and flexible and competitive, but also easy to understand.
As long as your vendor is reasonable and wants to work with you, this can work out fine. Which is generally true in most small towns. But if a certain party decides they have Market Power and Virtual Monopoly working for them when they cut the contract, you might be on the wrong end of the whipsaw.
Cost does matter. Both in real money spent, and in the time of training and ease of use. Don't make them regret any kind of transition. If they have any sense at all, it will be a phased transition, and they will be ready to back out at teh first bump in the road.