I am running an open node in my apartment with a broadband Net connection. A co-worker in the same building has wireless, but no Net connection and was hoping to use mine, but the signal was too weak. The other day he was checking the signal again and found yet another 802.11B AP that gave him a good signal and had a Net connection.
My point is this: Just encourage as many people as you can to set up open AP's using off-the-shelf AP's and whatever Net connection they have. Don't tell the providers. Don't worry about setting up complex routing or other network stuff (except making sure the AP's are on different frequencies to avoid stepping on each other). Don't sweat the details. Don't worry about who pays for what. Just do it.
The amazing thing about 802.11B is that it will probably work fine.
. . . something like that is found and the first thing the person with the porn knows about it is an anonymous note asking how much they are willing to pay *not* to be turned in?
I have given a lot of thought to this concept in the past and, although I think it has a lot of merit I also think it will require a different underlying software architecture than any of those we use today.
Currently for distributed computing we have Thin-Client/Fat-Server, Client/Server, N-Tier and Shared-Node architectures. I think most people are expecting a Shared-Node or Client/Server for Grid Computing because that is how existing implementations work. The issue with either of those is the size of the work unit. If the work unit is small than the nodes/clients must sychronize often. If the work unit is large then you are more likley to have nodes/clients in a wait state because required processing is not completed.
Using a network style architecture (distributed Shared-Node) raises more issues because of message routing. Interestingly, this is the 'web-service' model! For example a web site must verify a customer, charge her credit card, initiate a shipping action and order from a factory in a single transaction. So you get four sub-transactions. Let's say that each of those initiates two sub-transactions of its own and each of those initiates one sub transaction of its own. We now have a total of twenty transactions in a hierarchy that is three deep. Let's also assume that we only have one dependancy (the verification) before launching all other transactions asychronously.
The problem here is response times, they add up. if the average response time is 500 ms, then three transactions deep gives us 1500 ms. The dependacy, at a minimum, doubles this. So it takes three full seconds to commit the transaction. Something a user might be willing to live with until a netstorm occurs and the response time drops to thirty seconds or more. (Note: Isn't it funny how you never see this math done in the whitepapers pusing web services?) But three seconds is far too long for sychronizing between nodes of a distributed computing grid unless you only have to do it every once in a great while, pushing us towards large work units and idle nodes!
So the Internet itself imposes costs on a distributed model that wouldn't exist on, say, a Beowulf cluster because that cluster would have a dedicated high-speed network. Client/Server architectures work better for the Internet, but require dedicated servers and a lot of bandwidth to and from them.
I believe the real answer lies in what I call a Cell architecture. This would require servers, but their job would be to hook up nodes into computing 'cells' consisting of one to N (where N is less than 256?) nodes. Each node would download a work-unit from the server appropriately sized to the cell, along with net addresses of the other nodes in the cell. Communication would occur between the nodes until the computation is complete and then the result would be sent back to the server. When a node completes its work unit (even if all computation for the cell is not complete) it detaches and contacts the server for another cell assignment.
By reducing cross-talk to direct contact between nodes within the cell we allow smaller work units. By using a server to coordinate nodes into cells we are allowed to treat the cells as larger virtual work units.
Venus Equilateral was set in a space station of the same name located on a trojan point for Venus (thus the name). Pretty hard vacuum there.
Another problem with the science, but one I would give Smith a pass on considering the time it was written, is that the libration points for the inner planets are not supposed to be very stable. OTOH, they would be stable enough if you were willing to correct once in a while.
In Venus Equilateral they used giant vacuum tubes for their radios, and had no computers to speak of. The second part of the collection is about them finding new uses for the vacuum tubes such as reactionless drives and matter transmitters. A perfect example of the SF tendancy towards "When you have a hammer..."
Plus it never seemed to occur to Smith that, in space, they didn't need the 'tubes'...
Who's laughing now wide-open-brain-boy?
on
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· Score: 0, Redundant
My point is that MS has a major investment in COM code that will not go away soon. Instead they will hide it behind layers of.NET or will just continue using it without publishing the interfaces. COM and COM support will not go away soon.
This is a major threat to the big vendors. In fact I would say it is even more of a threat to Oracle than it is to MS! After all MS can continue to go after the midrange market that are are already locked into them for the OS.
But Oracle shops are dealing with expensive boxes they would love to replace, not to mention expensive Oracle licenses. Often the only reason they use Oracle (other than Oracle salesmen licking their buttholes) is because only Oracle has the horsepower to meet their requirements. Give them a cheaper alternative with the same capabilities and they will bail out faster than you can say 'Geronimo'.
Expect Larry Ellison to start talking about the dangers of using Open Source software now...
The rest of the questions asked have already been answered, so I am going to tackle "Is it really the end of COM?"
Uh... Was Windows 95 the end of MS/DOS? Was COM the end of DDE? Microsoft has a tendancy to wrap up stale old code in fresh new interfaces and let their Marketing people slap a new name on it. Sometimes those interfaces aren't all that fresh; ActiveX was mostly just a rename of COM with a couple of extra methods.
So the answer is no. At least not right away. Maybe ten years from now, but by that time Microsoft will be pushing some new technology without admitting that their new thing has.NET under the hood...
No kidding. That was my first reaction as well. Although I can see use for this in giant clusters on dedicated networks, it doesn't seem like something I would be implementing for myself, well, ever...
I agree completely, on all points made. In fact I would like to see the H1B program eliminated completely in favor of a program making it easy for anyone with certain kinds of skills (engineering, medicine, computers) to easily get green cards and become citizens.
Sure it increases the number of people competing with us for jobs here, but the key word is 'here'. If they remain in third or second world countries they will still be competing with us, but at cut rates because of lower cost of living. Bring them here and make them good capitalists and consumers like the rest of us. America will be the better for it, and the rest of the world the poorer.
But, as it stands, the H1B program is more like bondage than anything else. It means that the workers are not competing fairly for work in a free market. So we have all the problems and none of the benefits of an America bound brain drain...
I would suppose that it depends entirely on the relative size of the penguin and the shark. Being as MS is a very big shark the penguin needs to bulk up a little more first.
It has to do with the rush that comes from having 'Internet Everywhere'. And 3G just doesn't cut it. Read this recent/. journal entry where I talk about 'Internet Everywhere', Ricochet, 3G and how cool WiFi-enabled coffee shops can be.
Very good point. Cheaters are a major issue for this kind of thing as aimbots / healthbots / radar / invis and other cheats can't be stopped anyway I know of other than physically controlling the computer the player is using. Every attempt at cutting out the cheaters only falls victim to better cheat code. Like trying to create an unpickable lock; you just can't do it.
I am wondering about caparative processing speed myself. MySQL has always been the speed leader in Open Source databases. Now that they have added some industrial strenght features (like ACID compliant transactions and row level locking) via InnoDB, how well does the speed difference hold up? Is it still way faster, or just a little faster or not faster at all?
If the difference isn't significant then there is no reason to choose MySQL over PostreSQL for applications requiring high levels of data integrity. Especially when PostreSQL also brings you stored procedures, views and so on.
Clearly there are variations on the TTT, such as "Are you involved in any Open Source projects."
But your personal projects might not come out in a job interview unless you bring them up. I am thinking of making up a CD of some of my personal stuff (and selected past projects) that I can bring with me to an interview. That means I need to make them more 'proffessional' with real installers and such. Probably not a bad idea anyway.
My point is that star performers are always people that are excited about what they do. You don't become a star at something unless you are obsessed by it to some extent. But that obsession usually comes at the price of some area of social development; we can call that the geek tradeoff. Mind you I am talking generalities here, not specifics and there are always exceptions. But to some extent your obessions define you.
So if your biggest obsession is golf you will probably never be a star programmer. If your major interest is Unreal Tournament you might still stand a chance. However the guy in the next cube who is telling everyone in detail about a new sort algorithm he found on the net last night might be boring, but he is probably the one most likely to become make guru level. Even if currently he is only a 'larval stage' hacker.
A star performer is the guy or gal that when you ask about them everyone else says "Well, they are really good. But..." The 'But' will turn out to be that they don't show up exactly on time every day or they don't hang with every one else after work on Friday or some other thing that has no relationship at all to the actual work.
Reading/. is, unfortunately, not a good criteria. Reading the 'Software Patterns' by the gang of four during their lunchbreak might be one however. Also I have written before about the 'Toilet Tank Test' which is a question you ask during job interviews: "If I were to go to your house right now, go into your bathroom and look at the magazines on top of your toilet tank, what would I find?"
The answer to the TTT is often quite revealing. If they say 'Dr. Dobbs' then you might consider hiring them on the spot. If they say 'Golf Digest', then thank them for their time. The TTT works because it is designed to show whether the person is so into software development that they think about it during their 'off' hours.
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You beat me to the post I wanted to make. Now the most I can do is say "Mod this up!"
I am running an open node in my apartment with a broadband Net connection. A co-worker in the same building has wireless, but no Net connection and was hoping to use mine, but the signal was too weak. The other day he was checking the signal again and found yet another 802.11B AP that gave him a good signal and had a Net connection.
My point is this: Just encourage as many people as you can to set up open AP's using off-the-shelf AP's and whatever Net connection they have. Don't tell the providers. Don't worry about setting up complex routing or other network stuff (except making sure the AP's are on different frequencies to avoid stepping on each other). Don't sweat the details. Don't worry about who pays for what. Just do it.
The amazing thing about 802.11B is that it will probably work fine.
. . . something like that is found and the first thing the person with the porn knows about it is an anonymous note asking how much they are willing to pay *not* to be turned in?
Just call it 'Mozilla 2.0' and call it good.
There's no rule that says you have to add features with every release.
I have given a lot of thought to this concept in the past and, although I think it has a lot of merit I also think it will require a different underlying software architecture than any of those we use today.
Currently for distributed computing we have Thin-Client/Fat-Server, Client/Server, N-Tier and Shared-Node architectures. I think most people are expecting a Shared-Node or Client/Server for Grid Computing because that is how existing implementations work. The issue with either of those is the size of the work unit. If the work unit is small than the nodes/clients must sychronize often. If the work unit is large then you are more likley to have nodes/clients in a wait state because required processing is not completed.
Using a network style architecture (distributed Shared-Node) raises more issues because of message routing. Interestingly, this is the 'web-service' model! For example a web site must verify a customer, charge her credit card, initiate a shipping action and order from a factory in a single transaction. So you get four sub-transactions. Let's say that each of those initiates two sub-transactions of its own and each of those initiates one sub transaction of its own. We now have a total of twenty transactions in a hierarchy that is three deep. Let's also assume that we only have one dependancy (the verification) before launching all other transactions asychronously.
The problem here is response times, they add up. if the average response time is 500 ms, then three transactions deep gives us 1500 ms. The dependacy, at a minimum, doubles this. So it takes three full seconds to commit the transaction. Something a user might be willing to live with until a netstorm occurs and the response time drops to thirty seconds or more. (Note: Isn't it funny how you never see this math done in the whitepapers pusing web services?) But three seconds is far too long for sychronizing between nodes of a distributed computing grid unless you only have to do it every once in a great while, pushing us towards large work units and idle nodes!
So the Internet itself imposes costs on a distributed model that wouldn't exist on, say, a Beowulf cluster because that cluster would have a dedicated high-speed network. Client/Server architectures work better for the Internet, but require dedicated servers and a lot of bandwidth to and from them.
I believe the real answer lies in what I call a Cell architecture. This would require servers, but their job would be to hook up nodes into computing 'cells' consisting of one to N (where N is less than 256?) nodes. Each node would download a work-unit from the server appropriately sized to the cell, along with net addresses of the other nodes in the cell. Communication would occur between the nodes until the computation is complete and then the result would be sent back to the server. When a node completes its work unit (even if all computation for the cell is not complete) it detaches and contacts the server for another cell assignment.
By reducing cross-talk to direct contact between nodes within the cell we allow smaller work units. By using a server to coordinate nodes into cells we are allowed to treat the cells as larger virtual work units.
Comments?
Venus Equilateral was set in a space station of the same name located on a trojan point for Venus (thus the name). Pretty hard vacuum there.
Another problem with the science, but one I would give Smith a pass on considering the time it was written, is that the libration points for the inner planets are not supposed to be very stable. OTOH, they would be stable enough if you were willing to correct once in a while.
In Venus Equilateral they used giant vacuum tubes for their radios, and had no computers to speak of. The second part of the collection is about them finding new uses for the vacuum tubes such as reactionless drives and matter transmitters. A perfect example of the SF tendancy towards "When you have a hammer..."
Plus it never seemed to occur to Smith that, in space, they didn't need the 'tubes'...
And you thought my tinfoil hat was crazy!
My point is that MS has a major investment in COM code that will not go away soon. Instead they will hide it behind layers of .NET or will just continue using it without publishing the interfaces. COM and COM support will not go away soon.
This is a major threat to the big vendors. In fact I would say it is even more of a threat to Oracle than it is to MS! After all MS can continue to go after the midrange market that are are already locked into them for the OS.
But Oracle shops are dealing with expensive boxes they would love to replace, not to mention expensive Oracle licenses. Often the only reason they use Oracle (other than Oracle salesmen licking their buttholes) is because only Oracle has the horsepower to meet their requirements. Give them a cheaper alternative with the same capabilities and they will bail out faster than you can say 'Geronimo'.
Expect Larry Ellison to start talking about the dangers of using Open Source software now...
The rest of the questions asked have already been answered, so I am going to tackle "Is it really the end of COM?"
.NET under the hood...
Uh... Was Windows 95 the end of MS/DOS? Was COM the end of DDE? Microsoft has a tendancy to wrap up stale old code in fresh new interfaces and let their Marketing people slap a new name on it. Sometimes those interfaces aren't all that fresh; ActiveX was mostly just a rename of COM with a couple of extra methods.
So the answer is no. At least not right away. Maybe ten years from now, but by that time Microsoft will be pushing some new technology without admitting that their new thing has
Rubbing alcohol! They'll never know.
No kidding. That was my first reaction as well. Although I can see use for this in giant clusters on dedicated networks, it doesn't seem like something I would be implementing for myself, well, ever...
Somehow this doesn't excite me too much. I mean really, why would this be cool enough to be worth the effort?
But then, I never did understand why some people consider Open Source and art form.
The subject says it all.
I agree completely, on all points made. In fact I would like to see the H1B program eliminated completely in favor of a program making it easy for anyone with certain kinds of skills (engineering, medicine, computers) to easily get green cards and become citizens.
Sure it increases the number of people competing with us for jobs here, but the key word is 'here'. If they remain in third or second world countries they will still be competing with us, but at cut rates because of lower cost of living. Bring them here and make them good capitalists and consumers like the rest of us. America will be the better for it, and the rest of the world the poorer.
But, as it stands, the H1B program is more like bondage than anything else. It means that the workers are not competing fairly for work in a free market. So we have all the problems and none of the benefits of an America bound brain drain...
I would suppose that it depends entirely on the relative size of the penguin and the shark. Being as MS is a very big shark the penguin needs to bulk up a little more first.
I predict that in 100 years someone, somewhere, will still be running COBOL applications.
And I will still be refusing to maintain them. Six years in the COBOL mines was six years too long...
Either the military is tired of trying to keep up with Windows security patches or else they want to keep their options open...
Ximian is working on this? Hmm... I wonder how long it will be before we have a Mono (.NET) interface to the libraries?
It has to do with the rush that comes from having 'Internet Everywhere'. And 3G just doesn't cut it. Read this recent /. journal entry where I talk about 'Internet Everywhere', Ricochet, 3G and how cool WiFi-enabled coffee shops can be.
Very good point. Cheaters are a major issue for this kind of thing as aimbots / healthbots / radar / invis and other cheats can't be stopped anyway I know of other than physically controlling the computer the player is using. Every attempt at cutting out the cheaters only falls victim to better cheat code. Like trying to create an unpickable lock; you just can't do it.
I am wondering about caparative processing speed myself. MySQL has always been the speed leader in Open Source databases. Now that they have added some industrial strenght features (like ACID compliant transactions and row level locking) via InnoDB, how well does the speed difference hold up? Is it still way faster, or just a little faster or not faster at all?
If the difference isn't significant then there is no reason to choose MySQL over PostreSQL for applications requiring high levels of data integrity. Especially when PostreSQL also brings you stored procedures, views and so on.
Clearly there are variations on the TTT, such as "Are you involved in any Open Source projects."
But your personal projects might not come out in a job interview unless you bring them up. I am thinking of making up a CD of some of my personal stuff (and selected past projects) that I can bring with me to an interview. That means I need to make them more 'proffessional' with real installers and such. Probably not a bad idea anyway.
My point is that star performers are always people that are excited about what they do. You don't become a star at something unless you are obsessed by it to some extent. But that obsession usually comes at the price of some area of social development; we can call that the geek tradeoff. Mind you I am talking generalities here, not specifics and there are always exceptions. But to some extent your obessions define you.
So if your biggest obsession is golf you will probably never be a star programmer. If your major interest is Unreal Tournament you might still stand a chance. However the guy in the next cube who is telling everyone in detail about a new sort algorithm he found on the net last night might be boring, but he is probably the one most likely to become make guru level. Even if currently he is only a 'larval stage' hacker.
A star performer is the guy or gal that when you ask about them everyone else says "Well, they are really good. But..." The 'But' will turn out to be that they don't show up exactly on time every day or they don't hang with every one else after work on Friday or some other thing that has no relationship at all to the actual work.
/. is, unfortunately, not a good criteria. Reading the 'Software Patterns' by the gang of four during their lunchbreak might be one however. Also I have written before about the 'Toilet Tank Test' which is a question you ask during job interviews: "If I were to go to your house right now, go into your bathroom and look at the magazines on top of your toilet tank, what would I find?"
Reading
The answer to the TTT is often quite revealing. If they say 'Dr. Dobbs' then you might consider hiring them on the spot. If they say 'Golf Digest', then thank them for their time. The TTT works because it is designed to show whether the person is so into software development that they think about it during their 'off' hours.