As with all disasters of history, only by remembering can we prevent a repeat. We should always remember what happen in Germany in the 1930. A democratic Germany elected Hitler to power. and gave him nearly unlimited control.
We learn more from mistakes of the past then from when things went right
Mars has polar caps big enough that they can be seen from backyard telescopes. Yes you can see the ice with a telescope that will fit inside a small pickup truck. The mood even being much closer has no visible ice.
How can the Earth "run out of energy". Not until the sun burns out. It may run out of cheap energy. No matter how little energy there is on Earth, there is less of it on the moon.
I mean, in the U.S., the scarce organs available for transplant are decided (I think) by some medical board that determines the medical usefulness(?)
I think Steve can afford an airplane ticket to someplace outside the US. I think in China the process is different then here. They simply find a prisoner and schedule an execution.
Not saying he'd go to China but a person with his money has many options
this is the elephant in the room that no one talks about: used cd and dvd sales NEVER 'help' the artist yet they are 100% legal.
You can claim the same thing about used cars. How can buying a used Ford help Ford? Well here is how: a good used market helps keep the price of new good up. New goods (cars, CDs, Houses,.. have more value when the buys knows there s potential resale value. With CD's this effect is small but I think it's real. Small with CD's because so few are re-sold, bigger with cars and building because most of these are re-sold.
Put five people in a sailboat and have them circumnavigate the Earth twice. Tell them they can't come back into port until they finish.
Communications from a sail boat is via HF marine radio. The boat will not have much power so contact is only daily. They will be living in close quarters but with huge amounts of space all arond them. They will need to eat about the same kinds of food as on a trip to mars. They will have to fix things. And just like in space when soething goes wrong you can't call 911.
"People have never really wanted a speech interface"
That's not quite right. People have never really wanted to talk to their current mouse based interface. Tells the cursor what to click on --- you are right who'd want that. Put I would like one that is designed from the ground up. To used voice. Maybe the computer would not even have a visual screen. People don't have screens and we talk to people so why would a voice operated computer have a screen?
Did you see 2001? Hal had not keyborad and not LCD screen. You just asked him "Open the pod bay doors Hal." I could imagine a computer in my house to accepted voice commands. It would have a camera, like Hal too. and I'd ask it "Did you see whee I put my car keys?" I vouice commanded computer would do different things using a different interface.
A voice driven mouse is the best we have today and no one wants it.
"What I believe this means is that drives the creation of software is not how quickly it can be developed, but whether there's demand for it."
No, not at all. There is a HUGE demand for a computer that would accept a voice command like "Get a hold of Joe and set up a meeting for next Thursday" then the computer uses the phone or e-mail and failing that will ask people who know Joe where he might be.
Or what about the demand for a controller for a car that yo just tell it "get off at the next exit".
The issue is NOT demand. It's a lack of basic science. No one today understands how su h a device could work. We have no end to end theory of intelligence.
It's like saying there is not faster then light star ships because there are no buyers willing to pay for them.
Am I missing something, or does the article interpret the idea of the long tail incorrectly?
People who write for a living have to generate controversy because it youe write an article that reads "what we though all along to be true is in fact true" no one would read it. What the author did here was to miss-interpret "long tail" in a way such that he could show it does not work. That way he gets to write an article with a surprizing conclusion. It's an old trick.
The way to PROVE "long tail" does not work is to point to Amazon.com and show that they have changed and now carry only the top 100 titles.
But Amazon (today at least) does carry a bazillion titles and we can assume they do because they make money doing it.
"One of the reasons Windows gets a bad rap for crashing a lot is because it has to be able to handle any kind of hardware you throw at it. One of the reasons Linux gets such a bad rap for being difficult to install and use is because virtually everyone who's ever installed it has probably run into a problem where some piece of hardware that should be easy to make work just won't."
Linux actually supports FAR more hardware than does Windows. Have you ever tried to install MS Windows on either of these hardware devices
1) A Linksys routers 2) An IBM System 390 me=ainframe 3) a Google "Andriod" call phone 4) A Sun SPARC 5) A DEC "Alpha". (this di work once.)
Linux is the perfect couter example to the people who claim Mac OS X is stable only because it has to suport limited hardware. Linux is even more stable then mac OS X and it suports more hardware then Window, far more than Windows
The real reason is that Windows was designed to run on single user PCs and still carries that bagage. Unix was designed from the start, back in ght 1960's to run in a much more hostel environment: A shared machine with other logged in users doing "who knows what". Security, stabilty and compartmentalization ver designed in 40+ years ago. and Unix, Linux and Mac OS X still carry that baggage with them.
People don't like satellite links. Some people don't like then so much that they will hang up and re-dial hoping to get routed over a cable next try. The reason is the delay. Light is fast but geo-sync is high. It's annoying to have a lag in the phone conversation so cables are always preferred.
Yes exactly. Like one African military person defended shooting into a crowd as a means of ending a political protest. He said "It's OK. We don't have to kill them all, just a few and then they all run away."
The ionosphere moves. In fact it changes daily and is differnt at night and day and it depends on solar activity. It is a bit like sunlight it too changes (it get dark at night, some times there are clouds and soe times not) but still it makes sens to say "It's brighter then I thought it would be" that is wht they are saying here "It's lower than I thought it would be"
The two JVMs are different, and actually use different logic inside. One has to use the POSIX APIs while the other is using Windows APIs to get to OS services like reading files and drawing to the screen.
But you are correct if the test is a simple compute loop. One would think it should be the same. But no not really because one JVM was built with gcc and the other with some Microsoft compiler. Simply upgrading gcc might change the result. The JVMs really are different
The way around this is to cut out the ISPs. Just don't go through ISPs. For years and years long before the web the Internet (and DARPA NET) ran on communication links that went up and down. When All that travels over the web is emails and news and files then yu don't need a 24x7 link. The data sat in queues and moved when the link was up and waited when there was no connectivity. All the software to make this work is still on our computers are could be.
So what we do is go back to asking other people to connect with you. WIFI (with a good antenna) can connect with some on 10 miles away and connect a a small local group. Tossing a 100BaseT wire over the fence gets you to the guy next door and phone modem get you any place. There are more kinds of links and I could imagine some geeks might actually enjoy setting this up.
What you call this is a peer to peer physical network. It's the way the Internet used to work 30 or 25 years ago.
"..I can think of is a lack of third party support..."
No 3rd party Support? I think IBM will sell you a support contract for Solaris. Of course Sun will sell you one too.
Why do you need 3rd party suport? We have a contract with Sun where they come out on-site within 30 minutes to fix a problem. How you can get better then having a Sun engineer on site.
Other places I've worked have full time customer service people at our facility. We gave them office space and they worked 8-5 every day and if they ran into problem they have their buddies down helping ASAP.
"In terms of usability and functionality for a Laptop Solaris would be at a disadvantage to Linux"
You must not have seen a modern Solaris 10 system. I use both Linux and Solaris. You have to know what you are doing to tell the two a part. A casual user would notice. Solars now uses the same Gnome desktop as Fedora and except for cosmetics the desktops is the same, not "close" but the same.
Now once you get under the hood you find the same GNU utilities and gcc compiler, the same Apache and FTP severs and so on.
Get to the kernal level and things become different. Solaris really is so much better at that level
Whwere Linux is a big win is in hardware support. It runs on every CPU on earth and has wide peripheral support too.
If yu have not seem a resent Solaris system go try it out. It's not free and open source so there is no reason not to have at least running under VMware Easy to install too as Sun even distributes it in the form of a VMware image file.
Solaris uses "CUPS" for printing. CUPS has come a long way. For one reason because Apple alsouses CUPS in Mac OS X nd has put some effort into making it work. Including hiring the project leader and paying hiom to work full time. Most linux diistros use CUPS also.
I have had the same resilt with CUPS. It finds prints well even networked printers all over the building
You forget that iPods are "accessories". If you compare just tech specs others might be better but just tryand give some "better' MP3 player to my daughter and she'll tell you "I'm not going to ware that cheap looking thing."
She's right too. iPods are like a watch. I can gt a cheap plastic made in china watch that keeps time as well as a Rolex but people don't want cheap plastic. The point of a watch is how it looks maybe even more then keeping time. Same with a music player. Design is 80% function maybe 20% What Apple does is design things people like.
But this bunker was built to house a government. It has power, backup power and a backup for the backup power and all kinds of good redundant data connectivity. I've not seen this bunker but the few I've seen are designed to be very robust with multiple backups for everything and then if all else fails there are water, food, tools, parts and equipment stored in closets distributed throughout the facility. Don't assume it's a hole in the ground with just bare concrete walls
If Linux is a "desktop OS" then so is Solaris. I doubt anyone but an expert could tell a Solaris system running Gnome from a Linux system running Gnome. They both look and act pretty much identically. We have a lot of Solaris desktops around here. At the user level there is so little difference. Any difference is in the kernels anyways
(OK, you don't need to be much of an "expert" to type "uname" into a terminal window.)
When they say the MySQL will not scale like Oracle they are mostly right. The exceptions where MySQL works are when you design a application around MySQL and use just one installation of MySQL per application. When you do this and it works what you are really doing is using mySQL is a fancy kind of file system.
With Oracle you can build an enterprise database that holds _everything_ and all you applications can access the same database. There are some great advantages when you do this
Many of you miss the point. Yes at one point Chu did science. But now he is an administraitor at one of the biggest labs in the contry. He has spend his later years working for energy related issues
To compare SpaceX and NASA is silly. NASA does not built rockets. Boing and McDonald Douglas built rockets. NASA buys those rockets from contractors. What SpaceX is hoping to do is become a contractor and sell rockets to NASA.
This is not unique to NASA. The US Air Force does not build airplanes either and the Army does not build rifles.
What really matters is the kinds of projects. LLet them work in areas they know. For example most kids understand Vending machines. Write a program to simulate one. It is just a text mode CLI program that accepts commands and writes output.
You can start with some simple sub-parts. Like printing the sign-on measages "Vending, vers 0.3". This is just "hello world". Next have it accept commands and do an IF based on whck command is read.
Just keep expanding it.
Next year you build a GUI around the test based simulation engine
Any modern structured language would work. Java is as good as C++ but Pascal would work or maybe even Python
It's not the home type machine. This looks more like the vending machine that you see in a public place where you put in money and select the type of coffee. the machine dispences a paper cup and then makes one cup of coffee, trea, hot chocolate or whatver.
The real purpose of the machine is to reach people how to write software that controls machines. it purposly uses some interface that are used on factory floors
They could have used as a teaching device a machine that bends tubing to make automotive or aircraft parts but then you have to teach the students not only how to program but about tube bending machines. Coffee they already understand so you can get right into teaching programming.
Slashdot Mirror
As with all disasters of history, only by remembering can we prevent a repeat. We should always remember what happen in Germany in the 1930. A democratic Germany elected Hitler to power. and gave him nearly unlimited control.
We learn more from mistakes of the past then from when things went right
Mars has polar caps big enough that they can be seen from backyard telescopes. Yes you can see the ice with a telescope that will fit inside a small pickup truck. The mood even being much closer has no visible ice.
How can the Earth "run out of energy". Not until the sun burns out. It may run out of cheap energy. No matter how little energy there is on Earth, there is less of it on the moon.
I mean, in the U.S., the scarce organs available for transplant are decided (I think) by some medical board that determines the medical usefulness(?)
I think Steve can afford an airplane ticket to someplace outside the US. I think in China the process is different then here. They simply find a prisoner and schedule an execution.
Not saying he'd go to China but a person with his money has many options
this is the elephant in the room that no one talks about: used cd and dvd sales NEVER 'help' the artist yet they are 100% legal.
You can claim the same thing about used cars. How can buying a used Ford help Ford? Well here is how: a good used market helps keep the price of new good up. New goods (cars, CDs, Houses,.. have more value when the buys knows there s potential resale value. With CD's this effect is small but I think it's real. Small with CD's because so few are re-sold, bigger with cars and building because most of these are re-sold.
Want a better mar simulation?
Put five people in a sailboat and have them circumnavigate the Earth twice. Tell them they can't come back into port until they finish.
Communications from a sail boat is via HF marine radio. The boat will not have much power so contact is only daily. They will be living in close quarters but with huge amounts of space all arond them. They will need to eat about the same kinds of food as on a trip to mars. They will have to fix things. And just like in space when soething goes wrong you can't call 911.
"People have never really wanted a speech interface"
That's not quite right. People have never really wanted to talk to their current mouse based interface. Tells the cursor what to click on --- you are right who'd want that. Put I would like one that is designed from the ground up. To used voice. Maybe the computer would not even have a visual screen. People don't have screens and we talk to people so why would a voice operated computer have a screen?
Did you see 2001? Hal had not keyborad and not LCD screen. You just asked him "Open the pod bay doors Hal." I could imagine a computer in my house to accepted voice commands. It would have a camera, like Hal too. and I'd ask it "Did you see whee I put my car keys?" I vouice commanded computer would do different things using a different interface.
A voice driven mouse is the best we have today and no one wants it.
"What I believe this means is that drives the creation of software is not how quickly it can be developed, but whether there's demand for it."
No, not at all. There is a HUGE demand for a computer that would accept a voice command like "Get a hold of Joe and set up a meeting for next Thursday" then the computer uses the phone or e-mail and failing that will ask people who know Joe where he might be.
Or what about the demand for a controller for a car that yo just tell it "get off at the next exit".
The issue is NOT demand. It's a lack of basic science. No one today understands how su h a device could work. We have no end to end theory of intelligence.
It's like saying there is not faster then light star ships because there are no buyers willing to pay for them.
Am I missing something, or does the article interpret the idea of the long tail incorrectly?
People who write for a living have to generate controversy because it youe write an article that reads "what we though all along to be true is in fact true" no one would read it. What the author did here was to miss-interpret "long tail" in a way such that he could show it does not work. That way he gets to write an article with a surprizing conclusion. It's an old trick.
The way to PROVE "long tail" does not work is to point to Amazon.com and show that they have changed and now carry only the top 100 titles.
But Amazon (today at least) does carry a bazillion titles and we can assume they do because they make money doing it.
"One of the reasons Windows gets a bad rap for crashing a lot is because it has to be able to handle any kind of hardware you throw at it. One of the reasons Linux gets such a bad rap for being difficult to install and use is because virtually everyone who's ever installed it has probably run into a problem where some piece of hardware that should be easy to make work just won't."
Linux actually supports FAR more hardware than does Windows. Have you ever tried to install MS Windows on either of these hardware devices
1) A Linksys routers
2) An IBM System 390 me=ainframe
3) a Google "Andriod" call phone
4) A Sun SPARC
5) A DEC "Alpha". (this di work once.)
Linux is the perfect couter example to the people who claim Mac OS X is stable only because it has to suport limited hardware. Linux is even more stable then mac OS X and it suports more hardware then Window, far more than Windows
The real reason is that Windows was designed to run on single user PCs and still carries that bagage. Unix was designed from the start, back in ght 1960's to run in a much more hostel environment: A shared machine with other logged in users doing "who knows what". Security, stabilty and compartmentalization ver designed in 40+ years ago. and Unix, Linux and Mac OS X still carry that baggage with them.
People don't like satellite links. Some people don't like then so much that they will hang up and re-dial hoping to get routed over a cable next try. The reason is the delay. Light is fast but geo-sync is high. It's annoying to have a lag in the phone conversation so cables are always preferred.
Yes exactly. Like one African military person defended shooting into a crowd as a means of ending a political protest. He said "It's OK. We don't have to kill them all, just a few and then they all run away."
So just kill a few. It might work.
The ionosphere moves. In fact it changes daily and is differnt at night and day and it depends on solar activity. It is a bit like sunlight it too changes (it get dark at night, some times there are clouds and soe times not) but still it makes sens to say "It's brighter then I thought it would be" that is wht they are saying here "It's lower than I thought it would be"
The two JVMs are different, and actually use different logic inside. One has to use the POSIX APIs while the other is using Windows APIs to get to OS services like reading files and drawing to the screen.
But you are correct if the test is a simple compute loop. One would think it should be the same. But no not really because one JVM was built with gcc and the other with some Microsoft compiler. Simply upgrading gcc might change the result. The JVMs really are different
The way around this is to cut out the ISPs. Just don't go through ISPs. For years and years long before the web the Internet (and DARPA NET) ran on communication links that went up and down. When All that travels over the web is emails and news and files then yu don't need a 24x7 link. The data sat in queues and moved when the link was up and waited when there was no connectivity. All the software to make this work is still on our computers are could be.
So what we do is go back to asking other people to connect with you. WIFI (with a good antenna) can connect with some on 10 miles away and connect a a small local group. Tossing a 100BaseT wire over the fence gets you to the guy next door and phone modem get you any place. There are more kinds of links and I could imagine some geeks might actually enjoy setting this up.
What you call this is a peer to peer physical network. It's the way the Internet used to work 30 or 25 years ago.
"..I can think of is a lack of third party support..."
No 3rd party Support? I think IBM will sell you a support contract for Solaris. Of course Sun will sell you one too.
Why do you need 3rd party suport? We have a contract with Sun where they come out on-site within 30 minutes to fix a problem. How you can get better then having a Sun engineer on site.
Other places I've worked have full time customer service people at our facility. We gave them office space and they worked 8-5 every day and if they ran into problem they have their buddies down helping ASAP.
"In terms of usability and functionality for a Laptop Solaris would be at a disadvantage to Linux"
You must not have seen a modern Solaris 10 system. I use both Linux and Solaris. You have to know what you are doing to tell the two a part. A casual user would notice. Solars now uses the same Gnome desktop as Fedora and except for cosmetics the desktops is the same, not "close" but the same.
Now once you get under the hood you find the same GNU utilities and gcc compiler, the same Apache and FTP severs and so on.
Get to the kernal level and things become different. Solaris really is so much better at that level
Whwere Linux is a big win is in hardware support. It runs on every CPU on earth and has wide peripheral support too.
If yu have not seem a resent Solaris system go try it out. It's not free and open source so there is no reason not to have at least running under VMware Easy to install too as Sun even distributes it in the form of a VMware image file.
Solaris uses "CUPS" for printing. CUPS has come a long way. For one reason because Apple alsouses CUPS in Mac OS X nd has put some effort into making it work. Including hiring the project leader and paying hiom to work full time. Most linux diistros use CUPS also.
I have had the same resilt with CUPS. It finds prints well even networked printers all over the building
You forget that iPods are "accessories". If you compare just tech specs others might be better but just tryand give some "better' MP3 player to my daughter and she'll tell you "I'm not going to ware that cheap looking thing."
She's right too. iPods are like a watch. I can gt a cheap plastic made in china watch that keeps time as well as a Rolex but people don't want cheap plastic. The point of a watch is how it looks maybe even more then keeping time. Same with a music player. Design is 80% function maybe 20% What Apple does is design things people like.
But this bunker was built to house a government. It has power, backup power and a backup for the backup power and all kinds of good redundant data connectivity. I've not seen this bunker but the few I've seen are designed to be very robust with multiple backups for everything and then if all else fails there are water, food, tools, parts and equipment stored in closets distributed throughout the facility. Don't assume it's a hole in the ground with just bare concrete walls
If Linux is a "desktop OS" then so is Solaris. I doubt anyone but an expert could tell a Solaris system running Gnome from a Linux system running Gnome. They both look and act pretty much identically. We have a lot of Solaris desktops around here. At the user level there is so little difference. Any difference is in the kernels anyways
(OK, you don't need to be much of an "expert" to type "uname" into a terminal window.)
When they say the MySQL will not scale like Oracle they are mostly right. The exceptions where MySQL works are when you design a application around MySQL and use just one installation of MySQL per application. When you do this and it works what you are really doing is using mySQL is a fancy kind of file system.
With Oracle you can build an enterprise database that holds _everything_ and all you applications can access the same database. There are some great advantages when you do this
Many of you miss the point. Yes at one point Chu did science. But now he is an administraitor at one of the biggest labs in the contry. He has spend his later years working for energy related issues
To compare SpaceX and NASA is silly. NASA does not built rockets. Boing and McDonald Douglas built rockets. NASA buys those rockets from contractors. What SpaceX is hoping to do is become a contractor and sell rockets to NASA.
This is not unique to NASA. The US Air Force does not build airplanes either and the Army does not build rifles.
What really matters is the kinds of projects. LLet them work in areas they know. For example most kids understand Vending machines. Write a program to simulate one. It is just a text mode CLI program that accepts commands and writes output.
You can start with some simple sub-parts. Like printing the sign-on measages "Vending, vers 0.3". This is just "hello world". Next have it accept commands and do an IF based on whck command is read.
Just keep expanding it.
Next year you build a GUI around the test based simulation engine
Any modern structured language would work. Java is as good as C++ but Pascal would work or maybe even Python
It's not the home type machine. This looks more like the vending machine that you see in a public place where you put in money and select the type of coffee. the machine dispences a paper cup and then makes one cup of coffee, trea, hot chocolate or whatver.
The real purpose of the machine is to reach people how to write software that controls machines. it purposly uses some interface that are used on factory floors
They could have used as a teaching device a machine that bends tubing to make automotive or aircraft parts but then you have to teach the students not only how to program but about tube bending machines. Coffee they already understand so you can get right into teaching programming.