Of course its partially tongue-in-cheek, but there is a kernel of truth there. You see, I -was- an academic - got my Ph.D. and all. And discovered that the useful work was being done in the "real world." You have a skewed view of things. You name a fair number of real contributions from academia, but fail to measure them against the piles and piles of steaming horse dung that is also generated by academia. If you did that, you'd notice that things like Mosaic (or for that matter, Akamai) come very very few, and frighteningly far between.
FYI: I saw Kent speak in Erfurt, Germany last year. It was very gratifying to see just how wholly without merit the entire XP cult proved to be when faced with the scrutiny of university academics and industry scientists who spend their entire careers developing better means and methods.
Just out of curiosity - when was the last time you saw any "university academic" contribute anything that was useful in the real world?
What I want to know is whether they're gonna make an effort to get some of the original team on board, Greenspun, Eve Andersson, etc. Assuming, of course, that they'd want to come back. But RedHat's got to have someone clueful to manage the ACS project if they ever want anything out of it besides a tax writeoff.
I agree. There is a definite sense of unreality about how much *some* (not all) shareware authors charge.
Case in point is Interarchy, which used to be the best Mac FTP client around. On pre-OS X systems, it provided integrated net tools (ping, traceroute, etc.) as well an excellent FTP client, including mirror up/downloads and a skinnable interface. They asked about USD$30 for it, and I paid it - happily. The program was very much worth it.
Their OS X version stripped out much of the non-FTP client functionality - instead of wrapping the command line functionality into their GUI, they simply launched Apple's built-in (and inferior) GUI for these functions. The only significant features they added were a function to treat FTP servers like mounted shares (FTPDisk), which worked poorly and SSH tunneling of FTP sessions. Then to add insult to injury, they upped the price to $45, with no upgrade path, unless you'd bought the previous version within some short period of time.
They certainly have the right to charge whatever they want for their software. I didn't (and still don't) see the point in paying for it, when the command line functionality is there. However, if they had a Light version, or priced it in the $20 range, I might consider picking it up again - but only if they had a tryout version, which they've also stopped doing.
With Ambrosia, however, I've never gotten that feeling. Not that I have that much time to game anymore, but I've purchased two games from them (Escape Velocity rocks!), and feel like I got my money's worth.
Another worthwhile purchase is WeatherMan. Only $10, and I got nearly instant support on a really annoying bug.
Bottom line: I think shareware only works well for certain price points and levels of functionality, and especially niche markets. Ambrosia is probably pushing the limits of that, but are managing to do OK because of the way the gaming industry has pushed game prices up. In comparison, Ambrosia's prices are pretty good. But, shareware probably won't work for large, generally useful software - there's too much incentive to be dishonest.
The problem with Ethernet in clustering isn't bandwidth, its the latency.
The real issue is how parallel-efficient your algorithms are. We do molecular dynamics (MD) on large clusters, and we can get away with slow networks because each node of the cluster has data that is relatively independent of all other nodes - only neighboring nodes must communicate. If you have a case (and most cases are like this) where every node must communicate to every other node, it becomes a more difficult problem to manage. To deal with this, you need a high-speed, low-latency switch like the interconnects in a Cray. The only real choice for that is a crossbar switch, like Myrinet.
Not if the price includes the networking costs. If you're using "real" interconnects (i.e. not 100BT), the networking costs can be as much as a quarter of the total cost. Also, if you buy rackmount enclosures, they are typically more expensive than if you use minitower cases. But even so, when we built our 168 node Pentium cluster, we paid $900/node exclusive of networking costs.
Quite frankly, Salon has degenerated into Tabloid.com. The quality of writing for Salon was never that great, on average, and their declining fortune has been mirrored by a similar decline in what little quality they had. I stopped reading Salon when I could no longer find any articles other than melodramatic neo-brainless-leftist drivel and insider views into the sex industry.
Has it not occurred to anyone that web magazines are failing simply because they're crap? Even Suck, long one of my favorite sites, had become boring. You see, their schtick became old, and no wonder - Mad Magazine had already worn it out by the mid 80's.
The real issue is not the corporatocracy per se. The suits at these media companies are not sitting around in the boardrooms dreaming up ways to destroy indie web media. The issue is that web magazines and journals are publishing crap in order to have content at all.
For a web magazine to succeed, they will have to publish consistently good material for quite some time (and do so on a shoestring budget) in order to prove to the world at large that they are capable of equal or better quality than "Big Media." Its harder than it looks.
I had a great deal of lower back pain - nothing debilitating, but enough to get my concern level up. On the suggestion of a friend, I started taking yoga and it has helped me a great deal. Yoga will build up your strength gradually, but the benefits of gently working muscles that you misuse during the day will start immediately. I've found that I become fatigued more slowly, and the increased flexibility is nice too.
The real issue is exercise, of course. But for serious back pain, not just any exercise will do - i.e. running or jogging can exacerbate back problems. If you're worried about your back being hurt, talk to a doctor or physical therapist first
There is a subtlety here: Sony has added copyright protection to its implementation of 1394. Nowhere does it say that copy protection has been added to the protocol. This is an important distinction, because it means we will still be able to get CP-free implementations of 1394 from other vendors (i.e. Apple - at least until they get zombified by the MPAA)
Apple has an ADC to DVI adapter available, so the Cinema display is a viable option. ADC is just DVI with the extra stuff to clean up cable clutter. No Jobsian conspiracy or anything evil such as that:)
The book certainly does sound interesting, but Katz's imagery about the Knights Templar brings to mind a less savory aspect of their existence as well: their final fate.
For those who aren't familiar with the details, most of the Knights Templar were executed (burned at the stake) for "heresy." The charges were brought against them by the French king, who had heard rumors that the Knights were hoarding vast wealth. The king, in order to get his hands on the Templar treasure, conspired with groups of noblemen who were jealous of the Templars worldly power to destroy the order.
The amazing parallel here is to the internet in modern times. The internet contains vast wealth, which the greedy governments of modern times wish to acquire. Just as the king had help in the Templar's time, governments today have willing conspirators in the form of the companies who stand to lose the most from the internet.
The Golden Age of the Internet is over: the kings and their co-conspirators have decided to either control the wealth - or destroy it. The actions against MP3.com, Napster, and DeCSS are all symptoms of the growing movement to make the internet just another method of extracting wealth from the masses. In the United States, our elected representatives are fighting amongst themselves over how to tax the Internet properly. If sales taxes on the internet become unpopular, then they will simply levy a "telecommunications tax" on the service providers. Once it was obvious that the wealth was there in cyberspace, these institutions became the internet's worst enemy.
This is not a hopeless battle, though. The Industrial Revolution destroyed the power of the aristocracy in Britain by creating wealth that was not tied to large tracts of land. It did not, however, do so overnight. The decline of that institution can be measured from the mid-18th century up until the twilight of the 19th century. Much in the same way, I believe the Information Revolution was the death knell of government as we know it today, and its willing conspirators.
These institutions must evolve or be replaced, and they will. It is only a matter of time. What is important is that the replacements for them be what we dream about, not what we fear most. The hallmark of the Information Age is the burgeoning empowerment of the individual. It is this property that the modern governments and corporations in America and Europe fear most, and are trying the hardest to limit.
This is because these institutions require complacency and uniformity to exist. Consider: if all people liked the same music, finding artists to record popular music would be easier, discovering the next John Grisham or Tom Clancy would be simpler, and the products created by these people would be easier to market, and would sell more copies. This is why the large media companies focus on expanding markets by telling us what is "cool." They simply do not have the agility to deal with more that two or three different markets. This is leading to an explosion in small niche providers: the small record labels and presses. These people are doing much better in the Internet Age.
Can we make a difference? Certainly. Spend some time researching where your entertainment budget goes. Use the internet to find bands or authors or artists that are good, but not "signed" with a label or a publisher. Reward talent with money. If you are politically inclined, write. Write your newspaper, your representatives, and the executives of companies to praise moves you agree with and to condemn those you don't. Pick an issue for which you are passionate and promote it. And most importantly, if you don't feel like being such an activist, the email those who do with two lines or so of encouragement. It helps.
Then you, being a good little capitalist, will buy scented candles at dirt cheap prices, and offer them on eBay to candle-fetishists and buy your DVDs from people who don't buy very many themselves.
Adam Smith's invisible hand will pimp-slap Amazon's foolishness....
For whom do you suggest voting, neighbor? Neither Dubya nor Al Bore seem to measure up to the challenge of standing against "corporate interests." Dubya is blatantly in the pockets of several industry groups, including the oil industry. Al Gore is in the pockets of the entertainment industry and the labor unions.
Do you not recall the primaries, where the two most interesting candidates, the ones with genuinely new ideas, were gonged off the stage by their own parties, who had predetermined the "Chosen Ones." The 2000 primaries were a travesty of democracy, where the large interest groups TOLD us for whom we could vote in November. And they picked well. Neither Gore nor Bush have the backbone to stand up to their puppet-masters. Clinton, for all his many faults, could lie to these people and make them believe he had done his best.
And the saddest part is that the Congressional candidates are for the most part worse than the Golden Boys. The ones that could afford the campaigns are either incumbents, or "chosen" by a special interest.
So yeah. Turn out the vote. But don't vote for the Republicans or the Democrats. Find a third party that you can vote for in good conscience. Personally, I like the Libertarians , but if your tastes run other ways, their are many other third parties. The Libertarian, Reform, Green, and Natural Law parties are all running presidential candidates. These four and others, including the Socialist and American Independent parties, are running candidates at other levels of government.
There are choices, and while some of the men and women running under the banner of the traditional parties are good people, you must consider that they receive a great deal of money from the national parties, which have been proven to be exceptionally corrupt.
I agree completely with you thoughts about documentation, however, you no longer have to pay money for the Inside Mac books (unless you have a thing against trees). All of the Inside Mac documentation is free via html or pdf from the Apple developer website. Microsoft's developer docs are nowhere near as complete and easy to use.
I think the reason UN*X will be around for many years to come is that UN*X isn't wedded to any "paradigm." In other words: everything is extremely modular. This allows for evolution in the system to meet unforseen demands. Because of this, Un*x is used in everything from RT embedded systems to consumer desktop systems. So, while I think Un*x in 2050 will bear little resemblance to Un*x in 2000, I will be willing to bet that a unbroken chain of evolution will bind them.
I believe the question of morphing implementations for various platforms will be answered *after* Transmeta's penetration into the PC laptop and handheld market. At this point, there is no financial benefit for them to spend valuable man-hours supporting other platforms. In the future, though, it may be worthwhile for them to license the VLIW instruction set to Moto or to Sun so that Transmeta doesn't have to do the scutwork. It is a wise decision not to do that from the get-go, however - it is far better for them to concentrate on penetrating their initial target market so that they have a strong revenue base from which they can finance improvements to the platform. The venture capital won't last forever!
In some sense, the code morphing software acts like a hardware abstraction layer like a microkernel architecture. It would be silly of them not to capitalize on this in the long-term. So don't worry about it. If you want to see it sooner, tell all your friends to buy WebPads and the whatnot....
I think the most interesting thing about this (incredibly well written) PCWeek article is the paragraph on the 1st page estimating the personnel cost of maintaining a secure site
To quote the article:
This comes at a cost that rises quickly relative to presence online.... at least one person dedicating 20 percent or more of his or her time to Web security.... this amounts to a little more than $1,000 per month for a base-package site to remain securely online. For sites with more servers, more software and more connections to the Internet, the costs rise quickly.
Now, the interesting question is whether or not this should be considered to be an inevitable overhead cost of maintaining an internet presence?
In general, I think that security measures are becoming more powerful and easy to configure and administrate. Of course, as the de rigeur features of internet services change and evolve, the number of potential exploits increase.
Unfortunately, I think the "5% of hackers" the article mentioned will *always* be ahead of any automated security measures due to the nature of the security flaws being exploited - those which are due to new code that hasn't been "burn tested" in the real world. Thus, these costs seem to indeed be inevitable.
I think this is actually a corollary to Eric Raymond's apt observation, "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." Consider: a company may have 5 or 6 people testing new code for security flaws before release. There may be over 1000 people trying to find the flaws (to exploit them!) after release. Who do you think is going to have better luck?
The subject of teacher pay is another one altogether. Yes the pay sucks. Yes, it should be higher. No, that is not an excuse for doing a crappy job.
Plus, the summer allows her to pursue her hobby, writing historical fiction. The summer is when she typically does her research.
The point is that students will not be motivated to perform well if their teachers are not willing to treat the student's work as something worth spending time on.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course its partially tongue-in-cheek, but there is a kernel of truth there. You see, I -was- an academic - got my Ph.D. and all. And discovered that the useful work was being done in the "real world." You have a skewed view of things. You name a fair number of real contributions from academia, but fail to measure them against the piles and piles of steaming horse dung that is also generated by academia. If you did that, you'd notice that things like Mosaic (or for that matter, Akamai) come very very few, and frighteningly far between.
Just out of curiosity - when was the last time you saw any "university academic" contribute anything that was useful in the real world?
No, no. Thats *Darned* if you do, damned if you don't...
Actually, Moissanite is gemstone grade silicon carbide. SiC.
www.moissanite.com
What I want to know is whether they're gonna make an effort to get some of the original team on board, Greenspun, Eve Andersson, etc. Assuming, of course, that they'd want to come back. But RedHat's got to have someone clueful to manage the ACS project if they ever want anything out of it besides a tax writeoff.
Case in point is Interarchy, which used to be the best Mac FTP client around. On pre-OS X systems, it provided integrated net tools (ping, traceroute, etc.) as well an excellent FTP client, including mirror up/downloads and a skinnable interface. They asked about USD$30 for it, and I paid it - happily. The program was very much worth it.
Their OS X version stripped out much of the non-FTP client functionality - instead of wrapping the command line functionality into their GUI, they simply launched Apple's built-in (and inferior) GUI for these functions. The only significant features they added were a function to treat FTP servers like mounted shares (FTPDisk), which worked poorly and SSH tunneling of FTP sessions. Then to add insult to injury, they upped the price to $45, with no upgrade path, unless you'd bought the previous version within some short period of time.
They certainly have the right to charge whatever they want for their software. I didn't (and still don't) see the point in paying for it, when the command line functionality is there. However, if they had a Light version, or priced it in the $20 range, I might consider picking it up again - but only if they had a tryout version, which they've also stopped doing.
With Ambrosia, however, I've never gotten that feeling. Not that I have that much time to game anymore, but I've purchased two games from them (Escape Velocity rocks!), and feel like I got my money's worth.
Another worthwhile purchase is WeatherMan. Only $10, and I got nearly instant support on a really annoying bug.
Bottom line: I think shareware only works well for certain price points and levels of functionality, and especially niche markets. Ambrosia is probably pushing the limits of that, but are managing to do OK because of the way the gaming industry has pushed game prices up. In comparison, Ambrosia's prices are pretty good. But, shareware probably won't work for large, generally useful software - there's too much incentive to be dishonest.
The real issue is how parallel-efficient your algorithms are. We do molecular dynamics (MD) on large clusters, and we can get away with slow networks because each node of the cluster has data that is relatively independent of all other nodes - only neighboring nodes must communicate. If you have a case (and most cases are like this) where every node must communicate to every other node, it becomes a more difficult problem to manage. To deal with this, you need a high-speed, low-latency switch like the interconnects in a Cray. The only real choice for that is a crossbar switch, like Myrinet.
And Myrinet is tres expensive.
Not if the price includes the networking costs. If you're using "real" interconnects (i.e. not 100BT), the networking costs can be as much as a quarter of the total cost. Also, if you buy rackmount enclosures, they are typically more expensive than if you use minitower cases. But even so, when we built our 168 node Pentium cluster, we paid $900/node exclusive of networking costs.
We bought a 168-node Pentium cluster from Atipa, and we're negotiating for a 1024-node (yes, that's right) Athlon cluster from Linux Networx.
Has it not occurred to anyone that web magazines are failing simply because they're crap? Even Suck, long one of my favorite sites, had become boring. You see, their schtick became old, and no wonder - Mad Magazine had already worn it out by the mid 80's.
The real issue is not the corporatocracy per se. The suits at these media companies are not sitting around in the boardrooms dreaming up ways to destroy indie web media. The issue is that web magazines and journals are publishing crap in order to have content at all.
For a web magazine to succeed, they will have to publish consistently good material for quite some time (and do so on a shoestring budget) in order to prove to the world at large that they are capable of equal or better quality than "Big Media." Its harder than it looks.
The real issue is exercise, of course. But for serious back pain, not just any exercise will do - i.e. running or jogging can exacerbate back problems. If you're worried about your back being hurt, talk to a doctor or physical therapist first
There is a subtlety here: Sony has added copyright protection to its implementation of 1394. Nowhere does it say that copy protection has been added to the protocol. This is an important distinction, because it means we will still be able to get CP-free implementations of 1394 from other vendors (i.e. Apple - at least until they get zombified by the MPAA)
"Ease of Use!"
"Server Strength!"
"Ease of Use!"
"Server Strength!"
Probably because they ship with OS 9.1, which is not compatible with the OSX PB
If you use the ADC to DVI adapter, it should work fine with a DVI-based digital video card.
Apple has an ADC to DVI adapter available, so the Cinema display is a viable option. ADC is just DVI with the extra stuff to clean up cable clutter. No Jobsian conspiracy or anything evil such as that :)
For those who aren't familiar with the details, most of the Knights Templar were executed (burned at the stake) for "heresy." The charges were brought against them by the French king, who had heard rumors that the Knights were hoarding vast wealth. The king, in order to get his hands on the Templar treasure, conspired with groups of noblemen who were jealous of the Templars worldly power to destroy the order.
The amazing parallel here is to the internet in modern times. The internet contains vast wealth, which the greedy governments of modern times wish to acquire. Just as the king had help in the Templar's time, governments today have willing conspirators in the form of the companies who stand to lose the most from the internet.
The Golden Age of the Internet is over: the kings and their co-conspirators have decided to either control the wealth - or destroy it. The actions against MP3.com, Napster, and DeCSS are all symptoms of the growing movement to make the internet just another method of extracting wealth from the masses. In the United States, our elected representatives are fighting amongst themselves over how to tax the Internet properly. If sales taxes on the internet become unpopular, then they will simply levy a "telecommunications tax" on the service providers. Once it was obvious that the wealth was there in cyberspace, these institutions became the internet's worst enemy.
This is not a hopeless battle, though. The Industrial Revolution destroyed the power of the aristocracy in Britain by creating wealth that was not tied to large tracts of land. It did not, however, do so overnight. The decline of that institution can be measured from the mid-18th century up until the twilight of the 19th century. Much in the same way, I believe the Information Revolution was the death knell of government as we know it today, and its willing conspirators.
These institutions must evolve or be replaced, and they will. It is only a matter of time. What is important is that the replacements for them be what we dream about, not what we fear most. The hallmark of the Information Age is the burgeoning empowerment of the individual. It is this property that the modern governments and corporations in America and Europe fear most, and are trying the hardest to limit.
This is because these institutions require complacency and uniformity to exist. Consider: if all people liked the same music, finding artists to record popular music would be easier, discovering the next John Grisham or Tom Clancy would be simpler, and the products created by these people would be easier to market, and would sell more copies. This is why the large media companies focus on expanding markets by telling us what is "cool." They simply do not have the agility to deal with more that two or three different markets. This is leading to an explosion in small niche providers: the small record labels and presses. These people are doing much better in the Internet Age.
Can we make a difference? Certainly. Spend some time researching where your entertainment budget goes. Use the internet to find bands or authors or artists that are good, but not "signed" with a label or a publisher. Reward talent with money. If you are politically inclined, write. Write your newspaper, your representatives, and the executives of companies to praise moves you agree with and to condemn those you don't. Pick an issue for which you are passionate and promote it. And most importantly, if you don't feel like being such an activist, the email those who do with two lines or so of encouragement. It helps.
Adam Smith's invisible hand will pimp-slap Amazon's foolishness....
Do you not recall the primaries, where the two most interesting candidates, the ones with genuinely new ideas, were gonged off the stage by their own parties, who had predetermined the "Chosen Ones." The 2000 primaries were a travesty of democracy, where the large interest groups TOLD us for whom we could vote in November. And they picked well. Neither Gore nor Bush have the backbone to stand up to their puppet-masters. Clinton, for all his many faults, could lie to these people and make them believe he had done his best.
And the saddest part is that the Congressional candidates are for the most part worse than the Golden Boys. The ones that could afford the campaigns are either incumbents, or "chosen" by a special interest.
So yeah. Turn out the vote. But don't vote for the Republicans or the Democrats. Find a third party that you can vote for in good conscience. Personally, I like the Libertarians , but if your tastes run other ways, their are many other third parties. The Libertarian, Reform, Green, and Natural Law parties are all running presidential candidates. These four and others, including the Socialist and American Independent parties, are running candidates at other levels of government.
There are choices, and while some of the men and women running under the banner of the traditional parties are good people, you must consider that they receive a great deal of money from the national parties, which have been proven to be exceptionally corrupt.
But in any case - do vote!
Poor assumption.
Other people have already posted the alternatives in this forum, including OpenNap
I agree completely with you thoughts about documentation, however, you no longer have to pay money for the Inside Mac books (unless you have a thing against trees). All of the Inside Mac documentation is free via html or pdf from the Apple developer website. Microsoft's developer docs are nowhere near as complete and easy to use.
I think the reason UN*X will be around for many years to come is that UN*X isn't wedded to any "paradigm." In other words: everything is extremely modular. This allows for evolution in the system to meet unforseen demands. Because of this, Un*x is used in everything from RT embedded systems to consumer desktop systems. So, while I think Un*x in 2050 will bear little resemblance to Un*x in 2000, I will be willing to bet that a unbroken chain of evolution will bind them.
In some sense, the code morphing software acts like a hardware abstraction layer like a microkernel architecture. It would be silly of them not to capitalize on this in the long-term. So don't worry about it. If you want to see it sooner, tell all your friends to buy WebPads and the whatnot....
To quote the article:
Now, the interesting question is whether or not this should be considered to be an inevitable overhead cost of maintaining an internet presence?
In general, I think that security measures are becoming more powerful and easy to configure and administrate. Of course, as the de rigeur features of internet services change and evolve, the number of potential exploits increase.
Unfortunately, I think the "5% of hackers" the article mentioned will *always* be ahead of any automated security measures due to the nature of the security flaws being exploited - those which are due to new code that hasn't been "burn tested" in the real world. Thus, these costs seem to indeed be inevitable.
I think this is actually a corollary to Eric Raymond's apt observation, "Given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow." Consider: a company may have 5 or 6 people testing new code for security flaws before release. There may be over 1000 people trying to find the flaws (to exploit them!) after release. Who do you think is going to have better luck?
Plus, the summer allows her to pursue her hobby, writing historical fiction. The summer is when she typically does her research.
The point is that students will not be motivated to perform well if their teachers are not willing to treat the student's work as something worth spending time on.