Given the basic benchmarks used to rank supercomputers, could a cluster of loosely coupled machines compete, or is the bandwidth demands for the benchmark set too demanding? I'm just curious how projects like what is detailed at distributed.net compare: 1100 dual-processor macs would be vastly outranked by the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of PCs taking part in distributed processing for various code cracking or cancer curing purposes.
In the context of this discussion I think it's pretty clear that the title CEO is applied to large corporations (1000 employees and above) - If someone starts a home based business and calling themselves the CEO, that doesn't mean that the Wall Street Journal article on the excesses of CEOs refers to them (though there are plenty of articles on the ridiculous title inflation that has occurred).
Indeed, I didn't state that CEOs were alone in exhibiting that which we identify as greed : Virtually everyone is. The problem is that few people are in a position to basically write themselves a check (or to consort with their friends to do the same), but that's basically the position most CEOs are in - it seems insignificant in the scope of multi-billion dollar company, but it is diluting the value of every shareholder.
Unless you're the CEO of a tiny shipping company or a widget manufacturer, it is impossible for the CEO to have any knowledge of the true operations of the organization beyond the absolutely superficial. For that they have to rely upon their executive, which itself relies upon the upper management, which itself relies upon the middle management, which itself relies upon the "line workers". At all levels there is very little knowledge beyond the level below, and the knowledge that is filtered up has, inevitably, been biased, filtered and exaggerated to make a point. No CEO is an omnipotent all-knowing force making unilateral decisions.
Of course for the truly great decisions of organizational executives, you could do that with an 8-ball just as accurately. I say this jokingly, yet there is a notion of truth to it.
"8-ball...should I merge with my rival for `improved efficiencies'?"
"8-ball...should I divest non-core businesses for `improved sector focus'?"
"8-ball...should I create a new vision statement that encapsulates our core goal of putting the customer first blah blah blah?"
"8-ball...I read an article about outsourcing or XML or bluetooth or something...should I launch a fad-sheep initiative?"
If you don't like the system.. work hard, take a few risks, and create a succesful company that YOU can run.
Few CEOs "created" the successful company that they're now pillaging. If they did, they seldom have huge compensation because they already have a massive investment in the company (see Bill Gates - I don't hear anyone complaining about Bill's compensation). Where they were a founder and they're now pillaging, that's usually a sign that it's going down the toilet.
So.. why not be the CEO then? If it's so easy to do, why isn't everyone doing it? Part of the skill isn't just in the work required to BE a CEO, but the fairly diverse skill set required to BECOME one in the first place.
If only the world were so ideal. Your commentary is largely as realistic as telling a peasant in feudalist England that if being a Lord is so easy, why don't they just go and be one. Most CEOs are the spawn of powerful families with powerful connections and tremendous wealth - I think you'll find very few biographies that start in a poor ghetto.
The reality is that most CEO's are truly good people. They work hard, and work to make their companies as good as possible.
No one said that they aren't good people, but there is an element to human greed that comes into play when people are given such unchecked power. Read the book Animal Farm (or re-read it) as it's quite insightful.
As far as CEOs working as hard as they can to make "their" company (sure it's their's...once their $10 million in "incentive" stock options vest so they can immediately divest them) successful, how about this: You, Mrs. CEO, have the right to put down as much of your family's hard earned money as you want, on the open market, to buy company shares. I know that you'll be so dedicated, so talented, so visionary, that this will be nothing less than an extraordinary investment as you steer the organization to success. We will all applaud you when you reap the rewards of good stewardship.
Oh, what's that? You don't want to risk a penny of your money on this dump? You insist that we give you ridiculously under-priced stock options with no time-limitations? You insist that we line your contract with departure bonuses so no matter how much you screw up you're guaranteed a wealthy future regardless? You insist that there is rampant inbreeding among boards that you and all of your friends sit on, basically putting the wolves in charge of the hen house?
The only reason CEO's make so much money is because the market allows it.
Thanks for clarifying that. I think there are several thousand economics writers who you need to send a memo, as apparently the general consensus is quite contrary to your hands off belief.
You see, here's the funny thing: The compensation of CEOs is decided by the board. The boards are populated by executives who often sit on other boards, or are the heads of, other organizations. They are basically voting each other massive raises at the cost of shareholder equity - it is a false market.
Secondly, the "they can vote them out" is ludicrously laughable. Now ignoring the fact that the shareholder voting power is massively diluted by incredible option grants to the executives from the executives, few shareholders have the power to yield to actually affect change, and when they do they are very often in the inner circle.
Between 1980 and 2000 the pay of the average American CEO has gone from 42x the average worker's pay, to 531x the average worker's pay (source: National Post Business - Nov. 2003). Somehow I'm not crying any tears that they're putting in, err, "18 hour days" on executive lunches, driving in the limo, doing golf, and getting "exotic" massages.
But it is NOT easy. the competition is always there, working harder. Every time you have a great product someone else has just made it cheaper in Taiwan.
Uh, wouldn't this justify paying every programmer, designer, tech writer, etc, exhorbinant pays because it's "damn hard" to make money? You carry this on with:
As a tech guy I am not denying tech's value, But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
This seriously leads me to believe that your post is nothing more than a troll. The people who "create wealth" are the people that design and create the profit centers. Secondly, CEOs of public companies seldom own even more than a marginal percentage of the company - they walked into the situation generally because all of their friends sit on the board. The current running of public companies is absolutely criminal.
What extraordinary skill does the CEO bring to the table that justifies the unbelievable theft-from-within that is most CEO pays? Nothing justifies it. The reality is that a CEO position is indeed a necessary node on the org chart (a corporation needs someone at the steering wheel), but the person filling that role is not nearly as rare as is often made out, and usually is someone to basically tally the "votes" offered by all of the vice-presidents and directors to chart the course of the organization, and they most certainly don't need the sorts of incentives that they get dropped on their plate (531x the average workers pay? That is absolutely insane. Again - These people often didn't start the company, they have no loyalty to the company, and their only ownership is shares that they had to be GIVEN that they usually unload as quickly as they vest). Indeed, survey after survey have found that there is extremely little correlation (if any) between CEO pay and company performance.
When I stated that there was likely a very specific sweet spot, I didn't intend to imply that it was a precise fixed location relative to the speaker: Many such systems allow you to choose the "sweet" spot in the room, and it might be off-center. i.e. You configure your fancy system to give you the perfect sound for where your sitting, but where your friend is it's totally ineffective.
I've read about systems that claim room wide effectiveness, and I find that dubious (though I say that as a total layman in that area) - to trick the ear the tonality and phase at each ear has to correlate with the subject, and I don't see how it's possible for one system to prevent such an environment throughout a room.
Like all simulated surround, this one likely requires you to be in a very specific sweet spot (does anyone recall the Madonna CD of some 12 years ago or so that had "surround sound" on it? To actually experience it you had to be in an absolutely precise spot).
Having said that, it is hardly surprizing that this can be done -- we only have two ears. Our brain is determining location by phase between ears and tonal balance (sound hitting the ear from different angles, such as in front or behind, get different tonal characteristics). Presuming someone knew all of the functions involved it should be doable, at least with two speakers. I'm a little confused as to how they could manage left/right separation, though - using one speaker one would have to encourage a soundwave to hit one ear before it hits the other...
Virtually all remote control helicopters have fully "autonomous" stabilization.
flight control systems are completely autonomous. You plug in a gps location, and it flies there
This is one of those "big deal" sorts of things. We already have penty of other drones that have automated flight control, so they stuffed the control logic into a helicopter. That's an implementation detail.
Of course in 15 years specialized graphics chips will be that much further along, though I'm sure one could happily play Quake 3 in software mode at that time.
Seriously, though, one thing that continually strikes me is how absolutely primitive graphics (along with AI, reactive environmental, real worlds, etc) in current games are, yet how many people proclaim that it "can't get any better" (this is offtopic but I thought along those lines when writing about people playing current games in 15 years)
Finally someone who gets it? Do you really think you're in some exclusive little club of people who appreciate that government spending is excessive? I think your ideas are a tad less original than you make them out to be.
Having said that, one argument (that spending is excessive and needs to be curtailed) does not necessarily play a part in the second (governments have basic financial needs, and they will get them somehow, and exempting one sector of the economy while unfairly burdening the others isn't very logical).
Of course they can, however it is an invisible hand implying that something has momentum beyond the current administration (even the term "permanent" - the term "non-expiring" sounds better to me). It's all just nuances, but nuances are what politics are all about.
Indeed, and wouldn't it be irresponsible (and outside of their mandate really) for a temporarily elected group to attempt to pass a permanent ban? At most they can pass a four year ban and let the next batch decide when their turn comes around.
I like the whole "no taxes" thing, and it could continue to happen if the internet were a technology showcase used by a couple of people, however as the internet becomes (became) an integral part of our lives, and a key point of purchase for a massive value of goods and services, exempting it while continuing to tax other streams (like local retailers) is fiscally imprudent, not to mention unfair. This is the sort of policy that sounds good in theory (I mean who wants to pay taxes?), but it just doesn't work efficiently or fairly when taxes do need to be raised.
This doesn't happen any more near populated areas because people are hard-up about preventing forest fires.
How do people prevent natural forest fires (i.e. lightning, etc)? We're "hard-up" about preventing human-caused forest fires, of course, but before there were people everywhere I don't think this was much of an influence.
First, the National Post is noted for having a right-wing bias in its editorial section.
There's an understatement if I've ever seen one.
Along with being extremely right-wing (and anti-Canadian, humorously enough), the National Post caters to the armchair-cynic that feels that they best serve the planet by disbelieving anything those crazy environmentalists put forth (they occasionally have a "junk science" section -- a section which 'dispels' environmental/health/food claims with virtually no actual information, flawed conclusions and deductions, and an emphasis on words over facts. These articles are usually written by irrelevants who, incapable of doing actual research or innovative analysis themselves, grab a couple of seconds of fame by being the contrarian who 'sets the record straight').
During the BC fires, they had one article by a bitter and spiteful middle-aged female columnists in which she berated environmentalists for causing the fires. This apparently was due to the prevalence of underbrush in the forest -- her claim was that in the 1500s, all of North America was a carefully tended garden, apparently with all of the underbrush removed regularly by the indigenous people, and it's only been a recent development that underbrush has been allowed to collect to facilitate those damn environmentalists. Quite an amazing claim.
Indeed, it is a blanket statement. A process between computers, or with given technical criteria (such as a minimizing throughput over a network connection) is actually credible material for patenting, however most patents including the terms mentioned add nothing technically to the mix, but simply take a standard process (such as backing up and restoring preferences), put the world "Internet" in it, and call it patentable - in any other field that is nothing more than a nuance of implementation, but in the computer field it is considered unique (which is harmful).
This was filed December of 2002: I think Microsoft "roaming profiles" (of course their patent claims that the unique aspect is "access the world wide web", which is a clause that should immediately send any patent application to the garbage bin), or even ICQ (which stores settings and contact lists on their server) had them beat quite handily.
This is yet another bullshit patent that claims uniqueness (in this case to the rather bland "backup data" process) by adding "World Wide Web". I repeat: Any patent that includes any reference to the "World Wide Web" or "Internet" should be immediately discarded.
This is like saying that a husband is against the very idea of vacuuming, rather than simply doesn't want to vacuum. From what I have read of Torvald's opinion, the difficulty was that a microkernel isn't as easy to write, and can be less efficient (but on the flip side can be dramatically more secure and stable - see QNX). That's great that he feels that as a developer, but as a user, or as someone choosing products for embedded systems, etc, I think I'd take a microkernel.
I'd have to see an actual audio reviewer's impression of the quality, rather than a starstruck reporter -- I suspect that the quality is highly overstated. Certainly most any item can be resonated to become a speaker, and a large resonator plate would be such a method, but any item (like marble) has its own tonal qualities that are absolutely bound to seriously colour music - the idea of just slamming it against drywall or desks sounds like it might not yield the results hinted at here.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an astoundingly obvious troll, which makes it all the more hilarious seeing the serious replies that it's getting.
Given the basic benchmarks used to rank supercomputers, could a cluster of loosely coupled machines compete, or is the bandwidth demands for the benchmark set too demanding? I'm just curious how projects like what is detailed at distributed.net compare: 1100 dual-processor macs would be vastly outranked by the hundreds of thousands (or millions) of PCs taking part in distributed processing for various code cracking or cancer curing purposes.
Yuppies? Wow, that's a term I haven't heard for about 10 years...
In the context of this discussion I think it's pretty clear that the title CEO is applied to large corporations (1000 employees and above) - If someone starts a home based business and calling themselves the CEO, that doesn't mean that the Wall Street Journal article on the excesses of CEOs refers to them (though there are plenty of articles on the ridiculous title inflation that has occurred).
Indeed, I didn't state that CEOs were alone in exhibiting that which we identify as greed : Virtually everyone is. The problem is that few people are in a position to basically write themselves a check (or to consort with their friends to do the same), but that's basically the position most CEOs are in - it seems insignificant in the scope of multi-billion dollar company, but it is diluting the value of every shareholder.
Unless you're the CEO of a tiny shipping company or a widget manufacturer, it is impossible for the CEO to have any knowledge of the true operations of the organization beyond the absolutely superficial. For that they have to rely upon their executive, which itself relies upon the upper management, which itself relies upon the middle management, which itself relies upon the "line workers". At all levels there is very little knowledge beyond the level below, and the knowledge that is filtered up has, inevitably, been biased, filtered and exaggerated to make a point. No CEO is an omnipotent all-knowing force making unilateral decisions.
Of course for the truly great decisions of organizational executives, you could do that with an 8-ball just as accurately. I say this jokingly, yet there is a notion of truth to it.
"8-ball...should I merge with my rival for `improved efficiencies'?"
"8-ball...should I divest non-core businesses for `improved sector focus'?"
"8-ball...should I create a new vision statement that encapsulates our core goal of putting the customer first blah blah blah?"
"8-ball...I read an article about outsourcing or XML or bluetooth or something...should I launch a fad-sheep initiative?"
If you don't like the system.. work hard, take a few risks, and create a succesful company that YOU can run.
Few CEOs "created" the successful company that they're now pillaging. If they did, they seldom have huge compensation because they already have a massive investment in the company (see Bill Gates - I don't hear anyone complaining about Bill's compensation). Where they were a founder and they're now pillaging, that's usually a sign that it's going down the toilet.
So.. why not be the CEO then? If it's so easy to do, why isn't everyone doing it? Part of the skill isn't just in the work required to BE a CEO, but the fairly diverse skill set required to BECOME one in the first place.
If only the world were so ideal. Your commentary is largely as realistic as telling a peasant in feudalist England that if being a Lord is so easy, why don't they just go and be one. Most CEOs are the spawn of powerful families with powerful connections and tremendous wealth - I think you'll find very few biographies that start in a poor ghetto.
The reality is that most CEO's are truly good people. They work hard, and work to make their companies as good as possible.
No one said that they aren't good people, but there is an element to human greed that comes into play when people are given such unchecked power. Read the book Animal Farm (or re-read it) as it's quite insightful.
As far as CEOs working as hard as they can to make "their" company (sure it's their's...once their $10 million in "incentive" stock options vest so they can immediately divest them) successful, how about this: You, Mrs. CEO, have the right to put down as much of your family's hard earned money as you want, on the open market, to buy company shares. I know that you'll be so dedicated, so talented, so visionary, that this will be nothing less than an extraordinary investment as you steer the organization to success. We will all applaud you when you reap the rewards of good stewardship.
Oh, what's that? You don't want to risk a penny of your money on this dump? You insist that we give you ridiculously under-priced stock options with no time-limitations? You insist that we line your contract with departure bonuses so no matter how much you screw up you're guaranteed a wealthy future regardless? You insist that there is rampant inbreeding among boards that you and all of your friends sit on, basically putting the wolves in charge of the hen house?
Oooh, sounds like a deal to me.
The only reason CEO's make so much money is because the market allows it.
Thanks for clarifying that. I think there are several thousand economics writers who you need to send a memo, as apparently the general consensus is quite contrary to your hands off belief.
You see, here's the funny thing: The compensation of CEOs is decided by the board. The boards are populated by executives who often sit on other boards, or are the heads of, other organizations. They are basically voting each other massive raises at the cost of shareholder equity - it is a false market.
Secondly, the "they can vote them out" is ludicrously laughable. Now ignoring the fact that the shareholder voting power is massively diluted by incredible option grants to the executives from the executives, few shareholders have the power to yield to actually affect change, and when they do they are very often in the inner circle.
The reference came from the print version, however it can also be found online. Indeed there was a whole issue dedicated to CEOs.
Cheers!
Between 1980 and 2000 the pay of the average American CEO has gone from 42x the average worker's pay, to 531x the average worker's pay (source: National Post Business - Nov. 2003). Somehow I'm not crying any tears that they're putting in, err, "18 hour days" on executive lunches, driving in the limo, doing golf, and getting "exotic" massages.
But it is NOT easy. the competition is always there, working harder. Every time you have a great product someone else has just made it cheaper in Taiwan.
Uh, wouldn't this justify paying every programmer, designer, tech writer, etc, exhorbinant pays because it's "damn hard" to make money? You carry this on with:
As a tech guy I am not denying tech's value, But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
This seriously leads me to believe that your post is nothing more than a troll. The people who "create wealth" are the people that design and create the profit centers. Secondly, CEOs of public companies seldom own even more than a marginal percentage of the company - they walked into the situation generally because all of their friends sit on the board. The current running of public companies is absolutely criminal.
What extraordinary skill does the CEO bring to the table that justifies the unbelievable theft-from-within that is most CEO pays? Nothing justifies it. The reality is that a CEO position is indeed a necessary node on the org chart (a corporation needs someone at the steering wheel), but the person filling that role is not nearly as rare as is often made out, and usually is someone to basically tally the "votes" offered by all of the vice-presidents and directors to chart the course of the organization, and they most certainly don't need the sorts of incentives that they get dropped on their plate (531x the average workers pay? That is absolutely insane. Again - These people often didn't start the company, they have no loyalty to the company, and their only ownership is shares that they had to be GIVEN that they usually unload as quickly as they vest). Indeed, survey after survey have found that there is extremely little correlation (if any) between CEO pay and company performance.
When I stated that there was likely a very specific sweet spot, I didn't intend to imply that it was a precise fixed location relative to the speaker: Many such systems allow you to choose the "sweet" spot in the room, and it might be off-center. i.e. You configure your fancy system to give you the perfect sound for where your sitting, but where your friend is it's totally ineffective.
I've read about systems that claim room wide effectiveness, and I find that dubious (though I say that as a total layman in that area) - to trick the ear the tonality and phase at each ear has to correlate with the subject, and I don't see how it's possible for one system to prevent such an environment throughout a room.
Like all simulated surround, this one likely requires you to be in a very specific sweet spot (does anyone recall the Madonna CD of some 12 years ago or so that had "surround sound" on it? To actually experience it you had to be in an absolutely precise spot).
Having said that, it is hardly surprizing that this can be done -- we only have two ears. Our brain is determining location by phase between ears and tonal balance (sound hitting the ear from different angles, such as in front or behind, get different tonal characteristics). Presuming someone knew all of the functions involved it should be doable, at least with two speakers. I'm a little confused as to how they could manage left/right separation, though - using one speaker one would have to encourage a soundwave to hit one ear before it hits the other...
stabilization
Virtually all remote control helicopters have fully "autonomous" stabilization.
flight control systems are completely autonomous. You plug in a gps location, and it flies there
This is one of those "big deal" sorts of things. We already have penty of other drones that have automated flight control, so they stuffed the control logic into a helicopter. That's an implementation detail.
Of course in 15 years specialized graphics chips will be that much further along, though I'm sure one could happily play Quake 3 in software mode at that time.
Seriously, though, one thing that continually strikes me is how absolutely primitive graphics (along with AI, reactive environmental, real worlds, etc) in current games are, yet how many people proclaim that it "can't get any better" (this is offtopic but I thought along those lines when writing about people playing current games in 15 years)
Finally someone who gets it? Do you really think you're in some exclusive little club of people who appreciate that government spending is excessive? I think your ideas are a tad less original than you make them out to be.
Having said that, one argument (that spending is excessive and needs to be curtailed) does not necessarily play a part in the second (governments have basic financial needs, and they will get them somehow, and exempting one sector of the economy while unfairly burdening the others isn't very logical).
Of course they can, however it is an invisible hand implying that something has momentum beyond the current administration (even the term "permanent" - the term "non-expiring" sounds better to me). It's all just nuances, but nuances are what politics are all about.
Indeed, and wouldn't it be irresponsible (and outside of their mandate really) for a temporarily elected group to attempt to pass a permanent ban? At most they can pass a four year ban and let the next batch decide when their turn comes around.
I like the whole "no taxes" thing, and it could continue to happen if the internet were a technology showcase used by a couple of people, however as the internet becomes (became) an integral part of our lives, and a key point of purchase for a massive value of goods and services, exempting it while continuing to tax other streams (like local retailers) is fiscally imprudent, not to mention unfair. This is the sort of policy that sounds good in theory (I mean who wants to pay taxes?), but it just doesn't work efficiently or fairly when taxes do need to be raised.
Your post makes me feel honoured to be in your foe list.
Very ridiculous of you
Uh...okay....
This doesn't happen any more near populated areas because people are hard-up about preventing forest fires.
How do people prevent natural forest fires (i.e. lightning, etc)? We're "hard-up" about preventing human-caused forest fires, of course, but before there were people everywhere I don't think this was much of an influence.
First, the National Post is noted for having a right-wing bias in its editorial section.
There's an understatement if I've ever seen one.
Along with being extremely right-wing (and anti-Canadian, humorously enough), the National Post caters to the armchair-cynic that feels that they best serve the planet by disbelieving anything those crazy environmentalists put forth (they occasionally have a "junk science" section -- a section which 'dispels' environmental/health/food claims with virtually no actual information, flawed conclusions and deductions, and an emphasis on words over facts. These articles are usually written by irrelevants who, incapable of doing actual research or innovative analysis themselves, grab a couple of seconds of fame by being the contrarian who 'sets the record straight').
During the BC fires, they had one article by a bitter and spiteful middle-aged female columnists in which she berated environmentalists for causing the fires. This apparently was due to the prevalence of underbrush in the forest -- her claim was that in the 1500s, all of North America was a carefully tended garden, apparently with all of the underbrush removed regularly by the indigenous people, and it's only been a recent development that underbrush has been allowed to collect to facilitate those damn environmentalists. Quite an amazing claim.
Indeed, it is a blanket statement. A process between computers, or with given technical criteria (such as a minimizing throughput over a network connection) is actually credible material for patenting, however most patents including the terms mentioned add nothing technically to the mix, but simply take a standard process (such as backing up and restoring preferences), put the world "Internet" in it, and call it patentable - in any other field that is nothing more than a nuance of implementation, but in the computer field it is considered unique (which is harmful).
This was filed December of 2002: I think Microsoft "roaming profiles" (of course their patent claims that the unique aspect is "access the world wide web", which is a clause that should immediately send any patent application to the garbage bin), or even ICQ (which stores settings and contact lists on their server) had them beat quite handily.
This is yet another bullshit patent that claims uniqueness (in this case to the rather bland "backup data" process) by adding "World Wide Web". I repeat: Any patent that includes any reference to the "World Wide Web" or "Internet" should be immediately discarded.
I crown you "Master of the Obvious".
He is against the very idea of microkernel
This is like saying that a husband is against the very idea of vacuuming, rather than simply doesn't want to vacuum. From what I have read of Torvald's opinion, the difficulty was that a microkernel isn't as easy to write, and can be less efficient (but on the flip side can be dramatically more secure and stable - see QNX). That's great that he feels that as a developer, but as a user, or as someone choosing products for embedded systems, etc, I think I'd take a microkernel.
I'd have to see an actual audio reviewer's impression of the quality, rather than a starstruck reporter -- I suspect that the quality is highly overstated. Certainly most any item can be resonated to become a speaker, and a large resonator plate would be such a method, but any item (like marble) has its own tonal qualities that are absolutely bound to seriously colour music - the idea of just slamming it against drywall or desks sounds like it might not yield the results hinted at here.