Why is anyone afraid of providing a DNA sample? Is the government going to discover that I have a rare genetic condition that makes me susceptible to disease? If I did, then I'd sure like to know; thanks for the free life-saving test. Is the government going to clone me? I already have an identical twin brother. Resistance to ID cards makes sense; FUD about DNA sampling does not.
Want to really put the screws to "corporate executive" crime? Then eliminate the government granted limited liability that a "corporation" represents. Allow thereby the officers of a company to be directly liable for their decisions, their accounting practices, their performance.
SOX already holds CEOs and CFOs personably liable for accounting statements. I whole-heartyly endorse such practice. I am, however, doubtful that increasing compliance costs will be better for investors who, you know, generally like to see their companies make more money.
I saw some earlier references on here to the Guilds (for writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood) and the Associations (for doctors and lawyers across America). I think this analogy is spot on.
IT is a high-skilled profession; traditional unions organised mostly unskilled labour, like flight attendants. If the IT community were to organise, it would be better served by a union similar to the Guilds or Associations.
So let's just see how many people on Slashdot would actually be eligible for membership. Joining an Association requires a terminal degree from an accredited university. How many Slashdot posters have a PhD in computer science? Joining a Guild requires a produced feature-length film from a signatory studio. How many Slashdot posters have been the main technical leader of a large project from a big company?
It seems to me that most of the people on here would NEVER be eligible for membership with a union that only represented the truly high skilled. My advise: be careful what you wish for.
Now regarding the presence of a lobbying body, we already have the IEEE-CS and the ACM. Those groups will occasionally weigh in on legal issues, such as intellectual property reform. But they are not unions for the high skilled; they allow anyone to join. (For that mater, they don't even require prospective members to pass an ethics exam, unlike the CFA Institute.)
Ultimately, I don't believe unions would ever work in the IT field. Yes, unemployment sucks, big time. But one need look no further than the paralysis in Europe to see where strong-armed labour tactics lead to a stagnate economy. Would you ever higher someone fresh out of school if you knew you could never fire him? Didn't think so.
Yeah, like all those bonds traders a few weeks ago who were under the impression that the Treasury was going to release less-than-stellar employment numbers.
Wal-Mart is no different from GNU. They both represent a race towards commoditization and in the end force a lot of people out of business. If a producer doesn't want to be hurt by commoditization, then he can be more innovative. That's because a consumer who doesn't want to buy commodity will gladly spend a premium on innovation. Ironic then that the same people who bash Wal-Mart will praise GNU for the exact same actions.
It's surprising that Intel would have OOOE in Core. Itanium 2 goes more the VLIW route with what Intel terms "EPIC," short for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing.
There's an old saying that ideas are worthless because they have no risk. Economically, one of the elements of profit is risk. Merely having an idea, rather than acting upon it, has no risk and thus offers no reward. Hence why patents have traditionally protected only tangible items and copyrights have traditionally protected art in a fixed form; neither one of these designations used to protect mere ideas.
The patentability of business plans and software sets a dangerous precedent. What's to stop a film studio executive from patenting a story to prevent other producers from making movies that are similar?
I was at LinuxWorld, Sydney, last week. I met a rep from JBoss who immediately started asking me to code for his product. I kept explaining to him that I don't know the first thing about application servers. Didn't matter; he still kept pressuring me to write for him. Essentially, he wanted me to code for free while JBoss makes money. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
From an American in Australia: I don't see what the big deal is. The US has wire tapping, is in Iraq, has one party in control of the federal government, etc. For that matter, Britain is in Iraq too and is controlled by one party.
Where would you rather live? France, where routine protests stifle legislative progress? Or how about Germany, where making a politically unpopular statement (such as denying the Holocaust) is illegal?
The English-speaking countries are doing quite well for themselves.
Of course there's the supply and demand argument, but there is also opportunity cost, that area of economics that states we need to be compensated for giving up something. A highly skilled technical person could become a consultant and earn lots of money. Or he could spend his time putting his knowledge in a book. He's going to have to be compensated for it some how.
And secondly, as a few others have mentioned, tech books go out of date fast, so there's the cost to keep the operation going.
My father works in religious publishing; why are his books so cheap when supply and demand should be equivalent to technical literature? Because opportunity cost is low for preachers (most tend to be poor) and notions of a deity rarely change over time.
User-generated content has existed for years on EBay, Amazon, and even Slashdot. All of these sites understood that they could simply aggregate data and then distribute it. Ok, it's actually not that simple, especially for the larger sites, given the amount of logistics involved to coordinate it all. But it's been around far longer than MySpace or YouTube.
One of the dangers with this model, as others have pointed out, is the fallacy of collective intelligence, that we can some how vote on facts. Had Wikipedia been around in the Middle Ages, the entries on astronomy would have presented a geocentric view of the universe. There is much less quality control on these sites than in traditional media. While the editors of Slashdot do a better of managing content than say, the Internet as a whole, this webpage is not the Wall Street Journal. It's a good starting point, but definitely not the last word.
Cray and SGI have both been losing money recently as more users flock to clusters, which tend to be cheaper and more flexible. Now both of them are offering this "adaptability" position. SGI is moving in the direction of blades so customers can choose their level of computing power; Cray will soon have a core machine that customers can build out from. What's interesting to note is that both of them are ultimately selling Linux on commodity processors (Itanium for SGI and Opteron for Cray) plus a proprietary network and a few other bells and whistles. It seems unlikely they'll be able to compete LinuxNetworx or even *gasp* IBM.
I was surprised by some of the items missing from Jacqueline Ruttimann's list of "milestones in scientific computing." Perhaps the most glaring omissions are those that have lead to supercomputing-for-the-masses: the wide-spread use of clusters that have dramatically lowered the cost of computing systems, the adoption of MPI for portable software, the development of programs like MATLAB and Mathematica that greatly ease programming, etc. He does list the NSF's supercomputing centers, though chances are that few researches actually use them today.
IBM was pushing computing-as-a-utility a few years ago. Their premise was that just as customers don't have their own power generators—they just buy electricity at market rates exactly as required—folks should be able to acquire computing time only as needed and let a company of professionals deal with all the maintenance issues. But no one bought into on-demand computing and IBM has since backed away from this position.
The reason this flopped for IBM was that everyone compared it to the "good old days" of dealing with shared computing facilities and batch loaders. It's the same reason people buy small clusters instead of paying for space with a national lab. The comparison to punch cards is apt, as are the discussions of "what if I spend all this time and money only to discover that I bug?"
I don't see how Sun is going to succeed in the market. Smaller customers will probably be better off buying a "personal supercomputer" rather than rent time. As for the really large customers, they will be running jobs 24/7 for years on lots of processors; it may in fact be cheaper for them to buy a BlueGene than rent time from Sun.
I must say that I lost a very tiny bit of respect for him when he said that he "has nothing but respect for Microsoft", but my respect was pretty high to begin with so he didn't go down too far.
How much respect could you have possibly had? If you truly respected him, your reaction would have been, "I don't agree with all he has to say, but since I have a lot of respect for the guy, I'll hear him out." There, now that's much more respectful than, "I don't agree with all he has to say, so he's an idiot."
I'm glad to see someone else take Stallman to task. It wouldn't call him fascist though; he's more of a communist. He is to the services-based economy what Marx was to the manufacturing-based economy. Little does the FSF realize that profits are an incentive to create value for society. Open source software is inherently commodity, and thus produces little innovation. Compare that to Mac OS X, Solaris, and yes, even Windows.
I absolutely agree that lower-level software probably ought to be open source purely because of the commodity issue. Most higher-level software, from consumer-oriented entertainment products—video games, etc.—to business-targeted programs—financial systems, multimedia authoring, etc.—will tend to be commercial though.
Regarding items like croquet, it is pretty risky to "start over." Intel tried this with Itanium and no one bought it. AMD instead built on the existing x86 to produce Opteron, which was a huge success. They followed the advice of Newton and stood on the shoulders of a giant. If croquet succeeds, it will be a major coup. But the odds are against them; many people try to one-up the wheel and end up reinventing the square.
One of the Rhodes Scholars I knew back in my PhD program is blind. He was one of our best numerical analyst and could code in C or MATLAB as well as anyone else. He had a device that he connected to his computer that would scan whatever line the cursor was on and then raise some pins to form Braille. To read math books, he would request the LaTeX source from the publisher. He made all of his graphs in GNUPlot. He could even scan a page from a note and have OCR translate it to ASCII. He had no trouble getting his work done.
I would certainly like to see OS X work for the Xen hypervisor. If Intel's VT-x chips make their way to next generation Macs, then this will be a non-issue.
The whole reason people buy clusters instead of a specially built system like Cray's is for the cost. Running a large (hundreds of nodes) cluster costs upwards of tens of thousands a year for electricity and cooling. Energy efficiency is definitely warranted in this case. It's the same reason IBM's BlueGene employs 700 MHz PowerPC processors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
Xen works with any OS as long as either the kernel has been modified to fit virtualization, or the processor has extensions that support it directly. So either way, Xen allow just any old system, though it isn't tied to a particular platform.
Just a word of caution though: Xen is "new technology," which basically means it isn't the most stable product right now, especially given its level of technical sophistication. Similarly, the new processors from AMD and Intel are, well, new; they will require some time in the market before they are used adequately.
All in all though, the technology is pretty exciting. Some researchers I work with are looking into using Xen on SMPs with multiple Ethernet ports. Since vanilla Ethernet requires the kernel for TCP, multiprocessors tend to have trouble adequately using the multiple communication links. With virtualization though, there can be one instance of the OS per processor, which means one TCP stack per processor, which means one Ethernet port per processor.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is anyone afraid of providing a DNA sample? Is the government going to discover that I have a rare genetic condition that makes me susceptible to disease? If I did, then I'd sure like to know; thanks for the free life-saving test. Is the government going to clone me? I already have an identical twin brother. Resistance to ID cards makes sense; FUD about DNA sampling does not.
SOX already holds CEOs and CFOs personably liable for accounting statements. I whole-heartyly endorse such practice. I am, however, doubtful that increasing compliance costs will be better for investors who, you know, generally like to see their companies make more money.
I saw some earlier references on here to the Guilds (for writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood) and the Associations (for doctors and lawyers across America). I think this analogy is spot on.
IT is a high-skilled profession; traditional unions organised mostly unskilled labour, like flight attendants. If the IT community were to organise, it would be better served by a union similar to the Guilds or Associations.
So let's just see how many people on Slashdot would actually be eligible for membership. Joining an Association requires a terminal degree from an accredited university. How many Slashdot posters have a PhD in computer science? Joining a Guild requires a produced feature-length film from a signatory studio. How many Slashdot posters have been the main technical leader of a large project from a big company?
It seems to me that most of the people on here would NEVER be eligible for membership with a union that only represented the truly high skilled. My advise: be careful what you wish for.
Now regarding the presence of a lobbying body, we already have the IEEE-CS and the ACM. Those groups will occasionally weigh in on legal issues, such as intellectual property reform. But they are not unions for the high skilled; they allow anyone to join. (For that mater, they don't even require prospective members to pass an ethics exam, unlike the CFA Institute.)
Ultimately, I don't believe unions would ever work in the IT field. Yes, unemployment sucks, big time. But one need look no further than the paralysis in Europe to see where strong-armed labour tactics lead to a stagnate economy. Would you ever higher someone fresh out of school if you knew you could never fire him? Didn't think so.
Yeah, like all those bonds traders a few weeks ago who were under the impression that the Treasury was going to release less-than-stellar employment numbers.
Wal-Mart is no different from GNU. They both represent a race towards commoditization and in the end force a lot of people out of business. If a producer doesn't want to be hurt by commoditization, then he can be more innovative. That's because a consumer who doesn't want to buy commodity will gladly spend a premium on innovation. Ironic then that the same people who bash Wal-Mart will praise GNU for the exact same actions.
It's surprising that Intel would have OOOE in Core. Itanium 2 goes more the VLIW route with what Intel terms "EPIC," short for Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing.
There's an old saying that ideas are worthless because they have no risk. Economically, one of the elements of profit is risk. Merely having an idea, rather than acting upon it, has no risk and thus offers no reward. Hence why patents have traditionally protected only tangible items and copyrights have traditionally protected art in a fixed form; neither one of these designations used to protect mere ideas.
The patentability of business plans and software sets a dangerous precedent. What's to stop a film studio executive from patenting a story to prevent other producers from making movies that are similar?
I was at LinuxWorld, Sydney, last week. I met a rep from JBoss who immediately started asking me to code for his product. I kept explaining to him that I don't know the first thing about application servers. Didn't matter; he still kept pressuring me to write for him. Essentially, he wanted me to code for free while JBoss makes money. Yeah, I'll get right on that.
From an American in Australia: I don't see what the big deal is. The US has wire tapping, is in Iraq, has one party in control of the federal government, etc. For that matter, Britain is in Iraq too and is controlled by one party.
Where would you rather live? France, where routine protests stifle legislative progress? Or how about Germany, where making a politically unpopular statement (such as denying the Holocaust) is illegal?
The English-speaking countries are doing quite well for themselves.
Of course there's the supply and demand argument, but there is also opportunity cost, that area of economics that states we need to be compensated for giving up something. A highly skilled technical person could become a consultant and earn lots of money. Or he could spend his time putting his knowledge in a book. He's going to have to be compensated for it some how.
And secondly, as a few others have mentioned, tech books go out of date fast, so there's the cost to keep the operation going.
My father works in religious publishing; why are his books so cheap when supply and demand should be equivalent to technical literature? Because opportunity cost is low for preachers (most tend to be poor) and notions of a deity rarely change over time.
The Advanced Configuration & Power Interface already handles power usage issues. Does anyone know if this is available in Linux yet?
User-generated content has existed for years on EBay, Amazon, and even Slashdot. All of these sites understood that they could simply aggregate data and then distribute it. Ok, it's actually not that simple, especially for the larger sites, given the amount of logistics involved to coordinate it all. But it's been around far longer than MySpace or YouTube.
One of the dangers with this model, as others have pointed out, is the fallacy of collective intelligence, that we can some how vote on facts. Had Wikipedia been around in the Middle Ages, the entries on astronomy would have presented a geocentric view of the universe. There is much less quality control on these sites than in traditional media. While the editors of Slashdot do a better of managing content than say, the Internet as a whole, this webpage is not the Wall Street Journal. It's a good starting point, but definitely not the last word.
I was just about to suggest Fred Brooks. Adding programmers to a late software project is like trying to put a fire out with gasoline.
Cray and SGI have both been losing money recently as more users flock to clusters, which tend to be cheaper and more flexible. Now both of them are offering this "adaptability" position. SGI is moving in the direction of blades so customers can choose their level of computing power; Cray will soon have a core machine that customers can build out from. What's interesting to note is that both of them are ultimately selling Linux on commodity processors (Itanium for SGI and Opteron for Cray) plus a proprietary network and a few other bells and whistles. It seems unlikely they'll be able to compete LinuxNetworx or even *gasp* IBM.
I was surprised by some of the items missing from Jacqueline Ruttimann's list of "milestones in scientific computing." Perhaps the most glaring omissions are those that have lead to supercomputing-for-the-masses: the wide-spread use of clusters that have dramatically lowered the cost of computing systems, the adoption of MPI for portable software, the development of programs like MATLAB and Mathematica that greatly ease programming, etc. He does list the NSF's supercomputing centers, though chances are that few researches actually use them today.
Along with new stuff for gaming, it appears Dell will sell a massively overclocked (4.26GHz) Pentium D version of the XPS 600.
IBM was pushing computing-as-a-utility a few years ago. Their premise was that just as customers don't have their own power generators—they just buy electricity at market rates exactly as required—folks should be able to acquire computing time only as needed and let a company of professionals deal with all the maintenance issues. But no one bought into on-demand computing and IBM has since backed away from this position.
The reason this flopped for IBM was that everyone compared it to the "good old days" of dealing with shared computing facilities and batch loaders. It's the same reason people buy small clusters instead of paying for space with a national lab. The comparison to punch cards is apt, as are the discussions of "what if I spend all this time and money only to discover that I bug?"
I don't see how Sun is going to succeed in the market. Smaller customers will probably be better off buying a "personal supercomputer" rather than rent time. As for the really large customers, they will be running jobs 24/7 for years on lots of processors; it may in fact be cheaper for them to buy a BlueGene than rent time from Sun.
According to http://www.top500.org/, ASC Purple is number 3. Number 1 is BlueGene/L and number 2 is BlueGene W.
How much respect could you have possibly had? If you truly respected him, your reaction would have been, "I don't agree with all he has to say, but since I have a lot of respect for the guy, I'll hear him out." There, now that's much more respectful than, "I don't agree with all he has to say, so he's an idiot."
I'm glad to see someone else take Stallman to task. It wouldn't call him fascist though; he's more of a communist. He is to the services-based economy what Marx was to the manufacturing-based economy. Little does the FSF realize that profits are an incentive to create value for society. Open source software is inherently commodity, and thus produces little innovation. Compare that to Mac OS X, Solaris, and yes, even Windows.
I absolutely agree that lower-level software probably ought to be open source purely because of the commodity issue. Most higher-level software, from consumer-oriented entertainment products—video games, etc.—to business-targeted programs—financial systems, multimedia authoring, etc.—will tend to be commercial though.
Regarding items like croquet, it is pretty risky to "start over." Intel tried this with Itanium and no one bought it. AMD instead built on the existing x86 to produce Opteron, which was a huge success. They followed the advice of Newton and stood on the shoulders of a giant. If croquet succeeds, it will be a major coup. But the odds are against them; many people try to one-up the wheel and end up reinventing the square.
One of the Rhodes Scholars I knew back in my PhD program is blind. He was one of our best numerical analyst and could code in C or MATLAB as well as anyone else. He had a device that he connected to his computer that would scan whatever line the cursor was on and then raise some pins to form Braille. To read math books, he would request the LaTeX source from the publisher. He made all of his graphs in GNUPlot. He could even scan a page from a note and have OCR translate it to ASCII. He had no trouble getting his work done.
I would certainly like to see OS X work for the Xen hypervisor. If Intel's VT-x chips make their way to next generation Macs, then this will be a non-issue.
The whole reason people buy clusters instead of a specially built system like Cray's is for the cost. Running a large (hundreds of nodes) cluster costs upwards of tens of thousands a year for electricity and cooling. Energy efficiency is definitely warranted in this case. It's the same reason IBM's BlueGene employs 700 MHz PowerPC processors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene
Xen works with any OS as long as either the kernel has been modified to fit virtualization, or the processor has extensions that support it directly. So either way, Xen allow just any old system, though it isn't tied to a particular platform.
Just a word of caution though: Xen is "new technology," which basically means it isn't the most stable product right now, especially given its level of technical sophistication. Similarly, the new processors from AMD and Intel are, well, new; they will require some time in the market before they are used adequately.
All in all though, the technology is pretty exciting. Some researchers I work with are looking into using Xen on SMPs with multiple Ethernet ports. Since vanilla Ethernet requires the kernel for TCP, multiprocessors tend to have trouble adequately using the multiple communication links. With virtualization though, there can be one instance of the OS per processor, which means one TCP stack per processor, which means one Ethernet port per processor.