I think the power in my apartment is like this.
My monitor is "wavy" (I've tried 3 different ones),
OK, I confess. I live in the apartment next door to you and I've been running a 20kV Van de Graff generator alongside the superconducting magnet that I keep "Frank" in.
[All kidding aside, my boss at the consumer electronics store told me to do this for a few weeks to drum up some business for new TV's, computer monitors from my neighborhood.]
These grids are all great and wonderful as far as peak performance is concerned, but I'm wondering how the latency associated with long haul networks affects peformance for a range of applications that are not embarrassingly parallel.
IIRC, in much of the EU per-minute charges for local calls are the norm, where in the U.S. we have become accustomed to per-minute charges only for long distance service.
I wonder if I divided my loaded monthly local phone bill by 30*24*60 what my effective current per-minute charge would be.
I keep reading that network capacity doubles every 9 months, faster even than the 18 mo doubling time of Moore's Law.
Strange that the cost of BW at the end of the pipe at my house has not seemed to capture much, if any, of this fantastic price/performance gains of the overall network.
Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?
Maybe I'm overlooking the costs associated with bringing out such a broad product line, or intangible costs such as a perception of Oracle being a lighter weight product if a cheap version is sold. Some products seem to possess a certain cachet that is related to the fact that you must pay a threshhold price to get them, but I would figure that IT buyers would not confuse an Oracle database with a Rolex watch.
Funny. With tens of millions of consumers having to relay upon AOL email that their internal business units find it "inadequate".
It reminds of the dichotomy you find between "consumer" grade and "commercial" grade items, whether it be email systems or computer hardware or even construction.
Consumer grade has always been so price conscious that quality suffers, where commercial grade is always more expensive.
Software shouldn't have to be subject to the rule of this dichotomy, though.
AOL should clean up their act and put some efforts into adapting some open source email solutions to make them scalable to 1e7 users and to put on the shiny EZ front end that their consumers have come to expect.
When I was 16 and before I had my driver's license I had a checking account.
Having recently traveled overseas though I had a U.S. passport.
But a grocery store clerk refused to cash my check "without a driver's license", despite the fact that the passport represented an even more thorough form of identification.
So U.S. citizens get subjected to some of the same kind of stupidity, too.
But here's hoping that my next foreign trip my attempt to rent a car with only a U.S. license is not met with disappointment:)
In California, the power companies lease the land under the high-power lines to things like nursuries and christmas tree farms.
Hmmmm....
With all those high voltage lines, do you think they'd mind much if my "farm" consisted of lots of inductive loops with which to scrounge some electricity?
Dell will probably never go into the retail market. Their manufacturing scheme is direct sales.
Well, unless, after having swallowed most of the corporate desktop market the only way for Dell to achieve growth is by going into the retail stores.
They could still keep their ultralow inventory system, too, if they could just convince the consumers to wait for the box in the mail 2 days after they visit BestBuy...
Separation of a document's structure and layout is fine in theory, but I always find it difficult in practice.
If you're writing mostly text with even a few graphics images or equations, that model will stand up pretty well.
Where it begins to break down for me, anyway, is where your "document" moves into the realm of a choreographed presentation.
I've seen TeX styles for producing slides, but again, they don't give one direct control over page breaks, etc, particularly if you're adhering to the rigour of "structure must be separate from content".
So much of what I try to convey in a presentation depends almost as much on coordinated details of layout design as it does on what could fit into structured content. I want both SVG plots on the same page. I would like one to come in after the first. I'd like an arrow pointing to a feature on the plot and a small mathematical equation to pop up to make a point. Etc. Spatial layout is important and temporal layout is growing rapidly in importance for conveying a message.
I love the idea of DocBook and would like to see the back end processors for MathML and SVG provide the same quality as LaTeX to PDF. However, it's hard for me to seen any hope for XML tags to conveniently abstract away my layout decisions into a structure for presentations that make extensive use of multi-media more than just plain text.
is not so much the strong arm tactics that MS was using to thwart the growth of a competing operating system, but that they actually had memos and such concrete evidence of the fact.
I would have expected such thrusts to be communicated verbally to Dell so as to avoid this kind of embarrassment. Any written records could refer to "our joint efforts to establish a mutually
successful partnership team" and other such drivel that would be understood to include the verbal tenets of the agreement.
I think it's painfully obvious how poorly structured and poorly functioning the ICANN has turned out to be.
What's needed most are a small number of representatives with good technical understanding of the Internet and how it needs to grow, some organizational ability and follow-through, and absolutely nothing to gain directly from their participation in such a committee.
One of the biggest problems with many international organizations and governmental institutions of all kinds is that insidious problem of becoming self-promoting.
As usual in such circumstances, the people best qualified and most suited for such positions are the ones that do not seek such authority or position.
Anything to reduce the possibility of a security breach sounds good to me.
Of course, the amount of work you have to do to implement this is a consideration and, hopefully, the resulting code is reasonably modular and understandable after everything is done?
In some ways it sounds like the ideas of web security, where folks have tried to make httpd run as underprivileged as possible and separating it from other things, such as database activity.
The chopping up of privileges between parts also seems reminescent of SEL, too.
I think the only other items I would add to this are pursuit of programmer metrics include
How enduring the code and design are
How extensible
How much other programmers like to extend the original code that a programmer wrote.
It's hard to measure that, because the superficial situations are identical: programmers enthusiastically extending some well designed code on one hand, and a set of programmers grumbling about fixing things in a poorly written chunk of code.
It would be interesting to know how this technology compares in terms of
$/GB
GB/kg
GB/cm3
as an archive media versus magnetic disks and DLT.
Perhaps the biggest drawback may be sheer capacity. I swear that a 600 MB CD is getting to be as useless as a 1.44 MB floppy relative to how much data needs to be archived.
problem with technology and law is that we're dealing with new things.
Exactly.
It looks so stupid to me that the rulings have come out differently, largely as a result of myopic readings of earlier rulings on the telco industry before the advent of digital technology.
You can see where they're going to have to revisit and reverse the rulings because of two possible developments:
The cable company ISPs customer's start using voice over IP for a gradually increasing share of their telephone service.
The telephone company DSL lines get upgraded to the point where they can carry the odd digital cable channel.
Since I'm on a roll right now, I'll just throw in my complaint that FCC regulation and sale of the EM spectrum does not appear to go into the visible. Wouldn't you rather that lighted billboards pay for the privilege of radiating into the environment?
will be encouranged to liquidate their assets, like Blender, to another company who will pay for the technology. So getting it open-sourced is probably not an option on the table.
So, following up with a previous poster that commented that, despite having paid a license earlier, he would be willing to pay to have it open sourced under the GPL
Why don't Blender enthusiasts contribute to a fund with the express purpose of buying the Blender License so as to GPL the code?
If you get more money than you need in the bid at the auction, then consider using the extra to pay for some dedicated time by the author, etc.
I can really see how nice it would be to have integrated technology on one motherboard so my consumer box isn't unnecessarily large, noisy and consuming a lot of wattage.
But I wonder: can the same kind of reduction in form factor here be converged with all the efforts being put into making server blades that fit gobs and gobs into rack mount chassis?
It would be great leveraging if the technology used to make the single computer consumer box were the same technology used to make high density server farms.
I was going to say that most of the email sent and received in my corporation is not digitally signed.
I used to get laughs from coworkers by sending them messages with the name of the CEO in the From: field.
I can see the legal battles of Bill Clinton continuing as his sexual misbehavior is further detailed by all those Usenet postings to the alt.sex sites...
However, it's a good point. I think in the future that important emails will get my digital signature, even if puzzled recipients don't know WTF GPG is.
Because at my site, the naming conventions are pretty sucky.
Hostnames were constructed to have
a generic location code, a machine platform code, and then just a base10 number to indicate when it got in the queue to get a name.
But the location code is pretty stupid - like - we're all here in the same campus, right?
Likewise the platform codes got heavily bloated as soon as everything under the sun was a Wintel box.
I think there's still a good argument to be made for naming the box roughly according to functionality (assuming you're not exposed to the outside script kiddies), according to where the box is located (so you know where to go to get it fixed), what it is, and perhaps when you got or some easy-to-remember snippet of the internal property number or some such nonsense.
OTOH, maybe everyone would prefer to simply type "george" and know that it is a specific Dell Poweredge in the South machine room that runs Oracle.
For the case where software creation is regarded as a typical industry, their efforts could be seen as a form of Value Added Tax, about which, I believe, our colleagues in the U.K. could comment further.
The interesting part is where in the equation free or open source software enters.
While I believe that much of the free software I use on a day to day basis provides me with much "value", does it really possess value, if I haven't paid for it?
And, if free software does have value even if it is given away for zero money, if it is to be taxed, then one might well argue that other similar creations would be subject to taxation, such as artwork, literature, acting, music and scientific research that is openly published.
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I think the power in my apartment is like this.
My monitor is "wavy" (I've tried 3 different ones),
OK, I confess. I live in the apartment next door to you and I've been running a 20kV Van de Graff generator alongside the superconducting magnet that I keep "Frank" in.
[All kidding aside, my boss at the consumer electronics store told me to do this for a few weeks to drum up some business for new TV's, computer monitors from my neighborhood.]
These grids are all great and wonderful as far as peak performance is concerned, but I'm wondering how the latency associated with long haul networks affects peformance for a range of applications that are not embarrassingly parallel.
Why, why am I so cynical?
Because you are probably correct?
IIRC, in much of the EU per-minute charges for local calls are the norm, where in the U.S. we have become accustomed to per-minute charges only for long distance service.
I wonder if I divided my loaded monthly local phone bill by 30*24*60 what my effective current per-minute charge would be.
I keep reading that network capacity doubles every 9 months, faster even than the 18 mo doubling time of Moore's Law.
Strange that the cost of BW at the end of the pipe at my house has not seemed to capture much, if any, of this fantastic price/performance gains of the overall network.
Why not?
Well, once Oracle has been written, why not sell an Oracle-Lite to the SOHO market. Would it really cost all that much to do so compared to gaining a foothold in the low level marketplace?
Maybe I'm overlooking the costs associated with bringing out such a broad product line, or intangible costs such as a perception of Oracle being a lighter weight product if a cheap version is sold. Some products seem to possess a certain cachet that is related to the fact that you must pay a threshhold price to get them, but I would figure that IT buyers would not confuse an Oracle database with a Rolex watch.
Well, IT literacy does range quite a bit.
I'd say any fourth form student that already has an MCSE is qualified to take some IT courses.
OTOH, if they already have their CCNA you might let them skip the first couple of weeks of the course.
Funny. With tens of millions of consumers having to relay upon AOL email that their internal business units find it "inadequate".
It reminds of the dichotomy you find between "consumer" grade and "commercial" grade items, whether it be email systems or computer hardware or even construction.
Consumer grade has always been so price conscious that quality suffers, where commercial grade is always more expensive.
Software shouldn't have to be subject to the rule of this dichotomy, though.
AOL should clean up their act and put some efforts into adapting some open source email solutions to make them scalable to 1e7 users and to put on the shiny EZ front end that their consumers have come to expect.
When I was 16 and before I had my driver's license I had a checking account.
Having recently traveled overseas though I had a U.S. passport.
But a grocery store clerk refused to cash my check "without a driver's license", despite the fact that the passport represented an even more thorough form of identification.
So U.S. citizens get subjected to some of the same kind of stupidity, too.
But here's hoping that my next foreign trip my attempt to rent a car with only a U.S. license is not met with disappointment:)
A federal spamm license requiring spammer to register, etc, pay huge taxes to the government, complete with cute little orange tag for the ear.
I love it.
Can I be the one in charge of the tool that is used to attach the cute little orange tag to the ear?
[I was surprised a few years back when a relative with a small herd of cattle used yellow ear tags instead of the ole brandin iron...]
Sounds really nice.
I'm wondering if Crossover Plugin with just the handful of Office programs on a Linux desktop would be sufficient for most business purposes.
Also, whether managing a whole LAN of Linux desktops with these Crossover Plugins would be easy or hard?
In California, the power companies lease the land under the high-power lines to things like nursuries and christmas tree farms.
Hmmmm....
With all those high voltage lines, do you think they'd mind much if my "farm" consisted of lots of inductive loops with which to scrounge some electricity?
Dell will probably never go into the retail market. Their manufacturing scheme is direct sales.
Well, unless, after having swallowed most of the corporate desktop market the only way for Dell to achieve growth is by going into the retail stores.
They could still keep their ultralow inventory system, too, if they could just convince the consumers to wait for the box in the mail 2 days after they visit BestBuy...
Separation of a document's structure and layout is fine in theory, but I always find it difficult in practice.
If you're writing mostly text with even a few graphics images or equations, that model will stand up pretty well.
Where it begins to break down for me, anyway, is where your "document" moves into the realm of a choreographed presentation.
I've seen TeX styles for producing slides, but again, they don't give one direct control over page breaks, etc, particularly if you're adhering to the rigour of "structure must be separate from content".
So much of what I try to convey in a presentation depends almost as much on coordinated details of layout design as it does on what could fit into structured content. I want both SVG plots on the same page. I would like one to come in after the first. I'd like an arrow pointing to a feature on the plot and a small mathematical equation to pop up to make a point. Etc. Spatial layout is important and temporal layout is growing rapidly in importance for conveying a message.
I love the idea of DocBook and would like to see the back end processors for MathML and SVG provide the same quality as LaTeX to PDF. However, it's hard for me to seen any hope for XML tags to conveniently abstract away my layout decisions into a structure for presentations that make extensive use of multi-media more than just plain text.
is not so much the strong arm tactics that MS was using to thwart the growth of a competing operating system, but that they actually had memos and such concrete evidence of the fact.
I would have expected such thrusts to be communicated verbally to Dell so as to avoid this kind of embarrassment. Any written records could refer to "our joint efforts to establish a mutually successful partnership team" and other such drivel that would be understood to include the verbal tenets of the agreement.
I mean, any drug dealer knows these things.
I think it's painfully obvious how poorly structured and poorly functioning the ICANN has turned out to be.
What's needed most are a small number of representatives with good technical understanding of the Internet and how it needs to grow, some organizational ability and follow-through, and absolutely nothing to gain directly from their participation in such a committee.
One of the biggest problems with many international organizations and governmental institutions of all kinds is that insidious problem of becoming self-promoting.
As usual in such circumstances, the people best qualified and most suited for such positions are the ones that do not seek such authority or position.
I'll second that.
Anything to reduce the possibility of a security breach sounds good to me.
Of course, the amount of work you have to do to implement this is a consideration and, hopefully, the resulting code is reasonably modular and understandable after everything is done?
In some ways it sounds like the ideas of web security, where folks have tried to make httpd run as underprivileged as possible and separating it from other things, such as database activity.
The chopping up of privileges between parts also seems reminescent of SEL, too.
I think the only other items I would add to this are pursuit of programmer metrics include
It's hard to measure that, because the superficial situations are identical: programmers enthusiastically extending some well designed code on one hand, and a set of programmers grumbling about fixing things in a poorly written chunk of code.
It would be interesting to know how this technology compares in terms of
- $/GB
- GB/kg
- GB/cm3
as an archive media versus magnetic disks and DLT.Perhaps the biggest drawback may be sheer capacity. I swear that a 600 MB CD is getting to be as useless as a 1.44 MB floppy relative to how much data needs to be archived.
problem with technology and law is that we're dealing with new things.
Exactly.
It looks so stupid to me that the rulings have come out differently, largely as a result of myopic readings of earlier rulings on the telco industry before the advent of digital technology.
You can see where they're going to have to revisit and reverse the rulings because of two possible developments:
Since I'm on a roll right now, I'll just throw in my complaint that FCC regulation and sale of the EM spectrum does not appear to go into the visible. Wouldn't you rather that lighted billboards pay for the privilege of radiating into the environment?
will be encouranged to liquidate their assets, like Blender, to another company who will pay for the technology. So getting it open-sourced is probably not an option on the table.
So, following up with a previous poster that commented that, despite having paid a license earlier, he would be willing to pay to have it open sourced under the GPL
If you get more money than you need in the bid at the auction, then consider using the extra to pay for some dedicated time by the author, etc.I can really see how nice it would be to have integrated technology on one motherboard so my consumer box isn't unnecessarily large, noisy and consuming a lot of wattage.
But I wonder: can the same kind of reduction in form factor here be converged with all the efforts being put into making server blades that fit gobs and gobs into rack mount chassis?
It would be great leveraging if the technology used to make the single computer consumer box were the same technology used to make high density server farms.
I was going to say that most of the email sent and received in my corporation is not digitally signed.
I used to get laughs from coworkers by sending them messages with the name of the CEO in the From: field.
I can see the legal battles of Bill Clinton continuing as his sexual misbehavior is further detailed by all those Usenet postings to the alt.sex sites...
However, it's a good point. I think in the future that important emails will get my digital signature, even if puzzled recipients don't know WTF GPG is.
Because at my site, the naming conventions are pretty sucky.
Hostnames were constructed to have a generic location code, a machine platform code, and then just a base10 number to indicate when it got in the queue to get a name.
But the location code is pretty stupid - like - we're all here in the same campus, right?
Likewise the platform codes got heavily bloated as soon as everything under the sun was a Wintel box.
I think there's still a good argument to be made for naming the box roughly according to functionality (assuming you're not exposed to the outside script kiddies), according to where the box is located (so you know where to go to get it fixed), what it is, and perhaps when you got or some easy-to-remember snippet of the internal property number or some such nonsense.
OTOH, maybe everyone would prefer to simply type "george" and know that it is a specific Dell Poweredge in the South machine room that runs Oracle.
where I'm typing away at the latest inventory survey for..
-Jetson!
-Yes, Mister Spacely!
-Jetson, where are the figures for new account?
-Ummm, right here, no! This is Elroy's lunch!
For the case where software creation is regarded as a typical industry, their efforts could be seen as a form of Value Added Tax, about which, I believe, our colleagues in the U.K. could comment further.
The interesting part is where in the equation free or open source software enters.
While I believe that much of the free software I use on a day to day basis provides me with much "value", does it really possess value, if I haven't paid for it?
And, if free software does have value even if it is given away for zero money, if it is to be taxed, then one might well argue that other similar creations would be subject to taxation, such as artwork, literature, acting, music and scientific research that is openly published.