From sdw at lig.net Mon Dec 21 02:11:54 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 02:11:54 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: <4B2F49EA.9080902@lig.net> Jeff Bone wrote: > > There's this occupational hazard we programmers, techie types, and > similar geeks face as we ease on down that road to professional > senescence... > > "Parallel programming? That's just like doing multi-tasking on big > iron. We were doing that 10 years ago. More." Hey, I get to do that now! How's this? He worries about Buddylist-like applications with 7 billion users (Presence/IM, Twitter (which is just presence with 140 character status and no IM), etc.). Buddylist @ AOL in 1995-1998 handled 3-8 million simultaneous users with 100Mhz (PA Risc [1]) and 1GB RAM. Assuming the same rate of efficiency, scaling, and usage (not accurate, but within an order or two of magnitude), 7 Billion users would take: print (7*1000*1000*1000)/(3*1000*1000) 2333 machines of the same power or print 2333/30/16 4 computers with 3Ghz dual quad-core with hyperthreading (does not include various other benefits of modern processors) or print 2333/64 36 computers with 64GB of RAM. With 2 orders of magnitude of overhead (larger IDs, more frequent "updates", terribly expensive protocols requiring communication concentration), that's 3600 nodes max for real-time tracking of every living person. Not so tough. Or so it seems. > ... > > But with this article, at least the author has had the courage and has > made the effort to cast off some assumptions that may be convenient > and comfortable but are prima facie false. At least he has had the > courage to stand up and face the future, unflinching, and tell it like > it is. The idea of an open post-feudal market, the "Ambient Cloud", is very good. > > I wish more of us did this. I wish I did more often. > > Read it: > > > http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/12/16/building-super-scalable-systems-blade-runner-meets-autonomic.html > It's a nice read actually. A freaking kitchen sink of ideas, references, and ideas, but nice. > > aka > > http://tinyurl.com/y8ro8pl > > > Enjoy. > > > jb > > [1] http://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_processors.html#pa-7100lc sdw From jbone at place.org Mon Dec 21 05:49:34 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:49:34 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Computational thinking and energy literacy Message-ID: <36D87090-11A3-4D76-B663-138669D49619@place.org> Udell occasionally impresses. Take this one: http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/12/16/computational-thinking-and-energy-literacy/ Right on. Personally, I think Fermi estimation and related techniques need to be taught right alongside *counting* --- starting in preschool. And continued aggressively throughout a child's mathematical education. Nothing grounds new knowledge like the ability (and encouragement) to apply it to everyday life. Re: tools: of course, Mathematica (Alpha or otherwise) isn't the only game on the block. Google will do some of this for you, though not enough yet. (Prediction: in the '10s Google will either build and make available or buy and open-source + host / extend a full symbolic computational math product of some sort, along with beefing itself up on the "computational knowledge engine" front as Alpha matures and demonstrates what's possible.) But there's a long history of such things, and new tools appearing all the time... Most folks have forgotten all about the traditional UNIX "units" tool and friends. Frink has always impressed me, even though it's closed- source (open it up, Alan! It's been years. It's time. Get that bazaar factor going...) Fortress gets it. Etc., etc... Having dimensioned quantities and dimensional analysis built into a language is a powerful idea. Using a language with dimensional analysis built in --- just as a kind of adjunct to reasoning about real-world things --- is, as Udell demonstrates, a pretty powerful way of thinking. More like this! $0.02, jb From jbone at place.org Mon Dec 21 06:18:40 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:18:40 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: Stephen says: > Buddylist @ AOL in 1995-1998 handled 3-8 million simultaneous users Mmm hmmm.... and *surely* its system architecture, including technical architecture (mapping of the software architecture onto hardware resources, including the underlying networking infrastructure) could easily and linearly scale by the requisite 3 orders of magnitude necessary to handle every person on the planet. (It couldn't, of course. The networking infrastructure alone required for such a centralized service didn't exist at that time, and the solution is clearly subject to the "social supernode" problem eluded to in the linked article. And as I recall, such fails among other things inspired AOL's purchase of Mirabilis, which even then continued to have occasional outages as spikes ripped past the pace at which they could grow system capacity... Ding! circa the same timeframe tackled the first problem by being entirely decentralized / peer-to- peer, with uncoupled "servers" only serving to accomplish rendezvous and to host presence information when a user was offline, and otherwise leveraging the connectivity aspects of the social network graph along with peering in order to squeeze an order or two magnitude greater scalability (in theory) out of the system as a whole. But even that sort of architecture doesn't address the supernode problem, or supernode clustering, etc....) Now add every cell phone. Now add in every building. Every room in every building. Every light switch. Every power outlet. Every appliance. Every manufactured good --- every book, every can of cola, every article of clothing. Every streetlight. Every car, bike, train, train car, boat, plane, helicopter, etc. Every webcam peering into every space, public or private. Every GPS or other localizer embedded in or on something. Every RFID or other smart tag. Every piece of paper currency. Every box being shipped... all moving around relative to each other. Push the network into everything, yammering at everything else. How many orders of magnitude? How many names / network addresses *per person on the planet?* How many simultaneous conversations? How much presence data at a time? How much historical presence and communication data generated merely by logging? How to mine all that data, much less sift through it and react to it in real time? We can't even begin to understand the implications because, among other things, we only have a very tentative and nascent model for even *human* networks at present, and that only captures static structure rather than, particularly, dynamics. The communication patterns (static and dynamic) that will be common on the Internet of Things aren't particularly well-understood or even much-studied at present. (Robert Poor to the contrary...) It's truly difficult to envision applications of such higher-order scale vs. what you presently have at your disposal; about ten years ago one of the founders of Grande Communications, at the time of its inception, asked me what kinds of qualitatively different killer apps you could build if you had a gigabit / sec coming into your house... Sadly the only thing I could come up with at the time, despite much thought, was cloud-hosted infinite DVR and any-show any-time on-demand hi-def television. (And that was actually more of a storage problem than a bandwidth / delivery problem, which realization led me down the road toward Deepfile...) Maybe interactive hi-def games of a qualitatively different (but only evolutionarily so) variety. Ugh. Vision fail. Forget the apps. I'm sort of with silky on at least part of this, we don't even have any idea what might *require* a truly planetary-scale network. (Well, I have a few ideas...) To crib a phrase, in such a case *the network is the application.* But will it happen? Surely, if we don't hit some existential risk boundary first. Scale is everything. Two problems: figuring out what to do with it, and figuring out how to do it. Not the same. Both essential. jb From wgstoddard at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 06:22:13 2009 From: wgstoddard at gmail.com (Bill Stoddard) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:22:13 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] Computational thinking and energy literacy In-Reply-To: <36D87090-11A3-4D76-B663-138669D49619@place.org> References: <36D87090-11A3-4D76-B663-138669D49619@place.org> Message-ID: <4B2F8495.1040907@gmail.com> On 12/21/09 8:49 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Udell occasionally impresses. Take this one: > > > http://blog.jonudell.net/2009/12/16/computational-thinking-and-energy-literacy/ > > > Right on. > > Personally, I think Fermi estimation and related techniques need to be > taught right alongside *counting* --- starting in preschool. And > continued aggressively throughout a child's mathematical education. > Nothing grounds new knowledge like the ability (and encouragement) to > apply it to everyday life. > > Re: tools: of course, Mathematica (Alpha or otherwise) isn't the > only game on the block. Google will do some of this for you, though > not enough yet. (Prediction: in the '10s Google will either build > and make available or buy and open-source + host / extend a full > symbolic computational math product of some sort, along with beefing > itself up on the "computational knowledge engine" front as Alpha > matures and demonstrates what's possible.) But there's a long history > of such things, and new tools appearing all the time... Most folks > have forgotten all about the traditional UNIX "units" tool and > friends. Frink has always impressed me, even though it's > closed-source (open it up, Alan! It's been years. It's time. Get > that bazaar factor going...) Fortress gets it. Etc., etc... > > Having dimensioned quantities and dimensional analysis built into a > language is a powerful idea. Using a language with dimensional > analysis built in --- just as a kind of adjunct to reasoning about > real-world things --- is, as Udell demonstrates, a pretty powerful way > of thinking. > > More like this! > > Yes! Complete agree. Teaching my kids dimensional analysis and 'back of the envelope estimation'. Bill From eugen at leitl.org Mon Dec 21 06:28:41 2009 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:28:41 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <5e01c29a0912202128h5f35dce1hf68f9173e28bf007@mail.gmail.com> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <5e01c29a0912202128h5f35dce1hf68f9173e28bf007@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20091221142841.GX17686@leitl.org> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 04:28:01PM +1100, silky wrote: > I'm reading this now (it'll be a few weeks before I'm finished ...) > but one thing that I can't help but wonder immediately: Do we *need* > "planet-scalable" systems? IMHO, the answer is: "No". I don't think No. We don't need a planet-scalable system. We need to be able to scale to the solar system, the galaxy and beyond. Where else are we supposed to live, in pressurized tin cans? > everyone needs to use the same system, I don't think everything should But we're using the same system right now -- the Internet. Right now it's just the transport layer, but if you add generic processing and storage capacity, however minimal, and location awareness/geographic routing you can create a scalable system everybody and everything could use. Just with simple tags, database queries and geographic broadcasts you can do interesting things already. > be connected, and I think it's quite reasonable for there to be some Everything should and can be connected. And it can be a more lightweight than a whole IPv6 stack, and yet scale down to microscale. > reasonably-small limit on the amount of "things" a site can connect > to, and I'm okay with various delays or limits imposed on a system due > to it's nature (i.e. real-time). If it's about stupid social networks, why does the system not represent spatial relationship explicitly in every node on every street corner you could query, in realtime? It's the whole planet hammering a few racks in a room that doesn't make a lot of sense. > That said, I do think the article is interesting, but I don't think > the motivation for it is "good", whether or not it happens. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From russell.turpin at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 07:05:31 2009 From: russell.turpin at gmail.com (Russell Turpin) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 09:05:31 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar Message-ID: To anyone familiar with biology, the world in Avatar is unnatural, not in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of violating how life works. There is no evolutionary path for the kind of coordination it depicts between species. It draws a biological order that, quite unlike our own, would need a god or designer. Perhaps that works as fantasy. It fails as science fiction, providing not even a hint of explanation for it. Putting on my hat as gray-beard science educator, I worry how many young people today won't even sense the weirdness. Fun to watch in 3d. The kids will love it. From simon at thegestalt.org Mon Dec 21 07:26:00 2009 From: simon at thegestalt.org (Simon Wistow) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:26:00 +0000 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20091221152600.GP61831@thegestalt.org> On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 09:05:31AM -0600, Russell Turpin said: > It draws a biological order that, quite unlike our own, would need a > god or designer. Err, without giving too much away - isn't that kind of the point of the movie? From jtauber at jtauber.com Mon Dec 21 07:36:39 2009 From: jtauber at jtauber.com (James Tauber) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:36:39 +0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2833E98E-9BC0-493D-9A3F-6296BEE234E8@jtauber.com> On Dec 21, 2009, at 11:05 PM, Russell Turpin wrote: > To anyone familiar with biology, the world in Avatar is unnatural, not > in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of violating how life > works. There is no evolutionary path for the kind of coordination it > depicts between species. Unless they aren't different species in quite the way we would assume by analogy. What if the organism boundaries we assume from the phenotype aren't reflected in the genotype. i.e. what we see as distinct creatures in the movie actually share a genome. (aside: has that concept been explored in any science fiction work?) > It draws a biological order that, quite > unlike our own, would need a god or designer. Perhaps that works as > fantasy. It fails as science fiction, providing not even a hint of > explanation for it. By that criterion, I would think most "science fiction" fails (which put me off most science fiction as a science-crazed kid) > Putting on my hat as gray-beard science educator, > I worry how many young people today won't even sense the weirdness. > Fun to watch in 3d. The kids will love it. > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Mon Dec 21 07:37:03 2009 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:37:03 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <5e01c29a0912202128h5f35dce1hf68f9173e28bf007@mail.gmail.com> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <5e01c29a0912202128h5f35dce1hf68f9173e28bf007@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Dec 20, 2009, at 9:28 PM, silky wrote: > I'm reading this now (it'll be a few weeks before I'm finished ...) > but one thing that I can't help but wonder immediately: Do we *need* > "planet-scalable" systems? IMHO, the answer is: "No". There are many apps that will be impractical without planet-scalable systems. Organizations are already trying to build crude versions of such things. At this point, it is not motivated by a need for raw scale of the kind you might be able to fit in a multi-billion dollar data center (which is limited by crude algorithms anyway) but by the fact that for many applications it is not feasible to backhaul your data and computation to said data center. From kent at iotabits.com Mon Dec 21 08:08:23 2009 From: kent at iotabits.com (Kent Spaulding) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 08:08:23 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <2833E98E-9BC0-493D-9A3F-6296BEE234E8@jtauber.com> References: <2833E98E-9BC0-493D-9A3F-6296BEE234E8@jtauber.com> Message-ID: <872C4BE3-4CB5-43A0-8E29-8DB5A648D782@iotabits.com> > What if the organism boundaries we assume from the phenotype aren't reflected in the genotype. i.e. what we see as distinct creatures in the movie actually share a genome. > > (aside: has that concept been explored in any science fiction work?) Not traditional sci-fi, but I think it's fair to say that _The Sparrow_ by Mary Doria Russell, explores this notion as a secondary theme. From jbone at place.org Mon Dec 21 08:22:39 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:22:39 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Dear Texas, Please Secede References: Message-ID: Cross-posted for comic effect and that general frisson accompanying interesting but probably impractically idealistic ideas.... ;-) (Selectively unquoted for hopefully-improved readability. And to hopefully get around whatever weird problem my mail client has been having in conjunction w/ pipermail resulting in rampant misformatting. And yo, Ken, do something about yours; every paragraph you write ends up as a single, long, unbroken line requiring ridiculous amounts of horizontal scrolling. ;-) jb Begin forwarded message: > From: "R.A. Hettinga" > Date: December 20, 2009 7:29:46 AM CST > To: undisclosed-recipients:; > Subject: Dear Texas, Please Secede 'course, if all us "free people" went to Texas, it'd stop bein' Texas, wouldn't it?... Cheers, RAH Born in Providence(?) Hospital, El Paso, Texas, so I might *just* qualify for a passport... ------ Dear Texas, Please Secede Our Last Best Hope Dear Texas, I don't know much about you. I don't live there. I know it takes about two days to drive through your vast tracts of land in an aging Mazda RX-7. That drive really sucks. Even when listening to Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" on tape. I know that most of your nasty collectivist hippies have been confined to Austin, like cells of tuberculosis encrusted in calcium. They are harmless and if the chips were down, you could drive them out to live in some refugee camp on the Louisiana border. They could live there for decades, like the Palestinians in the Middle East, only they would be singing bad college rock. And smell worse. Your state is mostly flat. You have problems on the border. Most of your air smells like cow dung or dust, and Houston has terrific traffic problems. You also have bad food. Seriously. It's bad. Don't tell me about your barbeque and authentic Mexican crap, because I'm from New Orleans. ?a va? Also you have Ross Perot, and he's batsh-t crazy. Also you have Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a fifth-columnist collectivist if ever there was a Vichy in France. Also you have a former president there who teed up the United States of America for its final destruction with TARP I: A Fake New Hope. So you'll have to transfer him out of there to preserve your future freedom, otherwise he'll be trying to get good real estate deals, the rotten... Wait, I don't want to get ahead of myself. Dear Texas, despite all of your shortcomings, I am here to inform you: You are the last best hope of mankind. The collectivists now have the votes in the Senate to pass the Health Care Enslavement Act. Everything else is procedure. Therefore I must recognize that now, to my utter horror... I no longer live in a free country. I will be forced by the power of the State to pay for a stranger's MRI. I will be forced to beg the government for permission to get a heart transplant. I am a slave. The government now has complete power over everything that constitutes my humanity, for if they control my health and body, they control me. I've had to put up with the petty 'crats in my various entrepreneurial endeavors. I have lost countless hours filling out sales tax forms and regulation forms. I've spent hours at the DMV. At the local Fascist Building Code Authority. I saw my home town of New Orleans destroyed by collectivists at the Army Corps of Engineers, the City Council of New Orleans, the Mayor's Office, various Levee Boards, the Governor's Office, and hundreds if not thousands of Louisana State representatives sucking off the government teat for the better part of a century. These obscene lilliputian vultures! They have stolen countless hours of my life already through taxes and regulations. These vampires that produce nothing and consume all. Who destroy art and freedom and culture and happiness. These monsters of vulgarity who wish to control and regulate and want you to thank them for it. Yes, I have lost much to these evil creatures and to my shame I have put up with it, voting against them time and again. Voting for people and donating to people I thought loved liberty, only to discover the nasty little jack-in-the-box monster that pops up like a horror zombie, who sneaks in ear marks to increase the value of real- estate they "happen" to own. How many corrupt fifth columnists voting for bill after obscene liberty-killing bill must I endure before I wake from this nightmare? Denny Hastert, Tom Delay, Newt Gingrich, I am looking your way when I say that last bit about corrupt fifth columnists. You f-cks. Dance With the Stars and die. But this is the last straw. I will not put up with them in charge of my health, my children's health, or my parent's health. Never. Do you hear me? I refuse. I refuse to live under this tyranny. If I must choose to live as a slave or go to prison, then I choose prison. Better a prisoner than a slave. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, President Obamahole: arrest me now. Never a red cent shall I pay. Get it over with and come get me now. I won't pay your fines. I won't fill out your paperwork. I will die first. I refuse even under threat of death to conform to your Health Enslavement Act. Do you understand? This is not a democracy. This is a constitutional republic, and I do not care about your majority vote. My liberty is more important. Do you understand? It appears then that, since collectivists now control the United States and wish to enslave me and my family, I must consider other options. Shall I move? To where? Name a country that is not collectivist in one form or another, or under threat of imminent domination. Europe is under the crushing velvet glove of socialism, Russia is a madhouse, all else froth and insanity, corruption and tyranny. I want my United States, but it is no longer the United States. It is gone and has been since at least the 1950's, as Rome was no longer Rome after the madness of the twelve Caesars, but still trundled on under momentum and past glories. The radio hosts upon which I based my last film, Hive Mind, are for the most part believers in the vote. They do not believe in taking up arms against our nation and are extremely reluctant to even consider such with their audiences. For one thing, they could get yanked off the air. For another, they have a love for country that is as admirable, and stubborn, as what those British subjects felt for king and country in 1771 Colonial America. They revolted over a dinky tea tax, for Chr-ssake. Now look at us. You think George Washington would've sighed, shaken his head, and trundled down to the Tax-Stamp office to buy health insurance mandated by the British Crown 'cause it was the law? Frankly, I must confess that I'm not enthused by the image of villagers storming the White House with pitchforks and torches, or waging guerilla warfare against the combined might of the ATF, the FBI, and the Coast Guard. I am a realist, which means I am a pessimist, and unfortunately I must say with great pessimism that the country our radio hosts love is no longer the United States of America. It is beyond salvation. Now listen, I will certainly continue to fight through political channels. I will continue to call my Congressmen and Senators, and go to rallies and rail against the machine. But I know deep down, and I believe everyone else here does too, that with such power over the vast machinery of the United States in the hands of these ruthless collectivists, there will be no turning back the tide even should Republicans and Libertarians and Conservatives sweep the House and Senate in every election in 2010. Which brings me to the most important thing I know about Texas. Dear big beautiful Texas with all your gorgeous pageant women and crappy food: you are the only state that joined our Union with a treaty allowing for legal secession. Here's the "long story short," your favorite phrase, Dear Texas: You can get out now and no one will stop you. Look, I'm just a crazy filmmaker who writes a blog to boost sales for my movies. But before that I worked for the defense community and hung out in certain circles, so you meet people, you learn a few secrets. Here's a few that most beltway journalists know also, but are too chickensh-t to tell you, because if too many little people heard it, they'd rise up and kill all their buddies and benefactors in the government. And that would just totally kill the cocktail party circuit. Here's the first secret they know. Obama doesn't care about preserving the Union. He is the anti-Lincoln. He would be perfectly happy to see all the "Red States" go. They are pesky. They vote against collectivists. Red Staters own guns. They're dangerous. I know I am. Obama's buddies in the Weather Undergound were even overheard by the FBI in the 1960's trying to figure out how to get rid of all you liberty-loving gun-toting whack jobs. They estimated they'd have to kill 25 million in total. Which gave them pause. Not because the number was too big for their morality; it just seemed like a big job, and collectivists are lazy. Yet their lust for a collectivist country has brought them to the White House decades later, and, rather than be forced to kill all those that disagree with collectivism, they'll be happier jettisoning a state or two and let all the whack jobs who love liberty flee there. Don't get me wrong, Obama's Weather Underground buddies would cheerily kill every last Red Stater if they had to. Look at Jeremiah Wright. You don't think he wants you dead? Please, girlfriend. Please. But if it can be avoided, they'd prefer you secede. Less money spent on bullets and mass graves and more money for them to live like the Politburo elite in the good old days, with fancy toilet paper. Dear Texas, Obama-collectivist wants you to leave. You are a guest who has overstayed your welcome in the Union. You just don't know that the liberty party is over yet. Remember when Castro wanted to ship all his troublemakers out during the Muriel boatlift? Bingo. Dear Texas, put aside fears of "Civil War II: The Revenge of the North." Not going to happen. Consider that a large percentage of the U.S. Military is from Texas. Obama would dare not send his "Blue State" armed forces into your borders. He would invite a military coup if he even thought about it. And besides, without Red State soldiers, the U.S. Military will be too busy blow drying its hair, putting on makeup while driving, and fiddling around in its purse trying to find that Tomahawk cruise missile next to its tampon. Seriously, don't worry about a hot civil war. Remember that Truman (collectivist like Obama) was too much of a pussy to take care of the Soviet Union back when we were the only ones with the nuke. At worst, Obama will wage a cold war with you and maybe embargo your arugala supply. And really, I know you couldn't give a sh-t about that. Dear Texas, do you want to know what Obama will say? Have fun. Good luck. Sign a Global Warming Treaty with us? Buy our stuff with your Texas dollars? Here, take a bunch of these other pesky liberty-loving gun owners from Wyoming, Montana, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, Mississippi, etc. Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. But hey, sell us your oil until our solar panels are working. Be careful not to lend him money. He'll ask. Obama and his ilk don't believe that the United States should be the lone super power of the world. They really couldn't care less if you are in the Union or not. They just want collectivism and all the corruption money they can eat. Now Dear Texas, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it won't be easy. Let me let you in on another secret I've learned in my old-school circles. China's been giving Mexico's military arms and training for the better part of two decades. Many Chinese "companies" (which are really owned by the People's Liberation Army) run most of the major Mexican ports. They have been pre-deploying small arms, hand-held missiles, and other nasty pieces of work in warehouses down there, all for a rainy day like this. They would love to see Mexico try to take back Texas. During the confusion they'll be all over Taiwan like a drunk teenager on a 5 dollar whore. The Chinese and Mexicans have been slipping money to the Democrats (algore, Billary Clinton, Obamahole, etc.) and Republicans (John MyFriends McCain, Bob Viagra Dole, Denny Earmark Hastert, George Bushes Part I: The Lethargic Projectile Vomiter and Part II: The Expensive Mindless Sequel) for decades for a reason. Come on. You think China was giving money to Bill Clinton cause he looks good with Monica Lewinsky in his lap? 'Cause they wanted to sell us plastic Mardi Gras beads? They want Taiwan and then they want to pay back Japan for the rape of Nanking. And hey, if algore gets some bucks out of it, well, that's a cheap price 'cause algore's a cheap whore. So bear in mind, Dear Texas, that when you declare independence, Mexico will try to take you back. And Obamahole will not lift a finger for you in that instance. You will be alone. It will be a nasty and ugly guerilla war. I know you don't care about that, because you love liberty, Dear Texas. Plus, you have the hottest pageant women on planet earth, better even than Brazil, so you know you can't lose. You will indeed be "like a whole other country." I volunteer. I remember the Alamo. Save a seat for me in liberty's sweet embrace, 'cause I'm on my way. God Bless The United State of Texas. Update: Be nice to world's greatest blogger, Robert McCain, confirmed greatest since he recognizes my glorious genius. Even though he still hasn't sent me a mailing adress so he can have the glory of seeing any of my movies. Update Update: I've gotten a couple of emails already from people asking me if this blog post is serious or satire. Am I really this crazy? Look, I have a sense of humor and like to take it out on a walk once in a while. But I would rather go to prison, die, or be a refugee in The Republic of Texas than suffer any more loss of liberty, and the two secrets I mention (re: Obama being happy with less than 50 states and the long-term China-Mexico-Azatlan strategery) are indeed true, at least according to my sources, and I trust them more than I trust Katie Couric. She doesn't know sh-t, she's not even good eye candy anymore, and the last good question she probably asked was in 1973. "Does this dress make my ass look fat?" Received answer: "Yes." Good job, airhead. Save humanity. Follow me on Twitter and share this article on Twitter. Ladd Ehlinger Jr. - 2009-12-19 the creator of Flatland and Hive Mind, a techno-collectivist scifi horror film with a cast of billions From aaron at bavariati.org Mon Dec 21 10:57:27 2009 From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:57:27 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: <20091221185726.GA2182@aaron-aa1> On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 11:07:28PM -0600, Jeff Bone wrote: > "Parallel programming? That's just like doing multi-tasking on big > iron. We were doing that 10 years ago. More." So he was straight wrong, and maybe just fishing for an explanation without admitting ignorance. Too bad for both of you if it didn't turn into an interesting conversation. > But as I ease my way ever deeper and hopefully gently into my third > decade of (sometimes) writing software for money I find that this > tendency tugs. It pulls. It becomes the easy out. We might even > believe it: > > Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Same shit, different day. Most importantly, that's the route to being marginalized. Much of the stuff going on *is* the same old magic we used last time the power/bus/memory/MIPS balance was like this. It was all lost to proprietary codebases, dead languages and neuron-rot, and now the kids rehash it on top of a new layer of abstraction. Doesn't matter. What matters is, when kids with money wanna feel like they're building new stuff, shut up and make yourself useful, or get out the way. There might be free beer, and it might work better this time. > http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/12/16/building-super-scalable-systems-blade-runner-meets-autonomic.html > http://tinyurl.com/y8ro8pl Interesting. I haven't finished it yet, so I hope he recants a few assumptions he seems to make at the beginning. Comments: 1. You can't push bots to most clients. Most client devices are only available as compute resources when the user is actively interacting with it. Otherwise, they should be operating at minimal power consumption, with suspended procs. 2. Good partitioning and effective use of distributed hashes will get you most of the way to globe-scale (sorta-) shared state. The hard bit is getting devs to operate within the Heisenbergian constraints of a system that can tell you either what the state *was*, or give you a probablility distribution of what the state is *now*. 3. You can build global-scale systems, but so far, folks seem to want to shut the globe out - they want to find and hook up with their own tribe, not be faced with 7B people and their presence information, sorted helpfully by first name. Call it "e-goraphobia". :) 4. And having helped with building and running the backend for the biggest selling Playstation 3 game ever, may I just say that I'm very glad I don't have to worry about this kind of stuff professionally anymore? It gets ugly. Now to brush up on my ARM skillz again, Aaron From lucas.gonze at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 11:04:48 2009 From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:04:48 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <20091221185726.GA2182@aaron-aa1> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <20091221185726.GA2182@aaron-aa1> Message-ID: On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:57 AM, Aaron Burt > Doesn't matter. ?What matters is, when kids with money wanna feel like they're > building new stuff, shut up and make yourself useful, or get out the way. > There might be free beer, and it might work better this time. My mantra about tech rehashing is that history doesn't repeat itself. The next time around things have changed. Maybe CPU was a bottleneck first time around. Maybe it was VC, or installed base, or something legislative. Or maybe, and this is often the case, there are new insights. From sdw at lig.net Mon Dec 21 11:18:51 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:18:51 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Long text lines, was: Re: Dear Texas, Please Secede In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4B2FCA1B.3080408@lig.net> Jeff Bone wrote: > ... > > (Selectively unquoted for hopefully-improved readability. And to > hopefully get around whatever weird problem my mail client has been > having in conjunction w/ pipermail resulting in rampant > misformatting. And yo, Ken, do something about yours; every > paragraph you write ends up as a single, long, unbroken line requiring > ridiculous amounts of horizontal scrolling. ;-) He's sending text/plain with encoding of quoted-printable and every paragraph is one long line of text. Thunderbird handles this perfectly with nice flow according to the size of the window. I think it also flows paragraphs of text with newlines the same way sometimes. I'm using Outlook sometimes for work now, for the first time ever really. In general, I can't believe how bad it is as an email client in terms of text handling, quoting, etc. Just pathetic. In addition to its handling of email addresses in quoted/forwarded messages being totally and completely broken. What crap. The biggest shocker to me is that it totally ignores the HTML quoting tags that work so well with Thunderbird for HTML email. I have to send everything as text with people I know are using Outlook so that it is readable. Truly and completely pathetic and out of touch. Yet used by millions. Don't even think about auto-coloring of nested quoting levels... sdw > > > jb > From andrew at ceruleansystems.com Mon Dec 21 11:31:16 2009 From: andrew at ceruleansystems.com (J. Andrew Rogers) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:31:16 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <20091221185726.GA2182@aaron-aa1> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <20091221185726.GA2182@aaron-aa1> Message-ID: <7915A0E8-BD39-4A9C-9A19-F11F5B8E4B4F@ceruleansystems.com> On Dec 21, 2009, at 10:57 AM, Aaron Burt wrote: > 2. Good partitioning and effective use of distributed hashes will get you most > of the way to globe-scale (sorta-) shared state. The hard bit is getting devs > to operate within the Heisenbergian constraints of a system that can tell you > either what the state *was*, or give you a probablility distribution of what > the state is *now*. The serious limitations are not transactional, it really is that distributed hashes as currently imagined are deeply inadequate for global-scale shared state. Sure, it scales some concept of "state" but many (most?) interesting codes don't scale worth a damn if all you have to work with are cardinality relationships. From sdw at lig.net Mon Dec 21 11:36:13 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 11:36:13 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: <4B2FCE2D.6010703@lig.net> Jeff Bone wrote: > > Stephen says: > >> Buddylist @ AOL in 1995-1998 handled 3-8 million simultaneous users > > Mmm hmmm.... and *surely* its system architecture, including > technical architecture (mapping of the software architecture onto > hardware resources, including the underlying networking > infrastructure) could easily and linearly scale by the requisite 3 > orders of magnitude necessary to handle every person on the planet. > (It couldn't, of course. The networking infrastructure alone required > for such a centralized service didn't exist at that time, and the > solution is clearly subject to the "social supernode" problem eluded > to in the linked article. And as I recall, such fails among other > things inspired AOL's purchase of Mirabilis, which even then continued > to have occasional outages as spikes ripped past the pace at which > they could grow system capacity... Ding! circa the same timeframe > tackled the first problem by being entirely decentralized / > peer-to-peer, with uncoupled "servers" only serving to accomplish > rendezvous and to host presence information when a user was offline, > and otherwise leveraging the connectivity aspects of the social > network graph along with peering in order to squeeze an order or two > magnitude greater scalability (in theory) out of the system as a > whole. But even that sort of architecture doesn't address the > supernode problem, or supernode clustering, etc....) A) Most architectures seem to do it wrong the first time or two. I saw many people assume that everything had to go through a database server, which is silly. B) My response was tongue-in-cheek in the spirit of "That's the same thing we were doing..." C) Clearly, distributed systems with highly interconnected groups of people can work just fine. See email, etc. > > Now add every cell phone. Now add in every building. Every room in > every building. Every light switch. Every power outlet. Every > appliance. Every manufactured good --- every book, every can of cola, > every article of clothing. Every streetlight. Every car, bike, > train, train car, boat, plane, helicopter, etc. Every webcam peering > into every space, public or private. Every GPS or other localizer > embedded in or on something. Every RFID or other smart tag. Every > piece of paper currency. Every box being shipped... all moving > around relative to each other. Push the network into everything, > yammering at everything else. How many orders of magnitude? How many > names / network addresses *per person on the planet?* How many > simultaneous conversations? How much presence data at a time? How > much historical presence and communication data generated merely by > logging? How to mine all that data, much less sift through it and > react to it in real time? Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At least not in the traditional forms. > > We can't even begin to understand the implications because, among > other things, we only have a very tentative and nascent model for even > *human* networks at present, and that only captures static structure > rather than, particularly, dynamics. The communication patterns > (static and dynamic) that will be common on the Internet of Things > aren't particularly well-understood or even much-studied at present. > (Robert Poor to the contrary...) > > It's truly difficult to envision applications of such higher-order > scale vs. what you presently have at your disposal; about ten years > ago one of the founders of Grande Communications, at the time of its > inception, asked me what kinds of qualitatively different killer apps > you could build if you had a gigabit / sec coming into your house... > Sadly the only thing I could come up with at the time, despite much > thought, was cloud-hosted infinite DVR and any-show any-time on-demand > hi-def television. (And that was actually more of a storage problem > than a bandwidth / delivery problem, which realization led me down the > road toward Deepfile...) Maybe interactive hi-def games of a > qualitatively different (but only evolutionarily so) variety. Ugh. > Vision fail. I found advertising distasteful and irritating, so I was blind to the best revenue engine for too long... And I even wrote the code that powered the very first popups on AOL and knew the revenue numbers for quite a while. BTW, the very first popup was actually an FTC required notice. I had to make sure everyone saw and acknowledged it. Which led to: Gee, you know what that would be handy for... Vision fail, and even with glaringly obvious information. > > Forget the apps. I'm sort of with silky on at least part of this, we > don't even have any idea what might *require* a truly planetary-scale > network. (Well, I have a few ideas...) To crib a phrase, in such a > case *the network is the application.* But will it happen? Surely, > if we don't hit some existential risk boundary first. > > Scale is everything. Two problems: figuring out what to do with it, > and figuring out how to do it. Not the same. Both essential. > > > jb sdw From michaelslists at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 15:03:13 2009 From: michaelslists at gmail.com (silky) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 10:03:13 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: <5e01c29a0912211503v6c69bfc2r54f23db0e928e5af@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 1:18 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: [...] > Scale is everything. ?Two problems: ?figuring out what to do with it, and > figuring out how to do it. ?Not the same. ?Both essential. Here's a (not new) suggestion from me: the future is quantum. It seems too ridiculous and idealistic to me that the future is a distributed system of devices (i.e. phones and the smaller or larger or merged version of a "thing" we are surely heading towards, with phones getting larger and laptops getting smaller). I think these will be fun, (though I don't ever want to own one) but I don't think the idea itself is practical. As to the question of not-only planet-scaling systems, but universe-scaling (or at least interplanetary) perhaps the answer is entanglement. I.e., the universe itself scales to the universe. It holds all the data necessary, has the communication channels, and manages to communicate with itself, and manage all it's relevant nodes, to make things happen. So perhaps instead of creating networks out of physical things, we will start to adjust the "items" in the air for our purposes; thereby using the network we already have around us. I suppose on this basis, we could also (maybe, I'm not knowledgeable at all in this field) have satellites with appropriate conversion devices, and make use of the "storage" area out in space itself. Certainly a fun idea, at least to me. So now all we need to learn is quantum programming ... Man, writing unit tests is going to be difficult ... > jb -- silky http://www.mirios.com.au/ http://island.mirios.com.au/t/rigby+random+20 INVIGORATING: CONTAINERIZE transatlantic streaker imploringly. From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Mon Dec 21 18:08:57 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:08:57 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Dear Texas, Please Secede Message-ID: <195116.37327.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Mon, 12/21/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > ... And yo, Ken, do something about yours;? every paragraph you > write ends up as a single, long, unbroken line requiring > ridiculous amounts of horizontal scrolling. ;-) > I have no control. This is Yahoo.ca. Yours is the first complaint I've received. But that's probably because you, like me, know problems won't get fixed if they aren't pointed out, no judgement. I just don't know what I can do about it. ? Is this (above) better?? :-) ? In order to avoid such issues my normal setting is "Plain Text". I'll do this post with "Rich Text" and see if that makes any difference. No line breaks in this paragraph so it should be an indication whether it will make any difference. Does the mailing list manager dick with the posts or do they go through transparently? ? What email client are you using? Why doesn't it rewrap those lines when it displays? ? Has anyone else noticed this problem with my posts? ? ??????????? ?...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! http://www.flickr.com/gift/ From nornagon at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 18:23:14 2009 From: nornagon at gmail.com (Jeremy Apthorp) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 13:23:14 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] Dear Texas, Please Secede In-Reply-To: <195116.37327.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <195116.37327.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <14d615330912211823h4ba913bdwce04b108625dc6e0@mail.gmail.com> I'm using GMail, with which I rarely have display issues :) j 2009/12/22 Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo : > --- On Mon, 12/21/09, Jeff Bone wrote: >> ... And yo, Ken, do something about yours;? every paragraph you >> write ends up as a single, long, unbroken line requiring >> ridiculous amounts of horizontal scrolling. ;-) >> > > I have no control. > This is Yahoo.ca. > Yours is the first complaint I've received. > But that's probably because you, like me, know problems > won't get fixed if they aren't pointed out, no judgement. > > I just don't know what I can do about it. > > Is this (above) better?? :-) > > In order to avoid such issues my normal setting is "Plain Text". I'll do this post with "Rich Text" and see if that makes any difference. No line breaks in this paragraph so it should be an indication whether it will make any difference. Does the mailing list manager dick with the posts or do they go through transparently? > > What email client are you using? Why doesn't it rewrap those lines when it displays? > > Has anyone else noticed this problem with my posts? > > ??????????? ?...ken... > > > ? ? ?__________________________________________________________________ > Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! > > http://www.flickr.com/gift/ > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From howell.r at inkworkswell.com Mon Dec 21 21:04:36 2009 From: howell.r at inkworkswell.com (Reese) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:04:36 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B2E9C12.40004@lig.net> References: <20091214164831.GL17686@leitl.org> <69ae910f0912161200g1e5e71actd9ac7f9de37277a3@mail.gmail.com> <4B29A0D2.3040607@lig.net> <01bb01ca8183$d7211990$85634cb0$@com> <4B2E9C12.40004@lig.net> Message-ID: <4B305364.7050003@inkworkswell.com> On 20-Dec-09 16:50, Stephen Williams wrote: >> The only true choice left is to get up and walk out of the circus tent. > Does he know where Gult's Gulch is?? > That's a cop out. Smart people can ride most waves successfully. It's "Galt's Gulch" and, there are more poor smart people than there are rich smart people. Run the numbers on that. Reese From howell.r at inkworkswell.com Mon Dec 21 21:13:28 2009 From: howell.r at inkworkswell.com (Reese) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:13:28 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> On 21-Dec-09 10:05, Russell Turpin wrote: > To anyone familiar with biology, the world in Avatar is unnatural, not > in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of violating how life > works. There is no evolutionary path for the kind of coordination it > depicts between species. It draws a biological order that, quite > unlike our own, would need a god or designer. Perhaps that works as > fantasy. It fails as science fiction, providing not even a hint of > explanation for it. Putting on my hat as gray-beard science educator, > I worry how many young people today won't even sense the weirdness. > Fun to watch in 3d. The kids will love it. I'm reminded of a Henry Ford story I was told as a youngster. His engineers all told him, a v-8 block could not be cast in one piece. So he fired them and hired a new crop, fresh out of college, and charged them with designing a one-piece v-8 engine block. Not knowing that it was impossible, they designed it and made it work. Of course we think there's nothing to making a one-piece v-8 engine block today, but back then? I wonder how true that apocryphal story is. Reese From michaelslists at gmail.com Mon Dec 21 21:31:19 2009 From: michaelslists at gmail.com (silky) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:31:19 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> References: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> Message-ID: <5e01c29a0912212131w6beeeecds1fce2e675c8b729e@mail.gmail.com> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Reese wrote: [...] > I'm reminded of a Henry Ford story I was told as a youngster. His > engineers all told him, a v-8 block could not be cast in one piece. > So he fired them and hired a new crop, fresh out of college, and > charged them with designing a one-piece v-8 engine block. Not knowing > that it was impossible, they designed it and made it work. Of course > we think there's nothing to making a one-piece v-8 engine block > today, but back then? > > I wonder how true that apocryphal story is. That story is similar to this: http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young-the-61-year-old-farmer-that-won-the-worlds-toughest-race > Reese -- silky http://www.mirios.com.au/ http://island.mirios.com.au/t/rigby+random+20 rioter MORALIZER nosey changeover DAUGHTER-IN-LAW HICCOUGH YEARBOOK. Uniformed; periwinkle; v... From sean at conman.org Mon Dec 21 23:11:15 2009 From: sean at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:11:15 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] Dear Texas, Please Secede In-Reply-To: <195116.37327.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <195116.37327.qm@web33001.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <20091222071115.GA7882@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo once stated: > ? > What email client are you using? Why doesn't it rewrap those lines when it displays? Because all software sucks (some more than others). ? > Has anyone else noticed this problem with my posts? I have, but since I use a text-based email client (mutt under Linux) I don't have to scroll horizontally to see the text, but the long lines do make it a bit of a chore to read. -spc (I've found GUI-based email clients to be too slow for my liking) From sdw at lig.net Tue Dec 22 02:17:39 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:17:39 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B305364.7050003@inkworkswell.com> References: <20091214164831.GL17686@leitl.org> <69ae910f0912161200g1e5e71actd9ac7f9de37277a3@mail.gmail.com> <4B29A0D2.3040607@lig.net> <01bb01ca8183$d7211990$85634cb0$@com> <4B2E9C12.40004@lig.net> <4B305364.7050003@inkworkswell.com> Message-ID: <4B309CC3.4070107@lig.net> Reese wrote: > On 20-Dec-09 16:50, Stephen Williams wrote: > >>> The only true choice left is to get up and walk out of the circus tent. >> Does he know where Gult's Gulch is?? >> That's a cop out. Smart people can ride most waves successfully. > > It's "Galt's Gulch" and, there are more poor smart people than there Wow, sleep-deprived posting again. (And here it is 2am.) I even knew a John Galt. > are rich smart people. Run the numbers on that. The interesting question is: Of those two groups, which is smarter? Stephen > > Reese From jbone at place.org Tue Dec 22 06:21:17 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 08:21:17 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> Message-ID: <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> Stephen says: > Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At least not in > the traditional forms. With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in realtime are (today) different activities, I have to point at the existence proof (what I do for a living these days) as contrary to this point of view. And that activity and its general form are going to become even more prevalent outside the domain I operate in as we realize an Internet of Things. (It's already the case that this happens elsewhere; in the UK to a large extent and in the US to a much lesser extent realtime face recognition over public camera networks occurs already today...) qed, jb From ejw at cs.ucsc.edu Tue Dec 22 06:58:12 2009 From: ejw at cs.ucsc.edu (Jim Whitehead) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:58:12 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> References: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> Message-ID: <4B30DE84.6040307@cs.ucsc.edu> A little web surfing finds: http://www.conceptcarz.com/vehicle/z10206/Ford-V-8-Model-18.aspx > I'm reminded of a Henry Ford story I was told as a youngster. His > engineers all told him, a v-8 block could not be cast in one piece. > So he fired them and hired a new crop, fresh out of college, and > charged them with designing a one-piece v-8 engine block. Not knowing > that it was impossible, they designed it and made it work. Of course > we think there's nothing to making a one-piece v-8 engine block > today, but back then? > > I wonder how true that apocryphal story is. > From the link above: Billed as a five-passenger coupe, the 1932 Ford Model 18 Victoria could as easily been dubbed a close-coupled two-door sedan. The U.S. only received 8,586 units of the 1932 Ford Victoria's. In secret, Henry Ford organized his engineers Ray Laird and Carl Shultz to begin working on his own ideas in Thomas Edison's old Fort Myers lab. This laboratory had been moved from Florida to Henry's newly established Greenfield Village lab in Dearborn, Michigan. Next, Henry Ford asked Ed Huff, head of the electrical laboratory, to develop the ignition system. Huff didn't think that the ignition system could be done the way Ford envisioned, and told Ford this. Henry Ford wasn't happy with this response and instead when to Emil Zoerlein to develop the ignition system, and to keep his work on the down low. The design that he came up with was very similar to those found today, mounted on the front of the engine and driven directly from the camshaft. Since business at the Ford industry was going quite well in 1930, Laird and Shultz saw little reasoning behind turning Ford's ideas into reality. After all, Ford was selling nearly double Chevy's total, more than one-million vehicles. In November of 1930, Shultz and Laird finally reached success, when two different 90-degree V8 designs were completed. One of the designs had the same square dimensions as the doomed 299-inch Soth engine, while the other engine had a bore of 3.375 inches and a stroke of 3.25 inches, which gave a displacement of 232.5 cubic inches. Herman Reinhold aided in secretly casting blocks at the Rouge and by February of 1931 the first engine was up and running. Four engines that were dubbed Model 24 were installed in updated Model A models by June. Thinking that this wasn't the time to follow through with this experiment, Ford decided that the Depression was looming and that business was bad, so he instead decided to release an improved Model A. Work on that model began in late summer of 1931. From k.holtman at chello.nl Tue Dec 22 13:38:11 2009 From: k.holtman at chello.nl (Koen Holtman) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:38:11 +0100 (CET) Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <2833E98E-9BC0-493D-9A3F-6296BEE234E8@jtauber.com> Message-ID: > On Dec 21, 2009, at 11:05 PM, Russell Turpin wrote: > > To anyone familiar with biology, the world in Avatar is unnatural, not > > in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of violating how life > > works. There is no evolutionary path for the kind of coordination it > > depicts between species. Well... *spoilers* One hard science fiction interpretation of the movie is this. Evolution on the moon ended when the natives turned the biosphere into computronium and uploaded themselves. What you are looking at during most of the movie is just the screensaver. On Mon, 21 Dec 2009, James Tauber wrote: > > What if the organism boundaries we assume from the phenotype aren't > reflected in the genotype. i.e. what we see as distinct creatures in the > movie actually share a genome. > > (aside: has that concept been explored in any science fiction work?) Orson Scott Card did a nice murder mystery based on this in "Speaker for the Dead". Cheers, Koen. From simon at thegestalt.org Tue Dec 22 14:50:30 2009 From: simon at thegestalt.org (Simon Wistow) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:50:30 +0000 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <5e01c29a0912212131w6beeeecds1fce2e675c8b729e@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B305578.8090707@inkworkswell.com> <5e01c29a0912212131w6beeeecds1fce2e675c8b729e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20091222225030.GA18050@thegestalt.org> On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 04:31:19PM +1100, silky said: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Reese wrote: > That story is similar to this: > http://www.elitefeet.com/the-legend-of-cliff-young-the-61-year-old-farmer-that-won-the-worlds-toughest-race And http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/unsolvable.asp which later got used in Good Will Hunting. We used to do similar things at the film company I used to work at - get a bunch of new grads and get them to do an "impossible" project and watch them go. We referred to it as the Wile-E Coyote Project Method because as long as no-one looked down then they kept running in thin air. From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Tue Dec 22 14:52:22 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 14:52:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B309CC3.4070107@lig.net> Message-ID: <151912.30286.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Tue, 12/22/09, Stephen Williams wrote: > Reese wrote: > > On 20-Dec-09 16:50, Stephen Williams wrote: > > > >>> The only true choice left is to get up and > walk out of the circus tent. > >> Does he know where Gult's Gulch is?? > >> That's a cop out.? Smart people can ride most > waves successfully. > > > > It's "Galt's Gulch" and, there are more poor smart > people than there > Wow, sleep-deprived posting again.? (And here it is > 2am.)? I even knew a > John Galt. > > are rich smart people. Run the numbers on that. > > The interesting question is: Of those two groups, which is > smarter? > Based on what criteria? ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca From michaelslists at gmail.com Tue Dec 22 14:59:25 2009 From: michaelslists at gmail.com (silky) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:59:25 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <151912.30286.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <4B309CC3.4070107@lig.net> <151912.30286.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <5e01c29a0912221459n7b1c617by1765799fadb93334@mail.gmail.com> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote: [...] > > The interesting question is: Of those two groups, which is > > smarter? > > > Based on what criteria? Up to you, I suppose. There are varying degree's of "smarts", when it comes to invention, as far as I'm concerned: - Too stupid to invent X - Too smart to need to invent X - Smart enough to not need to invent X, but realise they can help others if they do, for a tidy profit - Smart enough to not need X, but immoral enough to invent it anyway, and profit from the production thereof I don't find this "interesting" I find it "depressing"", but then it's fairly obvious what group I consider myself part of :) > ? ? ? ? ? ?...ken... -- silky http://www.mirios.com.au/ http://island.mirios.com.au/t/rigby+random+20 coyote. License bilingual murderer rehang SAPROPHYTE! TRENCHANCY. From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Tue Dec 22 15:39:22 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:39:22 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> Message-ID: <638761.56262.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Tue, 12/22/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Stephen says: > > > Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At > least not in the traditional forms. > > With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in > realtime are (today) different activities, I have to point > at the existence proof (what I do for a living these days) > as contrary to this point of view.? > Perhaps you can "sift"/react in near-realtime (I assume you mean you're filtering the data pretty much as it's created?). But you can't "mine" in realtime. Mining requires a pre-existing source of accumulated data. Or it's not mining. By definition. ... Or is that what you just said?? :-) And you can't even sift in near-realtime if the data being filtered isn't hitting the filter immediately it's created. So for "remote" data sources, how do you position your filters in order for the data to hit them in near-realtime? Or is your definition of "realtime" sorta looser than mine (e.g. you don't count such things as latency, etc.)? (Notice I don't really like to use the term "realtime" because it never is. Comes from my days as a SCADA system developer. Users figured we really could do stuff in real time. And got pretty pissed when we didn't. So I quit using the term.) ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Looking for the perfect gift? Give the gift of Flickr! http://www.flickr.com/gift/ From gojomo at boxbe.com Tue Dec 22 17:11:30 2009 From: gojomo at boxbe.com (Gordon Mohr) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:11:30 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> Cameron reportedly has a three-movie story arc in mind. Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect that might be explained in the sequels. - Gordon Russell Turpin wrote: > To anyone familiar with biology, the world in Avatar is unnatural, not > in the sense of being alien, but in the sense of violating how life > works. There is no evolutionary path for the kind of coordination it > depicts between species. It draws a biological order that, quite > unlike our own, would need a god or designer. Perhaps that works as > fantasy. It fails as science fiction, providing not even a hint of > explanation for it. Putting on my hat as gray-beard science educator, > I worry how many young people today won't even sense the weirdness. > Fun to watch in 3d. The kids will love it. > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > > From russell.turpin at gmail.com Tue Dec 22 17:49:40 2009 From: russell.turpin at gmail.com (Russell Turpin) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:49:40 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Gordon Mohr wrote: > Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect that might > be explained in the sequels. You expect some hints of that, though. I didn't catch any. From jbone at place.org Tue Dec 22 19:44:27 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:44:27 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> Message-ID: Ken says: > But you can't "mine" in realtime. Mining requires a pre-existing > source of accumulated data. Or it's not mining. By definition. Ah, glasshoppah... ;-) Cf. "online learning." As opposed to "supervised..." My caveat (already stipulated) is that while it's true that today, for the most part, the two are clearly separable activities, this is already becoming a blurry distinction about the edges --- and will become even moreso. It's true that the notion of "mining" is useless without some historical corpus to work against, but the distinction between that historical corpus and the stream of things coming in in real time is increasingly meaningless. I.e., you can pick any definitions you want, but I can tell you from recent and relevant experience that the definitions you are asserting above are arbitrary and not very durable. $0.02, jb On Dec 22, 2009, at 8:21 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Stephen says: > >> Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At least not in >> the traditional forms. > > With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in realtime are > (today) different activities, I have to point at the existence proof > (what I do for a living these days) as contrary to this point of > view. And that activity and its general form are going to become > even more prevalent outside the domain I operate in as we realize an > Internet of Things. (It's already the case that this happens > elsewhere; in the UK to a large extent and in the US to a much > lesser extent realtime face recognition over public camera networks > occurs already today...) > > qed, > > > jb > > From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Tue Dec 22 20:27:50 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:27:50 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <960883.99142.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Tue, 12/22/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Ah, glasshoppah...? ;-) > > Cf.? "online learning."? As opposed to > "supervised..." > > My caveat (already stipulated) is that while it's true that > today, for the most part, the two are clearly separable > activities, this is already becoming a blurry distinction > about the edges --- and will become even moreso. > > It's true that the notion of "mining" is useless without > some historical corpus to work against, but the distinction > between that historical corpus and the stream of things > coming in in real time is increasingly meaningless.? > I.e., you can pick any definitions you want, but I can tell > you from recent and relevant experience that the definitions > you are asserting above are arbitrary and not very durable. > > $0.02, > So my $0.02 is that instead of changing the definition of what a mine is, just drop it and talk about sifting. Better still, since sifting normally connotes that you have a pile of something sitting waiting to be sifted through, drop that, too, and just talk about filtering. ...... Except when/if you really do mean mining or sifting. Or are you one of those who likes to use the phrase "that's just semantics"??? ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer? 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/ From gordonipub2 at gordoni.com Tue Dec 22 20:37:04 2009 From: gordonipub2 at gordoni.com (Gordon Irlam) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:37:04 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] freetable.org: Expressions of interest sought In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hi, Developing a website? ?Don't know how to map zip codes to city names? Unsure why IP address to geographic location data is so expensive when ICANN/IANA should require it and make it available for free. ?Annoyed by the developer unfriendly nature of the list of country names and country codes you have just found? Some friends and I are embarking on a project called freetable.org. We aim to create a public commons for shared data in much the same way Wikipedia created a public commons for textual data. ?That is, we seek to be a centralized real time repository for shared data. ?Some examples of the broad range of data we are considering: ? ?- classified, realty, job, and personal ads ? ?- customer reviews of products and businesses ? ?- app data for open source applications ? ?- geographic, scientific, and economic data Data will be able to be contributed by anyone, or at least initially, by any programmer, under an open license. ?Data will be in the standard table, record, field format. ?An interface similar to SQL will be provided for programmers to access the data. ?Permissions will be used to control who can modify the data. Rather than trying to carefully design the database tables we are going to support, we will allow programmers to create any database table on our system, and then see which tables prove popular. What we are doing has shades of Google Fusion Tables and shades of infochimps.org, along with some not for profit open licensing credibility. The purpose of this email is to gauge interest in freetable.org. ?We don't want to build something that isn't useful to people. So if you would use freetable, or if you have or know of an open dataset that you would like to make use of via freetable, could you please reply letting me know what that dataset is. many thanks, gordon From sdw at lig.net Tue Dec 22 21:11:19 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:11:19 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <638761.56262.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <638761.56262.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4B31A677.7010103@lig.net> Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote: > --- On Tue, 12/22/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > > >> Stephen says: >> >> >>> Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At >>> >> least not in the traditional forms. >> >> With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in >> realtime are (today) different activities, I have to point >> at the existence proof (what I do for a living these days) >> as contrary to this point of view. >> >> > > Perhaps you can "sift"/react in near-realtime (I assume you mean you're filtering the data pretty much as it's created?). But you can't "mine" in realtime. Mining requires a pre-existing source of accumulated data. Or it's not mining. By definition. ... Or is that what you just said?? :-) > > And you can't even sift in near-realtime if the data being filtered isn't hitting the filter immediately it's created. > > So for "remote" data sources, how do you position your filters in order for the data to hit them in near-realtime? > > Or is your definition of "realtime" sorta looser than mine (e.g. you don't count such things as latency, etc.)? > "Realtime" is as real as you wanna be. I started out doing embedded machine control, factory machines, for GE, making light bulbs. Low wattage arc lamps actually. Realtime was in the millisecond range. "Realtime" for AOL was maybe 200ms. for the end-user, 1 ms. at the server. "Realtime" for Geico was like 500-1000 ms. (horrifying!). > (Notice I don't really like to use the term "realtime" because it never is. Comes from my days as a SCADA system developer. Users figured we really could do stuff in real time. And got pretty pissed when we didn't. So I quit using the term.) > It's still a useful term, just has to have a parameter or two to be meaningful. Soft/hard, max/avg. latency, throughput requirements and distribution, etc. Stephen > ...ken... > > From sdw at lig.net Tue Dec 22 21:14:01 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:14:01 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> Message-ID: <4B31A719.4050007@lig.net> Russell Turpin wrote: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Gordon Mohr wrote: > >> Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect that might >> be explained in the sequels. >> > > You expect some hints of that, though. I didn't catch any. > Let's hope it is a whole lot better than long, steep, fast downhill boat rides that have you ending up 500-1000 ft. higher than you started. (City of Ember...) Stephen From gojomo at boxbe.com Tue Dec 22 21:49:29 2009 From: gojomo at boxbe.com (Gordon Mohr) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:49:29 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> Message-ID: <4B31AF69.5020008@boxbe.com> Russell Turpin wrote: > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Gordon Mohr wrote: >> Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect that might >> be explained in the sequels. > > You expect some hints of that, though. I didn't catch any. Well, it is remarkable: plants and animals with compatible biological USB ports. The whole planet might be a computer made by others, or a nature preserve/experiment (drug-discovery-lab?), or a primitivist refuge of some species that's gone posthumanoid (and lives in (a) the planet's core; (b) the neighboring gas giant; (c) the great beyond). Simpleton planet with big ancient secrets is an idea that recurs so often that there's a lot of big space-opera ways to go, if Cameron so chooses. - Gordon From whump at mac.com Tue Dec 22 22:14:55 2009 From: whump at mac.com (Bill Humphries) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:14:55 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B31AF69.5020008@boxbe.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B31AF69.5020008@boxbe.com> Message-ID: On Dec 22, 2009, at 9:49 PM, Gordon Mohr wrote: > The whole planet might be a computer made by others, or a nature preserve/experiment (drug-discovery-lab?), or a primitivist refuge of some species that's gone posthumanoid (and lives in (a) the planet's core; (b) the neighboring gas giant; (c) the great beyond). Well, after the clusterfrak that was the BSG finale, and reading "Look to Windward" many of us thought it was all the work of a Culture Mind with a nasty sense of humor, so why should I be surprised that Pandora is another Mind messing with humans? -- whump From sdw at lig.net Tue Dec 22 23:18:16 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:18:16 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <01cc01ca81c6$180fd940$482f8bc0$@com> References: <20091214164831.GL17686@leitl.org> <69ae910f0912161200g1e5e71actd9ac7f9de37277a3@mail.gmail.com> <4B29A0D2.3040607@lig.net> <01bb01ca8183$d7211990$85634cb0$@com> <4B2E9C12.40004@lig.net> <01cc01ca81c6$180fd940$482f8bc0$@com> Message-ID: <4B31C438.4030806@lig.net> Michael Cummins wrote: >> Touches on, but doesn't definitively reference. In these faux >> news days, that is highly suspect. >> > > I found some of it to be uncomfortable reading as well, but it was still > quite interesting. Mr. Seiyo didn't beat around the bush much. > > > >> The Chinese will be in a more delicate overall position than the US for a >> > very long time. > > Why do you think that? I'm not challenging your assertion, I just don't know > enough about it to hold an opinion. > Just my opinion, based on many factors. All easily disagreed with. Place your bets. One task queued is to learn a little Chinese. Are the great masses of rural subsistence farmers an asset or are they a great drag on any kind of rapid change or movement? Is the broken-but-working-anyway government an asset or a slow motion train wreck? Are the super artificially low wages rational? Would anyone who gains significant skill and knowledge keep feeding it? The language and cultural barrier make it tough to be competitive in many ways. Good enough for manufacturing, way too distant for most other things. Corruption is a way of government, and business to a large extent. Not a good base for anything. What happens to China if we quickly perfect AI-based robot factories? What about other possible major paradigm shifts? Nanotech, etc. The insistence on control, slow social change, murky ownership and reward, etc., along with the gigantic momentum of all of those people, are all going to make China lag in any real paradigm shift. > I *am* bumping into more and more Chinese companies these days, just doing > business. > Sure, Taiwan is still booming, as it will continue to. It is one of the manufacturing hot beds and has a lot going for it. Other business has been branching out. I'm still not convinced they are suddenly going to replace Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, etc. Seems like we have a nice mutually beneficial system going, except for the trade imbalance. While they are nuclear, are now in space, have some decent to great technology in some areas, I don't see evidence that they are going to be leading in multiple areas or even on par. I suspect that many of their successes have involved relatively huge outlays, stolen/borrowed tech, etc. I think that within the next few decades it is more likely that China, and probably India, will be more of a drain on the world than a powerhouse. All kinds of scenarios are possible. There could even be a giant reverse flow of money with the US just for medical care and technology for the projected massive elderly population. Hopefully they will earn enough now to pay us then. And hopefully they don't end up owning the whole country sooner. This web site seems to have a lot of typos, but it has some interesting statements: http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=129&catid=4&subcatid=15 > Population density: 362 people square mile (compared to 4 per square > mile in Mongolia, 72 in the United States, and 1,188 in South Korea). > The population density of China is three times the world average of 91 > people per square mile. In Shanghai, China's largest city, there are > almost 100,000 people per square mile. Only twelve cities on earth, > including China's Shenyang, Tianjin and Chengdu, have higher > population densities. > > In the year 2000 Shanghai had a population of 20 million people; > Beijing and Tianjin had 15 million each; and seven other cities had a > population of more than 5 million each. More than 100 Chinese cities > have a population of more than 1 million. > Population Growth in China > > The population of China is greater than the entire world 150 years > ago. Every year the population of China increases by 14 million people > (the number of people in Texas or Chile). Each decade it increases by > about 130 million (more than the population of Japan). About 39,000 > new people are added everyday. > > Population growth (2007): 0.6 percent. China accounts for 11.4 percent > of the world's population increase. > > Average number of children per woman: 1.75 (compared to 1.5 in Germany > and 7.0 in Ethiopia). The average fertility rate in rural areas is > 1.98; in urban area it is 1.22. > > The population of China is expected to peak at around 1.5 billion > around 2033 when China is expected to be overtaken by India as the > world?s most populous country. The population of China is expected to > start declining around 2042. > Population Problems in China > > With such a huge population, every social problem is magnified. If 10 > percent of the population in China is unemployed, for example, the > number of people out of work is equal to half the population of the > United States. > > Already the strains of over population have caused severe water > shortages in places with high rainfall and produced housing shortages > in cities where the average person lives in the space the size of a > small closet (12 square feet per person). > > The economy in China is booming in part because 70 percent of the > population is of working age. This will change dramatically as the > population ages and fewer children become adults because of the old > child policy. > Graying of China > > Another consequence of a low birth rate and one-child policy is an > increasingly older population. As of 2005 about 143 million people > (more than 10 percent of the population) were over 60. This is more > than population of all but about ten countries. The rate is expected > to increase at a rate of 100 million a decade. By 2050, there are > expected to be 438 million elderly, or one out of four Chinese, > compared with one out of ten in 1980. > > In Shanghai, people over 60 already make 21.6 percent of the > population and are expected to make up 34 percent in 2020. Similar > trend are occurring across the country, especially in urban areas > where the working-age population is expect to peak in about 2015. > > By 2050 China will have more than 100 million over 80. If things don?t > change that means that just 1.6 working age adults will support every > person aged 60 and above, compared to 7.7 in 1975. > As the working-age population shrinks, labor cost will rise. China?s > aging population could undermine the advantages of low-cost labor by > the middle of the 21st century. In 2007 China had six people in the > workforce for every retiree but this ratio while fall to 2:1 by 2050. sdw From sean at conman.org Wed Dec 23 00:29:50 2009 From: sean at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 03:29:50 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] freetable.org: Expressions of interest sought In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20091223082950.GA18169@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Gordon Irlam once stated: > Hi, Why, hello. I'll bite. > Developing a website? Not at the moment, but I've done a few in my time, and I have a few ideas. >?Don't know how to map zip codes to city names? No, but less than a minute at Google [1] brought me to http://www.zip-code-database.org which has zipcodes for each state, along with the lattitude/longitune of the center of each zone. > Unsure why IP address to geographic location data is so expensive when > ICANN/IANA should require it and make it available for free. I know why it's so expensive---because it's difficult to keep it up-to-date for any meaningful result. For instance, our company is based in Boca Raton, FL [2], and for one of our /20s [3], the majority of the addresses do indeed, map to our datacenter in Boca Raton, but we have two /24s [4] going to Charlotte, North Carolina [5]. I'm sorry, but we're [6] busy enough with keeping email going [7]; who's going to pay us to update ICANN/IANA with our routing choices? Oh, that's right---parts of that same /20 is *also* going down to Miami, Florida [8]. I did, however, find free databases that map IPs to countries, so that's a start. >?Annoyed by the developer unfriendly nature of the list of country names > and country codes you have just found? No. There's a nice table at the Wikipedia [9]. > Some friends and I are embarking on a project called freetable.org. Ah, much like: http://www.datawrangling.com/ http://www.freebase.com/ http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/ http://infochimps.org/ http://theinfo.org/ http://www.census.gov/popest/datasets.html http://www.kdnuggets.com/datasets/index.html http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/ http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ Even more amazing, I recently learned that Google Maps lists real estate sales, and there's even a Google Maps-mashup that allows you track ocean-going ships: http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ Pretty cool stuff already. I wish you luck. > We aim to create a public commons for shared data in much the same way > Wikipedia created a public commons for textual data. ?That is, we seek > to be a centralized real time repository for shared data. ?Some > examples of the broad range of data we are considering: > > ? ?- classified, realty, job, and personal ads How does this differ from Craigslist? > ? ?- customer reviews of products and businesses Amazon does this for every product they sell. And a Google search of "product review sites" reveals a ton of ... product review sites. > ? ?- app data for open source applications Such as? That's a prett open-ended description there. > ? ?- geographic, scientific, and economic data A lot of this already exists on the web, just a few searches away. > So if you would use freetable, or if you have or know of an open > dataset that you would like to make use of via freetable, could you > please reply letting me know what that dataset is. Sorry for sounding rude, but if there's an open dataset, why would I get it from freetable instead of the original site? -spc (Heck, the amount of information I can get from my county appraiser office [10] is incredible, and scary ... ) [1] Literally "zip code database" [2] Located at 26?22?21?N, 80?6?23?W---according to another database mapping US cities to lat/long and was able to download and use for a proof-of-concept website I built a few years ago. [3] 4,096 consecutive IP addresses. I could go into technical detail about how this is determined, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. [4] 256 consecutive IP addresses, and usually the smallest unit that can be routed via Internet carriers. [5] 35?11?51?N, 80?50?4?W---same website as [2] [6] A three-man shop [7] A small webhosting company [8] 25?46?32?N, 80?12?39?W [9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1 [10] http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us/papa/index.htm From jbone at place.org Wed Dec 23 04:10:10 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:10:10 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> Message-ID: <90FBAF29-F03D-4A2A-9CF6-1E81BD9BB308@place.org> Ken says: > So my $0.02 is that instead of changing the definition of what a > mine is, just drop it and talk about sifting. Often, the math is the same in "mining" and "sifting" --- it's just a matter of how you feed and store the data. (Often the math *isn't* the same, but that's a different story.) So no, I'm not particularly a "semantics" glosser; but in this case, there's inadequate precision in the terminology already, to the point that the distinction is useless... jb On Dec 22, 2009, at 9:44 PM, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Ken says: > >> But you can't "mine" in realtime. Mining requires a pre-existing >> source of accumulated data. Or it's not mining. By definition. > > Ah, glasshoppah... ;-) > > Cf. "online learning." As opposed to "supervised..." > > My caveat (already stipulated) is that while it's true that today, > for the most part, the two are clearly separable activities, this is > already becoming a blurry distinction about the edges --- and will > become even moreso. > > It's true that the notion of "mining" is useless without some > historical corpus to work against, but the distinction between that > historical corpus and the stream of things coming in in real time is > increasingly meaningless. I.e., you can pick any definitions you > want, but I can tell you from recent and relevant experience that > the definitions you are asserting above are arbitrary and not very > durable. > > $0.02, > > jb > > > On Dec 22, 2009, at 8:21 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: > >> >> Stephen says: >> >>> Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At least not in >>> the traditional forms. >> >> With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in realtime are >> (today) different activities, I have to point at the existence >> proof (what I do for a living these days) as contrary to this point >> of view. And that activity and its general form are going to >> become even more prevalent outside the domain I operate in as we >> realize an Internet of Things. (It's already the case that this >> happens elsewhere; in the UK to a large extent and in the US to a >> much lesser extent realtime face recognition over public camera >> networks occurs already today...) >> >> qed, >> >> >> jb >> >> > From jbone at place.org Wed Dec 23 04:19:54 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:19:54 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <90FBAF29-F03D-4A2A-9CF6-1E81BD9BB308@place.org> References: <272652A8-D280-4DE1-9257-C0AE119DE290@place.org> <23CCCE0F-9059-448D-B599-58D25B0C888B@place.org> <90FBAF29-F03D-4A2A-9CF6-1E81BD9BB308@place.org> Message-ID: <3043560A-8B8A-4D37-891A-3CBD647C9626@place.org> One other bit: > Notice I don't really like to use the term "realtime" because it > never is. I feel ya on this one. However, at the edges of this stuff --- even in non-physical apps like the kind I deal with, much less robotic and vehicular control apps and so on --- "real time" (at least to the extent of being able to determine "when" some thing happened relative to some other thing from some specific point of view, i.e. meaningful time stamp generation) is now measured at precision *below that of the clock cycle of the hardware it's on* and reaction times become frequently critical in the microsecond range, with nano looming. And for those "when did X happen" problems, and with a close eye to special relativity in the multi-machine case, even GPS-enabled NTP has become too "sloppy" and you find things like PTP and other, more precise protocols cropping up. (Even that is ultimately a losing battle because, in the limit, the notions of simultaneity and global total ordering are non-physically meaningful.) IME, RT is --- and for some time has been --- more about whether the hardware / software stack is such that it permits earliest-possible reaction to events --- i.e., user tasks can pre-empt system tasks when necessary --- rather than the slippery slope of precision. $0.02, jb On Dec 23, 2009, at 6:10 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Ken says: > >> So my $0.02 is that instead of changing the definition of what a >> mine is, just drop it and talk about sifting. > > Often, the math is the same in "mining" and "sifting" --- it's just > a matter of how you feed and store the data. (Often the math > *isn't* the same, but that's a different story.) > > So no, I'm not particularly a "semantics" glosser; but in this > case, there's inadequate precision in the terminology already, to > the point that the distinction is useless... > > jb > > > On Dec 22, 2009, at 9:44 PM, Jeff Bone wrote: > >> >> Ken says: >> >>> But you can't "mine" in realtime. Mining requires a pre-existing >>> source of accumulated data. Or it's not mining. By definition. >> >> Ah, glasshoppah... ;-) >> >> Cf. "online learning." As opposed to "supervised..." >> >> My caveat (already stipulated) is that while it's true that today, >> for the most part, the two are clearly separable activities, this >> is already becoming a blurry distinction about the edges --- and >> will become even moreso. >> >> It's true that the notion of "mining" is useless without some >> historical corpus to work against, but the distinction between that >> historical corpus and the stream of things coming in in real time >> is increasingly meaningless. I.e., you can pick any definitions >> you want, but I can tell you from recent and relevant experience >> that the definitions you are asserting above are arbitrary and not >> very durable. >> >> $0.02, >> >> jb >> >> >> On Dec 22, 2009, at 8:21 AM, Jeff Bone wrote: >> >>> >>> Stephen says: >>> >>>> Mining, sifting, and real-time do not go together. At least not >>>> in the traditional forms. >>> >>> With the caveat that mining and sifting / reacting in realtime are >>> (today) different activities, I have to point at the existence >>> proof (what I do for a living these days) as contrary to this >>> point of view. And that activity and its general form are going >>> to become even more prevalent outside the domain I operate in as >>> we realize an Internet of Things. (It's already the case that >>> this happens elsewhere; in the UK to a large extent and in the US >>> to a much lesser extent realtime face recognition over public >>> camera networks occurs already today...) >>> >>> qed, >>> >>> >>> jb >>> >>> >> > From jbone at place.org Wed Dec 23 04:38:42 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 06:38:42 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] zip code distance Message-ID: <1D480A26-DBBD-47A3-B0CE-8557F4D2C8B5@place.org> Tangential to the freetable discussion (I'd *love* to have a centralized repo of various public data sources, normalized to a simple textual format; I already download and do this for several for my own purposes, but would prefer not to be a curator of this sort of thing. But I've amassed quite a list of such data sources; Gordon, ping me off-list and I'll drop you a roundup of such things if useful.) But --- re zip codes, I recently had a need to find the distance between (severals pairs of) two zip codes as a part of a little throw- away script I was writing. Here's something that others might find useful. It probably violates geocoder's terms-of-use and is DAMN slow and wasteful anyway (could easily be replaced by script that might take, oh, two minutes to write over any of a dozen public zip mapping databases out there that could be downloaded locally. AT LEAST it should cache / memoize and deal with reflexivity.) Usually works, doesn't actually *return* anything useful, could easily be improved in an infinite number of ways. With those caveats and a stern admonition not to use this for any purpose, ever... zipdist. -- #!/bin/bash # Usage: zipdist zipcode1 [ zipcode2 ] --> distance in miles # replace "78701" in the uri w/ your preferred default function zipdist { local uri="http://geocoder.us/service/distance?zip1=${1}&zip2= ${2:-78701}" curl ${uri} 2>/dev/null | sed -e 's/.*=//' | sed -e 's/ miles$//' } zipdist $* -- jb From wkearney99 at hotmail.com Wed Dec 23 07:12:53 2009 From: wkearney99 at hotmail.com (Bill Kearney) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 10:12:53 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] zip code distance References: <1D480A26-DBBD-47A3-B0CE-8557F4D2C8B5@place.org> Message-ID: > But --- re zip codes, I recently had a need to find the distance between > (severals pairs of) two zip codes as a part of a little throw- away script > I was writing. What defines distance here? A straight line, as the crow flies? Or over-the-roads? Makes quite a difference when local terrain gets in the way... From sdw at lig.net Wed Dec 23 09:14:48 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:14:48 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] zip code distance In-Reply-To: References: <1D480A26-DBBD-47A3-B0CE-8557F4D2C8B5@place.org> Message-ID: <4B325008.50000@lig.net> Bill Kearney wrote: >> But --- re zip codes, I recently had a need to find the distance >> between (severals pairs of) two zip codes as a part of a little >> throw- away script I was writing. > > What defines distance here? A straight line, as the crow flies? Or > over-the-roads? Makes quite a difference when local terrain gets in > the way... Most online "show me the closest" business web applications seem to do just "as the crow flies". In many areas of the country, a reasonable approximation. Often, it isn't, but locals can filter out the error results usually. DC has a lot of "close" / far places. It's kind of strange to have so many route choices in the Bay area when there are even more significant geographical features that should have been strong partitions. sdw From zero at rawbw.com Wed Dec 23 11:44:48 2009 From: zero at rawbw.com (Zee Roe) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:44:48 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> Message-ID: <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> Gordon Mohr wrote: > Cameron reportedly has a three-movie story arc in mind. > > Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect that > might be explained in the sequels. > > - Gordon Chapter 2, whence we go from Dances With Wolves to Dune? From wgstoddard at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 12:02:21 2009 From: wgstoddard at gmail.com (Bill Stoddard) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:02:21 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> Message-ID: <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Sent from my iPod On Dec 23, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Zee Roe wrote: > Gordon Mohr wrote: >> Cameron reportedly has a three-movie story arc in mind. >> >> Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect >> that might be explained in the sequels. >> >> - Gordon > > > Chapter 2, whence we go from Dances With Wolves to Dune Gah... Head exploding. That Avatar is a white man guilt movie is a terribly contrived & twisted interpretation. > > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork From zero at rawbw.com Wed Dec 23 12:24:33 2009 From: zero at rawbw.com (Zee Roe) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:24:33 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4B327C81.2020108@rawbw.com> Bill Stoddard wrote: > > > Sent from my iPod > > On Dec 23, 2009, at 2:44 PM, Zee Roe wrote: > >> Gordon Mohr wrote: >>> Cameron reportedly has a three-movie story arc in mind. >>> >>> Yes, the Pandoran biosphere has some strange features. I suspect >>> that might be explained in the sequels. >>> >>> - Gordon >> >> >> Chapter 2, whence we go from Dances With Wolves to Dune > Gah... Head exploding. That Avatar is a white man guilt movie is a > terribly contrived & twisted interpretation. > (spoilers below) True. But in terms of story arc (as opposed to moral), astonishingly similar. From wkearney99 at hotmail.com Wed Dec 23 12:31:37 2009 From: wkearney99 at hotmail.com (Bill Kearney) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:31:37 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: > Gah... Head exploding. That Avatar is a white man guilt movie is a > terribly contrived & twisted interpretation. Tell that to the Washington Post nitwits. Yeesh. From lucas.gonze at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 13:17:08 2009 From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:17:08 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Bill Kearney wrote: >> Gah... Head exploding. That Avatar is a white man guilt movie is a >> ?terribly contrived & twisted interpretation. > > Tell that to the Washington Post nitwits. ?Yeesh. > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From wkearney99 at hotmail.com Wed Dec 23 14:13:27 2009 From: wkearney99 at hotmail.com (Bill Kearney) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:13:27 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com><33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: Oy, yet another idjit. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. ----- Original Message ----- http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM, Bill Kearney wrote: >> Gah... Head exploding. That Avatar is a white man guilt movie is a >> terribly contrived & twisted interpretation. > > Tell that to the Washington Post nitwits. Yeesh. From tomhiggins at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 14:19:23 2009 From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:19:23 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: I posted my reaction to this movie up on FB (short version... a pretty paint by numbers Hero With A Thousand CGI'd Fasces heros call movie with amost no higher thought levels involved in its watching. Paper thin plot, aimed at the Military Bad Tree Hugging Good crowd (read white liberal guilters..who are sitting in stadium seating theaters with tubs of popcorn and plastic 3d glasses (whats the carbon foot print on that darling little cinematic diversion deary))) Story arc? That would require a story. Ok so lets just say this was the Call Of The Hero chapter...go reread Campbell to find out what the next two movies are all about. Like I said, pretty pictures wheeee but no surprises at all . Meanwhile, for a dystopian take on the symbiotic take go back an reread Harry Harrison's "Plant of the Damned" http://feedbooks.com/book/2395 -tom(Hey look, its a Vasquez)higgins From gojomo at boxbe.com Wed Dec 23 14:53:29 2009 From: gojomo at boxbe.com (Gordon Mohr) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:53:29 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: <4B329F69.8070103@boxbe.com> FWIW, here are two apparently canonical (official companion material) sources that flesh out the backstory: 'Pandorapedia' http://www.pandorapedia.com/ Avatar, An Activist Survival Guide: a confidential report on the biological and social history of Pandora http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061896750 (found via: ) - Gordon From nornagon at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 15:16:44 2009 From: nornagon at gmail.com (Jeremy Apthorp) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:16:44 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> James Cameron clearly wasn't trying to construct a deep, plot-heavy film. Have any other James Cameron plots been anything but tissue paper and cellophane? I mean, seriously, 'unobtainium'? 'Flux vortex'? The things that really shine through in Avatar are the script, the acting, the animation, and the characters. It's not supposed to make you think, it's supposed to make you feel and respond to the situations. Which it does, IMO, and extremely well. j 2009/12/24 Tom Higgins : > I posted my reaction to this movie up on FB (short version... a pretty > paint by numbers Hero With A Thousand CGI'd Fasces heros call movie > with amost no higher thought levels involved in its watching. > Paper thin plot, aimed at the Military Bad Tree Hugging Good crowd > (read white liberal guilters..who are sitting in stadium seating > theaters with tubs of popcorn and plastic 3d glasses ?(whats the > carbon foot print on that darling little cinematic diversion deary))) > > Story arc? That would require a story. Ok so lets just say this was > the Call Of The Hero chapter...go reread Campbell to find out what the > next two movies are all about. Like I said, pretty pictures wheeee but > no surprises at all > > . > Meanwhile, for a dystopian take on the symbiotic take go back an > reread Harry Harrison's "Plant of the Damned" > http://feedbooks.com/book/2395 > > > -tom(Hey look, its a Vasquez)higgins > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From lucas.gonze at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 15:21:07 2009 From: lucas.gonze at gmail.com (Lucas Gonze) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 15:21:07 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: BTW, "The Road" is really good. On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 3:16 PM, Jeremy Apthorp wrote: > James Cameron clearly wasn't trying to construct a deep, plot-heavy > film. Have any other James Cameron plots been anything but tissue > paper and cellophane? I mean, seriously, 'unobtainium'? 'Flux vortex'? > > The things that really shine through in Avatar are the script, the > acting, the animation, and the characters. It's not supposed to make > you think, it's supposed to make you feel and respond to the > situations. Which it does, IMO, and extremely well. > > j > > 2009/12/24 Tom Higgins : >> I posted my reaction to this movie up on FB (short version... a pretty >> paint by numbers Hero With A Thousand CGI'd Fasces heros call movie >> with amost no higher thought levels involved in its watching. >> Paper thin plot, aimed at the Military Bad Tree Hugging Good crowd >> (read white liberal guilters..who are sitting in stadium seating >> theaters with tubs of popcorn and plastic 3d glasses ?(whats the >> carbon foot print on that darling little cinematic diversion deary))) >> >> Story arc? That would require a story. Ok so lets just say this was >> the Call Of The Hero chapter...go reread Campbell to find out what the >> next two movies are all about. Like I said, pretty pictures wheeee but >> no surprises at all >> >> . >> Meanwhile, for a dystopian take on the symbiotic take go back an >> reread Harry Harrison's "Plant of the Damned" >> http://feedbooks.com/book/2395 >> >> >> -tom(Hey look, its a Vasquez)higgins >> _______________________________________________ >> FoRK mailing list >> http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork >> > > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Wed Dec 23 16:43:24 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 16:43:24 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <4B31A677.7010103@lig.net> Message-ID: <837055.10845.qm@web33003.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Tue, 12/22/09, Stephen Williams wrote: > >??? > > It's [realtime] still a useful term, just has to have a parameter or > two to be meaningful.? Soft/hard, max/avg. latency, > throughput requirements and distribution, etc. > > Stephen > Agreed. And that's sorta what I was objecting to .. no qualifier or metric or illustrative adjective. Probably should have asked for clarification but I'm doing manual labour for a few days, helping a friend with his snow removal business in the middle of a snow storm that started a couple of days ago. I hate winter. I hate snow. I hate manual labour. So I shot from the lip instead of making nice. And I'm feeling even more picky and petulant tonite so I'm even less tolerant of uses that don't meet the criteria you outlined. Like Gordon's note about his proposed web site where he will have a "centralized realtime repository". ??? How's that again??? Do I smell an oxymoron?? It's okay if you ignore me. I *will* get better. Some day. After the snow stops and we get it all cleared away. Could be working Xmas. If so, I promise not to read anything in FoRK for at least a week. Or at least keep my hands off the keyboard. ;-) ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Ask a question on any topic and get answers from real people. Go to Yahoo! Answers and share what you know at http://ca.answers.yahoo.com From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Wed Dec 23 17:08:31 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:08:31 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B31C438.4030806@lig.net> Message-ID: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Wed, 12/23/09, Stephen Williams wrote: > > Just my opinion, based on many factors.? All easily > disagreed with.? Place your bets.? > Thanks for the list. Food for thought. > > Corruption is a way of government, and business to a large > extent.? Not a good base for anything. > Just so. But are they *more* corrupt than any other jurisdiction? Compared to, say, the United States, for example? >From the outside, there are some of us who view the US as at least as corrupt as many of the countries Americans typically hold up as egregiously corrupt. You'all just do it with more style. The bureaucracy charges license fees. They are frequently used as extortion. The politicians, on behalf of your big buinesses and constituencies with vested interests, negotiate free trade agreements that aren't. The politicians are owned by their largest contributors. When a senator needs millions to get elected, does anyone really believe the big contributors are doing it for altruistic reasons? Where do you think China's businesses learned how to screw people? They have learned well from businesses in the West. Why do you think we have so much consumer protection legistation? Hint: because we need it. We should hardly condemn them for using normal Western business practices when doing business with the West. Sorry to pick on just one of many factors but I'm curious why you think this one applies particularly to China when I don't see it being any more (or less) corrupt than its peers (India, USA, Russia, UK, any global business). Just another opinion, of course. ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer? 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/ From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Wed Dec 23 18:36:00 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:36:00 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <90FBAF29-F03D-4A2A-9CF6-1E81BD9BB308@place.org> Message-ID: <605796.67445.qm@web33006.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Wed, 12/23/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > > Ken says: > > > So my $0.02 is that instead of changing the definition > of what a mine is, just drop it and talk about sifting. > > Often, the math is the same in "mining" and "sifting" --- > it's just a matter of how you feed and store the data.? > (Often the math *isn't* the same, but that's a different > story.) > > So no, I'm not particularly a "semantics" glosser;? > but in this case, there's inadequate precision in the > terminology already, to the point that the distinction is > useless... > And my point was, quit (mis)using that terminology and use something with the requisite precision. What's the point of an analogy that isn't? ...ken... __________________________________________________________________ Make your browsing faster, safer, and easier with the new Internet Explorer? 8. Optimized for Yahoo! Get it Now for Free! at http://downloads.yahoo.com/ca/internetexplorer/ From ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca Wed Dec 23 19:04:20 2009 From: ken_ganshirt at yahoo.ca (Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 19:04:20 -0800 (PST) Subject: [FoRK] Stand up and face the future In-Reply-To: <3043560A-8B8A-4D37-891A-3CBD647C9626@place.org> Message-ID: <586644.28266.qm@web33008.mail.mud.yahoo.com> --- On Wed, 12/23/09, Jeff Bone wrote: > > IME, RT is --- and for some time has been --- more about > whether the hardware / software stack is such that it > permits earliest-possible reaction to events --- > I'm good with that. As long as "earliest-possible" isn't measured in minutes or days or months. If it's user-interface-ish, the reaction should be perceived as "instanteous". If it's date/time-stamping, it should be so close to the "actual" time that most users will be okay with weasel-words like near-realtime. This will generally be sub-second. How much "sub-" will depend on the nature of the events and why anyone cares about "when" they occured. As you mentioned, this is getting more and more "sub-" all the time. The question is, is "micro-" or "nano-" really necessary? Or is it just another one of those things we do simply because we can? (I'm accepting that there are legitimate cases .. just questioning whether all, or even the majority, of them are/will be.) E.g. when building and installing SCADA systems the users were often hyper concerned about having high availability and high reliability of the admin server, including things like uninterruptable power, etc., just like the monitoring nodes. We asked them if they were putting their terminals/workstations on UPS. They didn't understand the question. ...ken... (The answer was, "No.") __________________________________________________________________ Be smarter than spam. See how smart SpamGuard is at giving junk email the boot with the All-new Yahoo! Mail. Click on Options in Mail and switch to New Mail today or register for free at http://mail.yahoo.ca From simon at thegestalt.org Wed Dec 23 19:53:55 2009 From: simon at thegestalt.org (Simon Wistow) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:53:55 +0000 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 10:16:44AM +1100, Jeremy Apthorp said: > James Cameron clearly wasn't trying to construct a deep, plot-heavy > film. Have any other James Cameron plots been anything but tissue > paper and cellophane? I mean, seriously, 'unobtainium'? 'Flux vortex'? Just to be clear 'unobtanium' is a sort of inside sci-fi joke to mean some sort of McGuffin or just as short hand for materials that have very strong properties. It's even spilled over into real life - for example Skunkworks engineers used the term instead of Titanium in documents whilst building the SR-71. That said, I'm not necessarily arguing that inside jokes belong in movies, especially when they have a potential to come across as just plain dumb. See, sort of, the use of "Sabotage" in the last Star Trek. From rkhare at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 20:15:14 2009 From: rkhare at gmail.com (Rohit Khare) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:15:14 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Metcalfe's greatest PR hack owes something to JP Barlow :) Message-ID: <763CB1EA-8A59-43B4-8BF5-D16CC8096279@gmail.com> > ?That was my greatest publicity stunt of all time,? beams Dr > Metcalfe, whose intermittent vainglory obscures an underlying charm. > ?I am probably more famous for the collapse prediction, and the > eating of that column, than I am for inventing Ethernet,? he says. viz., > Most famously, he was challenged at an industry conference over a > column, published in December 1995, in which Dr Metcalfe predicted > that the internet would collapse under the weight of traffic in > 1996. Would he eat his own words, Dr Metcalfe was asked, if he > turned out to be wrong? Dr Metcalfe said he would. Ahem, that would be yours truly. WWW95, a snowy December day in Boston at the Copley Sheraton IIRC. > He was wrong. The internet did not collapse. Two years later, he > made good on his promise to eat his words?but not without great > fanfare involving blenders, investigation into the ingredients of > newspaper ink, cakes meant to look like newspapers and lots of > audience-baiting. ?He has a flair for the dramatic,? says Dr Cerf, > who was in the audience that day. I, in turn, was heckling him based on a stunt another IDG columnist invented at a sister publication I happened to be a stringer at -- John Perry Barlow's column at NeXTWORLD Magazine: http://www.blackholeinc.com/Library/93%20Aug.html > Eating Well > > By John Perry Barlow > > Winston Churchill once said that there is no meal quite so > nutritious as that of one?s own words. In that case, the astonishing > NeXTWORLD Expo ?93 certainly improved my diet. (Actually, I found > Expo a cornucopia in general...but I digress.) > > As you may recall, I last used this space to write what might be > called a premortum of NeXT, saying that if NeXT were anything but > dead or mighty moribund by late May, I would use the occasion of > Expo to eat my own words. > > Well, I wish to hell we used tastier newspring for this rag. I can't be sure anymore in my old age, but I believe JP shredded it and ate it straight, for the fiber value. Too bad there weren't websites in '93 to document that, eh? :) Best, Rohit http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/tq/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=15048791 Beyond the ether Dec 10th 2009 Bob Metcalfe has grabbed opportunity at every turn in his multiple careers?ever since he invented Ethernet at the age of 27 SUFFERING from jet lag and insomnia while staying at a friend?s house in Washington, DC, in 1972, Bob Metcalfe came across the proceedings of a conference held by the American Federation of Information Processing Societies. It certainly looked sleep-inducing, even for a young computer scientist. So Mr Metcalfe settled down and started reading. But rather than falling asleep, he became intrigued by an account of a wireless network in Hawaii, called ALOHAnet. This nocturnal encounter was the spark that prompted Mr Metcalfe to create a new networking technology, now known as Ethernet, that would help him finish his PhD at Harvard, become a multi-millionaire and revolutionise computing. And it highlights an ability to observe, synthesise and improve things that would serve him time and again as he progressed through his multiple careers of academic, entrepreneur, pundit and venture capitalist. ?Some call it luck,? says Vint Cerf, a founding father of the internet. ?But Bob has an ability to detect and take opportunities. And he is willing to take risk.? Born in Brooklyn in 1946, Mr Metcalfe grew up on Long Island. He did well at high school, graduating second in his year, and went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His parents paid for his first year of studies, but thereafter the young Mr Metcalfe paid for his own tuition by working the night shift programming computers at Raytheon and other companies. He was also captain of the varsity tennis team and graduated in 1969 with two degrees, in electrical engineering and industrial management. ?I don?t remember when I slept,? he says. He went on to Harvard, initially to study for a doctorate in business administration, and switched to applied mathematics instead, earning a master?s degree. But in 1972 his dissertation for a PhD in computer science was rejected. ?It wasn?t theoretical enough,? he explains, still rankling over his antagonistic relationship with Harvard. ?It was too much engineering.? This did not stop him from getting nine job offers, however. Mr Metcalfe ended up working at Xerox?s Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) in California, writing the networking software for a new computer called the Alto, the machine that later provided the inspiration for the Apple Macintosh. While at PARC he also taught at Stanford and, after his fateful encounter with ALOHAnet, finished his PhD by adding more ?theory??a chapter on ALOHAnet?to his dissertation. He then applied some of the principles from that network, which linked computers at the University of Hawaii, to his work at PARC. ALOHAnet?s nodes all transmitted data to a central hub on the same radio frequency, and received data on a second frequency. So if two nodes tried to send packets of data to the hub at the same time, the resulting ?collision? would garble both their transmissions. ALOHAnet solved this problem by having the hub acknowledge every packet it received. If a node failed to receive an acknowledgment, it would wait a while and then try again. This was a cheap and simple way to allow many devices to communicate using a common transmission medium. Dr Metcalfe, as he now was, adopted this approach for the system he was building to enable Alto computers to talk to each other, and to printers, on a network. He improved the rules that determined how nodes should handle the retransmission of failed packets (they were to continue to transmit for a while in the event of a collision, to ensure that all nodes realised that a collision had taken place, and were then to retransmit after a random interval). David Boggs, a Stanford graduate student who was working at PARC, helped Dr Metcalfe adapt his ideas to wired networks based on coaxial cables. Several names were suggested for this new local-area network technology, such as Bulletin Board, Parliamentary Procedure and Lazy Susan. But the name that stuck was Ethernet. Nativity story Years later, as a marketing ploy, Dr Metcalfe thought it wise to pinpoint the birth of Ethernet. So he fixed on May 22nd 1973, the day he circulated a memo about his ideas to PARC colleagues. Now, over 36 years later, Ethernet is widely deployed in networks around the world. It has been improved in many ways, but the way in which the protocol breaks information into packets and then checks for errors in their transmission is still recognisable. Dr Metcalfe did not make money from the actual invention of Ethernet. As he frequently points out to starry-eyed engineers dreaming of fame and fortune, it was the standardisation and commercialisation of Ethernet that lead to its runaway success and his own personal fortune. ?Nothing happens until something gets sold,? he says. Dr Metcalfe persuaded Digital Equipment, Intel and Xerox (the so-called DIX consortium) to make Ethernet an open standard, available to other companies for a modest, one-time licensing fee of $1,000. Perhaps even more important, notes his friend and former PARC cohort David Liddle, Dr Metcalfe also got Microsoft and Sun on board. As he built market momentum behind the technology, Dr Metcalfe recognised the business opportunity presented by the emerging market for Ethernet-compatible products. So he left Xerox and started a consulting company, 3Com, in June 1979. It soon moved into hardware: in September 1982 it started shipping ?EtherLink? adaptor cards for IBM?s new personal computer. 3Com?s sales skyrocketed along with those of the IBM PC, and in March 1984 3Com went public and raised $10m. When Dr Metcalfe started promoting Ethernet, one big problem was to convince people to adopt a networking technology that almost nobody else was using yet. Dr Metcalfe pointed out that each new user would increase the size of the market for Ethernet products, and that as more people adopted the standard, it would make more sense to be in the club?what is today called a ?network effect?. On a slide, he quantified a network?s value as roughly proportional to the square of its number of users. But it wasn?t until a dozen years later that George Gilder, a technology pundit, called this Metcalfe?s law. This argument helped boost sales, but there were missed opportunities, too. Bill Krause, a former HP executive who worked at 3Com in its early days refers to a ?$100 billion mistake? that he and Dr Metcalfe made in overlooking the gold mine of linking entire networks together, rather than just computers. ?A little company called Cisco? saw that bit of the future and became the main supplier for ?networks of networks?, Mr Krause observes ruefully. Indeed, by 1996, Cisco was selling more Ethernet equipment than 3Com, says Eve Griliches, an analyst at IDC, a market-research company. (In November 2009 HP said it planned to acquire 3Com for $2.7 billion.) Dr Metcalfe left 3Com in 1990, and his communications prowess then found a new outlet: he became the publisher at InfoWorld, a weekly computer magazine based in San Mateo, California, and started writing a column called ?From the Ether?. Soon he was widely known for his hyperbolic, often caustic critiques (he once called the FBI to report death threats provoked by his column)?and for his incorrect predictions. Dr Metcalfe says he learned from Stewart Alsop, InfoWorld?s editor, that it was more important to be interesting than to be right. ?I wasn?t as wrong as people like to claim,? he says. ?But on several occasions I was famously wrong.? But he even managed to turn those mistakes to his advantage, using them to raise his own profile. Most famously, he was challenged at an industry conference over a column, published in December 1995, in which Dr Metcalfe predicted that the internet would collapse under the weight of traffic in 1996. Would he eat his own words, Dr Metcalfe was asked, if he turned out to be wrong? Dr Metcalfe said he would. He was wrong. The internet did not collapse. Two years later, he made good on his promise to eat his words?but not without great fanfare involving blenders, investigation into the ingredients of newspaper ink, cakes meant to look like newspapers and lots of audience-baiting. ?He has a flair for the dramatic,? says Dr Cerf, who was in the audience that day. ?That was my greatest publicity stunt of all time,? beams Dr Metcalfe, whose intermittent vainglory obscures an underlying charm. ?I am probably more famous for the collapse prediction, and the eating of that column, than I am for inventing Ethernet,? he says. But he is now reluctant to be drawn into predictions about the internet?s future. When asked about the ?exaflood??the latest incarnation of the idea that the internet is in danger of being overloaded with data?he concedes that he has not been following the debate closely. ?I don?t really know the facts,? he says. Likewise for network neutrality: ?I think I?m supposed to be in favour of neutrality,? he says, ?but I refuse to take that position because I just haven?t been focused on the issue.? A communications specialist Instead, he has moved onto his latest career: since 2001 he has been a venture capitalist at Polaris Ventures in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he is trying to apply lessons from the computer industry to clean-energy start-ups. This has required him to deploy his communications skills in a new way. ?Most of these VCs don?t really give you advice or get back to you right away or introduce you to important people,? says Chris Stone, the former chief executive of SiCortex, one of the firms in Dr Metcalfe?s portfolio. ?But Bob is always there to tell you the truth. He is extremely and brutally honest.? So much so, in fact, that SiCortex was one of two companies Dr Metcalfe dropped from his portfolio earlier this year. In whatever profession he has taken up, there is nothing Dr Metcalfe enjoys as much as a good argument. But his vigorous defence of his views, whatever they may be, does not stop him from seeing the other point of view. During heated board meetings at GreenFuel, the other portfolio company that Dr Metcalfe dropped this year, ?he could very clearly synthesise everyone?s perspective in a brief statement,? including the views with which he strongly disagreed, says Simon Upfill-Brown, the energy start-up?s former boss. Dr Metcalfe delights in a paper published in 2005 by two academics, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, that presents a detailed refutation of his law. The authors argue that if the law were true, network operators would be merging left and right to achieve rapid growth in value. But such mergers do not in fact seem to create as much value as the law suggests. ?The law is not any amazing math,? Dr Metcalfe responds. ?It?s a vision thing. It?s vague. I said the value is approximately the square of the number of users.? And with Metcalfe?s law, as with so much else, the technology community is willing to cut him a bit of slack. ?Only geeks care about this stuff,? says Dr Cerf. The basic idea was right: bigger networks are more valuable. As Mr Alsop puts it, neatly characterising Dr Metcalfe?s career, ?Bob?s so smart and so confident that he gets away with it.? http://www.blackholeinc.com/Library/93%20June.html Exaggerated Report? By John Perry Barlow Mark Twain is reported to have encountered his own obituary and written its author a terse note, "Reports of my recent demise are grossly exaggerated." NeXT users have special reason to relate to this quote right now. Trouble is, "right now," as I write this, is mid-March. You won?t read this until the end of May or later. By then, Steve Jobs may have pulled his greatest resurrection stunt yet. If he hasn?t, an obituary of NeXT Computer might not seem so exaggerated. For the first time, and even though NeXT is doing most things right for a change, I?m having serious doubts that the company can become a serious player. If I?m wrong and NeXT is looking at a real future two months from now, I will gladly use the occasion of NeXTWORLD Expo to eat these words. I?ll literally chow down on this page of the magazine. If I?m not eating paper come Expo, it won?t be because of technology. With NeXTSTEP delivering today what Microsoft, Sun, and Taligent hope to have Real Soon Now, NeXT ought to be able to clean up, right? Maybe not. There seems to have been a failure to communicate. The results are discouraging. To name but one indication of this, I just read an entire issue of UnixWorld devoted to Windows NT and the other new-wave vapor operating system mentioned above. NeXTSTEP wasn?t mentioned once, even in derision. It was as though it doesn?t exist. Moreover, NeXT has been leaking brains as though from a massive head injury. Peter Van Cuylenburg?s departure is meerly the latest in a discouraging parade toward the exits. As one of the departed said to me recently, "The only people left at NeXT are those who simply can?t say no." And left alone at the top of this chaotic organization is the genuinely tragic figure of Steven Paul Jobs, a character with as much hubris as anyone who?s shown up since Euripides quit writing plays. Most of us yearn to do well the things we can?t and tend to diminish the importance of our real gifts. Steve is no different. A truly great visionary and myth-maker, he has strangely but consistently aspired to be a businessman and manager, showing markedly less talent for either of these dreary vocations. As a businessman, he?s had a hard time remembering the role of compromise in the Art of the Deal. While adherence to principle is an honorable attribute, one must enter most negotiations prepared to give something. But, as one industry leader told me, "I?ve tried to do business with Steve Jobs on ten different occasions and it always failed over some meaningless little detail." As a manager, he has a curse for creating organizations that look more like dysfunctional families, filled with people far too dependent upon his whims for their own self-esteem to tell him when he?s wrong. If NeXT fails, I will take it personally. I have staked a lot of my extremely scarce credibility on the proposition that, despite the worst marketing since the Edsel, anything as cool as NeXTSTEP would sooner or later sell itself. Now the time has come to think the unwelcome but nevertheless thinkable: This time, the magic may not work. This column now goes in a time capsule to be opened at Expo. By the time you read these words, their gloom will likely either seem hysterically exaggerated or just another piece of the eulogy. See you in San Francisco. http://www.blackholeinc.com/Library/93%20Aug.html Eating Well By John Perry Barlow Winston Churchill once said that there is no meal quite so nutritious as that of one?s own words. In that case, the astonishing NeXTWORLD Expo ?93 certainly improved my diet. (Actually, I found Expo a cornucopia in general...but I digress.) As you may recall, I last used this space to write what might be called a premortum of NeXT, saying that if NeXT were anything but dead or mighty moribund by late May, I would use the occasion of Expo to eat my own words. Well, I wish to hell we used tastier newspring for this rag. Not only does it appear I still have Steve Jobs to kick around, I may have a longer future in this community than I could have imagined back in March. And no, I don?t believe my faith in this most recent and miraculous resurrection is simply a product of the ol? Reality Distortion Field. For one thing, the RDF ? or at least that large part of it that relies on smooth theatricality ? was barely discernible during Steve?s keynote speech. He suffered a series of audio problems that would have strained the patience of Job, let alone Jobs. He was down to his hole cards, and they looked surprisingly good. Of course, he?s still got NEXTSTEP, which most sensible people who have actually experienced it agree is the best ? I could say tastiest ? operating system in the universe. (I ran into Sun founder Bill Joy on the plane to Expo and he expressed both this sentiment and his genuine sorrow over what both of us, at that point, took to be its last hurrah.) But now we?ve got NEXTSTEP on hardware that doesn?t require a crazy act of faith to buy. NEXTSTEP for Intel shipped on schedule, it works, and it?s packing a whole bunch of cool new features. Further, NeXT has lined up a very credible group of computer manufacturers, nice beige outfits like Dell and Epson, who will preload NEXTSTEP on the machines they market and sell. Most importantly, NeXT now has the ObjectEnterprise arrangement with Hewlett-Packard, which will provide terrific integration, depth, and development speed to any company using HP servers and NEXTSTEP clients. In the wildly unlikely event that I were running MIS for some oil- futures brokerage house, I would go ahead and gamble on NEXTSTEP whether or not UnixWorld knows of its existence. There remain a couple of watch-outs that might bear attention. I?ll get into those next month. But right now, I?ve got that nice feeling I get after dinner. From nornagon at gmail.com Wed Dec 23 20:22:12 2009 From: nornagon at gmail.com (Jeremy Apthorp) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:22:12 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> Message-ID: <14d615330912232022o52942f59ub2f4423ffc39f329@mail.gmail.com> 2009/12/24 Simon Wistow : > On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 10:16:44AM +1100, Jeremy Apthorp said: >> James Cameron clearly wasn't trying to construct a deep, plot-heavy >> film. Have any other James Cameron plots been anything but tissue >> paper and cellophane? I mean, seriously, 'unobtainium'? 'Flux vortex'? > > Just to be clear 'unobtanium' is a sort of inside sci-fi joke to mean > some sort of McGuffin or just as short hand for materials that have very > strong properties. > > It's even spilled over into real life - for example Skunkworks engineers > used the term instead of Titanium in documents whilst building the > SR-71. > > That said, I'm not necessarily arguing that inside jokes belong in > movies, especially when they have a potential to come across as just > plain dumb. See, sort of, the use of "Sabotage" in the last Star Trek. It's pretty obviously an in-joke; I was pointing out the fact that Cameron uses that to emphasise the fact that he doesn't want you to concentrate too hard on the details of the plot -- just that they're here to get something which the Na'vi are stopping them from getting. j From sdw at lig.net Wed Dec 23 21:41:52 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 21:41:52 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Corruption, was: Re: From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> References: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> Ken Ganshirt @ Yahoo wrote: > --- On Wed, 12/23/09, Stephen Williams wrote: > >> Just my opinion, based on many factors. All easily >> disagreed with. Place your bets. >> >> > > Thanks for the list. Food for thought. > > >> Corruption is a way of government, and business to a large >> extent. Not a good base for anything. >> >> > > Just so. But are they *more* corrupt than any other jurisdiction? Compared to, say, the United States, for example? > Overall, the US is hardly corrupt at all. You have to have a pretty distorted lens to believe that it is. In fact, I have never personally observed any instance of corruption by anyone in business or government in the US, and I've seen a lot of both. If I had, I would have reported it instantly. Sure, it happens. In New Jersey especially it seems. But it is very rare in terms of people involved and detectable impact. Sure, billions are spent with questionable justification, not enough competition, etc. Still not above noise for most people. The recent debacles have mostly been about lax regulation / criminals of various kinds / insane risk blindness, not corruption in general. The closest I can see to widespread corruption was that the Wall Street traders of certain kinds had collectively decided that certain things were valid, reasonable, and proper when clearly they were not. I can completely understand that each individual thought that since "everyone was doing it" and no one had stepped in to say it was wrong, that it must be OK. A big, fat, stupid mistake, but not clearly widespread corruption. The actual losses are due to loss of trust causing people to sell, bid less, etc. Corruption can't really exist because it would cause a similar loss of trust. Sure, we have criminals, and if they are in the wrong place without enough openness, they can pull off a lot (Enron, Madoff), but still that is not government corruption. Real corruption doesn't stand long usually and it's big news: NJ, the Chicago senate seat up for sale, Delay et al, etc. > >From the outside, there are some of us who view the US as at least as corrupt as many of the countries Americans typically hold up as egregiously corrupt. You'all just do it with more style. > What's your proof? Someone I know who traveled from Russia recently recounted how the person next to them in the customs processing step was being held up because their reason for travel was to accept an award. Mexico police are regularly found to be working for drug cartels. Canadians... Ha, just kidding. Because of the one party system, more or less feudal control over villages by authorities in many cases, and various other bad characteristics, corruption is a daily issue for probably millions in China. While we may have suspicions fairly frequently, any solid proof would be instantly acted upon. China's one part frequently seems to ignore corruption for as long as possible. > The bureaucracy charges license fees. They are frequently used as extortion. > In the US? It may feel that way, and it may in effect be that way, however it is not explicitly that way. Examples? I've only had to pay an usual tax once, when I shipped rather than carried a backpack from Canada to the US. Otherwise, I have paid only typical personal and corporate income tax and sales tax. Oh, I now pay $30 /yr. for a business license. > The politicians, on behalf of your big buinesses and constituencies with vested interests, negotiate free trade agreements that aren't. > There are mistakes, and there are deliberate attempts to favor certain constituencies, however actual corruption A) doesn't happen in illegal ways too often, and B) doesn't survive too long, usually not more than an elected term or two. I can't comment much on free trade agreements. It's a good idea in general, messy in specifics I suppose. I wonder why we don't have any Mexican or Canadian truckers here. > The politicians are owned by their largest contributors. When a senator needs millions to get elected, does anyone really believe the big contributors are doing it for altruistic reasons? > There is a lot of influence flow of various kinds, however businesses are legally barred from supporting politicians directly for a reason. They have to encourage their owners / employees, but cannot coerce. Money is a major influence, and so are votes. It's a bit like representatives vs. senators, little people vs. the fat cats or the many vs. regional distribution. Politicians are allowed to be influenced. That may even be good in most cases. It is only illegal generally when it is explicitly quid pro quo, i.e. "Pay me $40K and I'll vote your way." Keep in mind that, generally, the contributed money doesn't go into the pocket of the politician anyway, it goes to a reelection / travel / ad fund. The government pays the politician and their staff salary. Sure they get some benefit in meals, nice trips, etc., but it can't go directly to a mansion or whatever. Politicians still have to get elected. If they ignore the bulk of their constituents to vote the corporation's way, they'll get voted out. The next politician will reverse the damage. If they buy an argument and try to convince their constituents and then vote the way that both now want, there's nothing wrong with it. If we, the people, allow them to pull a fast one and convince us to go along with something against our interests, then shame on us. And there has been a lot of shame to be had in the last 10 years. Too bad we can't react faster, have even more openness to figure out the truth sooner, etc., however there are conflicting needs to balance. Sometimes it sucks, but those are the breaks. It never seems to be the case that the problem goes on forever. We always have another party or others who can get pretty vocal, drum up support, protest, etc. Piles of money are not necessarily competitive with a good idea and great representative and strategy. > Where do you think China's businesses learned how to screw people? They have learned well from businesses in the West. Why do you think we have so much consumer protection legistation? Hint: because we need it. We should hardly condemn them for using normal Western business practices when doing business with the West. > Consumer protection legislation, like much legislation, creates appropriate feedback and back pressure between and action and consequences. It is about the elimination of situation where one person acts and another pays. I don't think that their existence is evidence of the necessary badness of people, just in creating a proper functioning set of rules for a business market model. I wasn't talking about corruption in China's businesses at all. That is mostly self-limiting: If a factory screws me, I'll never order from them. I'll post a message and they'll never get another order. They know that. There are criminals we have to beware of, such as the dog food and formula ingredient cheating, and probably-ignorant people cutting corners (lead-based paint, etc.), but little corruption that I know about. I was talking about locals dealing with corruption to do business, live, exercise freedom, etc. What percentage of US businesses do you think are corrupt, and in what ways? > Sorry to pick on just one of many factors but I'm curious why you think this one applies particularly to China when I don't see it being any more (or less) corrupt than its peers (India, USA, Russia, UK, any global business). Just another opinion, of course. > India is famous for red tape, and corruption I suppose. It must be at least a little better now. I doubt there is any serious corruption in the US, Canada, Australia, NZ, any of "core" Europe, Iceland, or even, these days, South Africa, etc. Russia seems far better in most industries, but who knows. Both India and Russia are seriously exporting software development and other tech support, customer support, etc. If there is corruption, it has to be hands off to avoid souring that kind of business. > ...ken... > sdw From whump at mac.com Wed Dec 23 22:04:50 2009 From: whump at mac.com (Bill Humphries) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:04:50 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> Message-ID: On Dec 23, 2009, at 7:53 PM, Simon Wistow wrote: > That said, I'm not necessarily arguing that inside jokes belong in > movies, especially when they have a potential to come across as just > plain dumb. See, sort of, the use of "Sabotage" in the last Star Trek. When I heard The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" in the trailer for Star Trek, I was happy because: 1. It signaled Abrams wasn't going to treat Star Trek as a sacred, inviolate text 2. It introduced Kirk as a smart, but rebellious kid 3. This was the movie shouting "fuck yeah, this is Star Trek!" -- whump From whump at mac.com Wed Dec 23 23:03:20 2009 From: whump at mac.com (Bill Humphries) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:03:20 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> Message-ID: <0BBEB24F-14DF-49DD-93D1-1BA974129891@mac.com> On Dec 23, 2009, at 2:13 PM, Bill Kearney wrote: > Oy, yet another idjit. Annalee will just laugh at that, she's heard worse. Like the right-winger who was screaming at her about how feminism destroyed Japan. People who think that "Avatar" is problematic, and I'm one of them, don't think that liking "Avatar" makes you racist. Avatar is, by all accounts a visually amazing film, I get that people like it. However, "Avatar", "Dance With Wolves," and "The Last Samurai" have a common story: damaged white guy encounters The Other who heals them through their noble (yet savage/backward/alien) ways, and he rallies to lead them. And you know, while I can learn a lot from listening to other cultures, they aren't my therapists, their job isn't to make my feel good about myself, and they aren't there to die dramatically in the third act so I can complete a Hero's Journey?. While the inhabitants of Pandora aren't actual people of color, the movie's plot is "Dances with Wolves," John Carter, and "Last Samurai" redux. How about a movie about Geronimo? He lead his people in a revolt against their oppressors, and his tribe didn't need a broken white guy to help them. -- whump From dmorton at bitfurnace.com Wed Dec 23 23:06:50 2009 From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:06:50 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> Message-ID: <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> There's several readings of the "unobtainium" joke. Its not beyond credulity that the ore has a completely unappealing scientific name, with most people calling it unobtainium, as an in-joke amongst the characters themselves. Still, instead of 1 part dances with wolves, 1 part pocahontas, and 1 part ewoks, I would have liked to see 1 part syriana, and 1 part "buried my heart on wounded knee" thrown in there. I would have liked to see Jake Sully become, instead of a leader, an outsider and advisor - something like Matt Damon's character in Syriana. Would more than a fraction of the audience have been able to follow the story if, as in Syriana, there wasn't a lead character? Probably not. As for the planet-brain, well, we can go down the road of Solaris, maybe Greg Egan's "Wang's Carpets", all kinds of ways it can go. I just cant help but think that of all the ways it could go, Cameron will pick the least interesting path. Over at Military.com there's an article on how it makes the military look bad. And it does, but for different reasons than they describe. You would kind of expect an airborne attack on natives to look more like Apocalypse Now than the tactic- and strategy-free lining up of your gunships like Napoleonic soldiers. For all the richness of the visuals, and the thought put into conjuring up this world, the movie was unbelievably shallow. Other's have commented on the familiar plotline of one of us joining them and becoming the greatest among them. Maybe you just cant sell a movie about them to us without that plot device. There was one movie where it was done nicely, Anthony Banderas in the 13th Warrior - an outcast Muslim noble joins a Viking trading band and returns to Scandinavia with them. What was interesting about that movie was the trajectory where the Vikings came to respect the Muslim for his talents and he for theirs. Maybe I am just getting old, and movies just dont do it for me as much as they used to, but I was attracted for science fiction because it was for thinking and imaginative people. Avatar just doesnt inspire much thought in me, and not much imagination either. Beyond the visuals, It doesn't challenge or surprise at all. With so much money invested in this movie, its almost impossible for the producers to take risks beyond the technical realm. The storyline has to be disneyfied, what subversive motives Cameron may have had were hammered into submission. Or maybe there never were any. Makes me sick to think what this movie could have been. On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 5:04 PM, Bill Humphries wrote: > > On Dec 23, 2009, at 7:53 PM, Simon Wistow wrote: > > > That said, I'm not necessarily arguing that inside jokes belong in > > movies, especially when they have a potential to come across as just > > plain dumb. See, sort of, the use of "Sabotage" in the last Star Trek. > > When I heard The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" in the trailer for Star Trek, I > was happy because: > > 1. It signaled Abrams wasn't going to treat Star Trek as a sacred, > inviolate text > 2. It introduced Kirk as a smart, but rebellious kid > 3. This was the movie shouting "fuck yeah, this is Star Trek!" > > -- whump > _______________________________________________ > FoRK mailing list > http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork > From whump at mac.com Wed Dec 23 23:16:29 2009 From: whump at mac.com (Bill Humphries) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:16:29 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <7023F41B-9DEF-4881-A88B-14E9C6B95898@mac.com> On Dec 23, 2009, at 11:06 PM, Damien Morton wrote: > There was one movie where it was done nicely, Anthony Banderas > in the 13th Warrior - an outcast Muslim noble joins a Viking trading band > and returns to Scandinavia with them. What was interesting about that movie > was the trajectory where the Vikings came to respect the Muslim for his > talents and he for theirs. I was just thinking about "The 13th Warrior," and that reversal of the common trope made it fun. Michael Crichton, when not reactionary, makes an interesting source for adaptations. -- whump From jtauber at jtauber.com Wed Dec 23 23:49:08 2009 From: jtauber at jtauber.com (James Tauber) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 07:49:08 +0000 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> On Dec 24, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Damien Morton wrote: > Over at Military.com there's an article on how it makes the military look > bad. And it does, but for different reasons than they describe. I thought they pulled the standard Hollywood trick of making them privately-funded mercenaries as if to say "the *real* military wouldn't be like this but this is what happens under Capitalism!" James From dmorton at bitfurnace.com Wed Dec 23 23:56:45 2009 From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:56:45 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> References: <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> Message-ID: <8092dc770912232356u16045dd9h7cff3c1d78105be1@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 6:49 PM, James Tauber wrote: > > On Dec 24, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Damien Morton wrote: > > Over at Military.com there's an article on how it makes the military look > > bad. And it does, but for different reasons than they describe. > > I thought they pulled the standard Hollywood trick of making them > privately-funded mercenaries as if to say "the *real* military wouldn't be > like this but this is what happens under Capitalism!" > > They did, but Military.com missed that bit or overlooked it. They look like marines, sound like marines, and act like marines, so they must _be_ marines. From dmorton at bitfurnace.com Wed Dec 23 23:59:30 2009 From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 18:59:30 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> References: <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> Message-ID: <8092dc770912232359r1f9496a0p5df671ab8ad2bbdf@mail.gmail.com> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 6:49 PM, James Tauber wrote: > > On Dec 24, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Damien Morton wrote: > > Over at Military.com there's an article on how it makes the military look > > bad. And it does, but for different reasons than they describe. > > I thought they pulled the standard Hollywood trick of making them > privately-funded mercenaries as if to say "the *real* military wouldn't be > like this but this is what happens under Capitalism!" > > http://www.military.com/entertainment/movies/movie-reviews/avatar-thrills-but-troops-take-hit """ Sully goes on to help lead a massive ambush against the human forces ordered to blast the Na'vi from their village. The problem is, it becomes kind of difficult to cheer for the aliens since they're a.) killing a lot of humans during the assault and b.) those humans look a lot more like everyday Marines or Soldiers than gun-slinging Blackwater mercenaries. It's hard for at least this reviewer to see the entertainment value in blowing up transport ships full of Marines, no matter how malign their mission might be. """ From eugen at leitl.org Thu Dec 24 04:32:48 2009 From: eugen at leitl.org (Eugen Leitl) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:32:48 +0100 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <0BBEB24F-14DF-49DD-93D1-1BA974129891@mac.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <0BBEB24F-14DF-49DD-93D1-1BA974129891@mac.com> Message-ID: <20091224123248.GU17686@leitl.org> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 11:03:20PM -0800, Bill Humphries wrote: > However, "Avatar", "Dance With Wolves," and "The Last Samurai" have a common story: damaged white guy encounters The Other who heals them through their noble (yet savage/backward/alien) ways, and he rallies to lead them. Don't forget Pocahontas. -- Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE From jean.jordaan at gmail.com Thu Dec 24 05:37:34 2009 From: jean.jordaan at gmail.com (Jean Jordaan) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:37:34 +0700 Subject: [FoRK] Corruption, was: Re: From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> References: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> Message-ID: <91d4ce220912240537q58b86527udc9075f2ce9fbba4@mail.gmail.com> > I doubt there is any serious corruption in [...] even, these days, > South Africa, etc. Oh, there's plenty. Read http://www.noseweek.co.za/ -- jean . .. .... //\\\oo///\\ From jbone at place.org Thu Dec 24 06:41:32 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:41:32 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] re RT, precision, distance, etc. Message-ID: <425A4E2B-37D5-4419-8A78-FA13D895C58B@place.org> Ken says: > I'm good with that. As long as "earliest-possible" isn't measured in > minutes or days or months. It's not in the areas I'm involved in these days, of course. But in the limit, what do you measure? In a very-long-haul DTN network, say between Earth and a spacecraft heading out of the solar system, the time (distance) between our perception of an originating event here and the arrival of that event at the spacecraft is at the low end of the range; when we use (meaningful, I assert) words like RT in this kind of context, the time we're really talking about is the time between the arrival of that event at the destination and the earliest- possible time that userspace software on the spacecraft (as opposed to hardware / system software) can react to it. In that case, RT's probably more a factor in relating to local events than remote ones. But I can't imagine a hardware / software stack in which the inherent system-imposed delay between first arrival of some external event and userspace code becoming aware of it, and being able to handle it, being more than micro- or nanoseconds these days. More to the point, though, RT also implies that the userspace code should be able to *complete* its handling of the event without being preempted or interfered with by other, lower-priority, system- or userspace code. (So there's your relatively rigorous definition of what I (and lots of folks working under similar constraints) mean by RT; FWIW, hasn't changed much since the late 80s, cf. Wind River, QNX, Posix 4, etc. In my domain these days, the most-distant events of interest tend to originate milliseconds away, but the ability to react to them within micro- / nano- seconds of their arrival is highly important. > If it's date/time-stamping, it should be so close to the "actual" > time that most users will be okay with weasel-words like near- > realtime. This will generally be sub-second. How much "sub-" will > depend on the nature of the events and why anyone cares about "when" > they occured. So this isn't so much about "RT" as it is about accuracy and precision when trying to paint a causal picture of inherently acausal phenomena. Your definition inherently elevates concerns of human perception higher than they should be these days, for the systems of interest that I'm talking about; you're assuming things that aren't necessarily true about large, interesting classes of software (like the kind I deal with.) The (human) user generally doesn't get involved in these and other automated, optimal-control type problems until after the fact; the events in question to which systems react are generated by other systems and / or physical or other real-world phenomena, and the nature of the game is often to be first to react. Outcomes can ride on whether one is fast enough, accurate enough, precise enough, and can deal with the fuzzy nature of when something(s) "actually" occurred. In the limit, it's impossible to determine the "actual" time of something occurring (cf. Einstein.) Particularly when the gig is to understand and react to some ordering of events originating at different sources, communicated to you over different channels of different light-length and with different and variable delays, this gets tricky. The ability to do this "better" than others is of Darwinian importance in certain areas.... (These kinds of errors / sensory imprecision and inaccuracy, and the systems that deal with them, are the subject of an entire field of study originating in aerospace systems research but applicable elsewehere. Cf. "optimal control theory." It's an interesting problem in e.g. spacecraft control, but broadly applicable elsewhere.) Here's a homework question for you, Ken. What's the difference between "accuracy" and "precision?" > As you mentioned, this is getting more and more "sub-" all the time. > The question is, is "micro-" or "nano-" really necessary? Absolutely. The machines care, and in this case that means I care. ;-) Any time you get an ecosystem of machines going in which events are being generated by and reacted to by machines, without a "user" anywhere in the data path, these concerns will become criticial. Particularly when there's money on the line. (Similar comments apply when some of the events are representations of physical phenomena.) re zipdist, Bill K. asks: > What defines distance here? A straight line, as the crow flies? Or > over-the-roads? Makes quite a difference when local terrain gets in > the way... Excellent question. In fact, since a zipcode is an area rather than a point, there are two interesting issues here. Even if you assume Euclidian distance between zipcodes, there do you put the ends of the measuring line? Closest two points in the two regions? Most distant? Mean of the two? Mean of the distances between all pairs of points drawn one from each region? Some kind of geometric center-to- center? In this case, I was one of those woefully inaccurate human users that Ken is fixated on, and the answers to the above didn't really matter as the potential margin of error given any particular definition of distance between zips was uninteresting regardless of how this was calculated, as long as the calculation was "reasonable." I assumed geocoder's calculation method was reasonable. I.e., I don't actually know what geocoder is calculating but it didn't matter for my particular purpose at that point. (Basically, I needed a quick filter to screen out potential nannies --- based on profiles scraped from a web site --- that lived "more than x miles away." In this case, the margin of error was such that it didn't really impact the outcome.) $0.02, jb From jbone at place.org Thu Dec 24 07:08:09 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:08:09 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op Message-ID: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> Mappings between namespaces and protocols , generic interfaces for things like HTTP, 9p, and similar resourceful and RESTful protocols (op, a latency-insensitive, more RESTful and less chatty 9p derivative) have been much on my mind lately. This has been around for some time, but I stumbled across it again yesterday and found it both amusing and highly relevant: "A sane web protocol is not an oxymoron." cf. http://http02.cat-v.org/ While the name and some of the content is tongue-in-cheek, the points made are quite valid. An appropriately-defined subset of HTTP plus a standard collection of resources and conventions around them can (clearly) stand in for even sophisticated "filesystem" implementations and concepts ala 9p. And the much or all of the statefulness of things like 9p (which makes them somewhat less than RESTful) can easily be dispensed with --- making web space and generic "filesystem" namespace much more congruent. Existence proof, cf. op http://lsub.org/ls/export/op.pdf http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2007/10.op.esoriano.pdf It should be fairly clear to anyone familiar with both HTTP and 9p that a semantics-preserving mapping between them is possible given certain assumptions and subsetting / constraints, and that's even moreso true for e.g. op... This all leads me to recapitulate my longstanding but much-contested points-of-view: DAV is horrible and should be avoided at all costs, and the Web is a filesystem. The sooner both the filesystem and Web communities actually acknowledge those facts and start hashing out the consequences productively rather than unnecessarily amplifying the differences, the better. Just a little pot-stirring for the holidays, enjoy! ;-) jb From wgstoddard at gmail.com Thu Dec 24 07:58:39 2009 From: wgstoddard at gmail.com (Bill Stoddard) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:58:39 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <0BBEB24F-14DF-49DD-93D1-1BA974129891@mac.com> References: <4B316E42.3010308@boxbe.com> <4B327330.80309@rawbw.com> <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <0BBEB24F-14DF-49DD-93D1-1BA974129891@mac.com> Message-ID: <4B338FAF.9010501@gmail.com> On 12/24/09 2:03 AM, Bill Humphries wrote: > On Dec 23, 2009, at 2:13 PM, Bill Kearney wrote: > > >> Oy, yet another idjit. >> > Annalee will just laugh at that, she's heard worse. Like the right-winger who was screaming at her about how feminism destroyed Japan. > > People who think that "Avatar" is problematic, and I'm one of them, don't think that liking "Avatar" makes you racist. Avatar is, by all accounts a visually amazing film, I get that people like it. > > However, "Avatar", "Dance With Wolves," and "The Last Samurai" have a common story: damaged white guy encounters The Other who heals them through their noble (yet savage/backward/alien) ways, and he rallies to lead them. > Over-analyzed into meaninglessness. To offer a different, equally valid (and equally meaningless) interpretation... it's common knowledge the Chinese will rule the world 100 years in the future ergo the CEO, BoD, major stake holders and brains behind of the company funding the Avatar adventure are, ummm, not white people. The white guys are just grunts in the field doing the dirty work. For those who insist on reading meaning into the film (which is a mistake, imo), perhaps Chinese capitalist activity in Africa is a better example? Calling this a white guy guilt movie is trite and boring. Bill From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 08:24:05 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:24:05 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <8092dc770912232356u16045dd9h7cff3c1d78105be1@mail.gmail.com> References: <33423B63-D5AA-418D-8D7A-BB3E7B48C031@gmail.com> <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> <8092dc770912232356u16045dd9h7cff3c1d78105be1@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4B3395A5.7000702@lig.net> Damien Morton wrote: > On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 6:49 PM, James Tauber wrote: > > >> On Dec 24, 2009, at 7:06 AM, Damien Morton wrote: >> >>> Over at Military.com there's an article on how it makes the military look >>> bad. And it does, but for different reasons than they describe. >>> >> I thought they pulled the standard Hollywood trick of making them >> privately-funded mercenaries as if to say "the *real* military wouldn't be >> like this but this is what happens under Capitalism!" >> >> >> > They did, but Military.com missed that bit or overlooked it. They look like > marines, sound like marines, and act like marines, so they must _be_ > marines. > Funny that no one drew a parallel between Avatar "Marines" and Aliens' corporate Marines, especially with Sigourney Weaver involved. Seems very close, except going for pure commercial advantage vs. gaining a new weapon. Stephen From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 08:29:26 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:29:26 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Corruption, was: Re: From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <91d4ce220912240537q58b86527udc9075f2ce9fbba4@mail.gmail.com> References: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> <91d4ce220912240537q58b86527udc9075f2ce9fbba4@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <4B3396E6.8030707@lig.net> Jean Jordaan wrote: >> I doubt there is any serious corruption in [...] even, these days, >> South Africa, etc. >> > > Oh, there's plenty. Read http://www.noseweek.co.za/ > > Cool! I threw that one in as a wild hunch. I had just read the story of Zola Budd. I guessed that they were progressing. The fact that this web site is documenting the corruption is the first step in eradicating it. sdw From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 08:29:57 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:29:57 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Corruption, was: Re: From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B3396E6.8030707@lig.net> References: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> <91d4ce220912240537q58b86527udc9075f2ce9fbba4@mail.gmail.com> <4B3396E6.8030707@lig.net> Message-ID: <4B339705.6070400@lig.net> Stephen Williams wrote: > Jean Jordaan wrote: >>> I doubt there is any serious corruption in [...] even, these days, >>> South Africa, etc. >>> >> >> Oh, there's plenty. Read http://www.noseweek.co.za/ >> >> > Cool! I threw that one in as a wild hunch. I had just read the story > of Zola Budd [1]. I guessed that they were progressing. > > The fact that this web site is documenting the corruption is the first > step in eradicating it. [1] http://www.runnersworld.com/article/1,7124,s6-243-297--13308-0,00.html > > sdw > > From tomhiggins at gmail.com Thu Dec 24 09:50:47 2009 From: tomhiggins at gmail.com (Tom Higgins) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:50:47 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: <4B3395A5.7000702@lig.net> References: <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> <8092dc770912232356u16045dd9h7cff3c1d78105be1@mail.gmail.com> <4B3395A5.7000702@lig.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > Damien Morton wrote: > Funny that no one drew a parallel between Avatar "Marines" and Aliens' > corporate Marines, especially with Sigourney Weaver involved. Not only Ripley but, as my sig line mentioned in the first post I plotzed on this topic, Vasquez. As for pointing out the white mans guilt taint on this movie and then being called trite and boring...there are many reasoned and erudite responses to such throw off lines but I think I will go with the elegant and apropos " I am rubber you are glue..." retort as it contains just about as much worth as the trite and boring trite and boring toss off. -tom(I calls em like I sees em)higgins From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 10:39:00 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:39:00 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> Message-ID: <4B33B544.400@lig.net> Jeff Bone wrote: > > Mappings between namespaces and protocols , generic interfaces for > things like HTTP, 9p, and similar resourceful and RESTful protocols > (op, a latency-insensitive, more RESTful and less chatty 9p > derivative) have been much on my mind lately. > > This has been around for some time, but I stumbled across it again > yesterday and found it both amusing and highly relevant: > > "A sane web protocol is not an oxymoron." cf. > http://http02.cat-v.org/ > > While the name and some of the content is tongue-in-cheek, the points > made are quite valid. > > An appropriately-defined subset of HTTP plus a standard collection of > resources and conventions around them can (clearly) stand in for even > sophisticated "filesystem" implementations and concepts ala 9p. And > the much or all of the statefulness of things like 9p (which makes > them somewhat less than RESTful) can easily be dispensed with --- > making web space and generic "filesystem" namespace much more > congruent. Existence proof, cf. op A) Cool. I agree. B) Anything that continues to remain client/server rather than at least having a p2p mode is broken. Especially anything new. UPnP works almost everywhere now, thanks to Xbox 360 et al, Rendezvous is easy. You can tunnel most things through an HTTPS connection (i.e. a TLS TCP connection with anything inside). We do not need to only cling to HTTP. The syntax and encoding is fine, the half-duplex synchronous nature is not. Anything sane in a general sense must be async, pipelined, channelized lightweight message oriented with end to end flow control and adaptive rate handling. HTTP-like messages over BEEP or AMQP would be fine. And why does everyone think that always implies a big hairy message broker / router / ESB? (RabbitMQ et al.) For most processes, build in the smarts to the code running the connection... Message brokers should only be needed for fan-in/fan-out communications concentration, high security arbitration and logging, large-scale pub/sub repeating, and intermittently connected clients with stronger persistent needs. C) Where is libOpenSkype??? Give me efficient secure bulk pipelined encrypted bandwidth between multiple endpoints using any method that is most appropriate. Let me stream, let me scatter-gather, multi-party Merkle-hash bulk transfer, etc. I need it now. I need it later. I have always needed it. D) If everything is a file, fine, that is a reasonable paradigm for addressing, CRUD, etc. So, what's in the file? And is reading and writing streams of bytes the right generalizing paradigm for pushing everything to? This is right back at the design problem of what comes after Unix pipes, for one thing. If we arrive at a grand unified typed semantic (GUTS) but simple lightweight graph (GUTS Graph) interchange, then fine, maybe. E) Is everything-a-file a reasonable paradigm-for-everything? Or, after totally solving that problem, do I then have to solve a parallel but similar problem of protocols for pub/sub, message queues, database, streaming, services, etc. Can't we solve this once and layer the semantics for each view style on top? Filesystem, database (SQL, SPARQL, NOSQL, value store (key is Merkle hash), objects with swizzling), Imap, web, pub/sub/messages (Buddylist/IM/Twitter/RSS/Skype), etc. > > http://lsub.org/ls/export/op.pdf > > http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/IWP9/2007/10.op.esoriano.pdf > > It should be fairly clear to anyone familiar with both HTTP and 9p > that a semantics-preserving mapping between them is possible given > certain assumptions and subsetting / constraints, and that's even > moreso true for e.g. op... > > This all leads me to recapitulate my longstanding but much-contested > points-of-view: DAV is horrible and should be avoided at all costs, > and the Web is a filesystem. The sooner both the filesystem and Web > communities actually acknowledge those facts and start hashing out the > consequences productively rather than unnecessarily amplifying the > differences, the better. > > Just a little pot-stirring for the holidays, enjoy! Mmm. Mmm. Good. sdw > > > ;-) > > > jb From drernie at radicalcentrism.org Thu Dec 24 10:55:50 2009 From: drernie at radicalcentrism.org (Dr. Ernie Prabhakar) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:55:50 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <4B33B544.400@lig.net> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> Message-ID: <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> Hi all, On Dec 24, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > Anything sane in a general sense must be async, pipelined, channelized lightweight message oriented with end to end flow control and adaptive rate handling. > > HTTP-like messages over BEEP or AMQP would be fine. Just out of curiosity -- does anyone know why BEEP doesn't seem to have taken off? It seems more general and lighter than, say, XMPP, and on alternate weeks I agree with you that it makes more sense than abusing HTTP. Yet (other than my homie Xgrid :-) I'm not really aware of anything "interesting" built using BEEP, nor does it appear to be gaining momentum. Any theories? -- Ernie P. From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 11:44:41 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 11:44:41 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] A comment on Avatar In-Reply-To: References: <14d615330912231516k31f3471bs1952b14503b2e13e@mail.gmail.com> <20091224035353.GE46281@thegestalt.org> <8092dc770912232306w5bb49b19v7c49f9cc5ea13eb1@mail.gmail.com> <0490E224-9ABD-4B52-A52E-29E74F8F7E83@jtauber.com> <8092dc770912232356u16045dd9h7cff3c1d78105be1@mail.gmail.com> <4B3395A5.7000702@lig.net> Message-ID: <4B33C4A9.4020900@lig.net> Tom Higgins wrote: > On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 8:24 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > >> Damien Morton wrote: >> > > >> Funny that no one drew a parallel between Avatar "Marines" and Aliens' >> corporate Marines, especially with Sigourney Weaver involved. >> > > Not only Ripley but, as my sig line mentioned in the first post I > plotzed on this topic, Vasquez. > > As for pointing out the white mans guilt taint on this movie and then > being called trite and boring...there are many reasoned and erudite > responses to such throw off lines but I think I will go with the > elegant and apropos " I am rubber you are glue..." retort as it > contains just about as much worth as the trite and boring trite and > boring toss off. > You can read "white man's guilt" into a wide range of things, mostly erroneously I think. I think the sentiments in the movie are more generic than that, humans vs. nature, humans vs. X, or just advanced/aggressive species/people Y vs. less so species/people/group. There is an error in reasoning going on I think: More advanced, but still not perfected peoples, such as Europeans 150-400 years ago may have had some legitimate rationale for introducing knowledge to various "savages". This was good, or should have been good except for general clumsiness and unexpected problems like introducing disease to new populations. When their goals included conquering and pillaging, this was bad, mostly, at least in the short term. Although, after some time, geographically speaking successful colonization seems to have been good for many areas by comparison to those where it failed: India/Australia vs. Africa. When people then associated backwardness to these new peoples, that was initially neutral since it was true. We're talking intent here, not absolute truth. From their point of view and knowledge, people who seemed to barely be getting by, have no recognizable commerce, and have little recognizable culture seemed to be way back in pre-history in terms of development. When they assumed that this was somehow intrinsic, or when anybody later made the same assumption, this was wrong. When it included importing slavery or other mistreatment from the natives themselves, or inventing other abuse, by extending and solidifying those assumptions, it was horrible. People should have known better and we're all sad about that history. Today, stereotyping someone based on race is totally wrong, and is considered so. (Although a very small and mostly meaningless set of physical, genetic, and other details have certain probabilities.) However, we regularly start with a set of assumption baselines (weak stereotyping) based on what we know about someone's background: country of origin, university, profession, etc. That, again, is just neutral as long as it is fact-based and as long as we amend the estimation based on new information which we solicit willingly. Science fiction / fantasy often explores interesting and difficult problems, often in a new light or point of view. Avatar is about extended first contact, bidirectional opaqueness / other causing misunderstanding, over / unreasoned reaction to hostile situations, greed causing disregard to others, business vs. personal relationships, discounting the value of natural / living systems, science run amok, and narrow-minded rules of engagement causing abuse of power. And I got all of that from the previews. What it is not about is erroneous prejudice based on species / genetics that no longer gives any useful information, which is my definition of racism. Equating that setting and situation with racism is offensive in that it implies that in the future, "we" will become racist regardless of the facts and that implies that we are doing that now. The movie is still in first contact / alien-alien misunderstanding mode. The future racism hasn't even happened in the future in the movie. The 'member-of-group-A-becoming-a-member-of-group-B' and cross-pairing paradigms are the best ways to increase understanding and preventing racism. That people call this betrayal is revealing. Are we not all individuals seeking our best self-actualization? Isn't potential self-sacrifice to prevent guilt-inducing situations a worthy cause? Is the tribal coherence so weak that the defection of a single individual threatens to invalidate the whole? District 9 on the other hand was all about racism. Cleverly and appropriately, by the time the story takes place, the aliens had already been present for some time with extended opportunity for interaction and knowledge. Incredibly, the interviews in the movie were all or mostly real interviews with South Africans, but they were talking about a group of foreigner immigrants / itinerants, not aliens. While there certainly are stupid people who are still racist, I don't see new racism forming. In fact, I haven't observed any racism in young people for a long time and I've been around a lot of teenagers. Parents my age and older still sometimes have a problem, but they're few and ignorant where I choose to live. > -tom(I calls em like I sees em)higgins > Clean your glasses buddy. ;-) sdw From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 12:19:35 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 12:19:35 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> Message-ID: <4B33CCD7.6010809@lig.net> Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote: > Hi all, > > On Dec 24, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > >> Anything sane in a general sense must be async, pipelined, channelized lightweight message oriented with end to end flow control and adaptive rate handling. >> >> HTTP-like messages over BEEP or AMQP would be fine. >> > > Just out of curiosity -- does anyone know why BEEP doesn't seem to have taken off? It seems more general and lighter than, say, XMPP, and on alternate weeks I agree with you that it makes more sense than abusing HTTP. > I know all kinds of details about when it came out, but basically it is a mystery to me why others didn't layer on BEEP. I conversed with Marshall Rose when he released it. I was part of the IETF working group on presence/IM, which ended up having three spinoffs who couldn't reconcile: XMPP, SIMPLE (SIP), and I think a BEEP-based proposal (BXXP at the time, a little too clever). Even though I went on to Jabber.com, Inc. for a while, I thought that XMPP had some basic errors that should have been fixed. And I was wanting to do what AMQP is doing now. With the same or better efficiencies since I had just come from AOL Buddylist/Instant Images. However, most people wouldn't listen, didn't get it. > Yet (other than my homie Xgrid :-) I'm not really aware of anything "interesting" built using BEEP, nor does it appear to be gaining momentum. > It is a good reference design. Needs better libraries and some killer app. I've used it in projects. > Any theories? > > -- Ernie P. > sdw From sean at conman.org Thu Dec 24 14:23:08 2009 From: sean at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:23:08 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> Message-ID: <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Dr. Ernie Prabhakar once stated: > Hi all, > > On Dec 24, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: > > Anything sane in a general sense must be async, pipelined, channelized > > lightweight message oriented with end to end flow control and adaptive > > rate handling. Sounds like SCTP [4]. > > HTTP-like messages over BEEP or AMQP would be fine. > > Just out of curiosity -- does anyone know why BEEP doesn't seem to have > taken off? It seems more general and lighter than, say, XMPP, and on > alternate weeks I agree with you that it makes more sense than abusing > HTTP. I took one look at the RFC for BEEP (RFC-3080) and saw: At BEEP's core is a framing mechanism that permits simultaneous and independent exchanges of messages between peers. Messages are arbitrary MIME [1] content, but are usually textual (structured using XML [2]). Okay, so now my application needs to link against a MIME parser and an XML parser (SAX, lighter weight but difficult to use, or DOM, easy to use but my God the memory requirements [3]). So now my app becomes a bit more complicated. Thanks, I'll stick to UDP [5]. But overall, it sounds like it's trying to do SCTP. -spc (A greybearded C programmer) [1] Not My Footnote [2] Not My Footnote [3] Yeah yeah yeah, I know, gigs of RAM these days, it doesn't matter, but I say Nay! Nay! It *does* matter! Okay, at least to me, it does. [4] Stream Control Transmission Protocol---think reliability and congestion control of TCP but message based like UDP, and can even work of one, or both, of the endpoints change their IP address. And it's at the same level as TCP and UDP. [5] Used UDP in my greylist daemon [6], which wasn't that difficult to use actually. [6] http://www.x-grey.com/ Implements an anti-spam technique that works with both sendmail and postfix (and should support other MTAs with a minimum of work). It uses UDP as the underlying protocol. From sean at conman.org Thu Dec 24 14:47:10 2009 From: sean at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:47:10 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> Message-ID: <20091224224710.GB20218@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Jeff Bone once stated: > > This all leads me to recapitulate my longstanding but much-contested > points-of-view: DAV is horrible and should be avoided at all costs, > and the Web is a filesystem. The sooner both the filesystem and Web > communities actually acknowledge those facts and start hashing out the > consequences productively rather than unnecessarily amplifying the > differences, the better. The web is a filesystem? News to me (and here I was taught that filesytems were a type of database with only one indexed column). Anyway, the HTTP spec goes out of its way to avoid using the term "file", instead calling the endpoint of a URL (or is it URI?) is a "resource". That's because what's at the end of a URL (or is it URI?) "could" be a file, but it could also be something else entirely. Take, for instance, my Electric King James Bible [1][2]. The only "file" (in the traditional sense) is the index page---the rest, all 15 gazillion "pages", don't exist as individual files. Sure, there's Genesis: http://bible.conman.org/kj/Genesis but there's also the Noah and the Flood: http://bible.conman.org/kj/Genesis.6:9-9:17 and just his sons: http://bible.conman.org/kj/Genesis.6:10 There's some intelligence (read: program) that takes the URL (or is it URI?) and maps it to the data that needs to be returned for display on the "page" (or "file" I suppose). Yes, there's an underlying "file" (files, actually) that is (are) read to build the "page" but it seems wierd to me calling the result a "file". When it really isn't. -spc (My blog [3] uses a similar technique for displaying entries [4]) [1] http://literature.conman.org/bible/ [2] I picked the Bible for its structure (me? I'm not particularly religeous), where you can reference whole books (Genesis), chapters (Genesis 1) or even individual verses (Genesis 1:1). [3] http://boston.conman.org/ [4] http://boston.conman.org/2000/08/10-15 http://boston.conman.org/2000/08/15-10 The first link displays the entries chronologically, the sencond displays the entries in reverse chronological order. From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 15:02:41 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:02:41 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <4B33F311.70408@lig.net> Sean Conner wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Dr. Ernie Prabhakar once stated: > >> Hi all, >> >> On Dec 24, 2009, at 10:39 AM, Stephen Williams wrote: >> >>> Anything sane in a general sense must be async, pipelined, channelized >>> lightweight message oriented with end to end flow control and adaptive >>> rate handling. >>> > > Sounds like SCTP [4]. > Similar, but without assumptions on transport and with IETF application protocol like framing (ASCII), yet very lightweight and able to be optimized (pad numbers, etc.). If SCTP were easily used both as the transport and over an arbitrary transport and if it included TLS, then it would give you most or all of what BEEP provides. Since it is implemented natively on many systems, and it seems to be well thought out, perhaps the ideal solution is to use SCTP when it is available at both endpoints and can pass, or to use SCTP layered over one or more alternatives. I happen to be designing yet another async messaging solution, so it's a convenient time to think about it. I wonder if A) SCTP implementations all include TLS [1] and B) if SCTP includes rate-based [3] transmission and all of the improvements in UDT [2]. Another part of some problems is end-to-end flow control. It would be convenient if you could map transactions, messages, and chunks through both each transport and over the whole message path using the same mechanism, with or without various kinds of nesting. SCTP as native & library, with UDT/Rate based flow, TLS, full TCP/select semantics, and able to run over raw packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, HTTP, and libOpenSkype, with a coherent solution for link vs. end-to-end flow control would be the ultimate solution. Where libOpenSkype == automatic secure communication linkage between any 2 or more endpoints based on a unique ID, secure authentication mechanism, and over any required combination of communication link types to get the most efficient communication path: local packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, routed directly in whichever direction is required or routed through a "nearby" system with some policy. All intermediated by either a DNS-like neutral coordination server, or ISP-nearby, or private configured coordination server. Perhaps also with distributed self-healing hash/cache like HTTP cache / memcached + BitTorrent, pub/sub propagation, etc. >>> HTTP-like messages over BEEP or AMQP would be fine. >>> >> Just out of curiosity -- does anyone know why BEEP doesn't seem to have >> taken off? It seems more general and lighter than, say, XMPP, and on >> alternate weeks I agree with you that it makes more sense than abusing >> HTTP. >> > > I took one look at the RFC for BEEP (RFC-3080) and saw: > > At BEEP's core is a framing mechanism that permits simultaneous and > independent exchanges of messages between peers. Messages are > arbitrary MIME [1] content, but are usually textual (structured using > XML [2]). > > Okay, so now my application needs to link against a MIME parser and an XML > parser (SAX, lighter weight but difficult to use, or DOM, easy to use but my > God the memory requirements [3]). So now my app becomes a bit more > complicated. Thanks, I'll stick to UDP [5]. > Those are naive assumptions. First, for a typical application, you would only implement the Mime types you are interested in, which basically means you write a fixed string and read a fixed string, puking on anything else. A set of applications could even define private mime types as very short strings. The point is that the messages are typed and allow Mime-compatible strings. No library, no parsing. Second, BEEP messages are opaque and can be anything you want, including Google Protocol Buffers, XML, SMTP, images, etc. The RFC is just saying that XML messages work well with the text-based framing so you can debug easily, in keeping with SMTP, Imap, HTTP, etc. > But overall, it sounds like it's trying to do SCTP. > It was, for the application level. Their stated goal was to create the base application framing for most non-low level IETF application protocols. [1] http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3436.txt [2] http://udt.sourceforge.net/ [3] http://www.ee.duke.edu/~romit/pubs/xrtp.pdf > -spc (A greybearded C programmer) > > [1] Not My Footnote > > [2] Not My Footnote > > [3] Yeah yeah yeah, I know, gigs of RAM these days, it doesn't matter, > but I say Nay! Nay! It *does* matter! > > Okay, at least to me, it does. > > [4] Stream Control Transmission Protocol---think reliability and > congestion control of TCP but message based like UDP, and can even > work of one, or both, of the endpoints change their IP address. > > And it's at the same level as TCP and UDP. > > [5] Used UDP in my greylist daemon [6], which wasn't that difficult to > use actually. > > [6] http://www.x-grey.com/ > > Implements an anti-spam technique that works with both sendmail and > postfix (and should support other MTAs with a minimum of work). It > uses UDP as the underlying protocol. > Cool. UDP is nice, except when you need efficient security (authentication, encryption), minimal message count (NOT one message per packet), large messages (multiple packets to make a message), or any serious flow control (OS can be better at dealing with start/stop, resend, etc.), or you want to maximize throughput / separation of tasks (multiple tasks sharing 1 TCP port). || fail Have you used SCTP? Has anyone? sdw From sean at conman.org Thu Dec 24 17:02:01 2009 From: sean at conman.org (Sean Conner) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:02:01 -0500 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <4B33F311.70408@lig.net> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> <4B33F311.70408@lig.net> Message-ID: <20091225010201.GA13376@brevard.conman.org> It was thus said that the Great Stephen Williams once stated: > > Similar, but without assumptions on transport and with IETF application > protocol like framing (ASCII), yet very lightweight and able to be > optimized (pad numbers, etc.). Ah, silly me ... I thought that IP was the networking protocol that didn't make assumptions on transport, but then again, I never did like the OSI 7 layer burrito. > If SCTP were easily used both as the transport and over an arbitrary > transport and if it included TLS, then it would give you most or all of > what BEEP provides. I seem to be missing something. SCTP rides on top of IP; what else would you need SCTP to ride on top of, if IP isn't available? (And yes, there are RFCs covering IP over SCSI, ATM and avaian carriers, so I'm having difficulty seeing where you would have SCTP and *not* IP) > Another part of some problems is end-to-end flow control. It would be > convenient if you could map transactions, messages, and chunks through > both each transport and over the whole message path using the same > mechanism, with or without various kinds of nesting. I'm haing trouble parsing that paragraph. What do you mean by it all? > SCTP as native & library, with UDT/Rate based flow, TLS, full TCP/select > semantics, and able to run over raw packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, HTTP, and > libOpenSkype, with a coherent solution for link vs. end-to-end flow > control would be the ultimate solution. Where libOpenSkype == automatic > secure communication linkage between any 2 or more endpoints based on a > unique ID, secure authentication mechanism, and over any required > combination of communication link types to get the most efficient > communication path: local packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, routed directly in > whichever direction is required or routed through a "nearby" system with > some policy. All intermediated by either a DNS-like neutral > coordination server, or ISP-nearby, or private configured coordination > server. Perhaps also with distributed self-healing hash/cache like HTTP > cache / memcached + BitTorrent, pub/sub propagation, etc. Um ... yeah. The only thing I have to say is ... I hope it doesn't break (http://boston.conman.org/2009/12/08.1). > > I took one look at the RFC for BEEP (RFC-3080) and saw: > > > > At BEEP's core is a framing mechanism that permits simultaneous and > > independent exchanges of messages between peers. Messages are > > arbitrary MIME [1] content, but are usually textual (structured using > > XML [2]). > > > > Okay, so now my application needs to link against a MIME parser and an XML > >parser (SAX, lighter weight but difficult to use, or DOM, easy to use but my > >God the memory requirements [3]). So now my app becomes a bit more > >complicated. Thanks, I'll stick to UDP [5]. > > Those are naive assumptions. First, for a typical application, you > would only implement the Mime types you are interested in, which > basically means you write a fixed string and read a fixed string, puking > on anything else. A set of applications could even define private mime > types as very short strings. The point is that the messages are typed > and allow Mime-compatible strings. No library, no parsing. No library I'll grant you, but there's still parsing, even if it is minimal in nature. > Second, > BEEP messages are opaque and can be anything you want, including Google > Protocol Buffers, XML, SMTP, images, etc. The RFC is just saying that > XML messages work well with the text-based framing so you can debug > easily, in keeping with SMTP, Imap, HTTP, etc. As I keep reading the BEEP specification, I keep asking myself "Self, what's the point?" BEEP over TCP includes a window size, which is duplicating what TCP already provides (but I can see why it's done, which is to get around the whole "TCP dropped packets and blocking" issue, which gets into the whole "leaky abstraction" thang and seems to introduce yet another layer that can break on a whim). Looking even further, I see SOAP over BEEP and XML-RPC over BEEP and well ... it just seems overly engineered and complicated (just bcecause it can) just to schlep bits from point A to point B and back. It also seems that a bunch of these layers exist solely to bypass firewalls run by facist network admins that only allow ports 80 (which is invisibly proxied anyway: http://boston.conman.org/2009/11/17.1) and 443 (and really, what's the port of allowing *any* open port if you can tunnel anything through it anyway? http://boston.conman.org/2009/11/18.1), which means that firewalls have to get more instrusive, complicated, and make network troubleshooting all that more difficult (true story: setting up a route for a client in their cabinet at a large data center. One hour later and we still can't get to it from outside because a) the IP is private, and b) the consultants we're working with for the client can't figure out how to forward the network traffice from the public side to the router). > Have you used SCTP? Has anyone? Well, _Unix Network Programming, 3rd Edition_ shows that SCTP is used for ISDN over IP, M2UA, M3UA (SS7 telephony signaling), H.248, H.323 (IP telephony) and SIP. So it is in use. -spc (Having a hard time wrapping my brain around all these layers) From sdw at lig.net Thu Dec 24 19:47:08 2009 From: sdw at lig.net (Stephen Williams) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 19:47:08 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <20091225010201.GA13376@brevard.conman.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> <4B33F311.70408@lig.net> <20091225010201.GA13376@brevard.conman.org> Message-ID: <4B3435BC.2080408@lig.net> I remember Marshall Rose announcing BXXP in about 1999 or 2000, however the RFC is dated March 2001. SCTP was in an RFC in Oct. 2000. It would be interesting to know the relationship. Did Marshall announce BXXP and cause others to work on SCTP? Did SCTP work inspire Marshall to create a complementary (somewhat) solution at the "application protocol building block" level? We ended up not using either very much for various reasons. It is possible that both undermined the other. We get by on HTTP by sheer bandwidth, CPU, memory, and lack of good competition. That is even somewhat true in mobile now, although I think they may be using a rate-based tunnel to a web proxy to avoid severe problems from packet loss, slow start on multiple streams, etc. The Palm Treo / Centro models used a web proxy that resized images, filtered, etc. Seemed to slow things down a lot because, I think, the proxy was either underpowered or it throttled. I'm glad the current generation, Pre et al, are past that. Sean Conner wrote: > It was thus said that the Great Stephen Williams once stated: > >> Similar, but without assumptions on transport and with IETF application >> protocol like framing (ASCII), yet very lightweight and able to be >> optimized (pad numbers, etc.). >> > > Ah, silly me ... I thought that IP was the networking protocol that didn't > make assumptions on transport, but then again, I never did like the OSI 7 > layer burrito. > > >> If SCTP were easily used both as the transport and over an arbitrary >> transport and if it included TLS, then it would give you most or all of >> what BEEP provides. >> > > I seem to be missing something. SCTP rides on top of IP; what else would > you need SCTP to ride on top of, if IP isn't available? (And yes, there are > RFCs covering IP over SCSI, ATM and avaian carriers, so I'm having > difficulty seeing where you would have SCTP and *not* IP) > TCP, UDP, UDT, Skype, XMPP, AMQP/RabbitMQ, HTTP, SCTP->app->SCTP->app... If you can't do SCTP directly, or if your problem involves multiple hops or nesting, then you need to layer. There is a lot more to the world than a point to point link, even with full Internet routing. > >> Another part of some problems is end-to-end flow control. It would be >> convenient if you could map transactions, messages, and chunks through >> both each transport and over the whole message path using the same >> mechanism, with or without various kinds of nesting. >> > > I'm haing trouble parsing that paragraph. What do you mean by it all? > The problems that networking protocols solve appear at multiple levels of abstraction and also sometimes need to be nested. Let's say you are one of the few who realize that doing everything as chains of synchronous RPC calls is terribly inefficient, wasteful, and provides a fraction of the possible throughput. Using asynchronous message queues, you send messages through TCP/UDT/SCTP/* to the first server. That server may do some processing and/or it may be a message router / broker / bus. It produces messages that flow on TCP/SCTP/... to the next tier. That tier does the same, and so on. Now, in a simple application scenario, the sender may be just farming out of a few application requests to get some pipelining and basically expecting the results quickly. Readers all along the pipeline are expected to always pretty much keep up with writers. Describes some Wall Street apps. Now, what happens when the writer has a lot to send and it is always faster than one or more tiers downstream? The chokepoints could be CPU, an Internet data link, writing to storage, etc. The result: packets pile up in memory at the various queues because the individual TCP/SCTP/UDT links are only doing flow control for their endpoints. So, either your application is fragile and takes huge resources, or you build additional flow control at the next layer up. I've architected, designed, and built solutions for this a few times. Here is a SIP example: http://blog.tekelec.com/blog/?Tag=SCTP > In the following figure, a request starting at the caller traverses a > UDP hop, an SCTP hop, and a TCP hop before reaching the callee. Works fine for voice traffic, might work with enough bandwidth for video, and would fall apart completely without a higher level flow control for any serious bulk transfer. > >> SCTP as native & library, with UDT/Rate based flow, TLS, full TCP/select >> semantics, and able to run over raw packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, HTTP, and >> libOpenSkype, with a coherent solution for link vs. end-to-end flow >> control would be the ultimate solution. Where libOpenSkype == automatic >> secure communication linkage between any 2 or more endpoints based on a >> unique ID, secure authentication mechanism, and over any required >> combination of communication link types to get the most efficient >> communication path: local packets, TCP, UDP, UDT, routed directly in >> whichever direction is required or routed through a "nearby" system with >> some policy. All intermediated by either a DNS-like neutral >> coordination server, or ISP-nearby, or private configured coordination >> server. Perhaps also with distributed self-healing hash/cache like HTTP >> cache / memcached + BitTorrent, pub/sub propagation, etc. >> > > Um ... yeah. The only thing I have to say is ... I hope it doesn't break > (http://boston.conman.org/2009/12/08.1). > Although I buzzworded that to the max, an open solution that fits that description would benefit a lot of people. And a closed version already exists that provides the core of that: Skype does all of that automatic virtual secure network plumbing. It just isn't the solution in general because they have to keep control to retain their value. > >>> I took one look at the RFC for BEEP (RFC-3080) and saw: >>> >>> At BEEP's core is a framing mechanism that permits simultaneous and >>> independent exchanges of messages between peers. Messages are >>> arbitrary MIME [1] content, but are usually textual (structured using >>> XML [2]). >>> >>> Okay, so now my application needs to link against a MIME parser and an XML >>> parser (SAX, lighter weight but difficult to use, or DOM, easy to use but my >>> God the memory requirements [3]). So now my app becomes a bit more >>> complicated. Thanks, I'll stick to UDP [5]. >>> >> Those are naive assumptions. First, for a typical application, you >> would only implement the Mime types you are interested in, which >> basically means you write a fixed string and read a fixed string, puking >> on anything else. A set of applications could even define private mime >> types as very short strings. The point is that the messages are typed >> and allow Mime-compatible strings. No library, no parsing. >> > > No library I'll grant you, but there's still parsing, even if it is > minimal in nature. > 2 strcmp's for a typical application. If minimal, fixed size "mime" types were used, a quick compare of 4 bytes. > >> Second, >> BEEP messages are opaque and can be anything you want, including Google >> Protocol Buffers, XML, SMTP, images, etc. The RFC is just saying that >> XML messages work well with the text-based framing so you can debug >> easily, in keeping with SMTP, Imap, HTTP, etc. >> > > As I keep reading the BEEP specification, I keep asking myself "Self, > what's the point?" BEEP over TCP includes a window size, which is > duplicating what TCP already provides (but I can see why it's done, which is > to get around the whole "TCP dropped packets and blocking" issue, which gets > into the whole "leaky abstraction" thang and seems to introduce yet another > layer that can break on a whim). > > Looking even further, I see SOAP over BEEP and XML-RPC over BEEP and well > ... it just seems overly engineered and complicated (just bcecause it can) > just to schlep bits from point A to point B and back. > Then why put SOAP over HTTP? Why do you need HTTP at all? Answer that, and you will have taken your first step. For just part of the answer, and one of the features that few other protocols have: BEEP provides flow control on multiple simultaneous channels, all running over a single TCP (or whatever) connection. This means you could many separate IM/chat/presence channels with minimal traffic (no need to keep identifying the destination), including bulk data transfer at lower priority, all playing nicely with TCP and sharing packets when possible. Instead of sending 5 small packets, plus acks, for 5 separate IM / data transfer channels, you can send 1 packet with the data for all of them. Huge win in some cases. > It also seems that a bunch of these layers exist solely to bypass > firewalls run by facist network admins that only allow ports 80 (which is > invisibly proxied anyway: http://boston.conman.org/2009/11/17.1) and 443 > (and really, what's the port of allowing *any* open port if you can tunnel > anything through it anyway? http://boston.conman.org/2009/11/18.1), which > means that firewalls have to get more instrusive, complicated, and make > network troubleshooting all that more difficult (true story: setting up a > route for a client in their cabinet at a large data center. One hour later > and we still can't get to it from outside because a) the IP is private, and > b) the consultants we're working with for the client can't figure out how to > forward the network traffice from the public side to the router). > Actually, none of this is to bypass firewalls. Layering everything over HTTP is often done for that reason. BEEP, if it had become popular, would have been its own border protocol with explicit firewalling just like HTTP. Already, various protocols are supported directly for security filtering by the Cisco ACE product, including XML messages, HTTP, and others. It does all of the SSL/TLS wrapping and unwrappting, determine what is allowed where, creates audit trails when necessary, and is intended to be the corporate central switching point for message queue traffice, web, email, SOA, database (I think), etc. And Skype is already a master at getting through firewalls. Because they kept tight control of the application, have great although opaque security, and didn't go down the p2p file route (again, it's from the guys who did Kazaa), it is ignored by many corporate and other environments now. For more open networks, uPnP mostly solves the reachability problem, at least for UDP. Not sure if SCTP would flow through or not. Good thing to know. > >> Have you used SCTP? Has anyone? >> > > Well, _Unix Network Programming, 3rd Edition_ shows that SCTP is used for > ISDN over IP, M2UA, M3UA (SS7 telephony signaling), H.248, H.323 (IP > telephony) and SIP. So it is in use. > SS7 is a bit esoteric for most companies and people. It looks like SIP is not actually available and used over SCTP yet: http://blog.tekelec.com/blog/bid/8752/Architectural-Options-for-Core-SIP-Signaling-Networks > What are the challenges of building a large scale SIP-based signaling > network using SCTP as the foundation? > -spc (Having a hard time wrapping my brain around all these layers) > > sdw From jean.jordaan at gmail.com Thu Dec 24 20:28:43 2009 From: jean.jordaan at gmail.com (Jean Jordaan) Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 11:28:43 +0700 Subject: [FoRK] Corruption, was: Re: From Meccania to Atlantis In-Reply-To: <4B3396E6.8030707@lig.net> References: <636013.5556.qm@web33007.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <4B32FF20.9040306@lig.net> <91d4ce220912240537q58b86527udc9075f2ce9fbba4@mail.gmail.com> <4B3396E6.8030707@lig.net> Message-ID: <91d4ce220912242028s3b534380o406cf2b5d048b0a3@mail.gmail.com> >>> I doubt there is any serious corruption in [...] even, these days, >>> South Africa, etc. >> >> Oh, there's plenty. Read http://www.noseweek.co.za/ [...] > The fact that this web site is documenting the corruption is the first step > in eradicating it. It's actually an old-styld print publication with only teasers online. The media in SA is quite free, and the politicians are making periodic sallies at it. But as far as eradication is concerned, Zuma still became president in spite of detailed coverage of his involvement in the arms deal .. among other things. Lucky dip links: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7153473.stm http://www.mg.co.za/article/2006-08-18-arms-deal-the-truth-no-ones-telling -- jean . .. .... //\\\oo///\\ From beberg at mithral.com Thu Dec 24 22:10:47 2009 From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg) Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 22:10:47 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <4B33B544.400@lig.net> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> Message-ID: <4B345767.6030601@mithral.com> Stephen Williams wrote on 12/24/2009 10:39 AM: > E) Is everything-a-file a reasonable paradigm-for-everything? No, it's one of the fundamental misunderstandings of way back then, reasonable for almost nothing. Everything is a message. Some of them sit on a disk for a while before you open them up again, so people got stuck on that. Files are merely artifacts, messages frozen in time. Once you realize that all the "hard" problems everyone is trying to solve with HTTP right now look stupid, all messages crammed into the file concept like a dog in a horse costume. Much the same as XML - an intermediate language for when neither party is willing to speak the other protocol so a 3rd horrific one is used to insure job security, got turned into a language for actually doing things complete with the many orders of magnitude more complexity and overhead involved. People even try to run databases with it. Very little if anything in the universe is supposed to be difficult, just don't tell your boss how easy it could be ;) -- Adam L. Beberg http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/ From dmorton at bitfurnace.com Fri Dec 25 02:38:09 2009 From: dmorton at bitfurnace.com (Damien Morton) Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:38:09 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] merry xmas all Message-ID: <8092dc770912250238p6381eb89q465443bc35f07379@mail.gmail.com> best wishes for the new year to come From jbone at place.org Fri Dec 25 08:18:21 2009 From: jbone at place.org (Jeff Bone) Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 10:18:21 -0600 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> Message-ID: <594AF469-509A-40FF-A05D-017CF751BB64@place.org> Stephen opines: > D) If everything is a file, fine, that is a reasonable paradigm for > addressing, CRUD, etc. So, what's in the file? And is reading and > writing streams of bytes the right generalizing paradigm for pushing > everything to? This is right back at the design problem of what > comes after Unix pipes, for one thing. If we arrive at a grand > unified typed semantic (GUTS) but simple lightweight graph (GUTS > Graph) interchange, then fine, maybe. Think UNIX device drivers; or better, Plan 9 device drivers and file servers. Though at some level you are still "reading and writing streams of bytes" those bytes in many cases have structure, and (particularly in Plan 9) even multiple structures / formats are acceptable. There's a strong congruence to POST here. > E) Is everything-a-file a reasonable paradigm-for-everything? Or, > after totally solving that problem, do I then have to solve a > parallel but similar problem of protocols for pub/sub, message > queues, database, streaming, services, etc. Can't we solve this once > and layer the semantics for each view style on top? Filesystem, > database (SQL, SPARQL, NOSQL, value store (key is Merkle hash), > objects with swizzling), Imap, web, pub/sub/messages (Buddylist/IM/ > Twitter/RSS/Skype), etc. and similarly, Sean Conner says: > The web is a filesystem? News to me (and here I was taught that > filesytems were a type of database with only one indexed column). Everybody gets hung up on files, because we think of files as a static bag-o-bytes and directories as single-indexed static entities. Instead think "everything is a resource" and think of filesystems as resource namespaces with some namespace composition (e.g. mount, stacking where that's allowed, etc.) thrown of top. (This also addresses Mr. Conner's concerns as well. The more-robust notion of namespaces and resources within them evidenced in Plan 9 leads to great user flexibility and simultaneously great parsimony in implementation. It should be more extensively studied. If you think you know what a filesystem is but haven't actually attempted to live in Plan 9 for a while, you're missing a lot IMHO...) Dr. Ernie asks: > BEEP doesn't seem to have taken off? Too markup-centric? Too heavy? Unnecessary given layering on HTTP? Too much firewall friction for new protocols? HTTP as highlander- protocol? ("Port 80. There can be only one.") Just a few thoughts. Ivy seems interesting, too, but not much uptake there either. Re: everything-a-file, Beberg opines... > No, it's one of the fundamental misunderstandings of way back then, > reasonable for almost nothing. > > Everything is a message. Reasonable for almost nothing... except that the bulk of our planetary infrastructure runs on systems that make that assumption (or equivalent ones) to a greater or lesser degree. (And to the extent that it's "to a lesser degree" --- well, that's where we get impedance mismatch and abstraction-leak. You can thank Bill Joy and a host of other stoned grad students sitting in a hot tub in Tahoe during a "study junket" around ~1980 for creating the first cracks in the Grand Unified Theory of UNIX. ;-) :-/ But Beberg's is actually a reasonable point-of-view. It's also manifest in Erlang (well, everything in Erlang is a process *or* a message, and they are different; files also break that in Erlang but Joe has already stated that he now things files should be modeled as processes) and even moreso in the higher-order mobile pi-calculi (where everything is a process, including messages). For the most part I think there's a large equivalence between most of these points of view; basically, you win when you get to a point where "everything is a... x" (or rather, you minimize the number of kinds of things that things can be) and they all support a rather generic interface, putting a large part of the semantics in the composition / coordination / communications and in the values of the communications themselves. The filesystem / resource space view of the world is interesting as it unifies the naming and interaction aspects of things. "Everything is a message" doesn't necessarily address dynamics, which resources in web-space and devices in filesystem-space do; in "everything is a message" you end up with two distinct classes of things, messages and things that can be messaged. (If you say the latter are also messages, then I'd say that's interesting but I'm not sure how to think about that. ;-) Nonetheless, there's a very important and interesting point of view lurking in Beberg's utterance. If you think of "files" (in the usual, static, bag-of-bytes or even structured sense) as named messages from the past to the future, from some producer to some arbitrary number of consumers, you get some interesting mileage. Even moreso if you separate the notion of the persistently-identified / named objects and their state vector (or rather, graph) of individually immutable versions (think implicit versioning in the filesystem; cf. Amoeba bullet, etc.) It's worth pointing out that in most of these things except for the pure higher-order mobile pi-calculi, you do in fact end up with at least two classes of things: the communications between first-class entities (which may be first-class in themselves) and those entities (which generally capture both or either of any "static" named content and any named services.) Random thought re: actual filesystem implementation. Assume immutable file objects, persistent identity across versions, and so on ala Amoeba. Amoeba separates directory services from its "bullet" or chunk store, as is the normal pattern these days. However: if you have effectively separated the notion of persistent IDs and version graphs and have immutable storage of chunks in a flat / hashed namespace, could you not then implement e.g. directories as simple, versioned files on top of that? Can you not model directories as files, too, in that kind of a system? Dispense with the notions of inodes, dirents, and all the rest --- replacing them with simple name and namespace-composition mechanics and particularly-formated versioned files? (And: where do you put the metadata? Also: logs, read-write shared files / objects, etc. become difficult. I have an idea for that, too, that basically couples OT (operational transform) theory / patch theory (conjecture: patch theory is a subset of OT under certain constraining assumptions) with the way Amoeba treated "uncommitted" file objects.) Just more musing, jb From aaron at bavariati.org Sat Dec 26 20:15:08 2009 From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt) Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:15:08 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] Whither BEEP? Re: HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <4B3435BC.2080408@lig.net> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <4B33B544.400@lig.net> <72CEC39C-81E4-446C-82D9-23F6645D509D@radicalcentrism.org> <20091224222308.GA20218@brevard.conman.org> <4B33F311.70408@lig.net> <20091225010201.GA13376@brevard.conman.org> <4B3435BC.2080408@lig.net> Message-ID: <20091227041508.GA20051@aaron-x31> On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 07:47:08PM -0800, Stephen Williams wrote: > Here is a SIP example: > http://blog.tekelec.com/blog/?Tag=SCTP > >In the following figure, a request starting at the caller > >traverses a UDP hop, an SCTP hop, and a TCP hop before reaching > >the callee. > Works fine for voice traffic, might work with enough bandwidth for > video, and would fall apart completely without a higher level flow > control for any serious bulk transfer. Of course, streaming media protocols like RTP or Skype are bandwidth- adaptive, lossy, and meant for applications that are *not* serious bulk transfer. Makes the design *much* simpler, with much less need for trust or coordination between nodes. There's likely a way to make a PtP-friendly protocol that somehow serves both RT/streaming and bulk uses. I suspect you'd end up with something like XBox LIVE - various application-specific protocols over a peer-to-peer VPN over UDP. From aaron at bavariati.org Sat Dec 26 20:39:59 2009 From: aaron at bavariati.org (Aaron Burt) Date: Sat, 26 Dec 2009 20:39:59 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <594AF469-509A-40FF-A05D-017CF751BB64@place.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <594AF469-509A-40FF-A05D-017CF751BB64@place.org> Message-ID: <20091227043959.GB20051@aaron-x31> On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 10:18:21AM -0600, Jeff Bone wrote: > Random thought re: actual filesystem implementation. Assume > immutable file objects, persistent identity across versions, and so > on ala Amoeba. Erlang's lockless immutable variables, as applied to filesystems? A proper log-structured filesystem would be mostly there. A bit of deduplication to correct for pathological cases and Bob's your uncle. The results (a branching tree of slightly different files) would be a bit annoying, but I guess that's where yer OT comes in. Ultimately, we get to the point where filesystems become DVCSs, which don't sound so bad. Thanks for the amusing musing, Aaron From michaelslists at gmail.com Sun Dec 27 02:28:56 2009 From: michaelslists at gmail.com (silky) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 21:28:56 +1100 Subject: [FoRK] longbets Message-ID: <5e01c29a0912270228o4d75c338t7f1d1ecd6f3de0b7@mail.gmail.com> http://www.longbets.org/ " The purpose of Long Bets is to improve long?term thinking. Long Bets is a public arena for enjoyably competitive predictions, of interest to society, with philanthropic money at stake. The Long Now Foundation furnishes the continuity to see even the longest bets through to public resolution. " I don't know, but for some reason I think this site may be useful for some of you guys :) -- silky http://www.mirios.com.au/ http://island.mirios.com.au/t/rigby+random+20 EXURBIA noncommercial BOBBYSOXER weepy, frangible posh: compartmental situation? RUSTPROOF ja... From beberg at mithral.com Sun Dec 27 09:23:36 2009 From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:23:36 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] HTTP 0.2, 9p, and op In-Reply-To: <594AF469-509A-40FF-A05D-017CF751BB64@place.org> References: <1FFCA1AF-D079-4EDC-B140-7F79A82A03F7@place.org> <594AF469-509A-40FF-A05D-017CF751BB64@place.org> Message-ID: <4B379818.3030707@mithral.com> Jeff Bone wrote on 12/25/2009 8:18 AM: > It's worth pointing out that in most of these things except for the pure > higher-order mobile pi-calculi, you do in fact end up with at least two > classes of things: the communications between first-class entities > (which may be first-class in themselves) and those entities (which > generally capture both or either of any "static" named content and any > named services.) Both file and message models have processes. I don't see how this is a weakness, as the actor/data model is very robust. The message model makes vastly more sense once you build more then one machine, and you want to do anything with them. Things like checkpoints and process migration also are more intuitive concepts, things the file model has had people screwing up completely forever. Also easier to teach, as it maps better to what humans do. Messages are obvious, but files require more stretching. It's called Instant Messageing and note Instant Filing for a reason. Imaging the fun of IM if everything was a URL you had to goto, instead of just the message itself. -- Adam L. Beberg http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/ From beberg at mithral.com Sun Dec 27 18:27:44 2009 From: beberg at mithral.com (Adam L Beberg) Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2009 18:27:44 -0800 Subject: [FoRK] At least you're not in Berkeley.... Message-ID: <4B3817A0.1030307@mithral.com> We all know the college is circling a dark abyss of funding and moral due to the California budget. But looks like the high schools are in on the action too. Since they cut the number of kids allowed into the colleges, better cut the number of smart kids down :) ............ Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students. By Eric Klein http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/Content?oid=1536705 Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students. The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse. Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous. Science teachers were understandably horrified by the proposal. "The majority of the science department believes that this major policy decision affecting the entire student body, the faculty, and the community has been made without any notification, without a hearing," said Mardi Sicular-Mertens, the senior member of Berkeley High School's science department, at last week's school board meeting. Sincular-Mertens, who has taught science at BHS for 24 years, said the possible cuts will impact her black students as well. She says there are twelve African-American males in her AP classes and that her four environmental science classes are 17.5 percent African American and 13.9 percent Latino. "As teachers, we are greatly saddened at the thought of losing the opportunity to help all of our students master the skills they need to find satisfaction and success in their education," she told the board. The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at its January 13 meeting. Generally, such agenda items are passed without debate, but if the school board chooses to play a more direct role in the High School Redesign, it could bring the item back as an action item at a future meeting. School district spokesman Mark Coplan directed inquiries about the redesign to Richard Ng, the principal's assistant at Berkeley High and member of the School Governance Council. Ng did not return repeated calls for comment.