You have to realize that small countries in the west, like Sweden, Denmark and Norway, are de facto ruled by the US. All important decisions have to go by the embassy, and when told to jump, they will ask how high.
You don't think it's true? Have you in your lifetime ever experienced your government go against US interests, even when it's very clear that doing so is in the interest of the people they govern?
A clear overreach by the FBI, very clumsily handled. Also not all that interesting to the locals. Try issues where lives or large sums of money are involved.
It's always a bit amusing hearing outsiders refer to Scandinavia as 'socialist'. This is very far from the truth.
In Norway, the Labour party has been in power for much of the last hundred years, seems reasonable that it would be quite the socialist haven. In reality, in the last fifty years, anyone rising to power in the Labour party has had to be pre-approved by the CIA (well documented in e.g. self biographies of the people involved).
As it turns out, unsurprisingly, this has not been very conducive to any form of socialism.
> In reality, in the last fifty years, anyone rising to power in the Labour party has had to be pre-approved by the CIA (well documented in e.g. self biographies of the people involved
I think that's a very good point. When I was growing up in Norway, the 'others' were always far away. We were all so similar, in so many ways, it was very difficult to pit us against each other.
After 30-40 years of immigration, we're now much more heterogeneous and the solidarity and feeling of community is almost gone.
When I was growing up, we were taught in school that 'it must never happen again'. It's almost funny how violently people here cling to this understanding of WWII while at the same time seeming to accept all the 'this is who you should hate today' that the media here is peddling now.
A previously open and trusting society, experiencing real cultural clashes, mixed with misunderstandings and fear. This is unfortunately the perfect scenario for some real dark forces to appear, and I think it's not very long until it really goes off the rails here.
> This is unfortunately the perfect scenario for some real dark forces to appear
Well, they kind of did, and you handled it perfectly.
Anders Berivik killed 77 people (mosly kids). Compared proportionally to the population of the US, that would be 4822 people, a lot more than the 2977 victims of the 911 attack.
Yet Norway didn't start imprisoning people without trial, nor harass them at airports.
Well, that's certainly dimmed my views of Rackspace UK a bit. There would appear to be a rapidly thinning list of UK cloud providers who aren't subject to US interference.
Ever expanding bureaucracy is a problem, and the EU has a track record of turning several truly idiotic ideas into law. But people discussing EU regulations should be aware that the level of bullshit and outright lies coming out of the UK press in this regard is staggering.
Looking at the source for the page, the HTML is clean and there is nothing particularly fancy or out of the ordinary about the CSS. It does use semantic HTML (menu, section, nav, etc.), but that shouldn't be a problem.
I'm really curious as to what browser that is, seems like you have triggered some weird bug.
Quite so, hardware is the holy grail. (Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.") I dream of a golden age of experimentation in vertical stacks: specialized hardware designed for specialized classes of application with only so much OS as is needed to support them. Perhaps if the cost of developing hardware falls the way the cost of developing software did, we might see something. Why not an Erlang machine? A Lua machine? A spreadsheet machine?
Enough to bother with?
Order of magnitude is table stakes for interesting, wouldn't you say? Radical experiments demand radical gains. Surely there is room for an order of magnitude if one is willing to sacrifice general-purpose computing.
Order of magnitude performance improvement isn't going to be possible. That basically requires that over 90% of your cycles are currently being wasted by the OS somehow. Maybe this project could get 20% improvement.
You're talking about the OP's project and I was not – at least not when I brought up orders of magnitude. The confusion is my fault. I implicitly changed the subject to my own fantasy tangent.
My point is that if one is going to build a narrow vertical stack up from specialized hardware, there had better be a 10x advantage over running the application the ordinary way or the experiment becomes a why-bother. Also, the application had better be valuable enough to justify the effort.
This vision of systems design has been alive in the Forth community for a long time – maybe not the "iterating on hardware as part of application development" part, but certainly the specialized vertical stack idea, just in a very austere form. They make the tradeoff of dramatically reducing what the software will do in order to make it feasible to develop that way. That's a tradeoff most of us aren't willing to make. But I have a feeling there are more options if one is talking strictly about servers.
> Order of magnitude performance improvement isn't going to be possible.
I think the term 'order of magnitude' has started taking on a connotation of essentially meaning 'a lot'. It's a fair observation, but I hear it bandied about so often that I rarely actually think the parties are in fact using it literally.
It depends on how efficient/inefficient the OS's network stack and data transfer to user space is. For managed runtimes in a VM taking advantage of zero copy APIs is a challenge. I don't think 'order of magnitude' is possible but clearly there are a lot of cases where if implemented correctly this idea could dramatically improve performance.
A company called Wang took this approach with their word processing workstations. It might have been before your time, but anyway, this approach has been tried before and it didn't really work out. General purpose hardware running a general purpose operating system that abstracts away that hardware's peculiarities won the day for a variety of reasons.
Pendulums swing back the other way, though, when there's a game-changing advantage to be had. And server software that only has to produce well-formed output to be sent over the wire has considerable leeway in how those well-formed outputs get produced. We've seen that leeway be exploited in a major way at the programming language level, not so much at the OS level and not at all at the hardware level, yet. The question is what hidden advantages one might uncover by doing so.
Wow feeling old. Wang was a major supplier of purpose-built word processors for offices. 1970s timeframe. Prior to that they made sophisticated calculators for science and engineering and later finance.
Executives and most managers still had secretaries and dictated letters and memos. The Wang system was revolutionary. A multiuser, networkable word processing system that completely changed the game in terms of the time and effort necessary to produce typewritten documents.
They were supplanted in the 1980s by the more general purpose PC but definitely hold a significant place in the history of business computing.
Are general purpose operating systems really that inefficient?
I've thought about "boot into JVM" before, and I think it's enticing for technologists since it's so "clean", but all the projects aiming for this seems to have died from lack of interest (e.g. BEA Virtual JVM/JRockit Virtual Edition).
I'm not asking whether the general-purpose stacks are that inefficient at general computing, but whether there are classes of applications that could gain from a much more specialized stack. "Order of magnitude" comes in only as a way of saying that the gain would have to be large to justify the effort.
Edit: Perhaps I should explain where I'm coming from. I work on a high-performance spreadsheet system. One of the things that makes spreadsheets interesting is that their computational model is powerful enough to be valuable, yet not so powerful as to amount to general-purpose computing. Think of a server that doesn't need to do anything but access spreadsheet data, perform spreadsheet calculations, and serve them over the network to some client. Such a server's responsibilities are so specialized that one can't help but wonder how far down the stack one might push them and what one might gain by doing so. I daydream about this sort of thing.
There's many examples of hardware currently in use that can be programmed using software rather than a soldering iron (or more modern equivalents), but they tend to be within the realm of electronic rather than software engineering.
At a previous job I wrote software for a manufacturing company, and it was a real eye-opener to see one of the head engineers there - who had never in his life wrote a program, as we would understand it - modifying the complex ladder logic of a PLC[1] that operated parts of the factory, while I made changes to the software on the controlling PC. I realised that we were doing essentially the same thing, just in completely different spheres of operation.
Another example would be FPGAs, for relatively cheaply one can get a board with such a chip on it, and prototype all sorts of hardware designs essentially by writing software (in VHDL or Verilog). Again I've not done it personally but a friend of mine in smartcard research does this all the time, and doesn't call himself a software developer either even though it's really the same thing, just a different application to the usual general purpose machine.
Regarding color, I think you're at least a decade late. Eminem released The Slim Shady LP in 1999. Then you got Beastie Boys, Aesop Rock, El-P, Atmosphere, etc.
Let's not forget 3rd Bass, Cypress Hill, House of Pain, etc. White rappers have been around forever; to act like they're some sort of new or even remotely rare phenomenon is kind of silly at this point.
I'm just pointing out what the perception might be which caused the author to pick that headline. Plus, really you can only pick a handful of successful white rappers, for the level of success we're talking about here. Black rappers are far and away the majority.
I'm always amazed at what Americans let slide of governmental abuse as long as big private companies profit. I find it difficult to comprehend that even hard core libertarians will defend laws like these.
Just an observation on my part. Americans who call themselves libertarian often seem to be reflexively pro-corporate, even when it flies right in the face of their professed ideals.
Americans who call themselves libertarian often seem to be reflexively pro-corporate
That's not been my experience. Organizations like reason.com and the Cato Institute regularly criticize businesses that use government regulations to stifle competition and restrict the rights of customers. A solid majority of libertarians support either eliminating or substantially weakening IP laws. (There is a minority that believes that IP be treated the same as physical property, with infinite copyright terms and other silliness).
My primitive reading of libertarian philosophy in this case would go something along the lines of:
Companies should lobby for whatever regulation/deregulation benefits them because they are rational actors in a free market.
However the government should not have the power to actually grant this.
I suppose a hardcore libertarian might allow a contract clause which allows the phone network to hire someone to shoot you in the face if you unlock your phone.
my general observation is that libertarians don't object to "i'm bigger than you, and therefore i get my way", just to "i'm the government and therefore i get my way". nowhere is this thrown into sharper relief than when discussing "i'm the government and therefore i say you cannot use the fact that you're bigger to get your way".
