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One Computer to Rule Them All
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thursday February 07, @07:53AM
from the and-in-the-queue-bind-them dept.
from the and-in-the-queue-bind-them dept.
An anonymous reader writes "IBM has published a research paper describing an initiative called Project Kittyhawk, aimed at building "a global-scale shared computer capable of hosting the entire Internet as an application." Nicholas Carr describes the paper with the words "Forget Thomas Watson's apocryphal remark that the world may need only five computers. Maybe it needs just one." Here is the original paper."
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Firehose:One computer to rule them all by Anonymous Coward
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Yeah, right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, right... Indeed (Score:5, Funny)
a kill switch like..hmm..how about : whatcouldpossiblegowrong ??
agreed then. Thank you for participating.
Re:Yeah, right... Indeed (Score:5, Interesting)
They turned it on, and got the answer 'there is now'.
Fiction yes, but it was musing on the problem of relience on a single solution to a big problem (being in that case a question, but implying a deeper relience on computers, such that this solution was conceived in the first place). What if the single solution fails, or doesn't do what you want?
I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked.
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Funny)
Or, instead, prepare for a really big OOPS.
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:5, Interesting)
At which point you start to see were IBM's idea actually make sense--they are talking about building a worldwide, distributed, networked collection of cooperating computers... HEY, that sounds an awful lot like the Internet!!
(I swear, the comment quality on Slashdot gets more and more like YouTube every day.)
Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Good idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of 11001001 (Score:5, Informative)
Hosting the entire internet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of Internets! Bah.
The Internet isn't working! (Score:5, Funny)
Hello Multivac! (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe Asimov was right after all?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multivac [wikipedia.org]
So basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it does need just one... (Score:5, Funny)
One OS to rule them all (Score:5, Funny)
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows CD. To my astonishment and distress he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned it on. I was upset because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold and it seemed to have become thicker and heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, in lines finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
4F6E65204F5320746F2072756C65207468656D20616C6C2C204F6E65204F5320746F 2066696E64207468656D2C0D0A4F6E65204F5320746F206272696E67207468656D20 616C6C20616E6420696E20746865206461726B6E6573732062696E64207468656D
'I cannot read the fiery letters,' I said.
'No,' he said, 'but I can. The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Article Summary (Score:4, Informative)
In real life there may be a case to be made for IBM's solution. But making that case has more to do with actually convincing large customers that IBM is substantially cheaper (and runs the software people need). Since that doesn't seem to be happening on a massive scale, I tend to doubt IBM's hype.
We will ask this question (Score:4, Interesting)
And the answer is... (no spoilers. ) (Score:5, Informative)
Phython! (Score:5, Funny)
Reinventing torrents? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm using edge cases? I'm being biased? Well, here's how IBM describes their project: "Such a computer would be capable of hosting not only individual web-scale workloads but the entire Internet."
The *entire* Internet is vastly more complex and demanding on its *backend* than its *frontend* reveals. What can be hosted entirely on a distributed network of desktop machines precludes many trusted and secure online transactions we make use of in the Internet today. It's obvious from the get go, that this will be only usable for a limited subset of online applications (like, hosting Wikipedia for ex.?) , but I guess making overly broad statements caught the eye of some bloggers and journalists.
A free link to the original paper (Score:4, Informative)
Just like mine (Score:5, Funny)
Wonderful. Then, just like my computer, I estimate the data it contains to be about 70% porn.
Recursion (Score:5, Funny)