But... new != noteworthy.

Can is also not the same as "will".

Other than a few test or aborted development efforts and some niche markets, "cloud" computing has yet to become anything more than something for pundits to write articles about.

I predict there will be a few showpiece successes for the technologies labeled "cloud computing" before everyone realizes it's just another marketing label for the same "let's run our programs on someone else's computer" tech that's been around forever.

That'll happen about the same time that consumers/users/business owners realize they really want local control of their data, their computing power, and their applications, and start another cycle of decentralization of apps and systems.

The wheel of time turns...

(grabs fork)

No, just take a few deep breaths and it'll go away.

"Cloud computing" is the current buzzword express. Like "thin clients" or Ubiquitous Java or AJAX or any number of technological trends before it, it's a way for non technical executive types to "lead" by grasping hold of something they don't understand. It's a handle for managers to move large concepts around with. It doesn't matter that it's not a significant advance in technology, science, or cybernetics. Its purpose is to pick an arbitrary spot for the industry to orbit around for a while.

Most importantly, it's a way for technical types to manipulate executives, managers, and marketers. Want to sell an idea or concept to a manager? Ride the buzzword express. Even if it's a no-brainer idea that should be done to keep the company afloat, and the managers are smart enough to realize that, the easiest way to sell it is to use buzzwords. This lets the executives know you're listening to them, gives them a warm fuzzy feeling of being in control, and distracts the marketing people.

The Buzzword Express even labels for you those technical wanna-bes and young idealistic programmer types who have plenty of enthusiasm and not much real world experience. Just listen for the buzzwords...anyone taking them seriously can't be worth too much face time. It helps you weed out the riff-raff.

The only cost is that you sometimes are forced to listen to announcements about it. Just keep breathing...

They're kind of like the TSA... the "war on terrorism" provided an excuse for a grandstanding president with little intelligence to look like a "great statesman" by creating more, bigger government agencies that will have limited usefulness and will never shrink on their own. After all, their creation was an opportunity for elected officials to both appear to be "doing something" about terrorism and to spend a lot of money on their constituents, helping ensure their re-election.

It's a natural human impulse to think "more is better" or "bigger is better"... I'm starting to think it's biologically rooted. At any rate, combining all the intelligence agencies into one big organization only works if all the people involved are egoless, if they all are willing to work together, and if they all don't care if they have a job tomorrow. Most people can't do this, and the folks in charge at these agencies are the ones least likely to be able to do so, especially since many of them are government appointed or union.

The worst part is that many of the people involved with these efforts truly believe that they are doing the Right Thing, that they are the best defense against "another 9/11" and that they must be allowed to continue regardless of whether the US has the money or whether our existing laws stand in their way.

Submitted for your consideration: Which was worse for our country... the 9/11 attack and the aftermath, or the wars, restrictions, loss of freedoms, and problems created by our own government in response to it?

I never believed that 9/11 was anything but a horrible crime. No less than that, but certainly no more than that...

PS: Taco, this beta release of the comments editing software needs finishing...

No software patents, beautiful country, and I've heard the scuba diving and beer are good. Time to move....

That's why it has to be done under the radar, so to speak. Like a viral philosophy movement or maybe even a "club" sort of thing... use the impulse to belong against itself.

If we could "immunize" people against their own behavior by popularizing this sort of thinking, it might make it easier to change the system as a whole long term, so eventually things like this would be taught in schools. But the transition, getting it accepted and popularly used, is the tricky part.

Do you know of any system or philosophy that can teach these principles in an accessible fashion, without a lot of cruft? I'm thinking that creating a self analysis and critical thinking website won't work, it has to be presented as more of a "cool, smart and geeky thinking system"...something we'd see announced on slashdot when the editors were having a good day...

I couldn't agree more. The question is, how can the average person be encouraged to become aware of their own motives? They take any criticism of their affiliated group, their ideas, or thought processes as an expected (and in some cases welcomed) attack on their intellectual and emotional self, is there a way to circumvent these defenses?

A major problem in the US legal system is illustrated here. Even though the activity the programmer is engaging in is both legal and ethical, the software company is attempting to quash competition by threats and implied means. Despite the fact that both parties know who will win and lose in court (either that or they have delusional lawyers, and the former is more likely) the software company will get its way most likely because the cost of mounting a defense is too high to even attempt it.

The problem is, this sort of bullying is borderline legal for US companies (see Abuse of Process) or similar entries on vexatious litigation. It doesn't usually trigger any kind of statutory protection unless it's repeated and obvious.

Similarly to the MPAA and RIAA lawsuits for file sharing, the larger corporate entity involved is relying on the fact that legal defense against them will cost substantially more than complying with their demands, whether the target of the legal action is guilty or innocent.

It's easy to see "simple" solutions to this problem - hire smarter patent examiners, for example or outlaw software patents. These don't fix the real issue, however, which is the excessive level of influence corporations have in the US courts and legislature, and the corresponding changes they have made to the original copyright and patent systems. Originally these systems struck a balance between public interest in a new invention or work, and the right of its creator to profit from it. Nowadays, the systems have been warped into near monopolies enforced by criminal and civil law that benefit certain limited entities. Not the public, and not even the original creator of the work, receive the bulk of the benefit. It is largely the corporations, legal entities created specifically to shield individuals from accountability for their corporate actions, that win here.

Long term, fixing the root of these problems will be very hard. It can be argued that the US Government is too firmly under corporate control for the people of the US to ever take it back. If that's the case, then the US is on a long downward spiral, and someday US citizens will think of these times as a golden age of justice and fairness.

Right now, the only way to have power to affect laws and systems like these is to become a large corporation. Money talks. It's interesting that Google seems to be working toward this end.

Personally, I believe the downward spiral in the US government will end the way such things always have... when the government officials who hold power die of old age, permitting younger officials with different values to lead. There are certain aspects of the system that have become immortal, like the two party lock on government and the spoils system that will be harder to change, but a limited human lifespan is still the saving grace of the US government.

Sounds anecdotal. But you echo what I've said above.. if you really care about time you won't use NTP or any other time sync protocol based on a variable latency network.

Nearly no one does that. Two or three servers per site (depending on redundancy needs) is fine for all the sites I've seen.. use ntp to sync over local lan to those time servers.

Or if you really care about time that much, do go ahead and put a receiver in each server. Share antennas if needed. It's not impossible for those few applications that *really* need accurate time and who aren't for some odd reason interconnected using a common clock pulse over a dedicated network.

If you really want to know, check out the rationale of the folks building Linux clusters with Myrinet instead of Ethernet. Here's a link to a paper discussing one implementation from 2001: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.31.9270

Simply put, when working with high performance computing tasks using parallel toolkits like MPI or on problems that require inter node communication of intermediate results, latency really matters to performance. Minimum latency of Myrinet or similar communications frameworks is a small fraction of what ethernet's latency is.

So to answer your implied assertion, ethernet does not work perfectly well unless you consider "well" to cover the case where running a program takes 10x longer than it otherwise would for certain problems, IE the above mentioned timing-critical ones....

It's not that it's not linked to the real world, it's that it's not news for anyone.

NTP works fine without central servers, by the way. You just sync between machines on your site, which solves 99% of the problems you wanted time sync for in the first place.

This is the sort of story item that I would expect to see in one of the little side news boxes... like announcement of a new release on freshmeat including the new algorithm, or maybe a summary of news from the ntp world on a network time dedicated site.

Most people replying to my post have missed the point, that I'm not trying to say this isn't interesting or worthwhile work... I'm actually not saying anything about the article subject at all.

I'm saying that Slashdot has become less and less focused over time, more and more dumbed down, and less useful.

Of course, I don't pay for it or anything, so I'm not outraged or upset, I'm just lamenting the fact, and hoping that by pointing it out in a semi-sarcastic fashion that someone will take notice and perhaps improve things somewhat.

If I didn't care at all I wouldn't say anything... after all, honest criticism is an attempt to help improve things, right?

So let me get this straight... you're stating that the reason this should be a Slashdot story is because A) The US government may sabotage GPS, and in such a situation our first concern would be accurate time on our computers and B) When we go to mars and/or have problems with time dilation due to near lightspeed travel, we'll need the ability to sync local time over a variable latency network because atomic clocks will still be too expensive?

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this is not a big deal.

Any IT organization still buying its own atomic clocks is probably a government operation. Seriously, GPS based local NTP servers have been out for years.

To answer your implication about time variation between nodes, even a basic ntp server to which your local network nodes sync will keep them in at the same wall clock time, even more so if you follow the protocol and use multiple servers, even if the time source is the servers' quartz clocks. If you have more than a few milliseconds skew after that, you've installed NTP wrong.

If you need more than fractional second timing for syncing a process or physical events, you don't try to coordinate timing over a communications medium without guaranteed latency (like ethernet). This can be seen in certain types of linux superclusters that abandon ethernet and its descendents in favor of synchronous communications.

It's great that these guys are developing a better way to estimate the correct time. I value this sort of thinking, if nothing else.

This sort of breakthrough deserves a web site announcement, or a scientific paper.

If I have to sort through the BS, sponsored articles, and overblown hype to find the useful info on Slashdot, why not skip the middleman and just browse the web itself?

GPS is fine because the reason to have time synced at different sites is to correlate events at those sites. As long as they're in sync, it doesn't generally matter if they are exactly correct with respect to the wall clock. If you need to compare event time to wall clock time, you do the math for the time period in question.

If you have some pathological need to have the exact wall clock time down to the microsecond (an amount of time no human can distinguish) correct and identical at multiple discrete locations, then it's true that GPS won't help you. But few things will.

So. What.

RTTs to under a microsecond! Whoa! That'll make.... absolutely no difference at all to me. As mentioned, if I care about exact time, I use a GPS receiver (two for redundancy).

If I don't care about exact time, then something accurate to within a second or so is just fine... ntp_time fits the bill. If I'm not comparing time sensitive records across sites, I don't even care if the clocks on a site are correct, only that they're in sync.

Yes, this is development of a new system for time. Good for them. It deserves an "attaboy" in an email message, not a story on slashdot.