Plurp: Making Sara Beard Famous

Bigger!

2003.01.26 : 2003.02.01

Saturday, February 1, 2003
Plurp. Before the Mendelsohn concert today, a person from the New York Symphony Philharmonic approached a microphone on the stage and read from a piece of paper.
Music, he said, and science, and exploration, are all distinctly human activities. They all bring us joy. But today, he said, seven brave explorers died. And he asked us to rise and spend a minute in silence.
We rose. And, in the darkened concert hall, two thousand rowdy, restless New Yorkers fell silent. A woman coughed, once. A coat slipped to the floor. But, other than these, there was not a sound, not the merest whisper, for a long, long time in Alice Tully Hall.
We looked at our feet. We looked off abstractly into space. We looked at each other, some of us, wondering if others there felt the same sense of loss, the same sense that, given our dreams throughout childhood, it could easily have been us.

Friday, January 31, 2003
Blab. A reader and former cow orker writes:
Saw this and immediately thought of afternoons around the cafeteria table.
- Mike
- "Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship." - Cicero
Folks don't quote Cicero to us very often. We like that. But anyway! The referenced article is all about Augmented Reality, an idea that we came up with a few years ago only to have it stolen by evil engineers with time machines, said engineers now claiming to have invented it themselves. We hate that.
The idea is that your glasses (or some such) overlay whatever you're looking at with useful augmentations. Historical information about buildings that you're passing. Virtual roadsigns telling you where to find places of interest to you. Or, and this is the killer app for us, this:

We would pay a great deal of money for that.

Blab. Wednesday's gullible reader, having fallen for the line that we are not tracking its every move on the Web, writes:
Maybe I was at the cloned stevewhite.org. Maybe they set the cookies. Maybe therewee no cookies only milk.
There is no cookie, only Zool.

Blab. A friendly spammist sends us a surprising offer.
Dear Friend,
You are receiving this e-mail as our information indicate that you may qualify for participation in the US Green Card Lottery, that would allow you and your immediate family, if you were successful in the Lottery, to Live, Work and Study in the USA ... and even eventaully become a US Citizen.
And someday learn to spell, eh? Awesome. We should tell Ian about this. Or bin Laden.

Blab. A reader suggests an explanation for AOL's stunning ten buh-buh-billion dollar loss last year.
It must have spent it all on those free CD's and random password generators. $100Billion though! -AJL
We always worried about those pricey random password generators. Profligate living, they were.

Blab. This topic seems to have caused a veritable avalanche of reader thought. We apologize.
the AOL lossage is easy to explain. after all, they use the same accounting firm as the RIAA so if you figure that each CD is worth nearly 20 dollars and you ship a diaper-load of CDs to every household, well, you do the math. of course I checked Kazaa and couldn't find a copy of the AOL CD uploaded so I guess they can't blame the loss on piracy.
Dorian
There's that CD theory again! Makes sense to us. It must be true.

Blab. This reader sees humor in vast corporate tragedy. This is our kind of reader.
The AOL loss is pretty funny, really. According to the article you linked to, they took a $54 billion dollar "writedown" in the first quarter of last year ("we noticed the dotcom bubble burst"), and then another ($45 billion dollar) "goodwill" writedown at the end ("people think we're idiots"). The nicely symmetrical numbers add up to $99 billion. In actual money, not counting these little writedowns, I think they're claiming to have made like 5 billion after taxes during the year (although the article is amazingly muddy about when they're talking about the year and when they're talking about the quarter). Them intangible assets are so troublesome...
They should have auctioned off their good will on e-Bay. It just seems certain that they could have gotten more than negative $45B for it, doesn't it? Some wacky guy in Oklahoma, up late at night, figures he'll snatch up all of AOL's good will for, oh, twenty-five bucks?
Hey Martha! Wake up! I just bought all of AOL's good will for twenty-five bucks. Wait'll the Peterson's hear!
You can just picture it, can't you? We worry about you.

Blab. Apparently, the additional work of clicking on a single link for this week's Enigmatic Images Requiring Reader Explication was too much for our lazy, shiftless readers, as only 1.5 readers responded. Tsk!
they are clones.
Yes. And one of them is a calico cat.

Blab. As always, half of the responses ignore the question.
Enigmatic? What happened to A?
- Felis Lynx
We feel certain that it is still right there at the head of the alphabet. Go check.

Blab. A reader, freshly steeped in eldritch horror, sits in the corner of the basement, endlessly repeating:
In his house at P'lurp dead Bluedog lies dreaming.
Or, in the gutteral ...
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Bluedog P'lurp wgah'nagl fhtagn.
We'll just turn the light off and leave you alone, then. All righty.

Blab. A reader puts us in jeopardy.
Dr. Plurp : Beets :: This Reader : Cilantro
What is "Helen," Alex?

Blab. On our pledge never to buy anything from that lazy, shiftless Google ever again, a reader points out something that we didn't know.
Actually, it *is* possible to buy things from Google. Answers, for one thing.
They expect me to pay them to find out why it refused to make Sara Beard famous? It's an outrage.
But hallelujah, brethren and cistern! It seems that our rant against the do-nothing Googlebot was noted somewhere out there in the vast digital darkness, and the naughty bot was forced to come by on Wednesday night and index, not only our "current issue of Plurp" page, but all of last week's entries, including our previously fruitless attempts to make Sara Beard famous.
So congratulations, Sara, and our apologies for it taking so long. You're now Googlable! (And, gosh, won't those folks back in Winterport, Maine be envious.)

Plop. Hey! There are big hunks of ice in the East River today. Who put those there?

Yo. For those of you out there who follow that TV thing:
One of the trio of "Joe Millionaire" finalists has starred in dozens of kinky bondage and fetish films that feature her being handcuffed, gagged, hog-tied, or bound with duct tape. [...]
Ironically, one film features Kozer and a male partner as contestants on a reality television show offering a $1 million grand prize. The film, which opens with a crawl reading, "Reality Television Has Hit A New Low!," centers on a race between Kozer and her opponent--both of whom are bound and gagged--to be the first contestant to free themselves.
Does it get any better than this? We can't imagine how it could.

Plurp. Your popular search targets for our humble site this past week?

quap

helen naked pitures

ian naked pictures

music research

pitures child porn

porn

aaliyah

address

anunnaki

background

"ian naked pictures"? Oh, the horror.

Plurp. The big news today?
A biology professor who refuses to write letters of recommendation for his students if they don't believe in evolution is being accused of religious discrimination, and federal officials are investigating.
In other big news, we hear that there's a physics professor who won't write a letter of recommendation for anyone who believes the Earth is flat. Shocking.

Plurp. Thank you, Bill.
Read between the gaps

Read between the lines

Fill in the gaps

Yow. It's not nice, but it is very funny. (Mike)

Yak. Some wag on TV last night.
Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion.
Don't yell at us. We just report it.

Plurp.

Plurp.
The blue dog wondered
what happened to
Friday

Thursday, January 30, 2003
Plurp.
The blue dog wondered
what happened to
Thursday

Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Blab. A reader wants to know if Sara Beard is ...
Famous enough?
And the answer is: No. Those people are not our ("our") Sara Beard. (And how odd that there should be more than one.) Hopefully, when Googlebot deigns to pay attention to us once again (and, yes, that might be months or years from now), our ("our") Sara Beard will be duly famous.
We'll see.

Blab. A reader sends us stereoscopically blind links.
[link] [link]
Bush. Made in China. Fake setting. Setup for the media. Stuff like that.
Reuters news service reported that the president made his initial remarks in front of “a fake wall” made of cardboard boxes carrying a "Made in U.S.A." stamp. Another group of boxes, which carried marked-out "Made in China" stamps, sat to one side.
The White House told Reuters it did not intend to cover up the markings on the boxes.
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the switch, humorously dubbed “boxgate” by one press report, "appears it was an overzealous volunteer.”
Which, of course, was not corrected by the army of staff that Bush brings to events such as this.
We hope that volunteer likes the weather in Guantanamo.

Blab. A reader engages in wild extrapolation.
Speaking of mechanically secure computers, I saw an ad on a bus the other day for a company that apparently sells computers for use in blue-collar worksites. It showed a laptop case on a chain crashing into a concrete wall and leaving cracks.
Don't try this at home! (Or anywhere else.) Hint: The concrete wall wins.

Blab. On the topic of Kartoffelkanone, a reader writes:
apparently Germans are behind the times, if potato cannons are a new pastime. I was making those years ago. And the problem with those in the darwinism sense is it's relatively hard for them to wound the people that use them.
We think that the German's technological innovation consists of using ignited hairspray as the (incredibly dangerous) propellant. The BFPG 9000s with which we were previously familiar used compressed air, imbuing them with significant but unexplosive power.

Blab. A reader squeezes the depleted teat.
Lunatics on the grass, alas!
The situation is better explained by this reader.
could you tell your brain damaged reader that you'll see him on the dark side of the moon? -AJL
We think you just did.

Blab. A reader prejudices his case.
No no no! The faux-Latin's true use is for project proposals. No one reads them anyway. (If they did, mine would not have been approved.) Steve, there is an on-demand autonomic computing proposal coming your way from your's truely!
- Morton, the un-Swiss.
Regardless, we will try to give it an unbiased examination. But it will be difficult. :-)

Blab. A reader gets all meme-mixingly Christmas carolly on us.
Blessing to the Plurpmeister
Blessing to his wife
Blessing to the blue dog
Blessing to him without name
Blessing to the Kartoffelkanone
Blessing to his beets.
Gotta lose that last line, d00d!

Blab. A reader gets all incredibly nosey.
So did you actually bother to back up your data after the heart-stopping incident?
- Felis Lynx
Of course not! Why would we? We're moving to a new laptop within the week, which we will also not back up regularly.

Blab. A knowledgeable reader writes:
Being in the "telecommunication industry", I should know more about SS7, but we've still yet to integrate it into our systems.... Regardless, SS7 in and of itself will not let you listen in on the conversations in progress. It is used for advanced call control, including initiating outbound calls, controlling inbound calls, etc.   I'm guessing that the FBI reference is about part of what's involved with a standard wire tap, which would involve detecting, controlling, and/or altering calls into or out of a specific location. Seperate equipment would be needed to actually listen in to the convesation, although SS7 could be used to help with that.
This isn't to say that anybody would be able to do any of the above with anybody's phone calls if they used NMS's new API. SS7 usually goes over dedicated links and frame circuits....
- Felis Lynx
All we know is, we're not using telecommunications. Not ever again.

Blab. A reader thinks Bush and Asscroft were separated at birth. And maybe they were.
Bush showed a sense of humor? Is that what this action was all about? Or was it a don't get mad get even gesture? A hastening of the rapture, perhaps. Tap his tie and see him disappear.
Sadly, we found it too much of a bother to register at the LA Times site, so we can't quite follow that link. Still, does our reader hold out the tantalizing promise that we can make Asscroft disappear merely by registering at the LA Times site? Now there's an incentive!

Plop. AOL, the online part of AOL Time Warner, lost $100B this year. That's Buh-Buh-Billion.
How do you lose $100B? Criminey! IBM's annual revenue (not even counting expenses) is $80B, and IBM's a pretty big company. What in the world did AOL do to even spend $100B, much less lose that much?
Astonishing.

Plurp. This week's contest, Enigmatic Images Requiring Reader Explication, is a little different. We aren't presenting any images to you. None. Not one.
Instead, we point you towards these Enigmatic Images, which are quite masterfully collected by Dave.
So, you know, explain them.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was the depleted
teat

Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Blab. A reader riffs on our statement that we have high standards in hiring.
What do you mean by a really really high bar? I don't droll on myself...
Oh stop! Stop! Our tummy hurts from laughing too much!

Blab. A reader milks it.
NO!
The Lunatic was on the grass way before he was in my head. First on the grass, then in the hall, and THEN -- and only then -- in my head.
What. Ever.

Blab. A reader falls victim to our improperly tuned telepathic lasers.
I can't think of anything to say except...
I think it's marvelous
If only we knew what it meant.

Blab. A reader, perhaps desperate for a link, gets it.
plep
We now expect a reciprocal link in whatever that happens to be. We are, of course, too indifferent to look.

Blab. A Germanic fan of monospaced fonts suggests a horror like none we have never known.
|\_._._/|
| o o |
\ ´.` /
|`---´|
|     |    Der blaue Hund feels responsible
|`___´|\_    for little black spots on sidewalks.
/|     |\
##     ##
Please curb your dog.

Blab. A reader reviews current events, which helps us keep up.
Blessing to the Plurpmeister for avoiding mass stuff like superbowls. Having found myself in the company of family in San Diego on Friday, I had some peripheral contact with the "celebrators" of that apparently annual event. It was for the most part auditory, as we lunched at waterside on Coranado we could hear mega-bass wafting over the water as the rituals had begun on the mainland. The rituals, the particulars of which we which we are not privy, included that heavily expelled sound not unlike that accomapnying the first bowel movement after a hemmoroidectomy, but in stacatto. No need for the Travel Channel and clips of warriors afar as long as there is beer, stadia, and middle-aged adolescents.
Hearing this, and the next day the endless discussion of commercials on pubic (stet) radio; reading of commercials and movie people endlessly in the news; seeing that Bruckheimer's latest got a PG label despite sexual groping and other suggestive stuff, and reading of its being advertised during children's morning programs on television, begin to see a little more clearly why "they" think "we" are a pernicious world influence. And all of this without even thinking of the Republican Party makes me want to hide under my bed.
Blessed be. We are jealous of your visit to the warmer climes, with or without the usual sexual groping.
We're going to have to take your word about that bowel stuff, though.

Blab. A reader either misdiagnoses a message or reveals a mystery. Or both.
What'sthe cookie for? My browser calls it illegal.
We have no idea. Plurp (and, in fact, the whole stevewhite.org site) is entirely cookie-free. Cookies, you understand, are used to keep track of readers. And lord knows we don't care even one teeny bit who you are or what you're doing here.

Yow. You all heard about that SQL worm from last week (and dribbling over into this week). But the funny thing is this:
The frantic message came from the corporation's information technology workers: "HELP NEEDED: If you have servers that are nonessential, please shut down." [...]
But this wasn't happening at just any company. It was occurring at Microsoft itself. Some internal servers were affected, and service to users of the Microsoft Network was significantly slowed.
The disruption was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of secure computing. On Jan. 23, the company's chairman, Bill Gates, sent a memo to customers describing progress in improving its products since he announced a "trustworthy computing" initiative a year ago.
As a fan of irony, we are deeply, deeply impressed.

Yow. The next time you need page after page of faux-Latin filler, here's the Web site for you! A vital resource for Web designers and others. (Dave)

Yow. We sat through a talk at an internal IBM conference last year, in which the speaker explained the various mechanical techniques and widgets that they added to IBM ThinkPads in order to keep them from breaking if you dropped them. Mechanical technology, we thought. How very quaint!
Last night, as we packed up our very full shoulder bag on the mountain of papers and such on our office table, our ThinkPad decided to leap from its precarious pile and landed - smack - on the floor, right on one of its corners, a worst-case scenario.
Imagine our horror. If any small accident could wipe out our entire sorry life, losing all the data on our ThinkPad would be it. (And no, we don't have a recent backup. Quit nagging.)
Miraculously, the only thing that seemed to have happened is that an inessential plastic part popped out. That's it. The machine works. The disk is fine. The data is unharmed. All is well.
So, to our friends who work on that quaint mechanical technology that provides shock-resistance to ThinkPads, we can only say, We're not worthy! We're not worthy!

Plurp. We do so dearly love headlines these days.
Powell may take U.S. intelligence to U.N.
We've got it all in this little thimble, said Powell, and no one in the administration was using it anyway.

Plurp. More Headlines Too Ironic To Invent.
Iraq to chair U.N. disarmament conference
Fabulous.

Yo. Why is the FBI making a list of all of the mosques in the U.S.?
The FBI is defending its national tally of mosques.
The bureau says counting Muslim houses of worship is part of an effort to get a picture of the nation's demographics and possible terrorism targets.
Uh ... right.

Plurp. OK. We're too lazy or stupid to penetrate this highly technical press release.
NMS Communications [...], communications products and services supplier [...], is offering operators a new SS7 monitoring application for collecting previously untapped signaling information that forms the basis of important new revenue-generating enhanced services. NMS' SS7 monitoring application consists of application programming interfaces (APIs) and tools that gather intelligence using a "tap" and "listen" mode on a live SS7 signaling link. Customers can use this information to develop useful functions that are not possible from traditional SS7 equipment such as Lawful Intercept (FBI wiretap or equivalent in other parts of the world), international roaming operator greeting short messages, and SS7 signaling link testing.
Can someone explain that FBI part?

Plurp. From the BFPG 9000 front comes this.
German youths have taken up a dangerous new pastime: firing potatoes as fast as a rocket from “bazookas” made from drainage pipes.
One man almost lost an eye, a woman had her leg broken and one teenager was badly burnt when the hairspray used as the propellant exploded in his face as he prepared to fire.
A 16-year-old in the university city of Göttingen lost part of his ear when the firing chamber ripped open as he pulled the trigger.
The so-called Kartoffelkanone are made from piping and masking tape bought at any hardware store. With a range of 200 metres they could split a man’s head at 15 metres and penetrate a wooden wall at 90 metres.
Germany, it seems, also has a self-cleaning gene pool, though it may overflow at times.

Plurp. Dubya seems to be delivering his State of the Something address as we prepare Plurp tonight, and we have a question. Why is it that completing each single spoken sentence deserves applause? Shouldn't we have higher expectations of a president?
Yeah, maybe not.

Rant. Here we are, still trying desperately to make Sara Beard famous, and still failing. Today, we discovered why. Google does indeed come by our humble site every single day, looking for new things to index. In the past week, it has come by and looked at our Alien Food Symbols page, the Mia Chronicles, our Cthulhu Haiku, and several musty old Plurp archive pages that haven't changed in centuries.
But it hasn't come by the "current issue of Plurp" page since Thursday of last week. Frickin' Thursday of last frickin' week! We bragged to Sara that the Googlebot comes by every single day, 'cause we're so important and all, and now it turns out that it hasn't even bothered to peek in since Thursday of last week!
So that's it, Mister Lazy Google. We've had it with you! We're not buying anything from you ever again!
Oh.

Plurp.
The blue dog
visited the "current issue of Plurp"
page pretty much every day

Monday, January 27, 2003
Blab. A knowledgeable reader invites us to consider a previously unconsidered possibility.
of course mackerel have skin. How else could you describe someone as looking like a flayed mackerel? - AJL
It is an excellent point, and one which we had not previously considered. We stand corrected. Or flayed. Or splayed. As the case may be.

Blab. An insightful reader nonetheless sends us a blind ...
[link].
Let's see ...
Someone went to great lengths to ensure the backdrop for President Bush's sales pitch Wednesday on his economic stimulus plan sent all the right messages and none of the wrong.
Bush delivered his remarks from a warehouse floor [that] was flanked on all sides by piles of cardboard boxes with additional piles in front of and behind his podium.
Each one of the hundreds of boxes had a piece of paper obscuring its "Made in China" label.
A backdrop made-to-order for the White House filled the space directly behind Bush[...]. [I]t exactly mimicked the real-life box piles, down to perfectly aligned shelves.
Except the boxes on the backdrop were labeled, "Made in the USA."
We invite other insightful reader to compare and contrast with our previous Cynical Reader Contest.

Blab. Adding to our list of disgusting restaurant names is this reader.
Here's a bad restaurant concept:
Cthulhu's Cthusthard & Ichorous Ice Cream
Some popular flavors:
Vanilla Void
Chocolate Chaos
Soulless Strawberry
Primordial Pistachio
Elder Ones' Elderberry
Iä!
(And we spot a perhaps unintentional meme-mixing in that last one: Elder Gods + Old Ones. Hmm.)

Blab. Impressed by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg's stunning insight yesterday that those little black spots on the sidewalk are, in fact, gum (and they are, you know), a reader writes:

Yes, the rich are different from you and me.
But how come the scoundrels are always hiding in front of a flag?
We don't think of him as rich. We think of him as stupid. But, yes, the stupid are different from you and me.
We suspect that the rich, the stupid and the scoundrels form nonidentical, overlapping sets with nonnull intersection.

Plurp. Today's lunchtalk touched on the Superbowl commercials. Some of us had not seen these critical cultural touchstones because, well, we would have had to sit through all that football stuff to see them. Just not worth it.
Our current speculation is that, if Tivo doesn't let you do commercial-only programming now, they will next year come Superbowl time.
'Cause n3rdz r001 OK.

Plurp. As of this writing Sara Beard is still not famous.
VLADIMIR: We're waiting for Googlebot.
ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here?
VLADIMIR: What?
ESTRAGON: That we were to wait.
VLADIMIR: He said in the blog. (They look at the blog.) Do you see any others?
ESTRAGON: What is it?
VLADIMIR: I don't know. Plurp.
Nothing to be done.

Plop. On anticipating casualties.
In the past, the decision to go to war had always involved the sacrifice of blood and treasure. Now, the sacrifice is largely one of treasure, instead of blood. It has made it far easier for America to go to war, which may explain why we have been almost permanently at war for the past dozen years.
When waging war is too easy, it will be too easy to wage war.

Plurp.
The blue dog
wondered what they would do
if it didn't come.

Sunday, January 26, 2003
Blab. Wondering about that sly comment we made yesterday, a reader wonders:
Does that mean you're recruiting?
We're always recruiting. And we are looking for amazing people who can help us make autonomic computing happen. But we do set a really, really high bar when it comes to hiring people.

Blab. Turning back to one of last week's topics, a Treasured Reader becomes the clear last place entry in the Most Succinct Reader Contribution contest.
Subj: different computing paradigm
umm, sorry, the attic picture is getting too many wrinkles.
Jaron's item on "Coding from Scratch."
still wrestling with the concept he presents and its implications. if ya think about the cube-units IBM is building and scale it up a million-fold (a simple 128x128x128 cube (powers of two 'cause i think that way), not unlikely in the near future) you can begin to think of the cpu-storage-disk-power unit as a simple colored block. each color represents a different kind of unit (the surface could display the color) and the color can be dynamically changed, of course.
clearly you can think of them in simple ways, like performing a fast-fourier transform, where the whole meta-cube configures itself so that it can perform the FFT by "pumping" the data from node to node. fast, real-time FFTs but horribly inefficient in terms of cycles. and, in a static config, the whole think fails when one node dies. not particularly clever.
The idea might be to describe the pattern of the computation in the data (e.g. think of how the FFT pattern is described in books). If the data were a lisp s-expression you could describe the needed computation steps as items in a list, tree, graph, etc. Now based on the data structure you can dynamically configure the processors as they get the data and, in fact, the processors could be working on many different data structures in parallel so one processor is a leaf-node in computation tree A and a vector item in computation vector B at the same time. Cluster scheduling is now a self-organizing task based on the pattern of the incoming data structure and each processor self-selects its tasks from the incoming data structure.
how can they communicate to decide what to select out of the imcoming pattern? well, the most effective way would be a complete crossbar negotiation network where every processor has a direct path to every other. the best way to do this is with radio where each processor-processor channel has its own frequency (you AREN'T thinking of METAL cubes, are you? clearly for heat reasons alone you make the "cubes" out of floating gel-containers that float in a pool and make their own power from the surrounding liquid methane. nobody in their right mind would think of a cube as a hard block stuck in the middle of a pile. how would you power it, cool it and pass data to it? besides, dead nodes could float making them easy to spot and retrieve). if the processor frequencies are chosen carefully (or better, yet self-selected) you can define a "distance" between the processors based on their assigned frequency and even allocate them as needed in larger blocks (like a binary-buddy storage allocation scheme). anyway, the point is that the DATA contains the processor configuration pattern. there is no "scheduler". each processor computes its result and modifies the data. think of it as a "blackboard" architecture where the initial problem is written on the board as a huge data structure (say, an FFT). hundreds of students look at the data structure, find a portion of the structure that has all of its preconditions satisfied (this determines the actual order of computation) and computes the result of that substructure, erases the old data, writes the result, and updates the postconditions (be sure to journal the blackboard operations). then they look for another part of the blackboard to work on. at the end everybody is idle and the swarm is done.
the master computer (what an odd concept) posts problems to the blackboard and reads results. this would likely be an investigative workbench paradigm similar to the Magnus computer algebra system. instead of having a calculator-style interface where you present a problem and get an answer you pose problems that you work on (since you can also manipulate the blackboard, thus being able to make progress on portions that the cluster can't figure out) and you have a cooperative approach to solving a problem where part of the cooperation involves the cluster and what it knows. infinite group theory is a great example of this because almost everything is a infinite procedure rather than an algorithm. even if the infinite procedure doesn't happen to terminate (which it might) with an answer you can apply meta-procedures to the intermediate results (a stream of generated cosets) to try to find a pattern that could be used in a conjecture about the cosets.
suppose one of the students does a partial computation and walks away? since all of the state data is on the blackboard any other student can continue the computation (either from the top or by picking up where the other left off).
the virtual blackboard, of course, is being flung around on the radio network. not only does each processor have a frequency but it communicates with two, four, eight, etc processors on other power-of-2 frequencies (well, some logical equivalent thereof, as a power-of-2 would present some issues. perhaps log-powers or self-similar (fractal) powers at each power of two. somebody find me a radio engineer...) until the whole cluster talks on the "root" frequency which is the blackboard where problems are written and solutions are posted. any N processors can work on a subproblem at the power-of-2 frequency and use a single top-of-the-tree writer for their section of the blackboard.
but what about stored data on a cubelet? well, assuming that the failure of a cubelet is not total (say, just the cpu died) there is no reason for the storage (memory and/or disk) to go offline. the radio controller for the disk need have nothing to do with the radio controller for the cpu.
check out the GNURadio project.
even MORE pattern-oriented cleverness could be applied with the FFT problem. consider that the FFT is really an algorithm derived from signal processing to transform a signal into its components. If the signal is presented to the radio network in the right way then each processor can determine how much of the signal it receives and write the result on the blackboard. thus the problem is never even written down. you use the whole cluster radio net as one big "ear" and let it decompose the signal in parallel without computing anything at the cpu level. FFTs are useful for more than signal processing, of course. you can, for example, train a 9x9 neural network to recognize Joseki patterns (the opening moves in the game of GO) and, since the neural network is really just a matrix, do an FFT composition of the learned pattern with a 19x19 matrix that represents the whole GO board. now the "pattern" (a 9x9 matrix) can recogize the Joseki pattern anywhere on the 19x19 game board. Thus you can use an FFT to "spread" neural network pattern learning to larger objects without trying to train larger objects directly (a 19x19 neural net would take forever to train). So the FFT is much more general than signal processing. the cluster could be trained by impressing the 9x9 training neural net onto the larger network to develop this HUGE mother of a pattern recognizer. without programming the individual nodes. each individual node knows just a bunch of matrix values that would be meaningless without the overall pattern just like a single neuron in a neural network is noise.
at an even more digressively higher level you can consider what happens if you actually DO succeed in offering on-demand computing with such a thing. the pattern-recognition powers of the FFT can be used to find things you never suspected (although interpreting the items found might be hard). the FFT has the power to recognize objects in a noisy environment. the army used to use it to find tanks hidden in a forest scene. basically you take a picture of the scene, "convolve" (FFT multiply) it with pictures of tanks in all orientations, and project the result on a screen. by magic what you will see is a bright spot on the screen at the XY location of the tank in the forest scene. so recognizing meta-patterns in the radio-network of a corporation sized cluster would involve creating a "picture" of what you might be looking for and convolving it with the radio signals of the whole cluster. it would pick out the nodes that were "thinking" about that "picture". so you could recognize when somebody was computing a particular kind of problem on the cluster without disturbing the computation. this might be useful to find "dead" nodes in the cluster since the "picture" of a dead node might be easy to construct. or to find "runaway" nodes that are 100% busy, full, paging, etc.
so how does this affect the autonomic computing issue? well, autonomic computing, as far as I've seen, is oriented toward failures, and recovery therefrom, of particular nodes. since the problem is described in the data and the data is written on a blackboard this is like worrying about recovering from the problem of a student getting sick. who cares? a blackboard based on lisp s-expressions (so you can embed both procedures and data in the s-expression (so a processor can pick up the function to compute as well as the data from the blackboard)) removes the student from the problem. and a Magnus front-end makes the blackboard visible to the user so they can see the computation.
anyway, it was a most interesting article and worth the time to read. apologies for not including the link.
Dorian
Well, some interesting ideas there! We don't actually talk much about work stuff in his here blog. Maybe we'll make an exception, seeing as how it's Sunday and all.
We didn't get much out of Lanier's interview. Too far in the clouds and bereft of anything approaching real examples. Perhaps he's published those elsewhere?
Some right-minded folks at IBM Research are indeed thinking of building systems (starting with storage systems) out of stacks of identical cubes, which figure out how best to communicate and store things among them, coping with additions and failures of cubes. And yes, they have figured out how to power them, cool them and communicate between them. It's very clever.
Your sketch of reconfiguring the hardware to the problem sounds a lot like the Connectionist architecture popularized a while back by Thinking Machines. And the idea of multiple processes communicating via a blackboard ("blackboard" :-) reminds us of various 60's AI approaches, and of Linda in particular.
We agree that separating state from computation, and making the state robust against failure, is a great way to make robust systems. This works just fine when all of the relevant state can be represented in quiesced storage. The tricky part is dealing with the "live" state in a process.

Blab. Burt Reynolds informs us of this.
Cannonball Run for 21st century
To wit:
DARPA intends to conduct a race of autonomous ground vehicles from the vicinity of Los Angeles to Las Vegas in 2004. A [$1,000,000] cash prize will be awarded to the winner.
A good reason to stay off the LA - Las Vegas roadways in 2004!

Blab. A reader updates us on that break-in.
Correction, the lunatic is in my head.
Aha. It's too late to set off the alarms, then.

Blab. A reader tries to tell us something that we would, under normal circumstances, figure we must already know.
Note to Head Honcho: Helen watches "Unwrapped"
That makes sense. The combination of tons of sugar and vast, intricate machinery would be irresistible.

Blab. A reader responds to yesterday's Too Stupid To Be President.
Those who believe the current President to be stupid are themselves stupid. The proof is left as an exercise for the reader. Unless he, himself is stupid.
Ah. Something like this?
Bush was so deviously intelligent, [said Rumsfeld], that failure to find any evidence of that intelligence could be considered proof of it.

Blab. A reader enters the fray with these Maximally Bad Restaurant Names.
McGuano's
TGI Feces
Taco Bile
Le Pus Fétide
Hairy Queen
Bits O'Lepers
Congo Fried "Chicken"
Very nice! We especially like Bits O'Lepers, which could just as easily be the name of a candy bar. (We did, however, delete a couple of our Treasured Reader's entries as being a bit beyond the pale even for us.)

Blab. A second reader sinks that low.
Piss Christ's Burger Shack works for me, complete with badly photoshopped logo.
Whew. That is bad.

Blab. A reader sends one of the most enigmatic contributions yet.
Readers send Plurp Blabs
from obscure recesses of their mind.
It is weird.
Their projection in Fool's space.
And Meaning is leaking.
Cthulhu will be reigning again.
HIS Emissaries
and minions are already
in charge.
(oo)~
Well all righty then!

Plurp. New York's billionaire mayor has made an astounding discovery.
"Those little black dots on the sidewalk," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called them in November during his regular radio program, lamenting their ubiquity and confiding that he had always wondered what they were.
"That's gum," he told his listeners. Twice, as if it were hard to believe.
Ain't he just the Man Of The People?

Yow. Yow indeed! How did we miss this fascinating development in the War On Privacy?
Civil libertarians from both sides of the political aisle were successful Thursday in temporarily halting the Pentagon's "Total Information Awareness" program, which included plans for a new government "data mining" operation unparalleled by any past U.S. intelligence-gathering effort. [...]
Wyden said the vote "makes it clear that Congress wants to make sure there is no snooping on law-abiding Americans." He called the TIA program "the most far-reaching government surveillance program in history." [...]
the TIA system would potentially mine telephone records, bank and credit card transactions, medical files, hotel and airline reservations and receipts for prescription drugs, searching for evidence of terrorist activity.
Opponents believe the system could be used to gather information to which the government has no legitimate right, and that even information obtained properly could fall into the wrong hands.
One small skirmish won. We can only hope that it brings the stark reality of this 1984ish plan into focus for more people.

Yo. You may recall that Hooters, that male-oriented restaurant chain bought an airline. Well ...
Hooters Air 737s will be manned by a flight crew consisting of two pilots (wearing traditional pilot uniforms), three flight attendants (wearing khaki pants and orange Hooters Air polo shirts) and two Hooters Girls (wearing traditional Hooters Restaurant uniforms). The flight attendants will be experienced, certified, and the position will be gender neutral. The Hooters Girls will be restaurant employees who will assist with hostess and food/beverage functions as allowed by FAA regulations.
"[T]raditional Hooters Restaurant uniforms." As illustrated below.

We expect Hooters Air to diversify into straight-woman-oriented, gay-oriented and lesbian-oriented airline services later in 2003, leaving 2004 as the year in which the traditional airlines are forced to cater solely to eunuchs and Baptists.

Plurp. Oh, BTW, the reason Sunday was delayed until Monday is that we were waiting (fruitlessly, as it turns out) for Googlebot to come along and make Sara Beard famous. Where is that stupid Googlebot when you need it?

Plurp.
The blue dog
was forced to cater only to
eunuchs and Baptists

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