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you could download some papers on RCU: http://www.rdrop.com/~paulmck/...

hehe

Yeah, not the first. There were multiple public ISPs in Portland in 1989. PDxs, agora, Teleport...

One is still around, nearly 30 years later - Raindrop Laboratories http://www.rdrop.com/ still has its "vintage" mid '90s web page, too. (It has been around since 1985.)

If you follow the "Alan Batie" link from RainDrop's home page, and then follow his "agora" link from "I work at Peak Internet, a local ISP in Corvallis, Oregon. I also run a small ISP in Portland, Oregon, called RainDrop Laboratories. It started in 1985 as a public access system called Agora, while I was working at Intel.", it speaks of agora's RainNet Internet access starting in 1990 - "Now that our subject had SVR4, with TCP/IP and all, and there being several other hacker sorts around town who'd been eyeing the Internet with envy for sometime, it was time to see if something could be done locally. RAINet was thus born in the fall of 1990, and its first connection was a 2400 bps SLIP link between agora and parsely (another local public access system, owned by Tod Oace at the time)."

(Remember, unless you actually Provide a Service that lets you send IP packets onto the Internet, you're not an Internet Service Provider. Dialup BBSes don't count, UUCP doesn't count, only SLIP/PPP/bridged Ethernet/PPPoEoAoDSL/PPPoAoDSL/DOCSIS/etc. so that you can splat out one of these things - or one of these things - onto the Internet counts.)

Yeah, not the first. There were multiple public ISPs in Portland in 1989. PDxs, agora, Teleport...

One is still around, nearly 30 years later - Raindrop Laboratories http://www.rdrop.com/ still has its "vintage" mid '90s web page, too. (It has been around since 1985.)

...but if your wireless mics really are in the TV bands, and really aren't Part 15 devices, then they're Part 74, Subpart H devices, which do require a license. There are no other options. You're one of many who've been sold a bill of goods by unscrupulous manufacturers of these microphones which, by law, can only be licensed to television stations, broadcast networks, cable television systems, motion picture producers, television program producers, and Multipoint Multichannel Distribution System (MMDS) licensees (Title 47 USC, 74.832). See this for a pretty good, if slightly dated, FAQ on what's required to license a wireless microphone in the US.

These microphones typically will be offered no protection against interference from whitespace protocols like the IEEE 802.22 standard. Note that the IEEE 802.22 group is also in the final stages of standardizing a beacon protocol, IEEE 802.22.1 [pdf]. This beacon is to be present whenever the (licensed) wireless microphone is in operation, and produces a signal easier to detect (at a greater range) than the microphone itself, so that cognitive white space secondary users can more reliably determine that that television channel is occupied and move elsewhere. This system avoids interference to the wireless microphone by the secondary user.

if their device decided to employ the same strategy, it would interfere with the operating microphone within the analog television channel.

But the Google device will *not* use the same strategy. If there is an operating analog or digital TV station, the device will *not* use that frequency. So it's irrelevant whether or not the device can detect mics on the same frequency as a TV channel. As long as it detects one or the other, it won't interfere with either.

I probably don't have to tell you this, but it's worth pointing out anyway that the *vast* majority of wireless microphones are actually technically illegal. Unless you have paid $75 to the FCC and been granted a license, you are using wireless microphones illegally. The fact that the FCC chooses not to enforce this, but comes down so hard on white space devices, is really a double standard.

Two comments on that:

Firstly, the xahlee.org link results in a 403 if accessed directly from Slashdot. Copying the URL into a blank tab will allow access, though.

Secondly, the second picture is somewhat indicative - the spread thighs are reminiscent of the nadu [NSFW], a position found in the atrociously bad Gor books by John Norman*. Some doms really like having their subs assume the nadu or similar positions as a sign of submission. (Disclaimer: I'm just an unusually well-informed vanilla, but publishing intimate details onf a dom/sub relationship goes quite well with some aspects of BDSM, so it's not hard to find info on what people like to do.)


* Essentially bad SciFi with equally bad femsub mixed in. To get a glimpse of Norman's way with words, especially dialogue, read the parody Houseplants of Gor. Technically SFW, but of course parodying well-known BDSM texts.

Yes. I believe you would find some worth in reading Queen of Angels.
Mark Irons says it best.
~psybre

I looked it up. I had forgotten the "home computer" category, which was a subset of "microcomputers" in the time from 1977 to 1982. The VAX was actually a minicomputer. See this page which sets straight the confusion between microcomputers (PET, AIM, Apple //) and minicomputers (VAX, PDP-8/i, etc.)

During the "home computer" era, the terms "microcomputer" and "home computer" were used very commonly for the Apple 2 line and its competitors. The term "personal computer" wasn't really used for any of it other than in rare instances.

http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/Rants-Grammar.html

Try again.

Google "grammar try and" for more.

Card is an outspoken homophobe (although he wraps his fears in weird pseudo-logic based on his Mormon upbringing - if you're a member of a revealed-truth religion perhaps the arguments will make sense to you) so the parent post was actually pretty damn funny.

Card's anti-gay rants are saddening, since he is otherwise a voice of tolerance and sanity in the LDS - he has no knee-jerk distrust of science, for example.

Should of thought harder Gramps. CD rot may have taken care of coating on the disc long before the kids get access to it. Optical formats, though much more long lasting than magnetic tape, do not have an infinite life span. Over the course of say, 50 years, it's not feasible to think that all the data on the CD will still be non-corrupted.

Here's an example

Don't forget about CD Rot. While you'd like to believe that if you put that Treasure Map on a CD so you can find the treasure years from now, chances are... your map will have disspeared on you.

This is why I still get my digital photos developed. Last thing I want is all my treasured memories to become suddenly un-readable someday.

"In accordance with an ISO Council decision,
the decimal sign is a comma in ISO documents."

source

All of the staff look like pretty normal joes, until you get down to Lars, who looks like he stepped out of the LOTR set (or maybe MIT). I feel like I should have to crawl up the side of a mountain to ask him a question. (And not "Are you *really* the head of the Kwik-E-Mart?")

Then again, maybe you do: the guy lives in a yurt.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

...it had damn well better stay public. But the internet routes around damage --- if noaa can't do it, it'll just become another open source project, as it partially is now...

My weather station
(the flatline yesterday was a power outage)

Citizen's Weather Observer Program

XML munches up bandwidth like a lardy butter lover. Yes, yes, RSS feeds are handy, but they dont actually do anything that couldnt be achieved with a much leaner binary format. Its 2004, we dont have byte compatablitily issues any more

See Roedy Greens (one time comp.java.lang FAQ maintainer)excellent essay on why XML causes these problems.

I discovered the Yurt the other day.. They have been used for over 2500 years.

Still learning about them.. This seems like the ideal 'hacker hut' (not to be confused with the honeycomb shack).

All I have is a BA from a rather low grade college. I specialize in locking algorithms.

1. A reader lock-free algorithm now known as RCU. See HOS89 ref here
   
2. "A Distributed Solution to the Reader-Writer Problem" in SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, Apr 1990.
   
3. Two of the shortest reader-writer FIFO locks you will ever see (algorithm from above based on one) here
   
4. Lock-free reference counting using 2 different techniques, one for CAS2 and one for LL/SC that David Detlefs couldn't manage to do. Scan c.p.t for atomic_ptr.
   
5. A fast pathed counting semaphore that doesn't need futexes, i.e. will work on windows even.
   
6. A proxy garbage collection scheme implemented with atomic_ptr (less overhead than pure refcounted GC).
   
7. RCU for preemptive user threads currently being architected. This will work on any unix with the right /proc info (sorry windows) (I don't whether it will get implemented since it uses some IBM patented stuff).
   

Even more lesser hacks and unpublished stuff which I don't have time to go into here.

and that isnt the worst of them! check out this little "dictionary" of -ware terms...

Well, you could use patent 4,809,168 which AFAIK is in the public domain unless IBM convinced the Patent Office to allow IBM to retroactively pay the the maintenance fees. It's the patent referenced as HOS89 in this RCU performance paper. But I'd ask IBM for permission first because, one, Paul McKenney was gracious enough to cite that patent, and, two, because it doesn't hurt to ask the don for permission and show a little respect.

The Cringe (Bob X. Cringely) contested this with a simple argument in his column a while ago. Because Sequent documented the technology they developed in a generic way, not in terms of their specific implementation within Dynix (read the RCU paper here, for instance), it was possible to write a cleanroom implementation for almost any OS (even non-quasi-Unices).

The fact that it was partly written by the same talent in both Dynix and Linux is irrelevent, as the cat was already out of the bag.

As far as JFS is concerned, SCO can pound sand. The JFS patch for Linux wasn't even based on AIX code - it came from OS/2.

A simple google for "Orson, Scott, Card, mormon" and here's what I found, (albeit at the bottom of the first page) - Rants - OSC. Nothing wrong with Card writing these kinds of fantasy books with young boys being sexually assaulted by multi-penised monsters and countless, (some would say it's an obsession, not I!), tales of adolescent males coming of age, after all he's a good Saint, (that's Mormon to you and me). Heck give his writings from beliefnet.com a read if you have any doubts. I especially like "Hey, Who are You Calling a Cult?". His repressive religion has built nothing but character as far as I know. Next Sunday: the miracle of shame

The man is a fucking lunatic. His stuff isn't that good (sorta like Anne Rice, he wrote one good book and now he's intent on pushing out crap that follows the same formula), and more than that he's intolerant of homosexuality (I suppose that would put him in the majority on slashdot) and seems fairly intent on proselytizing the Church of Latter-Day Saints to everyone who reads, oh, anything he writes.

From the article referenced in my link:
"Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be
indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught
violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message
that those who flagrantly violate society's regulation of sexual
behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens
within that society."
- OSC

Look, if this dude hadn't written "Ender's Game", he'd be a nobody, a candidate for kook status. Because he did, he continues to get a voice in popular media. I find many of his personal opinions highly disturbing and the fact that he is continually presented as part of some mainstream community even moreso.

- Sequent was bought by IBM.

- Read-Copy Update was developed at Sequent.

Articles written by Paul E. McKenney on Read-Copy Update are available from
http://www.rdrop.com/users/paulmck/rclock/

An even more obscure Osborne computer was the Osborne 3 (on the left next to the Vixen prototypes). I saw the system demoed at a FOG meeting as the company was struggling to come out of bankruptcy -- circa ~1984. If I recall correctly, the Osborne 3 was a PC compatible system (8086 processor), ran MS-DOS and at that time it would have been one of the first portables to sport (gasp!) an LCD display.

But still, what does it all matter as long as userfriendly.org is still online?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

why is userfriendly.org still on-line?

To: Illiad

We respectfully ask you to delete all content hosted at userfriendly.org at your earliest convenience.

What's currently hosted there is, by its astonishing amateurism and outright offensive unfunniness, diluting the "User Friendly" concept currently used by parodies of boring and badly drawn web comics based on the incessant repetition of ancient tech support jokes and stereotypical anti-Microsoft zealotry.

These parodies are facing a bleak future, when there are sites like yours that are honestly intended to be "entertaining" by using even more tired clichés and even worse artwork than the parodies. How are parody authors supposed to survive if the objects of parody suddenly start to express the parodied traits even more extremely than the parodies?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-04 -07
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-08 -20&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-04 -17
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreindl ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-11.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-20.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-27.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-32.htm
http://www.somethingawful.com/jeffk/computarfunnys /comic-39.htm
http://somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/phot oshop/variety3/Eegah_comic.jpg
http://www.themushroom.com/mush0122/unfriendlyuser .html

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=user%20fr iendly
http://internettrash.com/users/theepisodes/keenshi t.htm
http://rmitz.org/comics.html
http://www.amk.ca/books/h/User_Friendly.html
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Rant s/ComicStrips.html

Enough already. Stop it.

I think that's a rare item. Stuff like Amiga 500 you have tons of, around, but this...

W e l l , I 'l l l e t y o u d e c i d e f o r y o u r s e l f .

The presence or not of Hawking radiation proves nothing about the nature of a black hole beyond its extreme gravitational field. Hawking Radiation is light emmited when a virtual photon/anti-photon pair emerges from the vacuum right on the event horizon. Usually the pair would mutually anhialate as if they had never existed, however, under extreme gravitational forces they are pulled apart, one into the black hole and one away from it. This is obviously going to be a very rare occurance which is why Hawking radiation is so weak. In fact, Hawking radiation theory states that the virtual anti-particle actually causes the black hole to loose mass, almost as if the black hole were evaporating away. In theory it is even possible for a black hole can attract no more fuel to completely evaporate to nothing simply from the hawking radiation.

LSB isn't a screwy kludge. Lots of other people did it as well. Its not exactly as if one is right and the other is wrong. Besides, PPC can be programmed into either big or little endian mode. Its Apple's fault for not being industry standard.
See the Endian FAQ

It could be done pretty easily with a small hardware mod, which could be installed inside the keyboard. For example, a microcontroller like the PIC or 68HC11 could be connected to the keyboard cable output, to read it and translate each value, and send the desired value on to the PC. This would mainly be a programming project, it doesn't require much electronics knowledge since the circuits are very simple and can be copied from similar devices. Here's some info about keyboard interfacing - there's plenty more if you search.

Based on the (skimpy) description, couldn't it just as easily have been a Neutron Star fragment or a primordial black hole?

Oh yeah, there is also a cool poster -m

---
http://dubinko.info/blog/

Maybe future researchers will have fantastic OCR cheaply available, and the benefits of barcodes won't be worthwhile. But maybe not, and why make their job unnecessarily more difficult?

I always wanted to take apart an old mouse, and mount two dials on the front end of the keyboard.

That way, you could have perfect orthogonal motion when doing CAD or drawing work. Doing diagonals will take some skill.

Remember the old Tektonix 4010 graphics terminals of the 70's who had just that for the graphics cursor: two thumbwheels on the right side of the keyboard?

But the best BM (before mouse) user-interface I've seen was on a Hewlett-Packard 9836 series desktop computer. It had a single thumbwheel on the left of the keyboard that sent the cursor in the direction of the last cursor key pressed.

--

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

where does that opinion come from, and does the sun shine there?
It's more of an impression than an opinion, one formed after reading lots of stuff on the internet (my sole source, sadly). I make no claims to expertivity (hence the final qualification); in fact, having scanned your page I'm willing to bow to your expertise on the subject. Whether the sun shines on my sources I'm not willing to speculate. Just so you can sneer properly, I enclose some of the links from my bookmarks that have been visited on a number of occasions:
The Cryptography Project
Quantum Computing FAQ
Quantum computing
There are more sites, but these are a fair representation. Were my conclusions wrong? Possibly. Was I reading the wrong sites? Maybe. Was looking on the web in the first place a wast of time? Dunno. But if I've helped you feel superior, then I can go home happy.

Here is the intro:

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."

If you really want to know how to build autonomous robots, there are several competitions with the same level of excitement as Battlebots et al, but with the added benefit that you can imagine it might eventually be a good thing to turn the resulting machines loose in the real world.

For instance, Robot Sumo is quite popular in Japan and the US. You can find the rules and links to competitions at Sine Robotics. Another big competition is the Trinity College Fire-Fighting Home Robot Contest, wherein robots navigate a known maze (a model house floorplan) to put out a fire (simulated by a lit candle).

Another nice thing about these competitions is they can be cheaper to get into than Battlebots (less heavy iron and welding). And there are lots of good people and organizations who can help you climb the learning curve. Just a few of my favorites are the Seattle Robotics Society, The Robotics Club of Yahoo, Raleigh Triangle Amateur Robotics Group, Portland Area Robotics Society, Robotics Society of Southern CA, and the San Francisco Robotics Society of America.

Finally, here's a few places you can find parts, books, plans, kits, and lots of links: Mondo-Tronics, Acroname, and Robot Books.com.

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

You could get a wireless, solar-powered weather station for your roof. Then you could get some UNIX-based software and MRTG and put some graphs of your station online.

Others who are doing robotics can be found via searches, or by following the links on most robotics clubs pages. I'm directly involved with Twin Cities Robotics. There are a bunch of others around the country, Portland Area Robotics (PARTS), Seattle Robotics Society (SRS), Triangle Amateur Robotics, Dallas Personal Robotics Group, Central Illinois Robot Club, Home Brew Robotics, and San Francisco Robotics Society of America to name a few.

There are also other devices which could be used for position sensing, such as wireless joysticks or electronic whiteboard devices.

I found a copy of that paper -- it's interesting reading: "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, 1980-04-01.