Slashdot Mirror

Whoops, with all the cutting and pasting, I did one wrong:

WPS Office

I despise the crowded "ribbon" for Word and Excel. Pure crap.

Possibly you should try WPS Office instead (for Windows, Linux, iOS, Android). It uses MS Office formats such as doc, docx, ppt, ppts, xls, xlsx, and even does what Microsoft said was impossible: it can switch between ribbon and traditional interfaces.

WPS Office for Linux is a pretty nice choice if you want something that works today.

WPS Office for Linux or Windows is still a lot more responsive. You should check it out. http://www.wps.com/linux/

That's why I *LOVE* WPS Office. It is a VERY WORTHY replacement of OpenOffice and LibreOffice! I *LOVE* its Linux port, too!

http://www.wps.com/linux/

I don't care what they call it. But I just want the ability to drill down to find my feature.

Try Kingsoft's WPS Office, then. It's MS Office 2010 compatible, down to supporting the same file formats and even the cursed ribbon. Of course, Kingsoft lets you switch interfaces using Tools/Switch UI (Alt-T Y for the keyboarders), and get the menus back. It will thereafter start with the menus.

http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/source/Fido-FidoNet/Fido-12u-29Oct1991/MYLIB/ZMODEM.C
Enjoy.

Mel Kaye was a real person, and here's his signature to prove it.

http://www.wps.com/index.html?

There are some interesting and curious products there. I've tried to purchase some of them,

but they always seem to be "sold out".

Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes.

Nope. ASCII was invented in 1963 and finalized in 1967.

You're probably thinking of Baudot's code, invented in 1874 and still in (limited) use in modern telecommunications. But that wasn't nearly a century before computers, either.

BTW, it's still conventional to put acronyms in all-caps, with a very few exceptions (Fortran, for example).

Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes.

Nope. ASCII was invented in 1963 and finalized in 1967.

You're probably thinking of Baudot's code, invented in 1874 and still in (limited) use in modern telecommunications. But that wasn't nearly a century before computers, either.

BTW, it's still conventional to put acronyms in all-caps, with a very few exceptions (Fortran, for example).

Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes.

Nope. ASCII was invented in 1963 and finalized in 1967.

You're probably thinking of Baudot's code, invented in 1874 and still in (limited) use in modern telecommunications. But that wasn't nearly a century before computers, either.

BTW, it's still conventional to put acronyms in all-caps, with a very few exceptions (Fortran, for example).

The 1988 movie "Willow" has some good early examples of morphing. One of the "special features" on my Willow DVD has a fellow named Doug Smythe talking about working on morphing software in 1987. It also mentions the "morf" vs. "morph" contention at ILM. Though it contains some interviews recorded around the time of the movie, the feature appears to have been put together some time later, so it still isn't really clear whether the term was used back then. But it does establish that the technique dates back at least to 1987.

Also, I could have sworn I had seen the word "morph" used in conjunction with some early Amiga animation software. So I googled "Amiga morph Aegis Animator" and found this archived fidonet post dated 17 March 1986 that mentions a "morph-hook" tool. Not sure if that's really related though.

not really a computer, more of terminal. I was 12, so that's about 1991. single line of 40 characters. size of a phonebook in a town of 80000. not progammable. could store 40K of text. had a serial port and and 110/300 baud *modem* built in. hello BBSs. I met a lot of weird bastards at a pizza party someone had organized. youngest person there, lot of hams and that sort of folk.

I can only find on ereference to it on the net here.

Eventually traded it for a commie 64. goodbye modem, hello BASIC and a tape drive.

at 15 I discovered sex drugs and girls. goodbye computers, until I was 20 and decided to go to college. hello pII 350 (I still it have it). frustrated by using *nix at school for programming, installed redhat 5.0, soon replaced by 5.2.

now I manage 212 debian machines, and a handful of personal stuff. Fun!

One of the requirements is that it be COST EFFECTIVE. Alcohol isn't. Alcohol is more expensive to produce than gasoline and has less heat content than oil which leads to decreased fuel efficiency and less range on a single tank of gas. So you'd be paying more to drive less.

You could also run your car on natural gas (I mean LPG...yes, I know that it is fossil fuel too).

While this is better than oil from an energy independence standpoint, it seems like a temporary solution since, as you said, it is still a non-renewable fossil fuel. Plus about 30% of LPG (in the U.S. anyway) comes from the oil and gas refinery process making the production of this "clean" alternative somewhat suspect.

So, yes, better than gas but I'm not sure it's worth an investment to get people to switch. I'd rather develop a renewal alternative and get people to switch 10 years from now when the alternative is ready than spend money on trying to push everyone to LPG today and then spend more money in 10 years when a truly renewable alternative is available.

But we use it every day, our Yahoo calendar sends events to it by email (no I won't tell you the address), and we see a printout every morning of the next day's events, easy to tear off and take with you on your way out.

The original inspiration for this was from Tom Jennings' "World Power Systems" site. Check it out. I used his ASCII-baudot conversion routines.

that was one example of a network whose structure could handle host disconnects. also freenet, which has redundancy built into its design. and gnutella, as you point out.

all of these essentially use P2P as their structure, but fidonet and freenet remind us that P2P-the-structure has a far wider range of uses than just downloading mp3's. right now the internet dominates "cause it's there" but even its structure was historically envisioned (by some, anyway) as much more decentralized than it is now. as it moves toward centralization it becomes increasingly unsatisfactory for many purposes, and momentum grows to build and use alternative, decentralized structures.

Here's a really well written history by Tom Jennings of the early character codes and the two ASCII standards in the 60's. AT&T apparantly forced the world to use ASCII. ASCII required 7 bits, which was a huge departure from the previous 6 bit (and 5 bit, 2 set) systems.

Tom's history doesn't mention the real reason we all have 8/16/32/64 bit machines today: IBM's Extended Binary-Coded-Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) encoding, which spec'd 8 bits per character (how he could leave out EBCDIC is beyond me?) IBM forced the world to 8-bits to represent characters inside the computer, and AT&T forced the world to communicate them with 7 bits. ANSI recommented in the 1967 ASCII spec (X3.4... the one that added lowercase) to use the eigth bit for parity. ASCII was more focused on communication than storage of data.

The thing I find interesting is that the old computer and telcom industry monopolies forced these fundamental architecture decisions on everyone, both discarding lots of established practice with little regard for backwards compatibility. But the modern computer and telcom monopolies have more or less adopted and adapted from existing technologies and have largely failed to push their own "standards" that discard backwards compatability, at least when it comes to how data is stored and communicated.

In spite of the trolling title, nothing in the article even implies that the USPS even considered "owning" or controlling the email delivery infrastructure. It says that there was a point where it could have bought much of the telegraph infrastructure (but it didn't), and there was a point where it could have offered email services, but decided it was out of their mandate.

If, in 1982 they decieded to offer electronic mail services, they would have found UUCP
and BITNet already there, connecting colleges, government agencies, and some companies with electronic mail and other services. Businessmen and power users with money were already sending electronic mail through services like Compuserve and The Source.

I don't see anything the USPS could have done to stop the rise of FidoNet in 1984. FidoNet allowed anybody to call up a local BBS system (which was often free), and send an email that could get routed internationally, or to any of the other email networks.

The bottom line is, there is no way short of draconian legislation that would have allowed the USPS to "own" email. The most that could have happened is for them to offer email to customers; customers who have other options that the post office must compete with. Kind of like package delivery: the USPS offers package delivery service, but as any employee of FedEx, UPS or DHL will tell you, they by no means own the service.

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

He has done a lot more than FidoNet - take a look at some of the artwork he's done recently. ( I suggest taking a look at the Story Teller - very very cool...)

He also has lots of info on Nixie tubes and builds some cool looking clocks with them (to tie into the earlier /. articles on nixie clocks from a few months back).

Be careful - the high intensity light from the scanner is damaging to old paper. Even a strobe/flash from a film camera can hurt the paper.

The best media for long term storage is mylar tape - you know, the stuff with holes punched in it.

• Historical Notes:
  http://www.wps.com/texts/paper-tape/
• Get tape from:
  The Trybus Company Inc, or
  Western Numerical Control (52000E)
• And the punch from:
  Western Numerical Control

And yes, I'd leave it to the experts. This might even be the kind of project that a University student would want as part of their studies relating to the preservation of cultural materials.

FWIW: I found a bibliography claiming to deal with Archives and Digital Longevity at http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/archivebib.html

I hit submit rather than preview and neglected to add this:
There is a good background writeup on nixie tubes here on part of the WPS site.

Please don't bother moderating this up - it's at a high enough level that people will see it, and I've been at the cap for quite a while.
(now, if someone were to flip my rtbl flag I'd be thankful...

The coolest looking nixie tube based clocks I've seen on the web are these over at World Power Systems.
(Be sure to check out the Story Teller if you go to that site - extremely cool!)

The coolest looking nixie tube based clocks I've seen on the web are these over at World Power Systems.
(Be sure to check out the Story Teller if you go to that site - extremely cool!)

The coolest looking nixie tube based clocks I've seen on the web are these over at World Power Systems.
(Be sure to check out the Story Teller if you go to that site - extremely cool!)

Much more information about Alan Turing and the book is on the web page created by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges: The Alan Turing Home Page.

From the Amazon review:

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
[Five Stars]
February 17, 2001

One of the most important books I've ever read. Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a 'pure' mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).

His best-known work is his 1936 'Computable Numbers' paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England's WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world's first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.

Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not 'number crunchers', the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60's and 70's. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn't exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until 'rediscovered' decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His 'Turing test' of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.

Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and "go along" with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn't acknowledge some of his life's work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.

I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, "we didn't know he was a homosexual until after the war... if the security people had found out [and removed him]... we might have lost the war". This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.

I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing's life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I've ever read.

-Tom Jennings

Much more information about Alan Turing and the book is on the web page created by Turing's biographer, Andrew Hodges: The Alan Turing Home Page.

From the Amazon review:

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
[Five Stars]
February 17, 2001

One of the most important books I've ever read. Without this book, the real Alan Turing might fade into obscurity or at least the easy caricature of an eccentric British mathematician. And to the relief of many, because Turing was a difficult person: an unapologetic homosexual in post-victorian england; ground-breaking mathematician; utterly indifferent to social conventions; arrogantly original (working from first principles, ignoring precedents); with no respect for professional boundaries (a 'pure' mathematician who taught himself engineering and electronics).

His best-known work is his 1936 'Computable Numbers' paper, defining a self-modifying, stored-program machine. He used these ideas to help build code-breaking methods and machinery at Bletchley Park, England's WWII electronic intelligence center. This work, much still classified today, led directly to the construction of the world's first stored-program, self-modifying computer, in 1948.

Computers were always symbol-manipulators, to Alan, not 'number crunchers', the predominant view even to von Neumann, and into the 60's and 70's. He designed many basic software concepts (interpreter, floating point), most of which were ignored (he wasn't exactly good at promoting his ideas). By 1948 Alan had moved on to studying human and machine intelligence, as a user of computers, again with his lack of social niceties and radical thinking, some of his ideas were baffling or embarrassing until 'rediscovered' decades later as brilliant insights into intelligence. His 'Turing test' of intelligence dates from this period, and is still widely misunderstood.

Poor Alan; his refusal to deceive himself or others and "go along" with the conventions of the time regarding sexuality caused him (and other homosexuals then) great problems; early Cold War England was not a good time to be gay, or a misfit, especially one with deep knowledge of war-time secrecy (he was technical crypto liason to the U.S., and one of the few with broad knowledge of operations at Bletchley, since he defined so much of it, in a time of extreme compartmentalization). His sexual escapades eventually got him in trouble, and his increasing isolation and the fact that he simply couldn't acknowledge some of his life's work due to secrecy, probably influenced his suicide at the age of 42.

I first discovered Turing-the-person in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY (Metropolis, Howlett, Gian-Carlo Rota; Acedemic Press, 1980), where I.J. Good wrote, "we didn't know he was a homosexual until after the war... if the security people had found out [and removed him]... we might have lost the war". This led me to look for books on Turing, and then the Hodges book magically appeared on the shelf.

I am grateful that Hodges researched his life as well as his work, as far as the data allows. Knowing the whole is always important, but I think critical in Alan Turing's life. Clearly, I rate this one of the most important books I've ever read.

-Tom Jennings

Check out the great review on Amazon by Fidonet founder and homo-anarchist Tom Jennings!

-Don

The Cryptonomicon provoked me to read the new American edition of "Alan Turing: The Enigma" by Andrew Hodges. It was out of print for the longest time, but the American edition was just recently published. It's an excellent book, entertaining while being both historically and scientifically accurate, and it's gotten straight 5 star reviews on Amazon (although neither the author nor the subject were straight). Tom Jennings [inventor of FidoNet and founder of the Little Garden ISP] wrote the first review of the original edition, and he rates it as one of the most important books he's ever read. So I bought a bunch and gave them out as xmas presents!

-Don

At least one end of an RF link needs to be well-sited and engineered. Cell sites and broadcast stations are in high, well-chosen locations with good antennas, so that they work with remote units in lousy locations with poor antennas. This is the basic limitation on peer-to-peer RF systems. However, if you have access to tall things to hang antennas on, it can work. Today, though, it's hard to find a tall thing that isn't overgrown with cellular antennae. People with tall things now want to be compensated for antennas on them. And there's more public opposition to putting antennae up every year.

I'd once toyed with this idea as a net for video games, with all the video game boxes in a neighborhood linking up. I'd also thought of a way to do legal "pirate" radio, with boom boxes acting as relay stations using spread-spectrum in a junk band. But without well-placed base stations, there will be too many dead spots.

Metricom probably has the cutest approach to this problem. Their service uses little boxes attached to street lights, and operates spread-spectrum in the 900MHz band. Most of the nodes are RF-only relays; only a few have wired connections to the Internet. They provide a good, although low-bandwidth, flat-rate mobile Internet service.

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Why do I bring this up? I do so because the Athenian Democracy had an enormous information management problem on their hands. The democracy came about by the revolution of the mob overthrowing a tyranny held in place by mercanaries hired from Sparta. Almost every citizen had a hand in this, and so had an interest in making sure that the rule of the tyrants did not return. A recent television series on PBS about the rise of the Greek culture illustrates this point with excellent clarity. As a result, one of the components of citizenship was that the required participation of every citizen. They had to manage and organized this process of the day to day workings of the democracy, selecting citizens at random from the various demes (tribes) for almost all offices and public functions.

There is a lot of data processing going on there. This was handled brilliantly by the mechanism described in the articles mentioned above. They had created a mechanical computer of sorts to handle the problems of handing out the assignments for juries, the routine bureaucratic assignments, all the rest. It is probably a work of genius, and is fundamental to really understanding how the whole place worked. It is obvious that such a system could easily be implemented on almost any database engine worth its' salt.

We now come to information societies. We can easily implement such a society using modern computing technology. The downsides of this are the modern apathy to political processes, as well as the desire for privacy. The upside is that you have a system that really reflects what the members of the community want. There is a certain conflict of interest inherent in this.

A possible solution to this is some sort of opt-in citizenship, with responsibilities attached along with the perks that go with it. This is a difficult question, because of the difficulties associated with question of rights and priveledges over others that are not earned, but are granted without cost.

In this context, I am thinking of the old problem of the haves vs the have-nots. If you win the lottery, make it big in a dot-com, or whatever, you will be surprised by how many new relatives you now have who think that they have more of a right to the money than you do, and who get insulted when you do not just hand it over. You also see this with certain culture clashes in the area of immigration.

An Information Democracy is possible, but I am still quite unclear as to how it could be implemeted. We see hints of this to some degree in the character of the various development communities, such as Microsoft Vs Open-source. Microsoft is probably closer to the old style greek tyrants, no matter how much they want to be portrayed as the philosopher kings of the computer age. The Open-Source community is far more adhoc in its organzation, and is not sufficiently organized to be a formal democracy like Athens. It might be said that Linus is probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher king in this context, although he is far more of a philosopher than king by far.

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Yes, he was, he also developed the MIRV, helped with ICBMs, advised Reagan on the SDI, and more or less devoted his life to developing technologies to further the cause of mass destruction. "He's a danger to all that is important. I really do think it would have been a better world without Teller"
-- physicist I. I. Rabi, 1973. Go here for a pseudo-not-quite-tribute

People share their information on dead media and list sources. They have a section of 'Working Notes' with all the information that can be found here.

Altogether, it looks very cool. They even have an article about the radio shack trash-80.

People share their information on dead media and list sources. They have a section of 'Working Notes' with all the information that can be found here.

Altogether, it looks very cool. They even have an article about the radio shack trash-80.

It sure is likely. The disintegration or disappearance of media formats happens all the time. For a wide-ranging compendium of information on this topic, see the dead media page:

The Dead Media Project

"An ad hoc database of the deceased, the slowly-rotting, the undead, and the never-lived media."

Infamous early Cygnus employees include Fred Fish (Amiga & later BeOS free software god), Sean Fagan (general troublemaker on the net), Tom Jennings (author of the original FidoNet software), Brendan Kehoe (G++ maintainer, author of Zen and the Art of the Internet, one of the first open source books and one of the first popular books about the 'net), Steve Chamberlain (extraordinary speed hacker, creator of Cygwin which built on DJGPP - he's now at TranceMeta), Ian Taylor (author of GNU/Taylor UUCP), and others too infamous to mention.