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Now, if you look in the middle sort of three-quarters of the way up you'll find another funny shaped bit that's called 'Europe'. In Europe there's a country called 'France'. Now the bit that you may not have noticed is this: it isn't part of the United States of America. Furthermore, the people there fart in the general direction of your Supreme Court. They think that your president is a hamster and that your senate smells of elderberies. In short, they're FRENCH .

Now the point about this story is it happens in France. The people there are French. The goodies in this story are French. The baddies are French. Even the bold Gendarmes are French.

Messing about with American tort law, or sending American execs who break American laws to American prisons, is going to worry them not one little bit.

GB stands for "Government and Binding" theory; it is the outgrowth of Noam CHomsky's model of Universal Grammar from the beginning of the 80's, and possibly the theory on which most theoretical syntax has been done.

GPSG stands for "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar"; it was developed in the late 70's, initially by Gerald Gazdar. Basically, it is an enhanced form of context-free grammar, that is more suitable for description of natural language syntax.

HPSG was derived from GPSG in the mid-80's at CSLI in Stanford, by Pollard and Sag. It incorporates ideas from other theories of syntax like LFG and GB. HPSG, in comparison to GB, is concerned with making its grammars as useful as possible for computational linguistics. Therefore, many HPSG researchers work in projects like LinGO, trying to apply HPSG to computational projects.

LFG, which I mention above, is another theory of syntax (if you have guessed by now that theoretical linguists are an unagreeing bunch, add 100 points to your total). It is also used in computational projects, like the Xerox NLTT.

I hope people find this info useful.

---

I am familiar with TAO, and with ILU, and certainly know of MICO and omniORB. I suggest taking a look at the GnuPaghe Project; they went through an ORB selection process, and waffled back and forth between TAO and MICO, leaning back towards MICO because of compile time memory consumption. The finding on TAO was thus: Huge at compile time; I haven't done precise measures, yet it surely eats about 700 Mb while compiling it. This may be an exaggeration on the hugeness of TAO; there have certainly been similar reports on MICO. I've compiled some bits of ORBit code, and found it fairly appalling how 1K of IDL turned into compiled object code a hundred K or so in size; for C++-based stuff to be more lardly is not too much of a surprise. If it takes 128MB of memory to compile Hello, World! that can represent a significant barrier to the widespread adoption of CORBA.

• Were you planning to support one language? Or multiple languages?

  If the only language is C++, then your project will be rejected because some people prefer to use C, Objective C, Scheme, Perl, Python, and Eiffel.

  If you plan to use many languages, then you probably have ONE choice for a structure on which to build this, namely ILU (Inter Language Unification). Unfortunately, that leaves you with a set of data structures that are to some extent a "lowest common denominator" of the things supported by all of the languages.

• Is what you want supported already by CPAN or by www.python.org ?
• By the way, if you wanted the facility to be network-distributable, then you definitely want to use ILU or some other CORBA variation.

In effect, the only choice for the sort of "componentizing" that you're describing is some variation on CORBA. You probably need to get a copy of the Henning/Vinoski book on CORBA, and to start writing chunks of IDL to represent all the sorts of interfaces that you want to be able to have "published."

Unfortunately, there's still an impedance problem, as:

• There are wide variations in performance between ORBs as well as between components that can communicate "real directly" via memory as they're running in the same process as compared to components that may communicate hundreds of times more slowly because they reside on separate hosts.
• Components may be implemented in ways that vary considerably, and which may require significant configuration effort to get their service running.

The purported reason for SOAP to be a "good thing" is that it's a way of layering a messaging model atop HTTP; of course, if this was truly their interest, honesty would require admission that it is possible to layer IIOP/GIOP atop HTTP, with ILU as the most obvious manifestation of an implementation of this.

The problem with SOAP is that it pushes you back towards defining messages, rather than protocol, as IDL provides.

My suspicion is that the real purpose is to get people to build messaging systems using XML. That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing; I'd much rather see people building asynchronous messaging systems where messages are represented in XML rather than in some less-well-known format. (And, plug, plug, use Isect as the transport mechanism...)

If you're wanting to build a reliable system using that "SOAPed" XML, Wouldn't it be better to transport that XML around using MSMQ with reliability guaranteed using a TP Monitor like MTS?

How much would you want to bet that reliability of the MSFT tools would be deliberately limited so as to encourage widespread use of MSMQ/MTS?

Optical lithology draws all the lines and circuits on wafer simultaneously. A line draw method such as this article is serial and may take forever to draw the billions of logical devices you can fit on a single silicon wafer these days.

The need for vast numbers of robot arms is why the literature spends so much time discussing self-replication, the only way to make the whole proposition economical. Until we have that, things like this will remain laboratory curiosities.

There are some ideas kicking around about exploiting the self-replicative abilities of cells, rather than waiting until humans are competent to design a real replicator. That's a hard engineering problem, and it might take a long time.

Optical lithology draws all the lines and circuits on wafer simultaneously. A line draw method such as this article is serial and may take forever to draw the billions of logical devices you can fit on a single silicon wafer these days.

The need for vast numbers of robot arms is why the literature spends so much time discussing self-replication, the only way to make the whole proposition economical. Until we have that, things like this will remain laboratory curiosities.

There are some ideas kicking around about exploiting the self-replicative abilities of cells, rather than waiting until humans are competent to design a real replicator. That's a hard engineering problem, and it might take a long time.

While I have not used it - Xerox's ILU (Inter-Language Unification) project has been around for a long time. It comes very highly reccomended. From the same people that brought you gui's, desktop publishing, ethernet and distributed computing.

We can assume that in the not too distant future technology is able to fit enormous amounts of data in a small space.
Read this article by Richard Feynman, where he states

I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide--- which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom! Don't tell me about microfilm!

Even if our technology does not come so far soon, it is obvious that we can expect small portable datastores with capacity good enough for creating usable One Time Pads.

I think Richard Feynman said it best many years ago:
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom by R. Feynman

IMO, he basically started many people thinking about nanotech (and this was in the '50s). There are some remarkable things coming from nanotech (IIRC, there are some remarkable things coming out of U of Michigan in nanotech).

There is plenty of room. We just need the technology and sophisitication in order to harness it. Somebody will achieve this technology (who and when are the important questions, not if ). When it happens, Moore's Law will just chug along as usual (as it always has).

Justin

The current high end from Xerox is the DocuTech 6180. Boy, do I love running that box:)

With new technologies it's possible to print books one copy at a time...

New? Only if you consider a 9 year old high speed printer new, such as the Xerox DocuTech. Of course, it's prohibitively expensive, but if I ever win about $50 million on a lottery I'd consider one.

George

for information on one such project (Xerox PARC's Electronic Paper), see http://www.parc.xerox.com/dhl/projec ts/epaper/.

They're working on distributed control of "smart matter", where there is no centralized control. Using computer algorithms and psudo MEMS devices, they managed to increase the buckeling stiffness of a beam by 3 times. Here's a link to their research projects. I've read a lot of comments about the miliary/FBI/authoritarian uses of smart dust. But I think that we'll find some decent civillian uses.

http://www.parc.xerox.com/spl/projects/ aop/

The guys at Xerox have already developed aspect extensions to Java, which look to be quite powerful.

First off, where did this term "deep linking" come from? I wouldn't be surprised to find some lawyer somewhere coined the term. Links are just links; they're what make the World Wide Web work.

Sure, most sites just use links as navigation controls ("Next Page", "Top", "Home", or even "click here"), but good sites also use them to direct a user to more information on a topic within the context of the page itself.

Where I think the problem arises is not "how do I ensure that my valuable ad banners get seen?" (Jakob Neilsen wrote in 1997 that advertising doesn't work on the web and in another article about research on web users' behavior that while ad banners are the most-used form of advertising on the web, it is the least successful.) but "how do I protect my intellectual property on the Web?"

In this case, I went to Movie-List to check it out, and it is a banner-driven (hence, I assume, ad-supported) site that is, essentially, a "link farm". He takes the trailers for movies and wraps his own HTML around them (complete with banner ad), and doesn't even acknowledge the movie studios the trailers are coming from. If I see a trailer from Universal's web site, I should have the option of hitting a link to their site to look around; Movie-List traps you there so you can look at his banner ads.

I would think that this is a violation of fair use (which is going to have to be redefined somewhat, if it hasn't already, to handle the Web) made worse by the fact that he's not incurring any bandwidth penalty himself; he's using their servers to host the information he's supposedly getting ad money off of, the trailers. My gut feeling is that Universal is in the right on this one.

Obviously, the concept of "fair use" on the Web is going to need to protect both the rights of the person who makes their intellectual property available on the web and the right of the person who wants to provide a link to it.

I would think that a good "fair use" policy for the Web should have the following requirements:

1) People should be allowed to point to copyrighted material on another site without obtaining explicit permission if they acknowledge the copyright holder of the material (either by providing the link in the context of their site, as my Alertbox examples do, or in the case of an image or movie, providing a link to the source of the copyrighted material). If search engines were to use the "copyright" LINK attribute (if properly set) on a page, I'd think that covers their backsides neatly.

2) People should only be able to place a page from another site within their own frame if the owner of the content of that site gives their permission (as I did when I set up my home page at XOOM) or for educational or informative purposes (a site that teaches good/bad web design, or a live "portfolio" of a webmaster's work). In the latter case, the frame should not have any ads on it.

3) A subscription-based site shouldn't include any copyrighted material from another source without that source's permission, period. Just live a print magazine.

This is just off of the top of my head; what else should go into a decent "Fair Web Use" policy?

Jay (=

Hardware

• Teletype ASR-33, teletypewriter very popular as a computer terminal.
• Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover story: MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer.
• Apple II with its color graphics and multiple easy-to-access expansion slots.
• IBM PC and its corporate desktop success providing cheap hardware for all.
• IBM's MicroChannel bus and its failure showed the popularity of open hardware.
• Hayes modem command set allowed modem control without custom device driver.
• VGA graphics. Finally the IBM PC could show reasonable images. Web browsing later became a significant side effect.

Software

• VisiCalc. Killer App. Welcome to "electronic spreadsheets." A reason to buy a computer.

Early Computer Magazines

• People's Computer Company, an organization promoting personal and community computing. A computer newspaper before there were computer publications. Community Memory was an early idea for sharing computer databases at computing storefronts.
• dr. dobb's journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, an early proponent of publishing source code. Evolved into Dr. Dobb's Journal.
• Byte magazine, its huge 50,000 copy beginning and eventually the first computer magazine to appear on general magazine racks.
• Kilobaud magazine, very popular hacker magazine, often with sources (remember programs on vinyl sheets for playback from phonograph player into cassette interfaces?).

Conceptual

• Homebrew Computer Club. Build your own computer if you can't afford a small CDC or PDP to heat your house. I was designing a TTL personal computer until the 8080 appeared; sure was nice to have quad NAND DIPs.
• Xerox PARC center with its influential network and user interface experiments.
• MECC: Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium" spread timeshare computing to all Minnesota school districts, then Apple computers. I worked there in the 1970's. State of MN has since sold it.

You can find information about how PARC's epaper works and some of the applications envisioned for it on PARC's web site on this page. More traditional display applications are very much being considered, in addition to the ideas about novel, more paper-like uses.

You can find information about how PARC's epaper works and some of the applications envisioned for it on PARC's web site on this page. More traditional display applications are very much being considered, in addition to the ideas about novel, more paper-like uses.

how can you make a robot smaller than the smallest possible computer core?

Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.

The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.

how the hell do you tell them what to do? ...

how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?

There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.

how can you make a robot smaller than the smallest possible computer core?

Maybe you can find something better than circuits etched on silicon surfaces. Tom Knight at MIT is looking at how to get bacteria to perform useful computations, using genetic engineering methods that have become well understood. You can mail-order custom DNA sequences, graft them into cells, and get the ribosomes to synthesize the proteins you want, if you're smart enough to design proteins. Eric Drexler, generally recognized as the guy who formulated the concept of nanotech, wrote one of his early papers on the possibility of engineering proteins as a step to a more complete form of nanotechnology.

The nanotechnology literature (see Engines of Creation and Unbounding the Future) talks about placing atoms at specific locations as you build up a molecular machine incrementally, in a process called mechanosynthesis. If this works (and I'm not aware of any technically sound arguments that it wouldn't), it might become possible to build almost any object whose existence doesn't violate the laws of physics. At least, it would become possible to build a lot of different things we can't build today.

how the hell do you tell them what to do? ...

how big are these things going to have to start out, since the first generation must contain all sets of code for all generations of nanomachines?

There is a lot of excellent information about nanotechnology at Ralph Merkle's site at Xerox PARC.

I've been playing with a 3d UI for a little while; apparently a lot of us have. I'd like a lot more than just a 3d interface though. Something that brings people into the same environment, something where object have permissions so sharing doesn't have to be total, something where I can work on my house design while watching the netrek freaks blowing each other away overhead...

Here's a screenshot of a tty running in my current software, with sheep wandering below. From here I can run commands from the shell level that produce output back here in my space, like a life simulation I wrote in Perl that communicates over TCP with my Z program to produce a life grid floating a little ways back into the trees.

Oh yes, the sheep bleat when you click on them.

I got into this idea at Origin games when I ended up with a $350k SGI reality engine on my desk. Now if I just had more time...

We need a shared, networked, distributed, permission-equipped environment -- all I've seen is internal-object-only, unnetworked, undistributed, one-user, no-permission environments. Even XEROX PARC can't seem to get two applications running in one space, according the little posted on their website , at least. Don't you want the tension of trying to read your email, or do some work inside of Quake 4?...

-Alex

Some of the ideas and innovations you mentioned should rightly be credited to Douglas Englebart. They worked together, and Englebart wasn't the only one on the team, but the work at PARC came after the work done in the late 60's at the Stanford Research Institute.

Perhaps there should be at least one mandatory preview of each comment? (I meant to preview it, honest!)

Perhaps there should be at least one mandatory preview of each comment? (I meant to preview it, honest!)

(I know a web page where a supposedly knowledgeable person tells a reputable interviewer that the Gavilan was the first laptop computer. (Not even close.))

And contrary to popular opionion, the MITS machine was not the first PC. (Not even close.)

Furthermore, he left out all kinds of important milestones:

• Doug Englebart and co's work with the mouse, user interfaces, and more (1969)
• The Xerox Parc innovations, including GUI's, ethernet, laser printers, and more (mid-70's)
• Dynalogic, Kyocera, GRiD, Sharp, and more, who gave us portable computing as we know it (early 80's)

There are plenty of others, of course. Some of the names he left out -- Englebart, Metcalfe, Kay, Berkeley, Sutherland, and so on, are equally, if not more, important than the names on his list.

To find out more [plug:] check out the Vintage Computer Festival or my site.

This guy did a bad job of research resulting in another incomplete and misleading web page.

In my original post to Slashdot, boldly titled I Got News for All of You, I made the following rash, unsubstantiated claim:

Overlapping windows were thought up in the '40s, the mouse in the '50s, and WYSIWYG in the '60s, before PARC existed.

A clever Anonymous Coward noted that I was a dumbass and provided no references to back up my statements. Some might argue that merely saying, "You didn't document your sources so what you say is shit!" fails to constitute stimulating intellecutal discourse. It's nothing more than small-minded heckling.

Some might even suggest that you can provide a counter proposition of your own, and if you then "up the ante" and back your own position with documented sources, you've pretty effectively proven your point and made your opponent look like a hothead besides.

I would like to thank my anonymous benefactor for not doing that to me, because I made several mistakes. Then again, within the context of the discussion, I believe the A.C. was implicitly defending the position that the whole WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers; a shorthand for describing the essential ingredients of a modern GUI) shebang was invented at Xerox PARC, which would be even more wrong than I was.

My primary source of information is the book (please forgive me) Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything, by Steven Levy. Sure, it's about the Mac, but really, how can you have any kind of meaningful discussion of GUI based computing without mentioning the Mac?

Yes, I was wrong. It was not multiple windows that were invented in the 1940s, it was information surfing. Vannevar Bush, in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think describes the sort of ad-hoc, stream-of-consciousness, associative method that characterizes the way we access information on the Web. Bush envisioned a work station with multiple screens, not multiple windows.

I was also wrong about the mouse being invented in the 1950s. Douglas Englebart didn't invent the mouse until the mid 1960s, when he was at SRI. Here's an interesting Smithsonian Institution interview with Douglas Englebart.

Sometime after 1966, Alan Kay at the University of Utah (later to join PARC) designed a "personal" computer called Flex that featured high-resolution graphics, icons and multiple windows. However, Kay himself admits (in Insanely Great) its interface was "repellent to users." Kay went on to work on the Alto and Macintosh.

In his own words, Jeff Raskin developed an idea for a graphical, multi-font WYSIWYG computer interface based on a bitmapped display in the mid-1960s, which is described in his 1967 Penn State thesis, A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. I couldn't find a link to the thesis itself, but it is referenced in the database of the Software Patent Institute Raskin started the Macintosh project at Apple.

Xerox PARC was founded in the year 1970. According to Levy, the Alto prototype was built at the end of 1972. Here's a nice A HREF="http://www.research.microsoft.com/users/blam pson/38-AltoSoftware/WebPage.html">artic le about the Alto.

Here is another interesting site with a number of links to articles on History of Computing

So, in the end, I was wrong about multiple windows, wrong about the mouse, right about WSIWYG, and right about all of these existing before the creation of PARC. I apologize for not checking my facts before posting.

Finally, to my "small-minded heckler", thank you.

I saw the Sony Flat Screen Tv last weekend and it was pretty impressive. Although it's $17000NZD. 1st division Lotto would be good or a bonus!

Anyway Xerox has already developed at Flat screen capable of 300dpi. Now this is cool.

XRCE: Flat Panel Display Interface