is a great essay by Edsger W. Dijkstra (yes, the shortest-path algo guy). the central point is that the complexity of software development is so much greater than anything else we construct that this sort of problem is inevitable.
it can be fine. Super Monkey Ball (on NGC, by Sega) for example, is all about the monkeys-collecting-bananas theme, for which the Dole (iirc) branded bananas everywhere make sense. the game, however, is utterly fun and brain crunchingly devious.
for the most part, I hate and completely ignore ads. I'm the kid that mutes every commercial and reads a book while watching tv (and regularly gets voted off his neighbor's TiVo, for overuse). any overt attempt at sticking ads in my face is going to get on my blacklist very fast.
movie theaters are among the current top offenders, imho. games are mostly ok.
Having placed my order for this book about 2.5 years ago, I was totally surprised to recieve it last month (during finals week, damn!) and accordingly devoured it.
Vinge is visionary, but what's always struck me about the Singularity is not what it says about the future, but what it says about our world today.
I grew up reading every scrap of cyberpunk I could get my hands on (and now I read Pynchon, so don't get me started), and knowing, not just imagining or believing, but knowing that modern man is soon to become obsolete. Everything about us is on the verge of becoming mere history to offspring quite unlike ourselves. I don't mean it in a bad way, in fact I quite look forward to it and don't doubt that we'll make a leap of our own, but in the back of my mind it's always underscored a certain thread of dispair. We seem to be at that tricky point where we've outlived our usefulness, indeed we have quite literally won the game (evolution) that brought us here, but haven't yet been replaced or upgraded. It gives life a certain quaint feeling, and a curious urge to transform now or self destruct (yes, go watch Fight Club again).
This world isn't quite mine. I think we're waiting ours to arrive.
Sometimes I wonder why noone (other than Vinge) is writing post-Singlarity science fiction.
In the meantime, go read True Names, then read the essays and read it again.
is how long until anonimization is available as a p2p service? if the users are providing the resources themselves, with a nice freenet style mix-n-match game of "whose data is this?," then they'd be good to go.
when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
is this not a clear indicator of the danger of placing all our trust in one party? even as tremendously altruistic as VA has been toward the free software community in the past, SourceForge is ripe for a single-point-of-failure disaster. Suppose MS buys VA, what then?
given the communal value of a SourceForge type repository and development nexus, wouldn't this be a fantastic application of peer-to-peer technology? a distributed system capable of these services would be invaluable. I won't pretend it would be easy, but if the will is there it could be done.
while I don't doubt that BeOS is neat stuff, I could never be bothered to mess with it. this is because, quite simply, after OSS what interest can compete with me having a personal stake in something? Now, by all accounts, Be is brimming with good design and technical genius. but, their market is people who already have a good-enough system which they are free to muck around in. IMHO, OSS may be their best possible business decision.
Tom's emergency root-boot floppy distrib is moving over to Lua script for as many utilities as possible. it's impressive, and Lua is a very cool language to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
is a great essay by Edsger W. Dijkstra (yes, the shortest-path algo guy). the central point is that the complexity of software development is so much greater than anything else we construct that this sort of problem is inevitable.
it can be read here:
http://www.ulla.mcgill.ca/arts150/arts150r1.htm
it can be fine. Super Monkey Ball (on NGC, by Sega) for example, is all about the monkeys-collecting-bananas theme, for which the Dole (iirc) branded bananas everywhere make sense. the game, however, is utterly fun and brain crunchingly devious.
for the most part, I hate and completely ignore ads. I'm the kid that mutes every commercial and reads a book while watching tv (and regularly gets voted off his neighbor's TiVo, for overuse). any overt attempt at sticking ads in my face is going to get on my blacklist very fast.
movie theaters are among the current top offenders, imho. games are mostly ok.
Having placed my order for this book about 2.5 years ago, I was totally surprised to recieve it last month (during finals week, damn!) and accordingly devoured it.
Vinge is visionary, but what's always struck me about the Singularity is not what it says about the future, but what it says about our world today.
I grew up reading every scrap of cyberpunk I could get my hands on (and now I read Pynchon, so don't get me started), and knowing, not just imagining or believing, but knowing that modern man is soon to become obsolete. Everything about us is on the verge of becoming mere history to offspring quite unlike ourselves. I don't mean it in a bad way, in fact I quite look forward to it and don't doubt that we'll make a leap of our own, but in the back of my mind it's always underscored a certain thread of dispair. We seem to be at that tricky point where we've outlived our usefulness, indeed we have quite literally won the game (evolution) that brought us here, but haven't yet been replaced or upgraded. It gives life a certain quaint feeling, and a curious urge to transform now or self destruct (yes, go watch Fight Club again).
This world isn't quite mine. I think we're waiting ours to arrive.
Sometimes I wonder why noone (other than Vinge) is writing post-Singlarity science fiction.
In the meantime, go read True Names, then read the essays and read it again.
is how long until anonimization is available as a p2p service? if the users are providing the resources themselves, with a nice freenet style mix-n-match game of "whose data is this?," then they'd be good to go.
when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
is this not a clear indicator of the danger of placing all our trust in one party? even as tremendously altruistic as VA has been toward the free software community in the past, SourceForge is ripe for a single-point-of-failure disaster. Suppose MS buys VA, what then?
given the communal value of a SourceForge type repository and development nexus, wouldn't this be a fantastic application of peer-to-peer technology? a distributed system capable of these services would be invaluable. I won't pretend it would be easy, but if the will is there it could be done.
when you start to grasp the implications of a beautiful language like Lua: http://www.lua.org
simple, tiny, fast, descriptive, extensible.
Meta-Features.
when your data is is code, it only makes sense that it's programmed in such a language that makes parsing it is as simple as execution.
while I don't doubt that BeOS is neat stuff, I could never be bothered to mess with it. this is because, quite simply, after OSS what interest can compete with me having a personal stake in something? Now, by all accounts, Be is brimming with good design and technical genius. but, their market is people who already have a good-enough system which they are free to muck around in. IMHO, OSS may be their best possible business decision.
it's rather philosophically similar to "The Payvote Method of Selling Intellectual Property" see http://www.payvote.com/
Tom's emergency root-boot floppy distrib is moving over to Lua script for as many utilities as possible. it's impressive, and Lua is a very cool language to say the least.