I've been carrying a Kyocera
7135 PalmOS SmartPhone for the last three weeks, as seen
on TV. I like it -- it feels like a phone that does useful things,
rather than like a PDA that can also make phonecalls. I get real
wireless Web browsing on it, that's a given. The MP3 player gets
a little choppy sometimes; I haven't figure out why yet -- but mostly
it plays pretty well. The MMC/SD slot enables me to hook in
all
sorts of cool gizmos: VGA adapters, printers, keyboards, cameras,
etc. Cost a little under $500. It's by far the most
useful toy I've ever had.
This is like saying that Physics and Chemistry is only good for research and academics. The fact that sciences are studied in universities doesn't mean that companies can't also make profits from the applications of science. We all manage to, as you say, "earn a living" making gadgets that apply scientific principles, but that doesn't mean we then take the next step and asume that those scientic principles must therefore become proprietary, as you have suggested. If you stop thinking of software as being like "books that we write" and start thinking of it as being like "theorems that we write" then it's easier to understand how free (as in speech) software is good for the economy. Yes, you could create a false economy (i.e., offering no productivity that has real economic value) by arbitrarily putting a price on theorems and getting mathematicians to license theorems to the world, but in the long run that's a silly approach that achieves to real economic gain.
I think one oft-unspoken reason overseas governments contemplate wholesale adoption of open source solutions is that doing so creates a lot of high-end local IT jobs (e.g., software development and support). This offers the prospect of creating more in-country "silicon valleys" and the possibility of local "dot.boom" economies.
Open source may have the advantage of better access to legacy civil documents and lower TCO, but the real motivation of politicians is getting re-elected, and job creation is always a good way to do that.
Conventional wisdom says that cars you intend to keep for a long time you should buy; cars you intend to keep for a short time and replace, you should lease. Following that line of reasoning, any type of car that's founded on quickly changing technology is a car you're going to want to replace in a short time, and therefore you should lease, not buy.
Over the past few years I've taken several old legacy Macs (PowerPC 5600-9600) and installed Sonnet CPU upgrades on them, then installed (or attempted to install) OS X. I'm not an expert on the OS X boot process, but it appears to me that one of the first things OS X does is check to make sure it's being booted on an officially supported platform. If it believes it's not on such a platform, it presents a screen that shows a circle with a "bar dexter" slash through it. I guess the idea is that OS X is checking to make sure that a G4 hard drive hasn't been taken out and stuck in an older PowerPC. SonnetTech.com has some tools that "trick" the OS into installing even on non-supported platforms, but my success with those tools has been mixed. For example, it doesn't appear to be working on the PowerMac 9600 that I was playing with this this last weekend.
As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful (and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large, relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames. (Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90% smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Legislatures often pass bad laws. Their intentions are good, but the letter of the law often leads to ridiculous conclusions when taken to the extreme.
It usually takes many years to discover how badly a law has been written, because it usually takes many years for people (or companies) to get around to pushing the wording to its logical conclusion. When Microsoft (or the RIAA, etc.) imposes seemingly ridiculously licensing terms on the public, they're actually doing us all a service in the long run, by quickly demonstrating to legislators that the applicable public policies are (in the long run) unworkable.
We know Microsoft isn't going to "win" in the long run (they're losing our data centers already, and eventually they'll lose our desktops and office suites as well), but when they do these extremely silly things they actually help hasten their own eventual demise, by rapidly educating the public (and the policy makers) about what's wrong with current regulation.
Getting laws corrected may feel like it's occuring with glacial slowness to those of us who already understand where things are heading, but it'll actually happen much more quickly than it would otherwise, the worse Microsoft behaves. So I say, heck ya Microsoft! Charge us twice for things you don't deliver...charge us ten times, twenty! Let's show the world what the phrase "illegal monopoly" -really- means.
Indeed, one of the fundamental underpinnings of any democratic society is that the rights of the many do NOT outweight the rights of the one. A person's rights are not predicated on the number of people with common interests. For example, I still have a right to free speech even if what I'm saying is something that nobody else wants to hear. I can congregate, worship (or not), read whatever I like, or put up tacky holiday ornaments over the protest of all my neighbors even though any of these or a thousand other activities may infringe on rights they percieve as their own -- and the number of neighbors is irrelevant. The democratic principle of "majority rule" does not imply that "majority rights" outweigh the rights of individuals...no matter religious fundamentalists (or Tim Mullen) claim. One of the great things about democracy is that the rights of an individual are precisely equal in weight to the rights of a legion.
When IBM first announced their big Linux initiative, I asked some of my IBM friends about the thinking behind it. They claimed that one advantage that drew IBM to Linux in the first place was the notion that IBM could use the same OS on everything from big iron to desktops to laptops to PDAs. In other words, IBM could focus on just the hardware and yet still have a common software solution that works across any product they might come up with. (What other OS can scale from mainframes to handhelds?) I conjecture that IBM has now forgotten the original rationale and is now focusing just on those areas that are most successful.
This is the ultimate fate of any Really Good Idea in any large organization: eventually, the rationale is forgotten and the focus switches to near-term success. This is probably a good thing.
My company used to surplus old PCs to local schools, but the schools don't want old PCs any more. They claim the #1 application they use for teaching is now Web browsing, so they need PCs that can run modern browsers with all the common plugins.
If Web browsing is the #1 educational application these days, it's difficult to see how these PalmOS gizmos will be useful in most schools. I have three browsers on my PalmOS cell phone (Kyocera) and I don't think any of them would provide an acceptable browsing experience for students.
A hundred years ago, we didn't all listen to the same music from the same artists, watch the same plays with the same actors, all read only a handful of common books that were blessed by Barnes & Noble as "top 20", etc. There were orders of magnitude more people singing, playing instruments, writing, painting, etc. Today's "superstar" system, whether it's music or novels, is an artificial convention perpetuated by publishing companies. When everybody can be their own publisher, however, the publishing companies go away, and so does the "superstars" business model. Without publishing companies and the "superstar" business models, digital rights laws may transition to better support regional or topical arts, rather than Fortune 500 conglomerates.
They should have arrived home "alien"
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
My original hope for the series was that while traveling home, they would periodically pick up new technologies and an occasional new crew member. Then when they finally arrive home seven years later, Voyager is barely recognizable as a Federation ship. It's got all kinds of jury-rigged technologies hanging off it...things they've picked up from other civilizations to compensate for the Star Fleet components that eventually failed. The jury-rigs are only half understood, but some of the technologies are so advanced that Voyager is able to slip past Borg cubes and make it home in just seven years. The crew has adapted so well to their "alien" adoptees that they no longer feel entirely at home on Earth. The final two-hour episode could have taken place entirely on Earth, each of the main crew members realizing that Earth no longer felt like home, and volunteering to embark on Voyager once again. The final shot could have been of them, ironically, _leaving_ Earth for another long mission. I like my ending better.
Running on a G4 Mac, I opened 6.0 as the "default" user, the Personal Security Manager appeared fine, but of course not showing my VeriSign certificate since that's in my real user profile. So I quit, then restarted as me, and the Personal Security Manager (apparently) hangs! Just a blank window, contents never rendered.
Out of curiosity, fired up a new mail message and looked to see where I would digitally sign the message -- that option seems to have been removed in 6.0, as I was afraid it might be.
So, for me, version 6.0 has fewer (useful) features than 4.7.
I tried to get residential ADSL from Covad via CapuNet over Bell Atlantic lines. Everything seemed set until CapuNet and I received an e-mail that said, "Order cancelled. No copper to door."
It turns out that Bell Atlantic Residential Telephone doesn't speak with Bell Atlantic High Speed Internet. The latter offers only DSL options for high speed Internet access, while the former has been wiring northern Virginia homes directly with fiber optic!
When I spoke with a Bell Atlantic technical representative, he agreed that clearly this was a disconnect between the two arms of Bell Atlantic, but that as far as he knew there was nobody in Bell Atlantic interested in resolving the issue.
So now I'm waiting for Adelphia to wire my neighborhood for cable modem. In "The Dilbert Principle" Scott Adams predicted that the telephone companies would win the high speed Internet access race, because "the cable companies are staffed with guys who couldn't get jobs at the phone companies." Humorous, true, but Bell Atlantic seems to be proving Mr. Adams wrong.
Here in northern Virginia, at least, Bell Atlantic has handed the high speed Internet business to the cable companies.
1) An AI that "looks" at a page, graphics and all, and verbally describes to the user what the page is saying. This could be very useful for visually impaired folks. Back when the commonly used HTML tags were semantic tags rather than formatting tags, this would have been a trivially easy assignment. But now, one almost needs to parse an image in order to view a typical Web page.
2) Along those same lines, a more "intelligent" filter for converting HTML to WML, so that the myriad Web pages currently formatted for 15" graphical displays could be translated better onto small text-based displays...or even Braille-based devices.
3) An enhancment to Google's "I feel lucky" mode, but applied to Jeeves, so that a Jeeves-type natural language query would generate a succint, single-sentence reply. One problem with Jeeves right now is that even when it understands your question properly, its answer is an entire Web page! not a simple sentence. An AI that parses the Web page to generate a single sentence that directly answers the original question -- that could be an interesting challenge.
A one-button mouse is ambidextrous. I'm right handed, and when I sit down at lefty's Macintosh, I can just move the mouse to the other side of the keyboard. But when I sit down at a lefty's PC, I have to reconfigure the mouse buttons, or retrain my fingers.
I think this is an interesting bit of history; I may be mis-remembering some details, but: Traditionally, one can patent "inventions" but not "discoveries". I.e., you can patent the telephone, but not the law of gravity. Or as another poster already phrased it, you can't patent laws of nature.
Traditionally, the legal system has considered mathematical theorems to be laws of nature. I.e., theorems are discovered, not invented. So, for example, you can't patent the Pythagorean theorem.
But, as we all know, some mathematical theorems lend themselves particularly well to becoming algorithms. For example, in 1984 when Karmakar discovered a faster way to solve linear programming problems, his employer (AT&T) wanted to patent the algorithm.
But back then, patenting algorithms wasn't allowed, so instead AT&T patented a design for a piece of _hardware_ that execute the algorithm. Because patent law doesn't allow you to "cheat" by creating a too-similar device, that patent therefore also prevented people from implementing Karmakar's algorithm in software -- unless you pay for licensing to AT&T, of course.
At that time, mathematicians worldwide were a bit up-in-arms about the whole thing. "This is outrageous! All progress will cease if people are allowed to patent theorems!" And, of course, a few years later, the software world is finally coming to the same conclusion.
Finally, I think it's interesting that when you take a Philosophy 101 course, the question as to whether or not "Platonic ideals" actually "exist" somehow is considered to be a very academic question. No practical applications. But if you think about it, this question is really at the heart of our debate. Did Amazon.com "invent" one-click ordering, or did they "discover" it? I.e., did one-click ordering already exist as some sort of Platonic ideal? If the latter is true, then clearly Amazon (nor others) should not be allowed to patent such ideas, because the ideas were _discoveries_, not inventions -- and patents are intended to cover inventions...not discoveries.
I think old-timers have seen this phenomenon enough times now to understand the pattern. College students become early adopters of a new technology that campus administrators don't quite "get". Two years later campus administrators find a more "serious" use for the same technology, and suddenly the bans are lifted.
In this case, the "fun" uses of audio-IP and network games will be supplanted by (say) virtual collaborative environments that actually work. These become serious academic research tools, and suddenly MP3 bandwidth is all in the noise. (No pun intended.) I remember (long ago) trying to explain why I needed to modem through a phone line that wasn't screwed up by our campus PBX, explaining to administrators who couldn't understand why anybody would want to "modem" to anything. What's wrong with snail-mailing floppy disks?
* FADE IN *
Prospective freshmen are toured around a college campus with their families. The alpha high-school geek asks the lovely tour-guide coed, "Does this campus have a snack bar?"
"Yes, but it closes at 9:30 each night and all it serves is pre-packaged food."
"How about soccer fields?"
"We have two fields, but they're not co-located with the main campus. You have to drive five miles to get there."
"Are the dorms wired?"
* dramatic pause * "Every dorm is connected to every Unreal server on every planet in the entire universe."
I'm going to say a naughty word: artificial intelligence. I'm hoping we soon ( 5 years) get good enough at this "indexing" stuff to create semantic models of Web content rather than purely syntactic models. (Google is a small step in the right direction.) If so, then perhaps dynamic pages can be indexed according to their location (role?) in an "ontology" rather than via the frequency of essentially meaningless character strings. That may sound farfetched, but it seems to me that the Web finally provides a real _financial_ incentive with near-term payoff for that kind of research. Hitherto, the quest has been purely academic. And where there's the lure of a real payoff, stuff often happens quickly (usually -- batteries and flat-screen technologies being notable exceptions).
Slashdot Mirror
I've been carrying a Kyocera 7135 PalmOS SmartPhone for the last three weeks, as seen on TV. I like it -- it feels like a phone that does useful things, rather than like a PDA that can also make phonecalls. I get real wireless Web browsing on it, that's a given. The MP3 player gets a little choppy sometimes; I haven't figure out why yet -- but mostly it plays pretty well. The MMC/SD slot enables me to hook in all sorts of cool gizmos: VGA adapters, printers, keyboards, cameras, etc. Cost a little under $500. It's by far the most useful toy I've ever had.
This is like saying that Physics and Chemistry is only good for research and academics. The fact that sciences are studied in universities doesn't mean that companies can't also make profits from the applications of science. We all manage to, as you say, "earn a living" making gadgets that apply scientific principles, but that doesn't mean we then take the next step and asume that those scientic principles must therefore become proprietary, as you have suggested. If you stop thinking of software as being like "books that we write" and start thinking of it as being like "theorems that we write" then it's easier to understand how free (as in speech) software is good for the economy. Yes, you could create a false economy (i.e., offering no productivity that has real economic value) by arbitrarily putting a price on theorems and getting mathematicians to license theorems to the world, but in the long run that's a silly approach that achieves to real economic gain.
I think one oft-unspoken reason overseas governments contemplate wholesale adoption of open source solutions is that doing so creates a lot of high-end local IT jobs (e.g., software development and support). This offers the prospect of creating more in-country "silicon valleys" and the possibility of local "dot.boom" economies.
Open source may have the advantage of better access to legacy civil documents and lower TCO, but the real motivation of politicians is getting re-elected, and job creation is always a good way to do that.
Conventional wisdom says that cars you intend to keep for a long time you should buy; cars you intend to keep for a short time and replace, you should lease. Following that line of reasoning, any type of car that's founded on quickly changing technology is a car you're going to want to replace in a short time, and therefore you should lease, not buy.
Over the past few years I've taken several old legacy Macs (PowerPC 5600-9600) and installed Sonnet CPU upgrades on them, then installed (or attempted to install) OS X. I'm not an expert on the OS X boot process, but it appears to me that one of the first things OS X does is check to make sure it's being booted on an officially supported platform. If it believes it's not on such a platform, it presents a screen that shows a circle with a "bar dexter" slash through it. I guess the idea is that OS X is checking to make sure that a G4 hard drive hasn't been taken out and stuck in an older PowerPC. SonnetTech.com has some tools that "trick" the OS into installing even on non-supported platforms, but my success with those tools has been mixed. For example, it doesn't appear to be working on the PowerMac 9600 that I was playing with this this last weekend.
As I recall from college anthropology, human childbirth is painful (and sometimes even fatal) precisely because our craniums are so large, relative to other mammals and relative to the size of our frames. (Humans have the highest ratio of brain mass to body mass; whales come in second.) If so much of our brain mass were hypothetically unnecessary, then humans with smaller brains would be more likely to pass on their genes, as those childbirths would less frequently be fatal. Over time, humans would come to have much smaller craniums (90% smaller, if the urban myth were true), not the large craniums that we currently possess. The fact that evolution is willing to pay such a high penalty (increased childbirth fatalities) for large brains indicates that there must be an offsetting evolutionary advantage to having large brains. The notion that much of our brain is therefore "unused" doesn't really make sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
Legislatures often pass bad laws. Their intentions are good, but the letter of the law often leads to ridiculous conclusions when taken to the extreme.
It usually takes many years to discover how badly a law has been written, because it usually takes many years for people (or companies) to get around to pushing the wording to its logical conclusion. When Microsoft (or the RIAA, etc.) imposes seemingly ridiculously licensing terms on the public, they're actually doing us all a service in the long run, by quickly demonstrating to legislators that the applicable public policies are (in the long run) unworkable.
We know Microsoft isn't going to "win" in the long run (they're losing our data centers already, and eventually they'll lose our desktops and office suites as well), but when they do these extremely silly things they actually help hasten their own eventual demise, by rapidly educating the public (and the policy makers) about what's wrong with current regulation.
Getting laws corrected may feel like it's occuring with glacial slowness to those of us who already understand where things are heading, but it'll actually happen much more quickly than it would otherwise, the worse Microsoft behaves. So I say, heck ya Microsoft! Charge us twice for things you don't deliver...charge us ten times, twenty! Let's show the world what the phrase "illegal monopoly" -really- means.
Indeed, one of the fundamental underpinnings of any democratic society is that the rights of the many do NOT outweight the rights of the one. A person's rights are not predicated on the number of people with common interests. For example, I still have a right to free speech even if what I'm saying is something that nobody else wants to hear. I can congregate, worship (or not), read whatever I like, or put up tacky holiday ornaments over the protest of all my neighbors even though any of these or a thousand other activities may infringe on rights they percieve as their own -- and the number of neighbors is irrelevant. The democratic principle of "majority rule" does not imply that "majority rights" outweigh the rights of individuals...no matter religious fundamentalists (or Tim Mullen) claim. One of the great things about democracy is that the rights of an individual are precisely equal in weight to the rights of a legion.
When IBM first announced their big Linux initiative, I asked some of my IBM friends about the thinking behind it. They claimed that one advantage that drew IBM to Linux in the first place was the notion that IBM could use the same OS on everything from big iron to desktops to laptops to PDAs. In other words, IBM could focus on just the hardware and yet still have a common software solution that works across any product they might come up with. (What other OS can scale from mainframes to handhelds?) I conjecture that IBM has now forgotten the original rationale and is now focusing just on those areas that are most successful.
This is the ultimate fate of any Really Good Idea in any large organization: eventually, the rationale is forgotten and the focus switches to near-term success. This is probably a good thing.
My company used to surplus old PCs to local schools, but the schools don't want old PCs any more. They claim the #1 application they use for teaching is now Web browsing, so they need PCs that can run modern browsers with all the common plugins.
If Web browsing is the #1 educational application these days, it's difficult to see how these PalmOS gizmos will be useful in most schools. I have three browsers on my PalmOS cell phone (Kyocera) and I don't think any of them would provide an acceptable browsing experience for students.
A hundred years ago, we didn't all listen to the same music from the same artists, watch the same plays with the same actors, all read only a handful of common books that were blessed by Barnes & Noble as "top 20", etc. There were orders of magnitude more people singing, playing instruments, writing, painting, etc. Today's "superstar" system, whether it's music or novels, is an artificial convention perpetuated by publishing companies. When everybody can be their own publisher, however, the publishing companies go away, and so does the "superstars" business model. Without publishing companies and the "superstar" business models, digital rights laws may transition to better support regional or topical arts, rather than Fortune 500 conglomerates.
My original hope for the series was that while traveling home, they would periodically pick up new technologies and an occasional new crew member. Then when they finally arrive home seven years later, Voyager is barely recognizable as a Federation ship. It's got all kinds of jury-rigged technologies hanging off it...things they've picked up from other civilizations to compensate for the Star Fleet components that eventually failed. The jury-rigs are only half understood, but some of the technologies are so advanced that Voyager is able to slip past Borg cubes and make it home in just seven years. The crew has adapted so well to their "alien" adoptees that they no longer feel entirely at home on Earth. The final two-hour episode could have taken place entirely on Earth, each of the main crew members realizing that Earth no longer felt like home, and volunteering to embark on Voyager once again. The final shot could have been of them, ironically, _leaving_ Earth for another long mission. I like my ending better.
Running on a G4 Mac, I opened 6.0 as the "default" user, the Personal Security Manager appeared fine, but of course not showing my VeriSign certificate since that's in my real user profile. So I quit, then restarted as me, and the Personal Security Manager (apparently) hangs! Just a blank window, contents never rendered.
Out of curiosity, fired up a new mail message and looked to see where I would digitally sign the message -- that option seems to have been removed in 6.0, as I was afraid it might be.
So, for me, version 6.0 has fewer (useful) features than 4.7.
And with three-letter/digit file extensions, the 70,000 applications are forced to share less than 50,000 document types... (say, 36 x 36 x 36...)
It turns out that Bell Atlantic Residential Telephone doesn't speak with Bell Atlantic High Speed Internet. The latter offers only DSL options for high speed Internet access, while the former has been wiring northern Virginia homes directly with fiber optic!
When I spoke with a Bell Atlantic technical representative, he agreed that clearly this was a disconnect between the two arms of Bell Atlantic, but that as far as he knew there was nobody in Bell Atlantic interested in resolving the issue.
So now I'm waiting for Adelphia to wire my neighborhood for cable modem. In "The Dilbert Principle" Scott Adams predicted that the telephone companies would win the high speed Internet access race, because "the cable companies are staffed with guys who couldn't get jobs at the phone companies." Humorous, true, but Bell Atlantic seems to be proving Mr. Adams wrong.
Here in northern Virginia, at least, Bell Atlantic has handed the high speed Internet business to the cable companies.
1) An AI that "looks" at a page, graphics and all, and verbally describes to the user what the page is saying. This could be very useful for visually impaired folks. Back when the commonly used HTML tags were semantic tags rather than formatting tags, this would have been a trivially easy assignment. But now, one almost needs to parse an image in order to view a typical Web page.
2) Along those same lines, a more "intelligent" filter for converting HTML to WML, so that the myriad Web pages currently formatted for 15" graphical displays could be translated better onto small text-based displays...or even Braille-based devices.
3) An enhancment to Google's "I feel lucky" mode, but applied to Jeeves, so that a Jeeves-type natural language query would generate a succint, single-sentence reply. One problem with Jeeves right now is that even when it understands your question properly, its answer is an entire Web page! not a simple sentence. An AI that parses the Web page to generate a single sentence that directly answers the original question -- that could be an interesting challenge.
A one-button mouse is ambidextrous. I'm right handed, and when I sit down at lefty's Macintosh, I can just move the mouse to the other side of the keyboard. But when I sit down at a lefty's PC, I have to reconfigure the mouse buttons, or retrain my fingers.
Okay, okay....we won't turn everybody in...only children of Pinkerton employees... Heh heh heh.
http//biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000113 / ca_secure__1.html
for a discussion of Linux at NSA
Traditionally, the legal system has considered mathematical theorems to be laws of nature. I.e., theorems are discovered, not invented. So, for example, you can't patent the Pythagorean theorem.
But, as we all know, some mathematical theorems lend themselves particularly well to becoming algorithms. For example, in 1984 when Karmakar discovered a faster way to solve linear programming problems, his employer (AT&T) wanted to patent the algorithm.
But back then, patenting algorithms wasn't allowed, so instead AT&T patented a design for a piece of _hardware_ that execute the algorithm. Because patent law doesn't allow you to "cheat" by creating a too-similar device, that patent therefore also prevented people from implementing Karmakar's algorithm in software -- unless you pay for licensing to AT&T, of course.
At that time, mathematicians worldwide were a bit up-in-arms about the whole thing. "This is outrageous! All progress will cease if people are allowed to patent theorems!" And, of course, a few years later, the software world is finally coming to the same conclusion.
Finally, I think it's interesting that when you take a Philosophy 101 course, the question as to whether or not "Platonic ideals" actually "exist" somehow is considered to be a very academic question. No practical applications. But if you think about it, this question is really at the heart of our debate. Did Amazon.com "invent" one-click ordering, or did they "discover" it? I.e., did one-click ordering already exist as some sort of Platonic ideal? If the latter is true, then clearly Amazon (nor others) should not be allowed to patent such ideas, because the ideas were _discoveries_, not inventions -- and patents are intended to cover inventions...not discoveries.
In this case, the "fun" uses of audio-IP and network games will be supplanted by (say) virtual collaborative environments that actually work. These become serious academic research tools, and suddenly MP3 bandwidth is all in the noise. (No pun intended.) I remember (long ago) trying to explain why I needed to modem through a phone line that wasn't screwed up by our campus PBX, explaining to administrators who couldn't understand why anybody would want to "modem" to anything. What's wrong with snail-mailing floppy disks?
* FADE IN *
Prospective freshmen are toured around a college campus with their families. The alpha high-school geek asks the lovely tour-guide coed, "Does this campus have a snack bar?"
"Yes, but it closes at 9:30 each night and all it serves is pre-packaged food."
"How about soccer fields?"
"We have two fields, but they're not co-located with the main campus. You have to drive five miles to get there."
"Are the dorms wired?"
* dramatic pause * "Every dorm is connected to every Unreal server on every planet in the entire universe."
"How is that...possible?"
Qwest -- Ride the Light
* FADE OUT *
I'm going to say a naughty word: artificial intelligence. I'm hoping we soon ( 5 years) get good enough at this "indexing" stuff to create semantic models of Web content rather than purely syntactic models. (Google is a small step in the right direction.) If so, then perhaps dynamic pages can be indexed according to their location (role?) in an "ontology" rather than via the frequency of essentially meaningless character strings. That may sound farfetched, but it seems to me that the Web finally provides a real _financial_ incentive with near-term payoff for that kind of research. Hitherto, the quest has been purely academic. And where there's the lure of a real payoff, stuff often happens quickly (usually -- batteries and flat-screen technologies being notable exceptions).